Tour d'horizon - 1 July 2019

1.  Canada Day - Everyone wears shorts - It probably won't snow today in Canada.

2.  China Trade - IMO the Chinese Communist Party and China have no intention of accepting a future in which the Middle Kingdom is other than the dominant world power.  In that context the Chinese will probably make some sort of deal with the US to take the heat off their declining economy- more Chinese purchases of US goods - paper agreements on Chinese underhanded trade practices but nothing that amounts to a basic Chinese change of policy.

3.  North Korea - Look to see a limited US/NOKO agreement on a freezing of nuclear status rather than a removal of NOKO nuclear weapons.  Trump is a practical man who wants apparent success before 2020 bites him.  He correctly, IMO, sees that a North Korea flooded with foreign capital, investment and consumer goods will be set on a path that the North Korean Communist Party will not be able to control.  It is interesting how much more control Trump has over Korean policy than he has over Cuba policy or the evolving disaster in the ME.  Why?  There is no Korean-American pressure bloc, nor the Zionist juggernaut.

4.  Hong Kong - The Chinese Communist Party will suppress autonomy in Hong Kong.  It is just a matter of time.  Socialist governments inevitably become more and more repressive and are required to rule through fear and police coercion.  A Hong Kong that defies centralized Communist rule is a threat to the party throughout the country.  It is just a matter of time.

5.  Turkey - The Neo-Ottomans are in the process of devouring large parts of northern Syria.  This process is something like an anaconda slowing engulfing a large animal.  We are now in the phase of this devouring in which there is a lot of nonsense about de-militarized zones, supposed cease fires, entrenched Turkish "observation posts" placed so as to keep the SAA and friends from getting at HTS and the other jihadis in Idlib Province.  If successful this will be followed by plebiscites and petitions by local puppet government for annexation.  This Turkish process of acquiring northern Syria is  greatly assisted by the continuing Bolton/Pompeo/neocon policy of regime change in Syria.  Under the sway of this policy we continue to do our best to impede the reconstruction of Syria and refugee return with all sorts of baloney in the MSM about Syrian government atrocities against returning Syrians.  We also are doing everything possible to discourage a Syria Kurd-Syrian government rapprochement.  IMO Trump has delegated attention on this to the neocons in his house and should take this function away from them in this area.

5. Iran - We continue  to squeeze Iran into a smaller and smaller space  in the belief that their knees will buckle and that they will then accept an Israeli view of their future, one in which they are rug manufactures and pistachio growers for the world under Israeli tutelage.  IMO this is nonsense.  They will not accept that any more than the Palestinians will accept Jared Kushner's vision of a re-birth of King Solomon's mythic realm in which Palestinians are perpetual serfs.  Eventually, the Iranians will fight us.

6.  Tucker  Carlson as a replacement for the 'stache?  Good idea!  Make the 'stache ambassador to Turkey or Israel.  pl

Comments

[Jack]

Sir

Spot on as usual.

The totalitarian CCP is the real strategic threat but Trump in his craving for pageantry is gonna let them get away like his predecessors for the past decades. It is only a matter of time before they suppress Hong Kong. I've read that PLA have been issued HK police uniforms and provocateurs have been sent to incite violence that will then be used to repress the people who don't want to live under the jackboot of the CCP. The CCP is extremely vulnerable right now and instead of ratcheting up the pressure by preventing any US investor from financing CCP entities Trump is going for a "headline" win. His primary focus is the stock market.

As far as the ME is concerned it should be obvious to even the most casual observer that Bibi and MbS are in the catbird seat. Khamenei should learn the lesson of KJU.

[Joseph Moroco]

Israel would then have two ambassadors. Send him to an unpleasant place where he can do little damage. How is East Timor these days?

[TI]

"This Turkish process of acquiring northern Syria"

I don't see why Turkey would outright annex northern Syria instead of creating puppet regimes there. They didn't annex northern Cyprus either, and the population there are ethnic Turks. A significant part of the Turkish public already seems to be very unhappy about the presence of large numbers of Syrian refugees in Turkey and doesn't like the idea at all that they will eventually acquire Turkish citizenship. Annexation of northern Syria would bring even more Arabs and Kurds into the Turkish polity, which must be a nightmare for any Turkish nationalist (the higher birth rates of Turkey's Kurdish minority as compared to ethnic Turks are already somewhat of a demographic time bomb). It's not clear to me that "Islamic solidarity" will be stronger than Turkish nationalism.

[catherine]

''Make the 'stache ambassador to Turkey or Israel. ''

Heaven forbid! Put him on a plane and drop him out over Houthis territory in Yemen instead.

[Walrus]

China has successfully transitioned from a command to a market based economy, in the process boosting the standards of living for hundreds of millions of its people. That is an achievement that makes Roosevelt’s new deal look like a local lemonade stand.

If America is to prosper it is going to have to contemplate the fact that the chinese are not stupid little yellow people ruled by ignorant and brutal dictators. They are struggling towards a Chinese version of a modern society that understands democratic ideals but also understands the damage unfettered personal ambition has caused China in the past. They are not Americans. Don’t expect them to behave that way.

[turcopolier]

walrus

China Joe Biden took their money to build his family's fortune, and still said they are stupid little brown people. Was that Chinese money talking? you meant him? China has partially transitioned to a market economy but their political system is still a Communist dictatorship.

[Fred]

Jack,

"The totalitarian CCP is the real strategic threat"

And #2 on Fortune Magazine's "World's 50 Greatest Leaders" is busy making New Zealand as authoritarian as only a former head of the International Union of Socialist Youth can make it. Thanks to an Australian who, like Sauron, can't be named and whose rational is whatever the Government of New Zealand says it is and don't let them catch you with a copy of his/her/xer's manifesto because the mere possession of such a thing is a felony there. Of course, Orange Man Bad, so don't pay any attention to what is happening to civilization down under.

[Fred]

Walrus,

"China has successfully transitioned from a command to a market based economy, ..."

Ross Perot didn't realize that the "giant sucking sound" of jobs crossing the border included a few million that went East with all the outsourcing the globalists demanded of the political left/right/center.

"If America is to prosper..."
American prosperity has been the envy of the planet for a couple of generations. That China, after the collapse of the USSR, has finally seen that communist economic theory and practice doesn't work should not be a surprise. America is still prospering inspite of the contempt of its own intellegensia and insatiable greed of an olgiarchy that would be as happy in Beijing as Boston or, dare I say, NYC.

[ted richard]

there is an expression that goes..... everyone needs an F-U million ($) if they want to exert control of their life.

at the end of WW2 the united states had the single largest pot of F-U millions the world had ever seen and we managed to piss it all away within my lifespan of 70 years.

if you want to blame china or russia or whomever go ahead but for my money we all ought to look in the mirror at the absolute vision-less garbage we have chosen to vote for and accept to lead us for decades and now, there is very little sand left in the hourglass.

[Jack]

China is a market economy only if you believe Alibaba and Huawei are private companies. They are controlled by CCP and are at their service. CCP understands the West better than we understand them. Wall St and the big corporates in their quest for short-term benefits have allowed the CCP to become the biggest strategic threat by financing them and providing them with technology. Their economy is riddled with non-tariff barriers. I know first hand as I'm on the board of companies that has tried to penetrate their market. Unless you have a JV with a Chinese partner and establish manufacturing there you don't have a chance. And there have been too many instances where the JV partner once they've learned your technology move out leaving you high and dry. There's no recourse as the Chinese legal system is biased in favor of CCP entities.

This has nothing to do with denigrating the Chinese people and their culture. In fact they are hostage to CCP authoritarianism. We are all witness to what is happening in Hong Kong. CCP is extremely vulnerable right now. Instead of pressing and allowing the Chinese people to determine their own destiny Trump is allowing the CCP to mock him by giving him headlines only to turn on him when this moment passes.

[DH]

My favorite Snoopy:

https://66.media.tumblr.com/5e9661f6fbe68672787e141077ef38ce/tumblr_oz030i8cqr1wzvt9qo1_400.jpg

[turcopolier]

DH

Snooopy was MACVSOG's mascot. We had cartoons of him riding into battle just like this one.

[Godfree Roberts]

"Chinese underhanded trade practices"? Oddly, none are revealed in the WTO or its TRIPS database. Should we search further or accept the fact that we've been beaten fair and square at a game whose rules we wrote?

"a North Korea flooded with foreign capital, investment and consumer goods will be set on a path that the North Korean Communist Party will not be able to control." Isn't that what we predicted for China? Besides, 80% of South Koreans (the non-capitalists) trust President Kim.

"The Chinese Communist Party will suppress autonomy in Hong Kong". If they didn't suppress it when we infiltrated 600 rioters and agents from HK for the 1989 Tiananmen caper, then murdered a dozen of their unarmed soldiers and twenty unarmed cops, then exfiltrated them again to HK (see Operation Yellow Bird), then they're not going to suppress it now.

Hong Kong, under our 'democracy' is the most unequal city on earth, with 23% of its children living in poverty and home ownership at 49%. Compare these figures to the mainland's 1% and 78% and you can see why Beijing can afford to wait: our model has failed.

[Norbert M Salamon]

Colonel:
With respect short of Plato's philosopher king there is no conceivable government type which can operate with 1.5 billion people [or 1.3 billion for India, or close to 400 million for USA] as an effective leadership in socio economic sense for the benefit of the citizen except one man with central power.

It doth appear that selecting engineers for top spot in China works better than any and all western types as Obama [a constitutional lawyer, who disregarded the Constitution of USA], Trump, a real estate developer [no understanding of other cultures], and Macron or numerous others sans De Gaulle [Eisenhower] military excellence, Mrs. Merkel [ a trained scientist] and Russia' Putin spying background [thus understanding the short coming of all other government systems,

[Elsi]

Exactly, and what is happening now in HK is not a "timely" democratic protest against the CCP, so timely that just coincide in time with the harshest presure by the US on economic war.
What is happening in HK is a typical "colour revolution" of those of Gene Sharp manual, of the same kind of that intended the other day in Tbilisi to prepare the terrain for to try to avoid Russia back into PACE.

Let's talk about that guy named Joshua Wong and his "umbrellas revolution" movement in Hong Kong, another paragolpist attempt by the US to undermine China's sovereignty using the well-known weapons of the "citizen movements" that act under the support of the CIA.

What is the US goal in Hong Kong through people like Joshua Wong? It is very clear: to turn the island into an epicenter of subversion financed with foreign capital, from where it will be easier to destabilize, directly, the mainland.

Joshua Wong has made a career in the Hong Kong Transition Project, a program of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), one of many US interventionist lobbies that is chaired by Madeleine Albright.

The NDI is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), two key CIA organizations that serve as a screen for human rights and "social" penetration in countries where the United States seeks regime change.

According to Thierry Meyssan, for 30 years, the NED has been in charge of the legal part of the illegal operations of the CIA. These are the so-called "color revolutions", opposition movements that seek to overthrow governments to replace them by US client regimes.

Hong Kong is still under the influence and ambitions of London, Washington and Wall Street. The "Occupy Central" movement, which emerged in 2014 among a group of agitators, has direct financial and political links with the West, specifically, with the United States and Great Britain.

In the wake of the 2014 protests, its leaders Joshua Wong, Benny Tai and Martin Lee were invited to Washington in 2015 to receive a prize from the NED branch, the Freedom House Foundation, another CIA partner that moves its involutionist tentacles in the world.

But what noboby will tell you, neither the MSM nor the "alt-media" and blogs, is that there are massive demonstrations in support of China and the police in HK:

https://newsvire.com/hong-kong-protests-thousands-rally-in-support-of-police-and-beijing/

[turcopolier]

Elsi

Are you an operative of the CCP?

[turcopolier]

Godfree Roberts

Yes. The CCP has managed to maintain control thus far.

[Elsi]

沒有, sir, no need, I just find this information in Twitter...

[CK]

Bolton as anything is an abomination. Send him to be ambassador to Plato's Retreat.

[Jack]

CCP "hasbara" on SST!

Enjoy the freedom of expression here that is denied by CCP in China.

[Barbara Ann]

On Iran: Is Franz Kafka the new WH Press Secretary? "There is little doubt that even before the deal’s existence, Iran was violating its terms."

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-60/

[Barbara Ann]

Norbert M Salamon

It is the duty of every freedom-loving citizen to conceive of, build, maintain and fight for just such an inconceivable type of government. This is everything America stands for.

The Chinese economic miracle came at a high cost. The CCP is now an Orwellian Leviathan that controls what every Chinese can think, though many won't realize it until the first serious recession hits. What is Sic Semper Tyrannis in Chinese?

[MP98]

Is "Elsi" a cover name for a Chinese diplomat?

[Julian]

Col., a bunch of world weary Americans/Westerners seize every post about US arrogance and overreach as fuel for their own cynicism and inner guilt complex. Hence they fetishize other societies they perceive to have greater moral invigoration and wisdom. Of course the Chinese 'middle class' are deeply unhappy, the increasingly urbanizing China is falling into a behavioral sink, and the Middle Kingdom as a whole teeters on the brink of environmental catastrophe. Iran has major problems with immigrant populations from Afghanistan, drug abuse, corruption, and power struggles among the elite.

Western-ness has become akin to an original sin; we can't enter into the promised land, but the 'brown people' can. They'll be the empathetic, tolerant, ecologically sensitive humanitarians we aren't (lol). The depressive self-preoccupation is all so tiresome. You can just tell these people get a jolly from the notion the 21st century won't be American - indeed, America is going to get taught a richly deserved lesson! Masochism masquerades in the garb of enlightenment.

None of this is to suggest the machinations of late stage empire aren't happening. It's about how various factions of the population relate to certain objective realities.

[Fred]

Norbert,

"there is no conceivable government type which can operate with... close to 400 million for USA] as an effective leadership in socio economic sense for the benefit of the citizen except one man with central power."

You'll just love living under Comrade Kamala.