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DATELINE: 31 May 2018
(Published 7 June 2018)
The Future of the US-North Korean Summit
World leaders played games with destiny as Momentous May 2018 wound down. The US backed out of an international agreement with Iran threatening draconian sanctions. It looked like a strong US move at home, but it isn’t seen that way abroad. Trump ended the month effectively starting a trade war with the EU, Mexico and Canada. He’s now embarked on a dangerous wheeler-dealing gambit that, if he loses, isolates America from the world economically, politically and militarily.
Click on this link and read a book written in April 2017 that reads like it was written today about Syria and North Korean flashpoints possibly causing a nuclear weapons crisis.
The United Kingdom ended May setting itself up for government-ending scandals. The UK Skripal poisoning case caused Cold War Two to deepen while time and evidence bears down unkindly on the UK government’s credibility. It’s looking more and more like Prime Minister Theresa May rushed to judgment about Moscow being behind a state-sanctioned poisoning of a retired Soviet-era spy turned British citizen for over 18 years and his daughter, a Russian citizen, visiting him in Salisbury, Britain.
The BBC last week interviewed the doctors who took care of the victims. They said they saw no symptoms of nerve agent affecting Yulia and her father Sergei Skripal, a former KGB double agent. Nor did the doctors experience any symptoms of Novichok themselves that Britain’s main chemical weapons research lab at Porton Downs, just a few miles up the road from Salisbury, said was used. The doctors and medical staff worked on the victims in the Salisbury emergency room completely unprotected from exposure to nerve agent contact. Strange they didn’t start dropping like flies with uncontrollable muscle spasms and incontinence before sinking into comas.
They had taken no precautions, telling the BBC they believed Yulia and her father were merely suffering from what appeared to be an opioid overdose. These doctors were trained in nerve agent emergency care and would have known that chemical weapons symptoms do not mimic opioids if it was present on the bodies.
The purported Russian poisoning looks more like a false flag every day. Further revelations in June might scandalize and topple the UK prime minister’s government.
Then there’s the month of May’s momentous ups and downs toward a historic breakthrough in US-North Korea relations, moving one step forward one week and one step backward the next. May ended with one step forward again with US and North Korean leaders back on track to meet in Singapore, the summit date remaining set for 12 June 2018.
Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump love to play games. One of them even wrote a bestselling book about it that has been in print since 1987, The Art of the Deal. The US “Surpriser”-in-Chief is about to meet his match in the art of the North Korean Deal, I wager.
When I assess the two leaders’ actions throughout May, I see behind the confounding gestures of both players a probing match of stress tests and counter stress tests. What we are seeing is unique. In this month of Twitter diplomacy from Washington meets “Dennis Rodman” diplomacy from Pyongyang (see May Two Article Wave). A string of tit-for-tat, provocative acts followed, trying to mess and counter mess with the heads of both US-North Korean diplomatic teams and leaders alike as each side seeks to read reactions to gage the other’s weaknesses and strengths before they possibly meet face to face on 12 June in Singapore.
Case in point, earlier in May, the US State Department negotiation team scheduled a meeting with their North Korean opposites in Singapore to discuss preliminary plans for the 12 June Summit. The US team flew in. They waited. Waited…
Many hours passed. No sign or word from the North Koreans. They never left Pyongyang.
Well stink my Kimchee! Are you serious about negotiating something or just pulling another North Korean diplomatic stunt?
Trump uncages his NSA advisor John Bolton. He appears on FOX and other networks mentioning for all to hear, including Kim and his government, America’s most powerful war hawk rubbing some Libyan desert salt with a rusty rebar between the buns of a dilemma to chafe North Korea’s tender concerns.
No shows in Singapore?
I’ll give you an offer you can’t refuse, or else. Think the Gaddafi/Libya solution if this summit is just a waste of Don “Donald” Corleone Trump’s time. The hint of what happened to Muammar Gaddafi is left to play on the minds of the North Koreans if they’re just dicking the Donald around. Kim and North Koreans have seen the video of their ally Gaddafi being sodomized with a rusted rebar before execution by US-backed jihadist guerillas.
After Bolton muses indirectly about a similar regime change fate, in comes Vice President Pence on US TV the following day implying more directly that Kim Jong-Un’s future might resemble that of Gaddafi if he should refuse an offer of a nuclear peace deal, on US terms that Pence hints is an offer/threat Kim can’t refuse.
Bolton and Pence aren’t playing by the rules of traditional statesmanship but what I would define as Trump’s “Reality Show,” Realitypolitik diplomacy. It’s a taste of how Trump the New York real estate deal maker played rough in the boardroom, learning a trick or two from his associates in the New York mafia, without whom you cannot build buildings in Manhattan because of their deep influence with construction contractors and companies there. Sometimes Trump plays Kim and sundry using language only a mafia don can understand to gain their fear and respect.
Give us what we want up front and we’ll give you respect.
Don’t do either and you might find yourself standing in cement shoes regarding the bottom of the Hudson River’s real estate rather than high and dry Manhattan properties, already. Hear what I’m sayin’…?
(Uncomfortable pause…)
(Then comes a stone face breaking into a big mischievous smile. Next the laughter and a friendly yet harsh slap on your back!)
Hahaha! Fuhgeddaboudit! Hey Tony Soprano, I’m only kiddin’…
Tony’s smiling back, laughing and playing along nodding while thinking, “Yeah, only kidding in earnest.”
If you’re the Korean Godfather Kim sitting before the affable Don Trumperino, your head’s working it out what Don Trumperino playfully threatening and calculating the odds it could be meant for you and why. You’re remembering Gaddafi first surrendered his nuclear weapons program as per US demands back in 2004. A few years later in 2011 the US turned around and contracted a UN resolution as a pretext to rub him and his regime out, choosing sides with the competition waging a civil war that destroyed his country, leaving behind a failed state. Why did they do that? What was the moment, right or wrong, they thought Gaddafi was giving them no respect?
Then comes the next thing you gotta work out.
Is Trump serious?! Or is this threat only theatrics to put you off balance for the real thing he wants? Is this a Celebrity Apprentice TV gag or something?
We don’t show in Singapore. Trump let’s his Kevin Bussey kook loose, his NSA celebrity apprentice cabinet member “the Walrus,” with that mustache with a mind of its own, talking Libya-model rub outs.
Then comes Trump’s chief of “Vice” his Vice President, the guy who showed our North Korean don’s sister “no respect” at the Winter Olympic ceremony. Pence gave Kim’s sister the cold shoulder sitting next to her in the VIP seats during the opening ceremony for the whole world to see his disrespect. Bolton’s Trump’s neocon clown in his court, but Pence. That guy could be Don Trumperino’s successor—the next US Godfather. Now that guy’s rubbing our noses in the stinking Libya model if we don’t agree to their terms, like, give up your nukes and “then” we’ll talk peace with’ya. Come on! We can’t do that. They know we won’t go there. Or do they? Are they serious?!
OK, our snubbing them no showing in Singapore earlier in May has worked. We now know what’s their literal “nuclear option” for rubbing us out, gone public, already. Let’s see what we can now do to undermine that publicly. Get the world more on our side. Put pressure on them to back off from their nuclear option.
Gaddafi was a chump compared to us. A wannabe nuclear power when we’re the real deal. You better show “us” some respect Don Trumperino, because we can make an offer you can’t refuse RIGHT BACK!
Fuhgeddaboudit a Nobel Peace Prize!
Fuhgeddaboudit a big political win you really need right now to stun your political competition before the midterm elections, making the competition for your turf lose out so they can’t put your organization in jail with impeachment or something. There’s more than one way to rub a guy out.
You’re not playing games with a newbie at bait-and-switch bluffing. We North Koreans think maybe you’re rolling out that Kevin Bussey-Bolton kook of NSA and Mr. Vice to see if you can ruffle our Godfather Don Kim Jong-er-oony.
Lessons from the North Korean sub learned. Kim’s next move threw it right back in Trump’s court, playing, You Bet Your Life. He took the Art of the Dealmaker back to school, North Korean style… Gain FULL ACCESS to this and all 3 articles for a donation of $5.00. I will download it to you directly as a PDF attachment. Thanks for your support.Put June One 2018 in the PayPal Memo line.
DATELINE: 31 May 2018
(Published 7 June 2018)
‘Abdu’l-Bahá.
The Ultimatums of the United State to Iran are a Brutal “Carthaginian Peace” Offer. I would Answer each Mike Pompeo Point inspired by the Spirit of what the Prophet of International Disarmament and Peace, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’, foresaw in 1875
Religious, racial, national, and political bias: all these prejudices strike at the very root of human life; one and all they beget bloodshed, and the ruination of the world. So long as these prejudices survive, there will be continuous and fearsome wars.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá (c. 1920),
The Secret of Divine Civilization (1875)
They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
First Isaiah (738-687 b.c.), Is-2:4
Since I’m a futurist, I contemplated on this most recent Memorial Day, all the fresh graves the US government is preparing to fill with thousands upon thousands of US service men and women. Many of these graves will be symbolic—their caskets empty. They will be lost at sea. Their gravesites will be at the bottom of the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s presentation a week ago Monday, 21 May 2018, of his so-called new Iranian “deal” replaces the JPOA (Joint Plan of Action) agreement already signed by the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia and China. It had been in action since October 2015 until the US bugged out of it this May 2018. The US under Trump complains that the Iranians don’t honor “the spirit” of the agreement even though Washington acknowledges Tehran has dutifully followed the letter of the agreement. It is considered the stringent inspection regimen ever tasked the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Administration) to catch a country red-handed if it pursues a nuclear weapons manufacture.
What Pompeo wants in its place is a list of demands that no sovereign nation with any dignity, would honor. This deal-cum-ultimatum reminds me of earlier presidents stuffing their cabinet with neoconservative cabinets like those of Republican President G.W. Bush dispensing similar-worded ultimatums in 2003 as a perfunctory gesture of faux civility before unilaterally invading and occupying Iraq.
This kind of bullying is bipartisan. Take the Democrat President who succeeded Bush. Barack Obama after strong prompting from his hawkish Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made his own ultimatums to Libya before he destroyed Gaddafi’s regime and helped destroy Libya “to save it.”
Not to be outdone, Trump’s cabinet of resurrected neocons, including many responsible for toppling Iraq, like John Bolton, set their president up for a war with Iran with such a preamble of truly impossible deals-cum-unconditional surrender aimed at Iran. Pompeo’s demands are tantamount to the Iranian nation of 81 million metaphorically lying on the ground with their bellies exposed like a compliant, submissive dog.
Only then will the US negotiate with you. Not in paper treaties it backs out of, but in the only way it deals with an independent and sovereign nation these dark American days that has its own interests that are in conflict with US hegemonic interests.
Lie down on your back exposing your soft underbelly, defenseless.
Wag your tail.
Good doggie!
Now we kill your leadership and if you resist we’ll kick you while we have you defenseless and down.
There, there. Don’t howl in pain. That’s a good failed-state doggie.
The Persian people have endured 3,000 years because their ancient culture sees crap like this coming and knows how to survive it. Pompeo threatens Iran with sanctions so harsh that they could collapse its economy completely in what was on 21 May 2018 his declaration of total economic war, or as he puts it in his own negative hyperbole, “These will be the strongest sanctions in history by the time we are complete. After our sanctions come into full force, [Iran] will be battling to keep its economy alive.”
How do 81 million Iranians avoid this draconian economic war by sanction?
Below is the list of 12 steps Iran must surrender to.
Before we scrutinize them line by line, I must tell you this about the programmed ego of Pompeo’s mind. He is a fanatic fundamentalist Christian dedicated to destroying Israel’s enemies as an agent of the fulfilment of apocalyptic Christian prophecy as he misreads it.
Alongside him in President Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton. Than man, back in 2017, ended a hellfire and brimstone speech delivered 10 months earlier in Paris to a gathering of what were once deemed by Washington, Islamic terrorists. They belong to the same group that Saddam Hussein harbored in exile in Iraq before Bolton’s neocon crew destroyed that regime.
At present the members of the Mujahedeen Khalq (MEK) are no longer “terrorist” but “freedom fighters” in Bolton bespeckled eye, even though they bomb civilian airliners, bomb places of worship, aid ISIS infiltrating and shooting up a parliament building and were contracted by foreign nations to assassinate scientists.
If I said they were killing British and American civilians you’d be horrified. But are you horrified if the civilians slaughtered and terrorized are innocent Iranian civilians, murdered by the hundreds for decades?
If America supports terrorists committing evil, it is a as much a terrorist nation as any other doing the same that it abhors.
Bolton ended his Paris speech to US-backed terrorist “friendlies” with the following and rousing ending (see also the link to his speech posted here on YouTube) You might call it Bolton’s hard lobbying of President Trump for regime change in Iran. A year later, Bolton is the most influential US warmongering lobbyist in Trump’s cabinet posing as his NSA advisor.
“The outcome of the president’s policy review should be to determine that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution will not last until its 40th birthday,” declared Bolton to the MEK audience.
Bolton is giving a deadline to end the Islamic Republic of Iran set for a time before 11 February 2019 for the following:
“The declared policy of the United States should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran. The behavior and the objectives of the regime are not going to change and, therefore, the only solution is to change the regime itself.”
Bolton ended his harangue with a roaring crowd pleaser: “And that’s why, before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran!”
That means Bolton, members of the US military Industrial Complex in attendance alongside MEK terrorists expect to reconvene a victory party in the conquered capital of Iran in less than a year.
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Step one towards that goal has already happened: President Trump backing out of the JPOA.
Step two: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issues his “deal” of 12 demands delivered to Tehran. Tehran rejects them off hand as expected because Pompeo was pompously peddling what diplomats call a “Carthaginian Peace.”
After Carthage lost the first and second of three Punic Wars with the Republic of Rome (264-261 BC and 218-201 BC), the victors’ defined “peace” as complete submission. Rome demanded that defeated Carthage be stripped of all its colonies, give up its naval fleet and armed forces, then with no way to defend itself, Rome forced it to pay a constant tribute. Carthage submitted to this ugly “peace” and endured it for decades as Rome tightened its grip. Finally, Carthage rebelled when Rome after 50 years of punishment added more outrageous demands such as taking the children of the Carthaginian aristocracy away as hostages and demanding the city of Carthage a maritime city state abandon its seaport and be destroyed by its own people, moved and rebuilt at their own cost inland away from the Mediterranean.
That did it! Carthage rebelled triggering the Third Punic War (149-146 BC). Rome had hoped as much so they could legally lay siege and rapidly annihilate what was left of its prostate enemy once and for all. The Romans then burned it to the ground and sold all its surviving citizens into slavery. Legend has it Rome afterwards spread salt over Carthaginian farmlands to render them a wasteland.
Ever since, the term “Carthaginian Peace” has been used to denounced notoriously unfair treaties meant to subjugate a vanquished people to a point where they rebel and are annihilated. The Versailles Treaty of 1919 ending the First World War was deemed a “Carthaginian Peace” by Germany. The victorious European allied leaders, along with a reluctant US President Woodrow Wilson, put all the blame for the Great War on Germany, for which the militant alliances of the victors had also shared an equal responsibility for starting. Like Carthage the Germans were forced to scuttle their fleet and reduce their army to a token shadow force. Germany had to pay for its own and all the damages of the Great War by itself through war reparations that caused a collapse of its economy and widespread threats of civil disorder, attempted revolutions and famine. Like Carthage before it, Germany, rendered more radicalized by the tyranny of allied “Peace” did more than rebel. It nearly destroyed the allies of the First in a bloodier Second World War. The injustice of Versailles was taken up by the likes of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to fan nationalistic pride and fanaticism. He road Versailles injustice to take power and brought full employment back to Germans by rearming for world war, round two.
Even after the Second World War, Germany faced a harsher Carthaginian Peace option considered by the allies called the Morgenthau Plan. It aimed to militarily denude and de-industrialize the German people down to subsistence farming. The need for a stronger Germany to wage Cold War One against the Soviet Union prevented it from going through.
Now Pompeo gives Iran the newest version of a Carthaginian Peace, or face sanctions that would collapse its industrial base unless it surrenders to the following terms. I will answer all 12 of Pompeo’s points in an unexpected way. I will agree to them, inspired by the spirit and vision of a pacifist prophet from nineteenth-century Iran:
ULTIMATUM 1
First, Iran must declare to the IAEA a full account of the prior military dimensions of its nuclear program, and permanently and verifiably abandon such work in perpetuity.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, one of the founders of the Bahai Religion, was born in Tehran in 1844. He died in Haifa in 1921. During his life he laid down the groundwork for peaceful resolution of the world’s problems, not only visualizing but through his correspondences to world leaders successfully lobbying for what later became first the League of Nations and later the current United Nations, charged with bringing an end to global conflict.
This enlightened man transcended all nationalistic identities, including his own. What he said in 1875 about the right way to disarm the world from all future wars is exactly what is needed today. Please note my leading titles to each of the following quotes defining the stages of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s vision of a world disarming its engines of war and living in peace… Gain FULL ACCESS to this and all 3 articles for a donation of $5.00. I will download it to you directly as a PDF attachment. Thanks for your support.Put June One 2018 in the PayPal Memo line.
DATELINE: 31 May 2018
(Published 7 June 2018)
How to Interpret Nostradamus—Lesson 3:
THE “STONE IN THE TREE” PROPHECY
It is key in your success as an interpreter of Nostradamus to be empathically connected with his point of view from the sixteenth century. Such an intuition requires an equal balance of objective knowledge about that century. Nostradamus’ understanding of history of his day was extensive, adding to that a talent unique to this seer of the High Renaissance era in France, a wide geographic knowledge of his world.
Any successful Nostradamian needs to have in their possession the same knowledge Nostradamus had. The same books he possessed and your own extensive collection of maps from the sixteenth century.
You need also to understand his prejudices, his Islamophobic concerns, and his stance as a royalist, for these will color his take on the future somewhat. I say somewhat because in my exposure to the man and works of Nostradamus going back all the way to 1968, and later in my phase of publishing articles and books about him since 1983, I have come to marvel at how unbiased he was politically and religiously about what he saw. That should not be construed to mean he didn’t find many things in the future horrifying, unbelievable, or hateful.
His ability to remain mostly aloof or on rare occasions express his opinions shows his ability to look beyond what he saw as good and evil to simply, neutrally, report on the future.
My deep study of Nostradamus has taught me to do the same when reading the future about currently contentious issues and people, like President Trump or Putin, the Russian hack story and what have you. I thank my study of Nostradamus for teaching me to see both sides of an issue in the same empathic way Nostradamus did. I am aided by my path of Meditation in doing this since I began being a self-observer of the body-mind and witness to its emotions, thoughts as well as watching the outside world’s emotions, thoughts and perpetual change and movement from a still and silent space since 1980.
So, to catch what Nostradamus is trying to describe from our times, require you know “his times” both intuitively and factually. I therefore contend that aided by empathy and that knowledge you may better catch his many attempts to describe our world with its technological wonders and horrors as a man from some pre-industrial era 4.5 centuries ago.
Here then is an example for today’s lesson: what did Nostradamus mean when he described a “stone in the tree” in Century 2 Quatrain 70…?
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