The Fox & Friends host Abby Huntsman apologised to viewers on Sunday, after referring to Donald Trump’s summit with Kim Jong-un of North Korea in Singapore as “that meeting between the two dictators”.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jun/10/a-fox-news-host

US President Donald Trump's top economic adviser Larry Kudlow has suffered a heart attack and is in Walter Reed Medical National Military Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Trump announced Kudlow suffered a heart attack a mere 25 minutes before the US President was slated to meet with Kim Jong Un of North Korea at the Capella Hotel in Singapore. His condition is currently not known.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/news/201806121065320973-Trump-Economic-Heart-Att...

Sonnet 107 —

 

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul 
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come, 
Can yet the lease of my true love control, 
Suppos'd as forfeit to a confin'd doom. 
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur'd 
And the sad augurs mock their own presage; 
Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd 
And peace proclaims olives of endless age. 
Now with the drops of this most balmy time 
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, 
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, 
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes; 
And thou in this shalt find thy monument, 
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.

Mr Trump, despite his euphoria, seemed to be setting the bar low. And in a statement displaying the brashness his biographers and other journalists have come to know, he admitted his gamble with Mr Kim could be for naught.

"I may be wrong," Mr Trump said during the news conference. "I may stand before you in six months and say, 'Hey, I was wrong'.

"I don't know that I'll ever admit that," he said with a smile, "but I'll find some kind of an excuse."

He may like to brush up on his World War II history. 

Chamberlain, as Britain headed into war with Germany, told the House of Commons:

"Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life has crashed into ruins."

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-13/trump-kim-adolf-hitler-benito-mussolini-chamberlain-wwii-peace/9863156

 

I think the author of this shit piece, Micheline Maynard, is in dreamland... I might even say that Trump knows exactly what he is doing: He has 5500 nukes at his disposal, massive amount of Tomahawks missiles, many shielding other missiles, while NK Kim has at most 20 missiles with say 10 nukes heads that can't reach the USA, and basically no defence. In regard to Chamberlain, the military balance was more in Hitler's favour. No comparison whatsoever...

 

Either that young (or old) "journalist" has no clue what she's is writing about or she does it, because like many journos, "she does not like Trump". I would say get a life. Had Clinton got the gig of US President, NK would be at war with the US, South Korea would be devastated and Japan would be a shell — but La Madam Clinton would be proud about solving this "problem" like she solved Libya.

Stranger things can happen. Maybe – just maybe – the United States and North Korea can find a way towards securing a lasting peace – despite being sworn enemies for the last seven decades.

Recall how only a few months ago, President Trump and Chairman Kim were threatening to go to war. Trump infamously had said at one point that he was prepared to "totally destroy" North Korea.

All the bellicose rhetoric instantly faded when the two leaders met this week in Singapore in what was a truly historic meeting. No serving US president has ever met a North Korean head of state.

At 33-years-old, Kim Jong-Un achieved something that his father Kim Jong-Il and grandfather Kim Il-Sung might have only dreamed about.

The cordial handshakes, smiles and friendly words make it possible for people of the world to hope for a peaceful outcome to the long-running US-North Korean conflict.

READ MORE: Historic Kim-Trump Summit Highlights: Handshakes, Body Language, 'Major Changes'

Still, there is a long way to go if peace is to be achieved. But what holds promise is the mutual attitude of the two leaders.

Kim Jong-Un spoke of "putting obstacles and prejudices of the past behind".

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201806121065348982-trump-kim-summit-o...

In other versions, Helen is a daughter of Nemesis, the goddess who personified the disaster that awaited those suffering from the pride of Hubris.

 

---------------------------

 

...

 

Trump held a Cabinet meeting earlier today in which he told a remarkable number of whoppers:

During the Obama years, that’s all I heard about: War with North Korea. 

Trump was imagining things during those eight years, because no one seriously suggested that war with North Korea was at all likely at any point during Obama’s presidency. It was only during Trump’s first year in office that fears of war with North Korea dramatically increased in large part because of the belligerent rhetoric from the president and then-National Security Advisor McMaster. Trump is trying to claim that he solved a longstanding problem, but by telling such an egregious and easily checked lie he just reminds everyone that it was his bellicosity and reckless threats that escalated tensions with North Korea in 2017. If the risk of war has receded, that is not because Trump has “solved” anything, but only because he has stopped making blood-curdling threats to annihilate another country.

Trump went on to say this later in the meeting:

Look, I’ve been given a very tough hand. Because I came up here, we had an economy that was going down. We had an Iran problem. We had a Middle East problem.  Take a look at what was going on in the Middle East. It’s a lot better now. You’re a lot smoother right now than anything you heard over the last eight years [bold mine-DL].

This is all nonsense, starting with the dishonest claim about the economy. But it’s the absurd claims about the Middle East that really stand out. The U.S. continues to enable the Saudi-led war on Yemen, and that war now threatens to devastate the port of Hodeidah and put the lives of millions of civilians at risk. Things are not “a lot better now” than they were before he took office. They are measurably and demonstrably worse, especially in Yemen. The Saudi coalition is in the process of committing a massive crime against humanity with U.S. backing as Trump says this. He has managed to take the worst Obama-era policy in Yemen and make it even worse than it already was, and he has done this on purpose to cater to the preferences of despotic regimes that have flattered and curried favor with him over the last few years. Trump’s description of his parallel reality unwittingly calls to mind his most reckless and destructive actions, and it shows how oblivious he is to their consequences.

 

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/trumps-parallel-reality/

 

 

The reality is a full apology from the satirical gallery:

 

 

Confession of a Putin-Nazi Denialist

 

Last week, I published an inappropriate and deeply offensive satirical essay, for which I would now like to repeatedly apologize. The offensive satirical essay in question, Awaiting the Putin-Nazi Apocalypse, which I regret having written and for which I intend to repeatedly apologize throughout this essay, concerned what I perceived, at the time I wrote it, as an overreaction on the part of millions of decent, patriotic liberals to the first eighteen months of Donald Trump’s presidency and Vladimir Putin’s ongoing efforts to destroy democracy and take over the world.

In light of recent revelations, and repeated viewings of heartbreaking close-up color photos of children in cages, I feel it incumbent on myself to confess what I recognize now as my part in spreading the scourge of Putin-Nazism that is metastasizing like a hideous Slavic colon cancer throughout our great nation, and to repeatedly apologize for having been an apologist for such Hitlerian evil, as well as any discomfort my Putin-Nazi Denialism might have caused anyone.

In addition to repeatedly apologizing for any emotional or psychological discomfort or trauma my essay may have caused, I would like to attempt to explain why I wrote it, not to in any way excuse myself, but rather, in the hope that other political satirists might learn from my mistake, and stop and think about the consequences of going after cheap, easy laughs while hundreds of thousands of innocent people are being rounded up by the American gestapo and shipped off to concentration camps to be horribly murdered with poison gas, and experimented on by sadistic doctors, or just slowly starved and worked to death … which is obviously nothing to joke about.

Again, I’m not trying to rationalize the offensive nature of the essay in question (which I wrote on prescription sleep medication), but I was honestly not aware when I wrote it that there was such a thing as the American gestapo, or that there were any actual concentration camps in the United States at the present time. I just assumed that the stories I was seeing in the press about children being torn away from their parents, locked in cages, or disappeared, were referring to the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, both of which were created in 2002, when everyone was still running around waving flags, backing the invasion of the Greater Middle East, the loss of any semblance of personal privacy, and the militarization of their local police, because the ruling classes and the corporate media had told them that Saddam Hussein was Hitler, or that Osama bin Laden, or someone, was Hitler. I had not realized that Putin had ordered Trump to transform the DHS (which during the beneficent Obama administration had been housing so-called “illegal immigrants” in comfort suites at the Holiday Inn, and providing the kids with Snow Cones, and so on) into a goose-stepping, Sieg-heiling Nazi kill-corps that is even now, as I am writing this confession, carrying out the Final Mexican Solution.

Fortunately, General Michael Hayden set me straight with his recent tweet, featuring a picture of Auschwitz itself, and a grim reminder that “other governments have separated mothers and children.” Hayden, a former director of both the NSA and CIA, and who has no qualms about torturing Muslims or illegally surveilling American citizens, surely knows a death camp when he sees one … so I figured I’d better dig a little deeper into this whole Nazified Amerika thing.

When I did, mostly by submersing myself in countless reports in the corporate media, and by spastically flicking through memes on Twitter, I realized what a fool I had been (which, again, I’m terribly, terribly sorry for). I had thought Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy was just another gratuitously sadistic twist on the long-standing practice of tormenting desperate people fleeing societies systematically destabilized by the US government and the corporations that basically own it in order to maintain a criminalized labor force to do the shit jobs Americans don’t want and drive down domestic wages, generally … but it turns out that isn’t it at all. No, this time, it appears it’s not just another Republican beating up on minorities to score political points with Americans too blind or ignorant to understand that “illegal immigrants” are not their enemies, but rather, the victims of the same corporatocracy that has been bleeding them dry for the last five decades while pandering to their tribalist fears and fantasies of racial superiority. No, this time, it’s the actual, literal Nazis with actual, literal concentration camps, except that this time they want to exterminate the Mexicans, or Mexican kids in any event, and Hitler is actually a foreign agent remotely controlled by Vladimir Putin, who is somehow, at the same time, also Hitler, and is trying to take over the entire world by allowing his country to be surrounded by NATO, except for his naval ports in Crimea, which Obama helped the Ukrainian Nazis try to steal away from the Russian Nazis, but that was way back in 2014, before Amerika went full-blown Nazi, when there were no Mexican kids in Walmarts converted into Nazi death camps. Or something more or less like that. I’ve been getting a little confused, myself, since I started trying to stop to overthinking things and instead just react to whatever stimulus the corporate media and the ruling classes wave in front of my face everyday.

Look, the point is, I’m terribly, terribly sorry for writing that offensive satirical essay, which I realize now was horribly insensitive, and hurtful, and possibly against some law, or corporate code of Internet conduct. I sincerely hope you will not read it, and that Google and Facebook caught it and deranked it before it lured any impressionable young minds into the cesspool of Putin-Nazi Denialism. As for me, I’ve decided it will be best for everyone if I withdraw from public life for a while to reflect on how I ended up here and … you know, to spend more time with my family.

Before I do that, I just wanted to mention (again, not to in any way defend the insensitive and narcissistic views I mindlessly expressed in the essay in question) that my failure to recognize what’s been happening back home might have something to do with the fact that I live here in Berlin, in Germany, where the streets are full of Stolpersteine, little brass cobblestones bearing the names of actual people torn out of their homes by the actual Geheime Staatspolizei, put on trains, sent to death camps, or just taken out into the woods and murdered. These Stolpersteine are embedded in the street outside the last houses where these people lived, so it isn’t that hard to imagine the Gestapo — i.e., the actual Nazi Gestapo — dragging, well, let’s say, Frau Elsbeth Piltz, out of what, until the 26th of February, 1943, was her home (and is now one of my local grocery stores), and sending her off to be gassed at Auschwitz. I pass her Stolperstein more or less daily, as well as those of other people … actual living human beings who walked the same streets I walk today, people who were murdered by actual Nazis … not the hysterical fantasies of Nazis that self-absorbed liberals entertain in order to short circuit their critical thinking and shout down any criticism of their self-righteous mission to defend democracy from imaginary Russians and Donald Trump. But whatever. Who gives a shit about history, or the memory of Elsbeth Piltz, or any other actual human beings, when you’ve got an official narrative to sell? 

Damn it … there I go again with my Putin-Nazi Denialism. Forgive me. I’m still working on it. Just give me a little time alone with the corporate media, and Twitter, and I will eventually get my mind right, I swear.

CJ Hopkins
First published in CounterPunch, June 20, 2018.

Stolpersteines (picture by Gus leonisky)

 

“The Faces of North Korea”

 

Text, photos and film: Andre Vltchek

 

This is my 25-minutes piece about the DPRK (North Korea) – country that I visited relatively recently; visited and loved, was impressed with, and let me be frank – admired.

I don’t really know if I could call this a ‘documentary’. Perhaps not. A simple story, a poem, you know: I met a girl, tiny and delicate, at the roller-skating ring in Pyongyang. How old was she? Who knows; perhaps four or five. She was first clinging to her mom, then to a Korean professor Kiyul, even to a former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Then she began skating away, waving innocently, looking back at me, at us, or just looking back…

Suddenly I was terribly scared for her. It was almost some physical fear. Perhaps it was irrational, like panic, I don’t know…

I did not want anything bad to happen to her. I did not want the US nukes start falling all around her. I did not want her to end up like those poor Vietnamese or Iraqi or Afghan children, victims of the Western barbarism; of the chemical weapons, depleted uranium, or cluster bombs. I did not want her to starve because of some insane sanctions pushed through the UN by spiteful maniacs who simply hate “the Others”.

And so, I produced a short film, about what I saw in North Korea. A film that I made for, dedicated to, that little girl at the roller-skating ring in Pyongyang.

When I was filming, collecting footage in DPRK, the war, an attack from the West or from Japan or South Korea, looked possible, almost likely.

When, some time later, I was editing, in Beirut, with a Lebanese editor, US President Donald Trump was threatening to “take care of the North Korea”. What he meant was clear. Trump is a ‘honest man’; honest in a mafia-style way. In the film I call him ‘a manager’. He may not be an Einstein, but he usually says what he means, at each given moment. You know, again, the Yakuza-style.

Now when I am releasing this humble work of mine, things look brighter after the Singapore Summit, although I really do not trust the West, after more than 500 years of barbaric colonialist wars and crusades. The ‘manager’ is perhaps honest when he says that now he likes President Kim, but then again, tomorrow he could be ‘honest’ again, declaring that he changed him mind and wants to break his arm.

Time to hurry, I feel. Time to hurry and to show to as many people as possible, how beautiful North Korea is, and how dignified its people are.

*

I can “sell” footage or “sell rights” and make some money for my other internationalist projects, but the whole thing would get delayed, and only limited number of people would see it in such case.

By releasing it like this, the film will make nothing, zero, but I guess it is my duty to do it this way. Hopefully, the film, or ‘a poem’, will be seen by many and the pressure on the West and on Japan will grow – pressure to stop intimidation of the people who already suffered so tremendously much!

 

Read more and watch the movie:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/07/30/the-faces-of-north-korea/