Trump Slams NATO, The Senate Slams Trump

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Jul 112018
 

Well that was an interesting day in politics!

Trump has arrived in Europe and immediately tried to insert both feet into his mouth – he insults the other members of NATO by openly criticising them for not meeting their commitment to military spending, and claims that NATO owes money to the USA for protection.

Now there used to be some grounds for criticising the European members of NATO for not spending enough on their military, but the spending has been going up in recent years (despite austerity). You don’t criticise someone for being overweight when they’re on a diet and have lost half their flab!

And Trump claimed that Germany is under the control of Russia because of Germany buying natural gas from Russia! First of all, the figures he were using were wrong, and when you boil it down Germany’s energy needs are very rapidly being switched to renewable energy sources – on some days all of Germany’s energy is supplied by renewable energy sources.

Trump exhibits the diplomatic skills of a rabid dog.

European nations aren’t dumb – we watched Russia blackmail Ukraine over gas supplies in winter and know that we need to wean ourselves off Russian gas. And we know that the US has sent us a self-destructive idiot to deal with; those meeting with Trump will be gritting their teeth and putting on their most diplomatic face.

The other interesting thing is the effect Trump’s attack on NATO has had on the US Senate; they’ve basically passed a resolution (passed 97-2) saying in a long-winded way: “Ignore that idiot Trump, we’re fully behind NATO”.

There are those in the US media saying that Trump is Putin’s biggest ally on all of this – he apparently would rather do a deal with the Russians than with the traditional allies of the US. Is Trump actually an FSB agent?

No. The Russians might well make use of Trump and drop him an advantage or two, but they’re not so dumb as to employ an idiot like Trump.

Trump is a clear and present danger to the interests of the US; not the stuff like treating immigrants like criminals (although that is bad enough) but the big stuff; stuff that will encourage Republicans to turn on Trump – National Security and the economy.

 

Trump’s Trade Tantrum

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Jun 142018
 

Trump is outdoing himself in stupidity by starting a trade war with the strongest allies of the US. He imposed unilateral tariffs on steel and aluminium (supposedly to protect US workers although it won’t do that), and acts surprised when allies respond with tariffs of their own.

Which is a bit like a child being surprised when they throw a ball in the air and it falls back on their head.

So what effect will the tariffs on steel and aluminium have? For a start, the US producers of steel and aluminium are not going to suddenly pick up the slack – the US imports in the region of $2 billion worth of steel products per month, and whilst US steel manufacturers can increase production it won’t be able to increase it that quickly.

So the US will continue to import foreign steel, but importers will pay more for it. That means the goods produced by imported steel will cost more. Consumers will pay more for those goods or switch to foreign producers who produce it cheaper (the later will cost US jobs).

So Trump has chosen to implement tariffs that will harm the US.

And assumed that those countries Trump has imposed tariffs on will meekly accept their punishment; which obviously hasn’t happened..

The EU has imposed retaliatory tariffs on motorcycles, cranberry juice, denim, peanut butter, and cigarettes. Notice something interesting about those products? They are all finished products with easily sourced alternative suppliers, or luxury goods that aren’t necessary.

In other words the EU tariffs are going to have a minimal impact on the EU economy.

So Trump will blame the damage to the US economy on his own trade war, and point to the lack of damage to the EU’s economy as ‘evidence’.

Expect more temper tantrum Trump ‘policies’ shortly.

 

Charlottesville, Trump, Neo-Fascists, and the “Alt-Left”

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Aug 192017
 

The simplistic recitation of what happened in Charlottesville last Friday was that a bunch of fascists organised a protest against the removal of a town statue of Robert E Lee and a counter-protest was organised by anti-fascists. The fascists had a perfect right to peacefully protest (although given their ideology, cringing in their basements in shame would be more appropriate), and the counter-protesters were almost inevitably present – arguably with also a right to be there (peacefully).

The protests turned violent, and on Saturday a fascist drove a car into a crowd of counter-protester killing one, and injuring 19.

Who was to blame? Well before I add my opinion to the pile of opinions out there, let’s take a look at some of the others that have come out since the attack :-

  1. Trump initially sought to blame “all sides”, then went back on his word, and then rolled it forward again. Such decisiveness. But blaming “all sides”? So in other words, the victims of terrorism are to blame as well as the terrorists? You could be generous, and assume that he intended to blame all sides for the general violence, but not to call the attack on anti-fascists terrorism was unforgivable.
  2. Early on, some fascists even tried to claim that the terrorist attack was perpetrated by anti-fascists to blacken the name of fascism. Unfortunately I cannot find a source for this, although I recall it being mentioned (perhaps an entry on the Stormfront site which is currently unavailable to unregistered users). This was a fore-runner of the next part of the “blame game”.
  3. “But BLM/Antifa are terrorists too”. Victim-blaming; even if it were true (I’ll come back to that), the only terrorist attack at Charlottesville was perpetrated by a fascist with anti-fascists as the target. Besides which, the majority of the counter protesters were not members of BLM or Antifa; students, church groups, local residents, hell anyone with half a sense of decency could have been there opposing the fascists.
  4. The deceptive use of the “Alt-Left” label. There is no equivalent of the alt-right on the left; the left have a pretty consistent attitude towards racism. Using the “Alt-Left” label implies that the counter-protesters were members of the lunatic fringe of the left. For a start, whatever you think of the old hard-left (communists and the like), they certainly aren’t new or “alt”in any way. And secondly, many of the counter-protesters were certainly not part of the far left; hell there were probably right-wingers as part of the counter-protesters. I’ve got a low opinion of the mainstream right.

Variations on number 3 above has been common enough online that I have seen it multiple times in my Facebook feed (and elsewhere). Let me emphasise something I mentioned earlier – two wrongs don’t make a right, and there was no BLM/Antifa terrorism at Charlottesville.

Now onto my opinion about who was to blame.

As mentioned before, the only terrorist attack at Charlottesville was carried out by a neo-fascist, and the terrorist attack was the only reason why Charlottesville made a big news story. The counter-protesters were not involved in terrorism.

Now onto the violence. Determining blame here is tricky for several reasons :-

  1. You cannot tell from media reports who was to blame for crowd violence; in particular video footage can be very deceptive especially once it is cut to “sex it up” for the news. When some bozo starts windmilling punches at the fascists, how do we know that he wasn’t hit by a stone thrown by the fascists just before? That could easily be not shown on any video footage. When police forces ask for everyone’s mobile phone video and pictures after a terrorist incident they do so for a reason – they want to see things from as many perspectives as possible.
  2. Reacting with violence to extreme provocation is wrong, but those going out of their way to provoke things are not entirely blameless. Having been on anti-fascist protests myself, I can say that fascists can be extremely intimidating and provoking.

Having said that, there is a school of thought that says that giving a fascist a good kicking is a job well done. Having recently seen a film of what racism seems to inevitably lead to, it is hard to condemn such an attitude :-

Watch that film, and dare say that nazis deserve the protection of the law. At the very least, punching a nazi is no crime. (whatever the law may say).

I have previously used the generic term “fascist” to describe the protesters at Charlottesville, but in reality there was an alphabet soup of right-wing extremists – the KKK, white supremists, neo-nazis, and every other bunch of thugs that are collectively known as “alt-right”. Yes, I said thug. If you scratch the surface of any low-level fascist, you will find a young man who is into violence. What passes for their idiotic ideology is little more than an excuse to justify violence against certain groups.

If you look at listed terrorist attacks in the USA by ideology, 15 attacks have been by left-wing extremists since 1901; 51 have been by right-wing extremists (which excludes lynchings which would bring the figure up into thousands). So which group is the most violent?

Is Trump a Russian FSB Agent?

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May 312017
 

No, of course he isn’t. The Russian intelligence services would never allow an agent of theirs to behave in such a foolish way; at most he is a useful idiot. But whose antics are getting to the point where the idiot part is outweighing the useful part.

Even ignoring the political shenanigans of doing almost the complete opposite of what he said he would do (decimating public spending on health care is going to come as a bit of a surprise to many of his supporters) :-

  1. Trump allegedly tried to pressure several intelligence agency heads into stopping investigations into the “Russian connection”.
  2. Trump fires the head of the FBI whilst that head was involved in investigating the “Russian connection”; whilst this was allegedly done because Comey’s performance during the investigation of Hilary Clinton’s email situation was sub-par, it looks like an attempt to stop the investigation.
  3. Trump allegedly has private meetings with Russian officials in the oval office where he allegedly calls the former head of the FBI a “nut job” and that his firing takes off the pressure of the “Russian connection” investigation.
  4. Trump allegedly shows highly classified intelligence information to Russian officials in the oval office. Imagine this happening during the cold war era!
  5. Trump in trying to deny the above lets slip that the source of the intelligence was an Israeli agent embedded within ISIS; if that agent survives, he or she is owed a free slap at him.

This all goes well beyond political naivety and well into the realm of complete stupidity. It doesn’t take much sense to realise that interfering with an investigation into the “Russia connection” is a spectacularly dumb move. And releasing classified information and then to top that by leaking the source is criminally stupid and quite possibly treasonous.

GCHQ Spying On Trump?

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Mar 182017
 

There is a media commentator (Andrew Napolitano) in the USA who has solved the mystery of who was spying on Trump during the election. Apparently it was GCHQ after being asked to by Obama. If it had remained just a commentator on Fox News which is well known for letting kooks, weirdos, and the generally insane spout all sorts of garbage, that would have been it.

But Sean Spicer then repeated the claims in a White House briefing.

And GCHQ have denied it.

But can we believe them? In this case almost certainly.

There is a very long standing convention within British intelligence agencies of neither confirming nor denying any action. Refusing to comment no matter how embarrassing is better than being caught in a lie, so the extremely unusual denial by GCHQ is believable because it is so unusual. But there’s more.

Firstly, Obama as president didn’t have the phone number of GCHQ (which is after all a British agency). A request from the president directly to GCHQ would probably be (and should be) answered with something along the lines of “Wrong number pal”. If he wanted to make a surveillance request it would go to the NSA who would then make an inter-agency request to GCHQ.

Which would of course result in a very secret paper-trail.

And if the request did make it through to GCHQ, the only surveillance data they are likely to have access to is international data (phone calls, Internet, etc) from Trump Tower to places abroad (with probably particularly good capture rates when passing through Europe). Which may well be of interest, but to actually put surveillance equipment inside Trump Tower?

That’s the job of a domestic intelligence agency, and whilst GCHQ could get involved in such an operation on foreign soil (and probably have), it is exceptionally unlikely in this case because it would put the intelligence co-operation agreements between the US and the UK at risk.

Whilst believing statements of an intelligence agency is a risky business, in this case it is probably true that GCHQ had nothing to do with any supposed surveillance of Trump Towers given the number of reasons why GCHQ wouldn’t be involved.

 

 

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