CNN (1/11/2017): South Korea is ratcheting up its rhetoric against Pyongyang with a new threat: Come at us, and we’ll cut off the head of the snake. The country is speeding up plans to set up what some call a “decapitation unit,” a brigade specifically tasked with targeting North Korea’s “wartime command,” including leader Kim Jong Un, according to a South Korea Defense Ministry official.
what’s the probability that lil kim’s testing is merely the means and cover for china (or iran) to perfect their nuclear capability and that china (and/or iran) is footing the bill, providing the material, technicians and the scientists?
the puppeteer will decide when to cut the puppet’s strings, when he’s no longer useful. this giuseppi will never let pinocchio become a real boy.
another observation/question along those lines: at anytime during all the testing, have the missiles ever been aimed toward china? one reportedly sailed uncomfortably close toward Russia…. seems all have been sent on their way everywhere but to china.
reuters:
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spoke with U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday and agreed on the need for further action on North Korea just hours after the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations said the United States is “done talking about North Korea”.
Since both Koreas are still at war, couldn’t any action by the South be justified as defensive?
your weekly john oliver
Published on Jul 30, 2017
Alex Jones is known for pushing conspiracy theories, but he also spends a lot of time promoting his own products. John Oliver and a “doctor” “from” M.I.T. test out his marketing strategy.
Perhaps Trump could send Kim a copy of Art of the deal, obviously he has never read it.
Seriously, Kim is unbalanced. South Korea is well advised to take any all precautions against possible North Korean aggression. A decapitation team seems like a very prudent place to start.
The Editorial (theater review) getting all the oohs this morning.
Death of a F***ing Salesman
Donald Trump Can’t Close The Deal
Jamie,
A little known fact is that McConnell and Trump both read for the part of Shelley Levene… Type casting at it’s best.
I heard Mooch is in charge of the North Korean problem….
He thinks he can swear it into submission
pence has been sent forth to quell global disorder…we are not to fear the nork with the dylan roof haircut. trumpence junta continues where man baby surrounds himself with the military order of his early schooling. His life has been a blend of military and mafia to control his massive theft of wealth. It is time for another hand laying, for sure. I am sure kelly will join the circle.
What if they miss? Then they just initiated hostilies with a nuclear-armed state.
I was surprised that mattis has already taken a vacay! trump unloads while the good general relaxes from the trump grinder at only six months into his term…he joins wayne tracker. trumpence junta enjoying the benefits of paid vacay, superior health care with insurance coverage and lots of free security, protection. While the fellow Americans suffer..no jobs, no healthcare, no insurance, no security…while the millionaires and billionaires are taking jobs in DC at break neck speed. The trumpence junta taking food from our mouths, too, for their silly problems of the uber wealthy. Plus, they appear to be working part time.
Do you think if we, as a nation, all raised about 20 billion dollars and offered it to Trump to resign, that he would take the deal? I’ll donate $200 towards the cause.
bink…he would take the money and stay. Remember saddam?
Holy unemployment and now we have to find jobs for the 755 expelled workers from russia. Insight into the rare restraint of putie, his patience finally falters.
No, I have never heard about Saddam offering to resign in exchange for payment. Interesting. Thanks, as always, for that info.
trump is going for trillionaire, by Willy Makeit? Betty Wont! putie is the richest man in the world and the race is on!
Department of justification….good read about sessions, bannon and miller from feb, 2017.
Now session on the outs…he did meet with the ruskies and lied about it…he is not the honorable human as painted by the gop. To recuse? there is no place in the trumpence wh for sessions anymore…wondering how this will play out.
Noregard is the line in the sand. PG is a coward. Heard he tried to offer Homeland Security to Sessions. Noregard just laughed.
just leaked…trumpence planning to secretly ship obamacare over to the norks…implosion to take down k j un regime.
Jamie, thanks for posting the link to Death of a F***ing Salesman
absolutely spot on. this week’s new Yorker story “The TV That Created Donald Trump” corroborated a lot of what nat’l review said.
here’re Emily nussbaum’s concluding paragraphs
In 2004, the top Emmy winners were “Arrested Development” and “The Sopranos”—two brilliant series that were, coincidentally, about rich criminal families. For television critics, it was a triumphant year. But Trump had a rougher sense of the medium’s power: he knew that numbers were what counted. He would go on to win an election fuelled by class rage and racial fury; but he also won because he’d starred in a show in which high-school-educated small-town white men cheerfully vied with big-city black female lawyers. If you can have it both ways, you can have everything.
In 2015, NBC fired Trump. By that time, he’d been an Obama-baiting birther for four years, but his comments about Mexican rapists went too far. He’d alienated black and Latino viewers. For others, the spell was cast: many of his biggest fans would continue to see him through the filter of Burnett’s TV hit, no matter what Trump said or did. By 2017, the media was his enemy. That included his old friend Jeff Zucker, who was now the president of CNN. One day, the President tweeted old footage from “The Battle of the Billionaires,” repurposed as a bizarre meme. A CNN logo was superimposed on McMahon’s head as Trump pummelled him.
Trump was a different sort of TV celebrity now. But if he’d wanted to conquer the medium, things had not worked out. Trump kept producing his own reality stunts as President: in a press conference, he gestured grandly at piles of folders, props that he claimed were filled with financial disclosures; he theatrically whipped up suspense over the competition between two Supreme Court nominees. And yet he couldn’t control how these stunts played on TV—other people would have the final edit. Day and night, he watched for hours, searching for people to hate. They were easy to find. If you squinted a bit, the President might look like just another old man, yelling at the screen.
hate to admit this but the twit tweeted today an idea that partially has legs:
“If ObamaCare is hurting people, & it is, why shouldn’t it hurt the insurance companies & why should Congress not be paying what public pays?”
however, it would be better if briefer and read “why shouldn’t the public get the health care congress gets?”
Universal Health Care
If you have a job the employer should pay even if you are only part time.
Unemployed the gov
patd, your scenario about china behind NK nukes is not beyond possibility, for sure. Which makes it a fool’s errand to ever think China will fix this. Several administrations in a row have whined about China stopping NK nuke program and treated NK with “strategic patience.” We need an alternative strategy, and there aren’t any effective ones that don’t come with unpleasant consequences.
craig, a quick look at wiki says:
The Chinese conducted their first nuclear test, code-named 596, on 16 October 1964, and acknowledged that their program would have been impossible to complete without the Soviet help. China’s last nuclear test was on July 29, 1996. According to the Australian Geological Survey Organisation in Canberra, the yield of the 1996 test was 1–5 kilotons. This was China’s 22nd underground test and 45th test overall.
[….]
A variety of estimates abound regarding China’s current stockpile. Although the total number of nuclear weapons in the Chinese arsenal is unknown, as of 2005[update] estimates vary from as low as 80 to as high as 2,000. The 2,000-warhead estimate has largely been rejected by diplomats in the field. It appears to have been derived from a 1990s-era Usenet post, in which a Singaporean college student made unsubstantiated statements concerning a supposed 2,000-warhead stockpile.
In 2004, China stated that “among the nuclear-weapon states, China … possesses the smallest nuclear arsenal,” implying China has fewer than the United Kingdom’s 200 nuclear weapons. Several non-official sources estimate that China has around 400 nuclear warheads. However, U.S. intelligence estimates suggest a much smaller nuclear force than many non-governmental organizations.
In 2011, high estimates of the Chinese nuclear arsenal again emerged. One three-year study by Georgetown University raised the possibility that China had 3,000 nuclear weapons, hidden in a sophisticated tunnel network. The study was based on state media footage showing tunnel entrances, and estimated a 4,800 km (3,000 mile) network. The tunnel network was revealed after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake collapsed tunnels in the hills. China has confirmed the existence of the tunnel network. In response, the US military was ordered by law to study the possibility of this tunnel network concealing a nuclear arsenal.[30] However, the tunnel theory has come under substantial attack due to several apparent flaws in its reasoning. From a production standpoint, China probably does not have enough fissile material to produce 3,000 nuclear weapons. Such an arsenal would require 9–12 tons of plutonium as well as 45–75 tons of enriched uranium and a substantial amount of tritium. The Chinese are estimated to have only 2 tons of weapons-grade plutonium, which limits their arsenal to 450–600 weapons, despite a 16-ton disposable supply of uranium, theoretically enough for 1,000 warheads.
As of 2011, the Chinese nuclear arsenal was estimated to contain 55–65 ICBMs.
In 2012, STRATCOM commander C. Robert Kehler said that the best estimates were “in the range of several hundred” warheads and FAS estimated the current total to be “approximately 240 warheads”.
The U.S. Department of Defense 2013 report to Congress on China’s military developments stated that the Chinese nuclear arsenal consists of 50–75 ICBMs, located in both land-based silos and Ballistic missile submarine platforms. In addition to the ICBMs, the report stated that China has approximately 1,100 short-range ballistic missiles, although it does not have the warhead capacity to equip them all with nuclear weapons.
Just killing Lil Kim might seem like a good idea on it’s surface… BUT… didn’t a world war start because of an assassination….
I don’t wish for World War 3.
off topic, but not that far off when you think about it
carl Hiaasen: Who’s the real animal? The shark abuser
Renee, I thought it was a bull – oh, wrong Ferdinand?
Oh I feel so much better now. Trump just said, “We will handle North Korea. It will be handled. We handle everything.”
boss, does that fall under the same category as
“everybody’s got to be covered” and “I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not,” and “The government’s gonna pay for it.” [cnn]
renee, true, advocating assassinations not a good idea…. tends to boom-a-rang on he who does.
however, my sensitivities would not be disturbed nor tears flow if dire accidents befell certain people.
raw story points out something media overlooked last week during all the wh chaos:
Bill Browder — once the biggest portfolio investor in Russia but now a leading critic of Vladimir Putin — told the Senate Judiciary Committee how the Russian president needs to lift U.S. sanctions to deliver what he promised to corrupt oligarchs who support his rule, reported Huffington Post.
“There are approximately 10,000 officials in Russia working for Putin who are given instructions to kill, torture, kidnap, extort money from people and seize their property,” Browder testified.
Browder and his attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, blew the whistle on a scam by corrupt Russian officials to steal one of his companies and then illegally claimed back $230 million taxes he’d paid.
U.S. imposed sanctions in 2012 against some Putin cronies involved in the attorney’s death, which a Russian attorney asked Donald Trump to lift in exchange for campaign assistance offered to his son and other top campaign officials.
“Before the Magnitsky Act, Putin could guarantee them impunity and this system of illegal wealth accumulation worked smoothly,” Browder testified. “However, after the passage of the Magnitsky Act, Putin’s guarantee disappeared.”
[….]
“(Putin) keeps his money in the West and all of his money in the West is potentially exposed to asset freezes and confiscation,” Browder testified. “Therefore, he has a significant and very personal interest in finding a way to get rid of the Magnitsky sanctions.”
The testimony received less coverage than other hearings, in part because Browder is more obscure than previous witnesses — but also because it came after Trump’s raunchy speech to Boy Scouts and a day ahead of a profane rant by new communications chief Anthony Scaramucci.
Looks like someone did not like the mooch hanging around the WH. Reports are he has been canned. Time for him to take a break and relax. First join SFB, fire Spicey, let loose with a talk, confuse public records with classified info leak and treason, divorce papers, new COS, and now fired. Pretty good week for a
clownjerk.patd
That shark video is the type of thing that makes you wish many human beings were an endangered species.
Blue Bronc… looks like you were correct…
here’s CNN’s take on the resignation of Mooch…
hate to ascribe any coherent logic to twit, but perhaps mooch was purposely brought in as a hatchet man as well as a bling-y distraction on a temporary basis.
btw, kudos to matt taibbi for calling it [see rolling stone piece 2-3 days ago]
here’s that link i posted yesterday afternoon
i better share this from rolling stone’s matt taibbi before mooch is thrown under the bus by the general
I see Sam Shepard died. Pity, I kinda liked him.
Nice interview of Jessica Lange talking about Sam Shepard shortly before his death
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-4747090/Jessica-Lange-talks-ex-Sam-Shepard.html
And his Variety Obituary
http://variety.com/2017/legit/news/sam-shepard-dead-dies-buried-child-the-right-stuff-1202510811/
courtesy of our Canadian contingent
Scaramucci is slated to leaveDespite what he came to achieve,Like colourful cussingAnd phone calls discussingThe autofellations of Steve
crackers – I guess we need a better idea than mooch swearing NK into submission. (Spicey must feel pretty good right now.)
Kimmy has done equally horrible things to family & foe (can’t believe the butterball has ever had a friend) alike. Live by the sword/poison/weapon of choice, die by it, as the saying goes. The sooner the better.
Iran and China have given them support. No more raw materials, purchase orders to China until they step up. They won’t. F! Nixon!
Do an either/or for Congressional healthcare.
Either we all get caviar like you, or, you get canned beans like us.
There should not be two Americas.
The orange senile old man has not signed the Russian sanction act yet. Maybe he is trying to do a pocket veto. Will the Congress let him?
So it appears SFB dictated drumpf Jr’s “misleading” statement about the meeting with the Russian lawyer. (What we lawyers call a LIE). Well there’s a bit of symmetry to that ain’t there?
BB, at 530-5? NFW
pgp, he’s always ready for another distraction. remember
Article 1, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution states:
the magic words – given they are about to go on their annual (multi-year ?) vacation: unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its return
trump jr’s lies were read word for word from daddy’s text – or so multiple WH sources claim.
General Kelly can’t stop the leaks. Well, not all of them. First of all, the top leakers are beyond Kelly’s control. Number one is named donald trump. Kelly can’t shut the boss up. The next two are independent of the White House and out of Kelly’s reach. They stand to gain the most from the pussypincher’s failure. The fourth is bannon, and the rest of the eight are junior, eric, Ivanka, and jared.
Kelly might be able to block bannon and jared. Big deal. But, it would break the boss’s heart. No big deal.