

21 March 2018




Why the Western concern about NordStream pipeline but none about TurkStream? Are there no sanction problems for the Swiss company working with GazProm? Plus I wonder if this is one of the reasons why Russia has lately become paranoid regarding US Navy FON operations in the Black Sea?

The main concern has the name Sabetta--it is the port and a hub to a largest Liquid Natural Gas operation, which also happened to be (in relative terms) next to Europe's LNG ports. I usually don't do this but I apologize, here is a link to my blog's piece on that:


LNG is precisely a commodity which is counted by US as a major component in possibly (and most likely not very probable) US re-industrialization. For that, the US has to sell her LNG to Europe. This implies removing Russian LNG from the EU market which dwarfs that of Turkey and some South European nations. Germany, France, UK, Holland among others are the prize here. Russian LNG must be verboten, in US mind, or at least pushed back. As per FON--it has nothing to do with FON but has everything to do with:

1. Flag demonstration--that is presence and Fleet In Being.
2. Signals collection from Sevastopol, Novorossyisk and, in general, all Russia's Southern Military District emitters.

John Minnerath

Some very interesting comments about what's happening in China now.
In particular the link provided by divadab on Xi's formative years.
I've long admired China and its different peoples. I was taken aback by what I saw as an undoing of the changes to their Constitution Deng had worked hard to get done.
Then I have to stop and remember that China's culture is Chinese and my western ideas and upbringing make it impossible to really understand where they want to go and just what Xi wants to accomplish and how to go about it.


robt willmann,

"n addition to the common desire of some (or many) human beings to exercise authority over other groups of people, I think Xi Jinping and his supporters want to complete the large and complex economic and financial projects they have started. ..... The desire of some to be king of the world pushed the chance of improvement aside. Nevertheless, today even autocratic governments see that having financial and governmental options can be a beneficial thing."

Substitute XI Jinping with Obama/Clinton and you describe the American Establishment, especially on the left. Mexico? Remind me again how the owner of the NYT and one of the richest men on Earth got that way and just what all the Presidents of Mexico do when they come to the USA to seek votes, and for whom they are seeking them?


I've been waiting to see what happens with the SDR (Special Drawing Right). The IMF (International Monetary Fund) added it to the SDR basket in October 2016 after a lot of foot dragging by the US. The AIIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank) was setup largely as a Chinese alternative to the US dominated IMF and World Bank because they were not being given an appropriate "place at the table" in the IMF, which was founded as part of the Bretton Woods Agreement at the end of WWII. I see the global monetary reset currently underway as the slowly moving, but unstoppable, glacier that is forcing all other events.


Reading Lucian Truscott's memoir, Command Decisions. The big spender I am, it was .99 cents on Kindle. With my admitted amateur status, I must say I like the man, both military and personal, that I am reading about.

Peter Kim

From what I learned about this Skripal affair and what we’re expected to believe— i.e., the official U.K. government version— is ludicrous. Farcical. I’m talking Fargo and Burn After Reading kind of farcical. And is anyone a little alarmed that the same Monty Python-esque goofball is behind the attempted subversion of Trump’s election in collusion with U.S. Deep State with a ludicrous ‘Golden Showers’ dossier was also the U.K.’s weapon to subvert FIFA and Russia in the World Cup and was an associate of Skripal.


BBC (1/13/2017): Ex-MI6 man Steele hired for England World Cup bid

Norbert M Salamon

with respect if you are citing PPP for China and USA then you should be consistent with respect to Russia, thus Russia is a little more than 1/5 of US [4 trillion vs 19.36 trillion for 2017


TTG should love this article. Only difference is that in the writer's view the Trump campaign was far more effective than the Russian trolls.


The reason Hillary Clinton did not win despite the media and social media companies doing everything they could to rig the election in her favor is because Facebook double dipped and allowed Cambridge Analytica to use their surveying tools to collect user data on tens of millions of users. This data was then used to target tens of millions of users with political advertising using Facebook’s ad platform based on psycholgoical profiles from data they bought or acquired from Facebook.

Facebook is basically responsible for feeding the analytics system that enabled Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign to be so targeted and effective with a minimal budget.....

That’s what happened, that’s how Trump won. It wasn’t the Russians, it was our own social media companies who sold our data to the Trump campaign which they then likely used to convince liberals not to vote in swing states.

It’s both horrifying, and cleverly brilliant at the same time.

The funny thing is, Obama did something similar in 2012 and liberals celebrated. Not so funny when the other team takes your trick and executes it more effectively now is it?

The Twisted Genius

Eric Newhill,

Reference your comment at #4

I know you're being sarcastic, but you bring up a good point about the 2A question. In my opinion, the 2A's idea of an armed citizenry as a defense against tyranny would be better served if we were all allowed to carry a fanny pack full of mini frags. Toss a few of those around and you won't give away your location. Keep the mutha fukkas guessing. Our nation would be more secure if we each had a cache out back with a small supply of C4, det cord and blasting caps to supplement our small arms ammo. I could understand restrictions against such caches in apartment complexes, but what about the rest of us? Clearly there's no advocacy group for "destructive devices" in this country. Such a group could teach neighborhood classes on constructing and employing improvised explosives and ensure that we remain free to exercise our full 2A rights.



I was the SSO in ALFSEE the NATO army group headquarters in Izmir, Turkey when General Ben Harrell was the commander. The job caused me to spend time alone with him every day. He had been Truscott's G-3 staff chief (operations) at Anzio and for the rest of the war as Truscott moved higher and higher (army, etc.) I knew a lot about these battles and Harrell talked to me about Italy a lot and Truxcott's command style. He admired Truscott a great deal as a commander and a man. I remember particularly what he told me of the importance of SIGINT products in planning the breakout from the Anzio beach head. pl

Rick Merlotti

Russian meddling in our election? The evidence continues to point to the British...





Sounds to me like an attempt to exonerate the CIA for the plot and put the blame on Tillerson who Trump wanted out anyway. I mean, the CIA was probably involved or at least knew about the false flag attack, then Pompeo gets asked to "investigate himself", uses that to stab Tillerson in the back and take his job? Seriously? Sounds like typical office politics to me...

Assuming you can trust anything that comes out of Voltaire.net. Stuff I've read there in the past appears mostly speculative and poorly sourced.


Chemical Hamish.

Seems a bit much just to undermine the Russian World Cup and the Presidential election, perhaps it was meant to be part of something more.


Colonel, I had meet and heard personally the guy running this outlet. Frankly, it's just some pebbles of "vraisemblance" in an ocean of fakes and fairies. A kind of "leftist-anti-imperialist" copycat of DEBKA, if you see what I mean...

Eric Newhill



Additionally, a home with a perimeter ringed with claymore mines is a home that has insured its 4th amendment rights won't be readily violated. Tends to cut down on breaking and entries too. So it's also in line with the spirit of the 2A per the Heller decision.

There are groups that offer instruction of constructing and employing improvised explosive devices - at least so I'm told. I understand it's all on line. I just don't want to verify because with my luck there'd be black helos over my house within an hour of me doing the search.

I did see an ad for a fully functioning black powder cannon. It's a replica of a civil war model. I confess to being mightily tempted.

Of course my sarcastic point was that psycho killers gonna kill; guns or no guns. Who would have guessed that some kid with no military training would have been able to create so many effective bombs? Now watch it become the new trend.


Neocon military "analyst" Ralph Peters no longer loves Fox News.



Pat, thank you for that! One of the most interesting parts so far involves his meeting Cardinal Spellman just after Tunisia. The Cardinal tells the officers present he has been requested to broadcast a statement regarding the allied victory and to include the superiority of American equipment as a significant factor. General Truscott's polite response was to disabuse the Cardinal regarding that notion, reciting the litany of equipment woes that were discovered during combat versus German formations.



"by some measures" If you torture the data long inenough it confesses. So the US is one of the five worst in income inequality? Maybe those Chineese imigrants should all stay in China to enjoy their "percentages". Of course they might first ask just what the 400% increase in Chineese income means. Oh, that's right, the 400% increase from almost nothing to 4 times almost nothing. The negative 1% reduction in bottom 50% of income distribuiton in the US over that 4 decades resulted in:

"Median individual income for all earners in the workforce was $37,610.00, and the breakpoint to be a one-percenter (99th percentile) was $300,800.00."


So the 50% percentile in the US has a 37K icome. What is it for China, it certainly isn't 37K. That's right, acording to the link you provided it's 14,600 USD. In China, with the official exchange rate.

James T,

"but the western press are clearly ignoring important economic statistics regarding both China and Russia."

Yes indeed, they ignore the actual data and repeat out percentages with no idea of the underlying facts of how those percentages were created and not bothering to ask how they were calculated.



It's pointing to corporations in the US, like Facebook, as well. Then there is the ongoing indoctrination campaign being waged by America's teachers to convince them to become the junior anti-second amendment police and shame their parents to vote for the correct party's candidates. That's an abuse of government power by local government school systems.



I think that in much of the world The World Cup is a bigger deal than the Olympics. I knew some atheletes here in Canada who had their athletic careers ended by our boycott of the 1980 olympics (after years and years of hard work). I'm surprised western intelligence agencies have not done more to undermine Russia's world cup. They may yet.


That's a very interesting theory.


Give the teachers bombs too!



The New CIA Director Nominee and the Massacre at My Lai
By Ann Wright

Protecting those who commit heinous crimes in the name of the U.S. government provides a dangerous precedent and could lead to the conclusion by many in the military and CIA that they can “get away with murder,” Ann Wright observes.



Ralph Peters is no longer a Fox News contributor. That's too bad. His torturous defense of Trotskyite ideals will be missed. He quit declaring,


If you want a good chuckle, the rest of his resignation letter can be read here at Buzzfeed.


Smoothie -

Thanks! I am not a fan of LNG. If I was a Euro there is no way I would allow LNG in, whether from Sabetta in Russia or from Sabine Pass in the US. But I thought that the NorthStream or Nord-Stream pipeline was NOT liquified, is that not correct?

FON Ops include showing the flag, nothing wrong with that. Every Navy does it. We don't bar Russian ships from the Gulf of Mexico. The Black Sea is not a Russian lake, its littorals include several other nations.

And there is nothing inherently wrong with signals collection. I distinctly remember being shadowed while on float in the 60s and 70s by Soviet QUOTE-trawlers-or-hydrographic-research-ships-UNQUOTE that had more antennas than Fort Meade. We never freaked out. Signal collection efforts can be avoided or spoofed.

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