Extreme weather report - 06/29.2018

Ireland bracing for the hottest day in recorded history

It's so hot in Ireland right now that you can no longer place bets on the weather.

As Ireland continued to sizzle in the heatwave yesterday on what was the hottest day of the year to date, bookies suspended betting on the 131-year-old record being broken for the highest temperature ever recorded in Ireland.

Mercury levels hit their highest ever point on June 26, 1887, when temperatures soared to 92F (33.3 C) within the grounds of Kilkenny Castle.

https://www.irishcentral.com/news/hottest-day

Hottest day in Glasgow since records began as city hits 31.9C

Sean Batty‏Verified account @SeanBattySTV

BREAKING: Glasgow and Renfrewshire have their hottest day on record with a high of 31.8C! This well exceeds the previous record set at Glasgow Weather Centre back in 1975, & Bishopton record of 28.6C in 2014. This is an extraordinary hot spell for June! #ScotScorchio

36.9K views

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4:05 AM - 29 Jun 2018

Meteorologists have confirmed that Glasgow has had its warmest ever day as the temperature in the city topped 31.9C.

The city beat Wednesday’s high of 31.3C (88.3F) in Aviemore in the Highlands, and came close to matching the hottest June day ever recorded in Scotland - 32.2C (89.9F) at Ochtertyre in Perth and Kinross in 1893.

At 31C (87.8F), Strathallan in Perthshire enjoyed the second highest temperature on Thursday, followed by Tyndrum which saw the mercury hit 30.7C (87.2F) The Met Office said Thursday saw Glasgow beat a previous high of 31.1C (87.9F) recorded in 1950.

CAPE ALERT FOR JUNE 30, 2018

Sam Carana, via Facebook

Severe storm & hail warning. Convective Available Potential Energy (CAPE) is forecast to be as high as 6122 J/kg on June 30, 2018, at the location in the United States marked by the green circle.

The huge amounts of additional energy in the atmosphere are in line with high temperatures over land and high sea surface temperatures.

For June 29, 2018, 'feels like' temperatures as high as 44°C or 111.1°F (Misery Index, i.e. perceived air temperature as a combination of air temperature, relative humidity and wind chill) are forecast for 29, 2018 (at green circle).

Meanwhile, more recent forecasts show CAPE as high as 6488 J/kg on June 29, 2018. For the following days, forecasts show CAPE as high as 6499 J/kg on June 30, 2018, and as high as 5613 J/kg on July 1, 2018.

More recent forecasts also show the Misery Index go up as high as 44.7°C or 112.5°F 'feels like' temperatures on July 29, 2018, and as high as 44.6°C or 112.2°F 'feels like' temperatures on July 30, 2018.

Created by Sam Carana for Arctic-news.blogspot.com

 

 with nullschool.net

NY Excessive Heat Watch

ISSUED BY: NEW YORK CITY - NY, US, NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE

 

...HEAT ADVISORY NOW IN EFFECT FROM NOON SATURDAY TO NOON EDT SUNDAY...

 ...EXCESSIVE HEAT WATCH IN EFFECT FROM SUNDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH MONDAY EVENING... 

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN UPTON HAS ISSUED AN EXCESSIVE HEAT WATCH, WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM SUNDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH MONDAY EVENING. * 

HEAT INDEX VALUES...IN THE UPPER 90S ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON AND EARLY EVENING. UP TO 107 IN THE AFTERNOON AND EARLY EVENING SUNDAY AND MONDAY. *....

http://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/news/local-news-nyc-nj-ct/2780-excessive-heat-watch

Utah on fire: Wildfires erupt across the state

According to Utah Fire Info, 27 human-caused fires have been started in Utah over the past two days.

Northern California wildfires, map: Pawnee Fire and others mostly contained, more evacuees returning home

Crews on Friday were mopping up wildfires that had mostly been contained in Northern California, and no structures were being threatened

Internet fiber optic cables cut in several places around the United States.

Internet Fiber Optic Cables "cut" in several places nationwide!

In what appears to be a coordinated act of sabotage, Internet fiber optic cables have apparently been physically cut in several places around the United States.

One worker, allegedly from Comcast, claims the attack is causing severe service disruptions to not only Comcast, but many other Internet and cable TV providers across America.

The map above, from the service called "DownDetector" reflects the skyrocketing complaints for COmcast as of 6:10 PM EDT on Friday.

http://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/news/u-s-national-news/2777-internet-fiber-optic-cables-cut-in-several-places-nationwide

FRIDAY'S MASSIVE COMCAST OUTAGE SHOWS HOW FRAGILE THE INTERNET IS

Wired,

29 June, 2018

WIDESPREAD INTERNET OUTAGES around the United States on Friday afternoon quelled productivity and sent irate customers to Twitter to complain. Comcast and Xfinity suffered the biggest service interruptions across its internet, cable, and landline products. The company, which has more than 29 million business and individual customers, said on Friday that the outages stemmed from fiber optic cables at two internet infrastructure companies that were cut or otherwise disrupted.

Like virtually all internet providers, Comcast relies on a combination of its own fiber optic infrastructure and that of other partner companies to seamlessly route data around the world.

"We identified two, separate and unrelated fiber cuts to our network backbone providers," Comcast said in a statement to WIRED. "Our engineers worked to address the issue immediately and services are now being restored to business and residential internet, video and voice customers."

Comcast says the two internet infrastructure companies involved are Level 3 (now owned by CenturyLink) and Zayo, a fiber company headquartered in Colorado. Throughout the afternoon, the outage-tracking site Down Detector showed service interruptions at CenturyLink, Zayo, and Comcast, but the latter suffered the most severe consequences.

"While the CenturyLink network continues to operate normally, on June 29 we experienced two isolated fiber cuts in North Carolina affecting some customers," CenturyLink said in a statement. "At this time, our technicians are working to restore the services."

CenturyLink noted that its two fiber cuts would not have been enough on their own to cause the outage, indicating that another also occurred, as Comcast said.

"Earlier today, Zayo experienced a fiber cut in the New York area," said a Zayo spokesperson in a statement. "We immediately dispatched our local team who quickly restored the cut. All impacted services in the area have been restored."

Fiber cuts aren't necessarily malicious, and can happen as the result of incidents like severe weather or construction mistakes. They're also not terribly uncommon; when they do happen, the internet infrastructure community works to implement redundancies and traffic rerouting tactics so physical disruptions don't cause digital ones. In this case, the combination of disruptions in New York and North Carolina were enough to turn off the internet for millions of people.

The underlying physical backbone of the internet is surprisingly fragile, and failsafes don't always work. For example, in November, a tiny misconfiguration error at Level 3 caused outages around the US. And a digital attack on the internet infrastructure company Dyn famously caused major outages in 2016 because they were targeted at destabilizing one of the internet's underlying routing protocols.

"We are profoundly and globally dependent on a fundamentally fragile infrastructure," says Roland Dobbins, a principal engineer at the DDoS and network-security firm Arbor Networks, which monitors global internet operations. "Some redundancies exist, but many times they don't."

By Friday evening, Comcast service had come back for many customers. But the underlying message should resonate: The internet can be more frail than you'd think, and sometimes all it takes to shut it down is a couple of cuts.

The post-modernist liberal agenda

Sex offenders including paedophiles should be allowed to adopt, Theresa May told

Rules which bar sex offenders from working with children are ‘unfair’ and even convicted paedophiles should have the right to adopt, a leading legal academic has said.

Helen Reece, a reader in law at the London School of Economics, called on Theresa May, the Home Secretary, to relax rules which automatically ban sex offenders from caring for children, saying that this could breach their human rights.

In an article in the respected Child and Family Law Quarterly, Miss Reece suggested that reoffending rates were not high among sex criminals, adding: “despite growing public concern over paedophilia, the numbers of child sex murders are very low.”

Facebook survey asks users if they condone pedophilia

Facebook is under fire for publishing a stomach-churning survey that asked users whether pedophiles should be allowed to solicit “sexual pictures” from underage girls.

The cringeworthy poll surfaced at the top of Facebook’s home page for an unspecified number of users this past weekend, according to a report.

“In thinking about an ideal world where you could set Facebook’s policies, how would you handle the following: a private message in which an adult man asks a 14-year-old girl for sexual pictures,” one question in the survey reads.

The disgusting multiple-choice poll gave users the option to condone the sick behavior, allowing them to vote that the “content should be allowed on Facebook, and I would not mind seeing it.”

Another possible, nausea-inducing response was that “the content should be allowed on Facebook, but I don’t want to see it.”

On the other side of the equation the Russians, after 70 years of communism and tasting western post-modernist liberalism are moving in the opposite direction and bringing morality and faith back into public life

From Australian TV .

James Howard Kunstelr on US politics

Hidden Figures

James Howard Kunstler

Kunstler.com,

29 June, 2018

The fabulous Coen Brothers of Hollywood couldn’t come up with a wackier Deep State than the one depicted on Cable News this week. Thursday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing had Congressman Jim Jordan (R- Ohio) in the role of “The Dude” from The Big Lebowski doing battle with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as “Osborne Cox” in Burn After Reading. Rosenstein was sure burning, or at least smoldering in his seat, as Jordan badgered him about threatening House staffers by subpoenaing their emails and phone calls…!

The gotcha moment: “You can’t subpoena a phone call,” Rosenstein answered, trying to suppress his mirthful smirk… as in, listen to me, you dim, Rotarian, Buckeye clod, with your worthless JD from the most obscure law school in the darkest corner of your meth-and vicodan-addled state… you can’t subpoena a phone call, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha…!

Had Mr. Jordan been a little more nimble of mind in his Dude role, had he not, say, downed that Red Bull and Ayahuasca “pick-me-up” before the committee session, he might have come back smartly at Mr. Rosenstein with a simple, “…yes, but you can subpoena the records of phone calls, can’t you?” Schwing. Only the poor clod muffed it, and Rosenstein’s praetorian guard of attorneys in the seats behind him joined in the mirthful smirkery, grand fellows of the Deep State are we, we eat Buckeyes for breakfast!

Now, Mr. Trey Gowdy (R – SC) is a different breed of porpoise among congressmen, kind of legal man-eating orca. In look and demeanor, he comes off as a cross between Atticus Finch and the young feller who played the banjo so well in the opening scenes of Deliverance. Mr. Rosenstein didn’t dare lay any mirthful smirky trips on Mr. Gowdy, who radiated the consolidated wrath of the legislative branch at this flock of executive branch popinjays. Mr. Gowdy, who is declining to run for his seat this year, may be bound for bigger things. Some say he may be the next Attorney General.

In case you’ve forgotten, Rod Rosenstein is not the Attorney General, he’s the Deputy AG. His boss is Mr. Jeff Sessions, an elusive figure for months now in the malarial DC backwaters, like that Louisiana Swamp Thang that turns up in the fake Bigfoot documentaries, looming hairily through the night-vision goggles in a cypress slough. Maybe three or four people have laid eyes on him since sometime back in April. Better check his office, make sure he isn’t hunched over face-down in a take-out order of tonkatsu ramen.

It’s rumored that our president, the Golden Golem of Greatness, can, shall we say, put the Department of Justice and its subsidiary, the FBI, out of their current misery by finally firing a few of these conniving top dawgs. Order Rosenstein to release un-redacted files he’s been sitting on for a year, and fire his ass for cause when he refuses. In the case of Mr. Sessions, for Godsake, call the undertaker.

The figures most hidden these days go by the names Barack Obama, Hillery Clinton, Bill Clinton, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Loretta Lynch, Huma Abedin, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. If or when the dark, tangled, matrix of “matters” at the FBI ever manage to get unraveled, these characters will come tumbling out with the yarn, dropping into the harsh daylight like little squirming larva of Tineola bisselliella, the common wool moth.

Personally, I can’t imagine that the mighty mischief at DOJ and the FBI the past two years was not initially approved before 1/20/17 in some fashion by Mr. Obama and with his explicit knowledge. There’s little doubt that the “Steele Dossier” was the “insurance policy” that FBI Counter-espionage Chief Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page referred to in their famous text exchange about how to deal with the “terrifying” specter of a possible President Trump. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz needs to explain under oath how her humble IT employee, a Pakistani national, become a real estate millionaire in the DC burbs while servicing, shall we say, her laptop. Hillary, of course, is like some mythical Cave of Seven Winds — a boundless dark realm of winged beasts and crawling things. Loretta Lynch still has some public ‘splainin’ to do about meeting certain folks on tarmacs. The grand juries are begging to be convened.

Eminent commonsense from Dmitry Orlov

Barbarians Rampage through Europe's Cemetery

Dmitry Orlov

Club Orlov,

26 June, 2018

Around the world, very few people are capable of wrapping their heads around the European reaction to the migrant crisis. On the side of the migrants, we have avid displays of barbarism, fanaticism and aggression; on the side of the Europeans, we have abject fear of appearing… intolerant. In an out-of-control situation where we would expect people to organize, protest, put up road blocks and vote en masse for nationalist parties, we are instead subjected to the ridiculous spectacle of meek, effeminate Europeans dressed up in unisex outfits chalking “No to terrorism!” on sidewalks. Most people around the world see in this an orchidaceous display of anthropological nullity. “Is Europe dead?” they wonder aloud.

Lest you think that this impression is politically incorrect or undiplomatic or somehow marginal rather than mainstream, Russia's FM Sergei Lavrov, a senior Russian statesman and a diplomat’s diplomat, is on the record saying that the European Union is “committing suicide” by letting in the invading hordes from the Middle East and North Africa.

Here we have a flood of people coming in, the majority of them young adult males shirking military service back home, and relatively few of them are qualified to seek asylum. Most of them are unqualified to do any sort of work within the EU due to lack of literacy, education or work ethic. Many of them would not be trainable in any case, coming as they are from populations bred for physical stamina and disease tolerance rather than intelligence.

Quite a few are Islamic radicals who see themselves as actual colonizers; many more have no qualms about robbing Europeans and raping European women. A few thousand are actual terrorists being sent in to await orders. For most of them, crashing into the EU and freeloading there is part of an excellent adventure—far more exciting than herding cattle or growing millet in their native villages.

European NGOs equip them with inflatable lifeboats and life vests and set them adrift off the coast of Libya or in the Adriatic. European NGO ships then scoop them up and deliver them to ports in Italy, Greece or Spain. And then they get to freeload, for months on end, while more NGO types help them with the paperwork and clog up the courts with lawsuits they file on their behalf.

I am sure that some Europeans might think me unkind for presenting such an unflattering summary of the situation. But there is a much higher standard by which to measure it than mere kindness: is it truthful? Truth is often cruel and painful, and yet without truth—with which to understand the true consequences of our actions—we are all but lambs to the slaughter.

Refusal to face the truth by hiding behind a hypocritical, threadbare veil of “kindness” is mere cowardice. Indeed, cowardice is often on display in Europe, hiding behind another threadbare veil—of “security.” When ISIS bombed the airport in Brussels, the Belgian king Philippe and his royal spouse were swiftly evacuated. During medieval times such cowardly behavior would have cost the monarch his crown, possibly along with his head. But now it is fine for a cowardly nation to have a cowardly king.

It is quite difficult to understand the rationale behind such enforced cowardice. Why are the European elites so insistent on ramming “tolerance” down the throats of their citizens and replacing them with imported barbarians? What happened to the spirit of bloodthirsty empires that had bled the entire planet dry for centuries, accumulating countless treasure?

What I believe happened is that the Europeans became too comfortable. Yes, they did experience some hardship during the two world wars, but it was nothing compared to what many other nations went through, Russia and China especially. When life is a struggle, experience is vivid, simple joys are profoundly felt, intelligent choices are critical to survival and acts of heroism are both necessary and valued. When life is comfortable, people become satiated and hard to satisfy, tastes become decadent and effete, questions of safety are pushed off on specialists and spontaneous acts individual heroism and bravery come to be treated as symptoms of social maladaptation.

Given enough safety and comfort, they become ends in themselves and the standards by which all things are measured. Those less safe and less comfortable are perceived as less successful and fashionable, and become less popular, in a game of endless oneupmanship. In turn, those yet to be seduced by safety and comfort, and willing to battle for principles higher than mere tolerance and kindness, become incomprehensible; after all, what else is there but safety and comfort? But this is only a setup for the next leg down, because safety and comfort cannot function as absolutes.

Safety cannot be guaranteed in all places and at all times: accidents do happen. You might get punched in the face by a belligerent drunk, get molested by a horny migrant, die in a terrorist attack because Allahu akbar or, more likely, break your neck by falling off your bicycle. Since you are no longer responsible for providing for your own safety—it is now the work of paid professionals—you can’t blame yourself. You can, of course, blame the paid professionals, but they are, you know, doing their best… Your only choice is to claim that you are a victim. Victimhood becomes a prized commodity and a badge of honor. Extreme attention and care lavished on all varieties of victims, who are encouraged to organize and to bargain collectively, helps assure the rest that their total security is very important. You can be a victim, but you can’t be a victim of your own stupidity.

Speaking of stupidity, the realization that you are stupid is not comfortable, yet everyone—even the stupid—must remain comfortable at all times. Given that exactly half the people are of below-average intelligence, this is rather tricky to arrange. Claiming that half the population are victims of stupidity doesn’t exactly solve the problem: such an overabundance of victims hollows out the promise of universal comfort. Nor is the problem addressed by imposing a system of universal meritocracy based on individual rights: the intelligent will do better than the unintelligent, causing the latter considerable discomfort.

The solution is to step back from the principle of meritocracy. Instead of guaranteeing individual equal rights and opportunities based on ability and performance we strive for equality of outcome: everybody gets a participation prize and a bit of money just by being obedient and polite, with the size of the prize and the sum of money carefully calibrated based on one’s level of victimhood. This is now sometimes referred to by the strangely repurposed word “equity.” Since it is hard to organize the distribution of “equity” on an individual level, people are formed into a myriad of groups and each group gets weighted against the rest. If you are a disabled black lesbian, you get to check off three victimhood boxes at once and be handed the same prize as an able-bodied white heterosexual male. This is now strangely referred to as “social” justice—as if there were ever any other kind.

This new type of person, which arose first in Europe and then spread all over the West and beyond, does seem like a degenerate form of humanity: bereft of great passion and lofty goals, lacking any clear ethnic or social allegiance or preference, fixated on comfort and safety and deficient in both masculinity and femininity: a sort of civilizational eunuch imprisoned in a four-star LGBTQ concentration camp. These may seem like major negatives, but on the plus side this type of person is mostly harmless. Half a billion people now inhabit, without posing much of a danger to each other, a smallish peninsula jutting out of Western Eurasia that until recently has been the scene of endless armed conflict. They do not destroy material or cultural artifacts but seek to accumulate them, investing in comforts and in consumption. That, most people will agree, is progress.

The last major challenge to this way of being was presented by the integration of Eastern Europe, where national passions still run high. But that problem was easily solved by finding a scapegoat—Serbia—which was cursed for its lack of multiculturalism and tolerance and bombed into submission. This scared everyone else in Eastern Europe into inaction, for the time being. But now mass migration has presented a problem on an entirely different scale, causing Poland, Hungary and now even Italy to rise up in rebellion against the alien onslaught.

The newcomers predominantly come from cultures that are the opposite of tolerant and kind. They are mainly characterized by cruelty, passion, clannishness and religious and political fanaticism. They want to live right here and right now, take pleasure in the beastlier side of human nature, and they see Europe as a treasure chest to be looted. Their cultures hearken back to an earlier era of European history, when huge crowds gathered in city squares to watch people being drawn and quartered or burned alive.

The Europeans conquered their own medieval nature, but then reimported it. The new, emasculated Western European Man is unable to push back against it; nor can their governments, whose leaders are forced to abide by the same cultural codes of tolerance, political correctness and compulsory kindness. But the Eastern European Man, only temporarily frightened into acting tolerant and emasculated, will not stand for any of this for much longer. His medieval nature is still quite close to the surface, while their Western neighbors have placed theirs in museums and various other tourist traps. This is already apparent: there was a recent EU summit on immigration; the East Europeans didn’t even bother showing up.

Looking at the situation from even farther east, from European Russia and the rest of the Eurasian landmass, there is a distinct sense of sadness in watching Europe die. A large chunk of human history is about to get trampled and despoiled. Having spent the last several decades resurrecting Eastern Christendom after the damage caused to it by the Bolshevik barbarians, they watch with dismay as the relics and ruins of Western Christendom are becoming submerged by a new barbarian wave. Western Europe’s inhabitants may no longer amount to much, but they are still valuable as museum attendants and tour guides.

That Europe is turning itself into a museum was apparent to Dostoevsky 150 years ago, when he wrote this (speaking through the character of Versilov):

“To a Russian Europe is just as precious as Russia; every stone in it is charming and dear. Europe is as much our Fatherland as Russia… Oh, how precious are to us Russians these old foreign stones, these miracles of an old, godly world, these shards of holy miracles; they are more precious to us than to the Europeans themselves!”

And then again, this time speaking as Ivan Karamazov, with even greater passion:

“...I want to travel to Europe, and so I will. Of course, I know that I will just be visiting to a cemetery. But so what? The corpses that lay in them are precious; every headstone tells the story of a great life, of passionate belief in heroism, in one’s own truth, one’s own struggle. I know already that I will fall to the ground and kiss these stones, and cry over them—even though convinced with all my heart that all of this has turned into a cemetery long ago, and is nothing more.”

[Inspired by E. Kholmogorov]

Free-ranging conversation between Lionel and Peter Lavelle

Lionel Interviews Peter Lavelle of RT's 'Cross Talk' About Everything and Anything

Part One


Part two 

Lionel Media

'CrossTalk' is RT's flagship program. This TV debate experience presents hot-topic discussions on politics, business, newsmakers, global trends, present-day conflicts, and dangers and challenges facing our world. Host Peter Lavelle poses hard, straightforward questions to his guests, and demands concrete answers in response. Peter's guests are politicians, journalists, scientists and decision-makers of all sorts – anyone who influences the decisions changing our world or plays a key role in forming public opinion.

https://www.rt.com/shows/crosstalk/

CrossTalk: Vigilante Politics

RT

 Remember when the political left stood up for free speech and equality for all in public life? Remember when the mainstream media called for the same? The tone and tenor of political discourse appears to be at a turning point. If you don’t agree with the left you face insults, harassment and even violence. Is a new civil war on?

CrossTalking with Rob Taub, Gina Loudon, and Ron Placone.

Making sense of the Putin-Trump summit

Two Views of the Putin/Trump Summit

Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Craig Roberts,

29 June, 2018

The meeting that the Deep State strived to make impossible with fabricated “Russiagate” assertions and an orchestrated “investigation” by Mueller has now been set in place by no less than Deep State neocon operative John Bolton. Patrick Lang explains how this came about: 

https://russia-insider.com/en/politics/stroke-brilliance-trump-has-made-bolton-his-point-man-putin-summit/ri23950

Many see benefits from the Putin/Trump meeting. 

 

For example: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/06/25/these-are-benefits-of-us-russia-summit.html

Putin himself sees benefits in the meeting as does Trump. Putin sees hope of improving relations between the two governments. Of course, the “strained relations” are entirely due to Washington, which has demonized both Russia and Putin with false accusations and hostile acts such as illegal sanctions. It was miscalculation for Washington to expect Russia to give up its Black Sea naval base to Washington’s coup in Ukraine.

What can an agreement be based on? Bolton’s position has been opposed to making any agreement with Russia or cooperating with Russia in any way. From the neoconservative standpoint, Russia is in the way of US world hegemony. As the neoconservative foreign policy doctrine states, it is a principal US goal to prevent the rise of any country that could serve as a check on American unilateralism. Russia is a challenge to the American World Order because Russia stands in the way of the American unipolar world.

A successful summit will require Trump to reject this neoconservative doctrine. If Trump can pull this off with Bolton sitting by him, Trump’s critics will look very silly. Do Bolton and the Deep State have a way of baking failure into the summit that will ensure the continuation of Russia’s enemy status, thereby sustaining the enormous budget and power of the US military/security complex? Is Trump a superman who can overcome this powerful vested interest about which President Eisenhower warned Americans in 1961? How much stronger is this complex more than half a century later after being nourished by decades of Cold War and War on Terror?

Assad and no doubt Iran are convinced that negotiations with Washington are a waste of time. Assad has concluded that “the problem with US presidents is that they are hostage to lobbyists. They can tell you what you want to hear, but they do the opposite. That’s the problem, and it’s getting worse and worse. Trump is a stark example. That’s why when talking to the Americans, discussing something with them does not settle anything. There will not be any results. It’s a simple waste of time.” 

https://www.fort-russ.com/2018/06/assad-says-talks-with-the-trump-a-waste-of-time/

Assad’s view has the evidence on its side. One of Trump’s first actions was to unilaterally pull out of the multi-nation Iran nuclear agreement. There is no evidence that supports the hopeful Russian view.

It would be an interesting exercise to list all the agreements Washington has made over the course of US history and to calculate the percentage that Washington kept. If Putin doesn’t want to be taken for a ride, he should contemplate the words of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce summing up his negotiations with Washington: “I have heard talk and talk, but nothing is done. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and broken promises.”

Sergei Lavrov speaks to Britains Channel 4

‘Post-West world order’ being shaped as we speak – Lavrov to Channel 4

RT,

29 June, 2018

A new multipolar order, driven by economics and history, is emerging in the world and Western attempts to stop or to slow it down are unlikely to succeed, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told UK’s Channel 4.

“I think that we are in the post-West world order,” Lavrov told the British Channel 4 in an interview on Friday. “It is a historical epoch, if you want. Certainly, after five or so centuries of domination of the collective West, as it were, it is not very easy to adjust to new realities that there are other powerhouses economically, financially and politically,” he added, pointing to China, India and Brazil.

Asked if Russia was shaping this world order, Lavrov replied it was rather the product of history and “development itself.”

“You cannot really hope to contain [these] new powerful, economically and financially, countries. You cannot really ignore their role in world trade and world economy,” despite attempts to slow down the process with sanctions and tariffs, the top Russian diplomat said.

The European Union is “certainly a very important pillar of any world order,” Lavrov added, but it needs to decide whether to remain reliant on the US or become more self-sufficient. By way of illustration, Lavrov brought up the migrant crisis, which the EU is currently struggling with.

“NATO bombed Libya, turned Libya into a black hole through which waves of migrants, illegal migrants, rushed to Europe. Now EU is cleaning the broken china for NATO,” Lavrov said.

Russia’s relations with the West, which have soured dramatically since the 2014 US-backed coup in Ukraine, will be among the topics discussed at the July summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump in Finland.

During the interview, Lavrov brushed off Channel 4 speculation that Russia could offer to hand over NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, whom it granted political asylum, in exchange for the lifting of US and EU sanctions.