Mohammed bin Salman

Remorseless resignations, purchasing paintings and personal/political music + this day in history w/the murder of Dimebag Darrell and our song of the day by Boulevards on your Morning Monarchy for December 8, 2017.

JP Sottile of NewsVandal.com joins me in the first hour to discuss the decline of the US empire. We begin by discussing the continued decline of the US media. JP and I touch on the the ways in which the US media (particularly TV) has become ever more enamored with the cult of celebrity. We discuss the ways in which the TV talking heads will obsess over a single tweet by Trump while actual real news is happening all around us. JP and I speculate over the reasons for this trend, and why the media loves to distract us with “news items” about presidential tweets.

Palestinian officials are voicing major concern following a recent meeting between President Mahmoud Abbas and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, during which the prince set out a shockingly bad set of terms for a new peace proposal being pushed, supposedly with the support of the U.S. government.

This November in Riyadh, colder than ever, turned out be hot in the political sense and provided Saudi Arabia the front-page spaces of the world mass-media outlets. To be more precise, it was secured by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohhamad Bin Salman Al Saud, who, throughout the whole month, was pursuing extremely active foreign and domestic policies.

Saudi Arabia is attempting to mend its historically antagonistic relations with Iraq’s Shia, at Iran’s expense.
In early November, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman launched a domestic shake-up, as well regionally, ratcheting up tensions with Iran, and sabre-rattling against the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
However, as Riyadh seemed to stoke tensions with the region’s Shia, there had been a quieter Saudi campaign unfolding to co-opt Iraq’s Shia.

Federico Pieraccini
Strategic Culture

Analysis — Aaron Miller and Richard Sokolsky, writing in Foreign Policy, suggest “that Mohammed bin Salman’s most notable success abroad may well be the wooing and capture of President Donald Trump, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.” Indeed, it is possible that this “success” may prove to be MbS’ only success.

Secret meetings, unprecedented drills and misleading costs + this day in history w/the murder of Karen Silkwood and our song of the day by Frank Carter on your Morning Monarchy for November 13, 2017.

When Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s plane landed in Saudi Arabia on November 3, his phone was confiscated. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman did not send an entourage to greet him like a dignitary. The next day, he appeared in a taped broadcast on a Saudi television station and read a statement that suggested he had resigned.