The nature of kingship in William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth follows the events that occur during Macbeth’s unlawful rise to the throne......The themes of greed, arrogance and excessive political ambition are still, very relevant to the world today. Shakespeare got it right - his story of Macbeth still applies to today's world....
It’s risky to hack American institutions like leading parties, and even just to interfere with American elections—but it was inevitable because Putin made anti-Americanism and the challenge of America’s influence in the world a core of his domestic propaganda. He saw a big opportunity, because after so many years of weakness shown by Obama’s administration, Putin felt emboldened. That’s why I was sure he would do it, because I’ve read enough history books to learn that dictators—if they don’t stop at an early stage, they eventually go off-limits. Putin saw a big opportunity with Donald Trump and he grabbed this opportunity, and we know that this administration—Obama and the White House, the State Department, CIA—they received these reports and they tried to avoid an open conflict with Russia because, obviously, there are many arguments why you should avoid this conflict. That was Putin’s precise calculation.
Two Russian intelligence agencies—first the FSB, which is Putin’s organization, the successor to the KGB, and then separately Russian military intelligence—both hacked into the DNC. And if the story is to be believed, one hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing. It sounded, at some level, like a coordinated plot, and then at another level, like a certain amount of chaos.
Putin was betting on Obama doing nothing, sitting on his data, hoping that Hillary would win anyway. And then Putin believed that he could not just win this battle, not just get the outcome he wanted, but also send a message. Because Putin’s role in America’s election is not just a fact of American domestic politics. It demonstrated to everybody—to American allies in NATO, to Arab monarchies in the Gulf, to Chinese, to Japanese, to African nations, to Latin America—that Putin is so powerful, so arrogant, and so confident, that he could intervene in the American political process, and the U.S. basically swallowed it.
Trump’s behavior. I read an interview you did in Playboy. You said, talking about Trump “for somebody who is inconsistent in almost everything, being so consistent in defending Putin raises my suspicions.” I thought that was a really interesting observation. I mean, Trump’s all over the map. He’s a figure of chaos. But he’s been amazingly consistent in being pro-Putin. .....It’s highly unusual for any candidate of a major party, especially for a Republican, to go after the CIA or FBI and take the word of the KGB. But there are two reasons. One is that since we have no knowledge or almost no knowledge of the structure and finances of Trump’s empire, I think it was a phenomenal success of Trump that he could get elected without revealing the true nature of his financial affairs. Whether, you know, he’s a billionaire, maybe he’s not, he owes money to people in America or elsewhere. We don’t know whether the man—who, as we all know, survived four bankruptcies and borrowed tons of money and now is about to become commander-in-chief—owes favors to maybe America’s foes around the world. We don’t know.
So maybe Putin has something that is so vital for Trump that he didn’t want even to consider any conflict with Putin. Maybe. I don’t know. I think it’s very important for Democrats and, I guess, for Republicans to press Donald Trump to eventually show his tax returns—to understand whether there’s something in it that prevented him from doing it during the campaign. Of course, it could be something else. It could be some kind of blackmail materials, maybe recorded while Trump was in Moscow—I don’t know, I can only speculate, and I don’t feel very comfortable speculating.
After Trump’s bankruptcy, American banks wouldn’t lend him money. One of the places he had to look for funding was Russian oligarchs. Whether he took money from them or not, he spent a lot of time with them.
.....http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/12/garry_kasparov_on_why_vladimir_putin_hates_chess.html