EU to set up HQ2 in Poland

Because Brussels is way too closely identified with the "old" Europe, whereas Poland represents the fresh young face of democracy in the Old World.

Just ask Donald Tusk. Tusk is President of the European Council, after all, and his musings have some schlepp. How a retrograde Polish right winger ever reached that office is a mystery to me; something akin to making Doug Ford Sec General of the UN. The reason the current anti-Iran "summit" is unfolding in Poland is because none of the core European nations of "Old Europe" want to encourage more Yankee-Doodle diddling in their affairs.

But Poland wants to host a US military base, and they want to call it Fort Trump.

So the anti-Iran summit happens. The highlights? We're seeing great strides in rapprochement between the only democracy in the Middle East and the almost-but-not-quite democracy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

And the mastermind behind this rapprochement is none other than Jared Kushner, the power behind the throne in Washington, if you believe the latest stories coming out of DC.


By golly... I think I see a Nobel Prize in young Jared's future!

Failed State Britain sees war with Russia as panacea for domestic collapse

Cameron and Hammond are gung-ho for war with Russia.

They're the only NATO bosses who talk a bigger game than perpetual war-mongers Tusk, Harper, and a couple of the Baltic pipsqueaks.

Not hard to see why the prospect of war is attractive to the dumbshits at Whitehall. Britain has been in a one-way death-spiral ever since the Thatcher era. It's a great place if you're a bond-trader in the City or a plumber from Poland or a beggar from Bulgaria, but not so great for those ordinary folks formerly known as "Brits".

In fact, somebody recently did the math and concluded that if Britain were an American state, it would be the poorest state with the possible exception of Mississippi, and there are a gaggle of Mississippi economists taking issue with that.

So with un-earned riches from North Sea Oil dwindling, an ossified political elite who believe in nothing other than their own privileges, and an exponentially expanding underclass that will only remain "under" for so long,
that elite is prepared to push the world into war just to avoid the consequences of the last forty years of governmental dysfunction and horrendously wrong-headed policies.  

Obama's billion dollar commitment to turn eastern Europe against America

There will certainly be a few leaders in eastern Europe who will welcome the European Reassurance Initiative. After all, there were a few leaders in eastern Europe happy to follow the US into Afghanistan over the objections of their people.

The technical term for such grovelling is "sucking up to the big dog."

It's a popular pastime among certain elements of the European elite.

It is bound to polarize the people on the street. There's a very wide swath of the population that is no more eager to have US troops "protecting" them today than they were to have Soviet troops "protecting" them in the bad old days.

Look for anti-US demos in the streets of Warsaw by the end of the month.

Making Russia disappear; hanky-panky in the blogosphere

On a typical day this blog can expect to get 50 or 60 page views from Russia. In the three years I've been putting out this unique combine of investment tips, political commentary, highly selective personal memoir, and downright awful offal, page views from Russia rank third in number, after only the US and Canada.

So when there are zero page views for several days in a row, I know something is going on.

My Russian readers are back, as of shortly after noon today. 

It's as if a tap was turned off, and then turned on again.

Was it something I said?

Russians enjoy something lacking in much of the Western world; leadership. There's not a whole lot of folks who don't understand who is in charge in Russia.

We can disagree to the nth degree over whether the man governs for "the people" or for a mafia of oligarchs, but we can all agree that one man is in charge.

Nobody is sure who is in charge in America, but most people are agreed that it ain't Obama. The "Oracle of Nairobi" has pretty much dropped the ball on every file that he's ever handled. 

Single payer universal health care morphs into the biggest profit subsidy for private health care ever imagined.

Closing Gitmo morphs into keeping that festering sore open forever, or till the last inmate dies.

Hope and change morphs into dope and rage...

"Red lines" come and go, as well they should, because most of what comes out of Obama's mouth is about political expediency that doesn't look more than 15 minutes into the future.

The Ukraine fiasco is that only because Obama couldn't decide, and still hasn't, what America's "strategic interests" are in that corner of the world. And unless you buy into the "American exceptionalism" fantasies of the PNAC crowd, you have to admit there are none.

A cursory reading of history and a glance at a map will confirm that Russia, on the other hand, does indeed have legitimate strategic interests in Ukraine, specifically in Crimea, and it didn't take Putin long to act in the interests of the nation he is leading.

The presumptuous dilettantism of Nuland and Pyatt was nipped in the bud before they were done congratulating themselves on their "revolution."

That has of course led to the most embarrassing howls of outrage from the PNAC acolytes in Washington, and also from their more devout devotees like Tusk in Poland and the incomparable Harper-Baird combination in Canada.

I don't for a moment imagine that Putin is some sort of modern day messiah who is leading his people to the promised land. But I do believe he is a hard-nosed realist who is preventing Russia from being steam-rollered by the "American exceptionalism" juggernaut that rules Washington and most of its helper-states these days.

And for that Mr. Putin should be celebrated.