Bibi-Donnie bromance shows signs of severe strain

Back in February last, when USA/Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran, in the midst of pretend peace negotiations, it looked like the good guys had the upper hand for a few days. We murdered the top wog and most of his family, to say nothing of his ruling clique who all deader than dead! In fact, we killed so many of the evil-doers we don't even have anybody to talk to for the next round of fake peace negotiations.

And as we've been reminded once or twice by Mafia Don and the unctuous jerk-off of a platoon-leader who by some miracle became Secretary of War,  our forces of righteousness and projectiles of democracy have sent their navy to the bottom of the sea and its leaders to hell. Oh ya baby!... USA USA USA!!!

A few days into that glorious war, I posted this; The war Israel and USA started ten days ago now threatens the future of both.  

Bingo!

Seven months later, how's it going? The towelheads o' terror are still firing missiles with reckless abandon. The Good Guys seem to be running low on interceptors. There is no sign of peace on the horizon. The Nations of Virtue have sanctioned the Persians from top to bottom and up the wazoo since '79, to no avail. Those folks will eat grass and live in caves for a thousand years before they bow to the genocidal duopoly USAIsrael.

Both of these war criminals are getting more than a little nervous about where things are headed.  There's a real fear that the terrorists might launch a few thousand missiles before the Good Guys in Jerusalem get their next batch of Patriot interceptors, which are scheduled to arrive in three years time. Both of  'em are way out on political limbs they're furiously sawing off in hopes of distancing themselves from blame, but I don't see any hope. America will be in turmoil after Tuesday. The GOP will be decimated, but the Dems will explode in civil war. A lot of heavy hitters in the donkey club hate their fellow asses more than they hate Trump, if what just happened in Michigan is any taste of where we're heading.

Meanwhile, The Greatest Leader Since Moses, while having lost the election, nevertheless finds himself as the 'caretaker' PM while a coalition is formed, a process he should be able to stretch out indefinitely. So here we are. Trump knows Bibi has already destroyed his presidency.

That's not the kinda thing Mafia Don is gonna forgive and forget.

Trump declares "peace in our time" for 39th time in three months

Donny J is working on the premise that if you repeat utter bullshit often enough, eventually it becomes reality. Or at least seems realistic enough to much of his fan base that they go along with it. I can see how that happens. I just spent ten minutes watching Larry Kudlow interview Gen. Jack Keane at Fox. Aside from being a retired General and the boss of the Institute for the Promotion of War, Keane is always keen, in every appearance on screen, which is multiple times per day, to remind the Fox audience that Trump's tenure as Commander-in-Chief has cemented America's status as World Hegemon. The reality of things of course points entirely in the opposite direction. In the first year-and-a-bit of Donny's second term, the wheels are falling off the Empire's bandwagon everywhere you look. No matter the extravagant lengths the narrative managers go to divert our attention, it's hard to come to any other conclusion than non-nuke Iran has fought two nuke powers to a stalemate. I predicted months ago that America didn't have the resources to crush Iran, and that once US power in the 'hood was throttled, Israel as we know it is doomed. That's not a bad thing. The Israel that every Christian kid who ever went to Sunday School was taught to revere, has long since morphed into a racist apartheid state committing mass murder on an industrial scale. The end of the US empire that facilitates and fully pays for Israel's atrocities can only be welcomed by the entire Middle East.

Drunk on hubris, American Empire races towards the abyss

For about the last thirty years, I’ve been hectored by save-the-planet types to mind my carbon footprint. If it’s not Greta Thunberg in my face, it’s Al Gore up my arse. We gotta get off fossil fuels or we’re all gonna die! In the here-and-now, we find ourselves in a world run by billionaires and their minions. Many of the billionaires hail from Silicon Valley. Most of them are salivating at the prospect of multiplying their billions many times over. Now that they’ve got a huge majority of the serfs addicted to their digital devices, they have concluded the next level in our enslavement will require massive server farms, aka “data centres,” to process the never-ending data streams we provide them. These require massive amounts of energy. The Silicon Valley billionaires have no compunction whatsoever about running their data centres on the very fossil fuels I’ve been warned away from for the last thirty years! And while the filthy rich keep getting richer, it becomes increasingly obvious that America at large is circling the drain. The physical infrastructure is crumbling due to habitual neglect necessitated by the needs of the one percent for ever-lower taxes. Ditto the education system. Housing precarity has become normalized. Health care in America boasts top-of-the-line expenses, but bottom of the barrel results. America’s vaunted military, by far the most expensive in the world, hasn’t won a war since 1945, and has lost it’s proxy war in Ukraine. America’s blank-cheque no-questions-asked support for Israel’s ongoing genocide is earning it the hatred of 80% of the planet. In response, America destroys the remnants of the rights and freedoms, that once made it worthy of the Statue of Liberty, by stomping on the rights of its critics, people like Mahmoud Khalil. As history repeatedly demonstrates, failing empires eventually resort to looting their allies, more properly termed vassals. That’s where we’re at in the present moment. We’ve destroyed Germany’s industrial economy but invite German manufacturers to set up shop in America. We’re going to snuff out industry in Canada and get their branch-plant economy to come home to Daddy. America is racing towards the abyss. The two hour phone call with Putin yesterday led to absolutely nothing. Our adversaries are not impressed, nor are they intimidated by idle threats. As I write this, the Empire is bombing Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world, to make it stop harassing Red Sea shipping. Our operation “Prosperity Guardian” has in one year accomplished exactly nothing. The Yemenis are not cowed. Nor are the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians. The world at large is fed up with American “leadership.” It’s increasingly obvious that Americans themselves, those suffering under the yoke of billionaire rule, are fed up too. Witness Luigi. Witness flaming Tesla stores. Only the blind and stupid, drunk with hubris, fail to see the writing on the wall.

Mass graves discovered at Gaza hospital after retreat of "most moral army in the world"

Most moral army in the world? That pungent flower of PR supremacy is wilting fast. Most of us who follow these things are so relieved the face-off between Iran and Israel has been tamped down, at least for now, that we’ve almost forgotten Gaza. But the genocide continues. The death toll has passed 34,000. Gazans, especially the youngest and most vulnerable, are starving to death - if they live long enough. And let’s not be deluded about why they are starving. The food that would prevent their starvation rots in tractor-trailers that sit at the gates of Gaza, while Israel slow-walks aid via 1001 petty obstructions. Al Jazeera is the only major news source available in the West that reports out of Gaza without Israeli censorship. That’s why you can’t hope to be reliably informed if you limit yourself to BBC/CBC/CNN/MSNBC/Fox. The “mighty Wurlitzer” of American Empire propaganda ensures we see only the side of the story that is convenient to the Empire. The story we were treated to today was that Israel’s retaliation against Iran demonstrated Israel’s strategic dominance. The Iranians were cowed into standing down, and global nuclear war was averted. Whew! Here’s a more plausible scenario. While we were told the first Iranian direct attack on Israel in history was an abject failure, the reality seems to be somewhat different. We were told 99% of incoming was taken down by a combination of Israel and its allies. We now know some missiles got through the various defences and hit at least three strategic military targets. That was a wake-up call for at least some of the senior IDF guys who don’t pull their strategies out of 3,000 year old religious texts. That’s why Israel’s response was, in the words of Itmar Ben Givr, Minister of National Security and far-right religious nutter, “lame.” It’s comforting that their are some sane folks left at the top of the IDF. Whether they can prevent the Greatest Leader since Moses taking the country into the abyss remains to be seen.

Just ignore that mushroom cloud; the show must go on

I see where those nasty Houti rebels in Yemen have sparked up some serious fireworks at an Aramco oil storage facility near Jeddah. That's where the Saudi Formula One race is supposed to happen tomorrow.

F-1 is a multi-billion dollar international media spectacle. Countries actually pay big bucks to F-1 for the privilege of hosting a race. It's not about the race, it's about the PR.

Those dastardly Houtis, supported by the evil ayatollahs in Iran, have attempted to pee on the party with this cowardly attack.

Just imagine the PR coup they'd have pulled off if they could get the Saudi Grand Prix cancelled!

Since the fireball over those blazing storage tanks was visible to the drivers doing practice laps for Sunday's race, there was some reticence in the ranks. 

After an emergency drivers' meeting, where it was explained to the drivers who butters their bread, it was agreed.

The show must go on!

US sends more troops and missiles while Putin gives NATO the finger

I'm not optimistic about how this will turn out.

The Americans still talk as if they're the Big Dog who gets to boss everybody around. Look at their track record since WWII.

• fought the Koreans to a draw in a war that remains officially hot
• destroyed and lost Vietnam
• sabotaged multiple developing countries by assassinating democratically elected leaders
• destroyed multiple countries in the Middle East since 9/11
• spent twenty years occupying Afghanistan, only to leave the place worse than they found it, and hand it back to the previous owners.

With a resume like that, where do these morons get the idea they can tell the rest of the planet what to do?

But there's no stopping them. America's ruling class is so blinded by hubris they have no clue what they're doing. These are the people who spent $300 million every day, including weekends, for twenty years, trying to bend a nation of semi-literate subsistence farmers to their will.

And failed!

All of this while their own country is going down the shitter, big time, while the whole world is watching.

But now they're gonna take on Russia, China, and Iran? All at the same time?

We live in truly interesting times...

The truth is more important now than ever

I look forward to my New York Times International Weekly, which is included at no extra charge with my Sunday Star. It gives country bumpkins like me a chance to view true world-class journalism, unlike the crap those hacks in Toronto shovel out. I also have a hunch that recycling NYT copy is way cheaper than paying their own writers for original work.

In this era of truth being more important than ever, it's surprising how much truth the Times' world-class journos forget to include in their stories. Ruth Maclean reports on the conflict in Mali, and totally forgets to mention said conflict was unleashed when the USA destroyed Libya.

Julie Turkewitz reports on the heart-breaking plight of children in Venezuela. It truly is heart-breaking, but in a half-page story, there is nary a mention of the devastating sanctions the US has imposed on the country.

Alissa Rubin informs us that these are the "worst days ever for Iraqis." The poor sods are getting it from all sides. Collapsed oil prices, a collapsed economy, collapse upon collapse, and the ever-present meddling of the Iranians behind it all. If any of Iraq's travails had anything whatsoever to do with the USA's destruction and continued occupation of the country, you'd never know it from Rubin's story.


For an outfit that coined the slogan "The truth is more important than ever," that's a pretty slovenly performance.

Donald Trump, disposable doofus

I've said it before, but it bears repeating; the decision making powers of President Donny J don't extend too far beyond whether he's gonna have KFC or Micky D's for lunch.

Real decisions are made elsewhere.

Between COVID-19 and the collapse of the stock market, the odds of Trump winning a second term are becoming increasingly remote. But what a bonanza his four year term has been for the folks behind the curtain!

Relations with Russia are completely down the shitter. Ditto China. The Iran deal is out the window. The screws are tightening on "rogue" states like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

Meanwhile, for the Likud crowd, every day has been Christmas Day since Trump's inauguration. Whether it's gifting Golan, whacking Soleimani, or moving the embassy to Jerusalem, they love Santa Trump in the Holy Land.

So sit tight for a few months, and America should be back to "normal," to the great relief of the American political establishment. They won't roll back any of Trump's deeply counterproductive decisions, but at least the Orange Ogre will no longer distract the world with his tweets.

Instead, they'll  celebrate a "safe" president, a guy with a thirty plus year record of screwing over working class Americans, a guy who appears to be a few laps ahead of me on the Alzheimer Speedway.

The fix is obviously in, and nobody raises any serious questions about it. How exactly did Buttigieg go from winning Iowa to endorsing Biden less than a month later? How is it possible for the Dem leadership race to be over after the first three primaries?


Yes, Trump was an aberration. A guy with zero political experience, he'd been a Clinton funder and all-round pal since Bill was running for governor in Arkansas. The Clintons thought it might be fun to see their pal stir up shit on the Republican side, and whoopsie, Trump grabbed the ball and kept running.

The rest, as they say, is history, but don't worry; there'll be plenty more history coming down the pike soon enough.

Bring back Baird!

A country's foreign minister is the most high-profile personality to represent their nation on the world stage, after the prime minister or president. That's why you want somebody in the role who brings a little zenf to the table.

I thought Bullshittin' John Baird managed that in spades. I didn't agree with him very often but he was impossible to ignore. He was also a breath of fresh air among the stodgy band of fundamentalist Christians Harper surrounded himself with. It was sad to see him walk away from politics when he announced that he was transitioning to the private sector for the "stuff-my-pockets" phase of his career.

There can't be a lot of Canadians who could name the two FMs we had between Baird and Chrystia. Those guys had serious zenf deficits.

Then Chrystia. You always got the sense that she was more about promoting her personal brand and ingratiating herself with the Trump administration. Sometimes these two goals worked at cross-purposes. It's tough to pretend you're tough on Saudi's human rights record while simultaneously selling them military tools that enable them to further oppress dissent.

In practical terms she wasn't much of a FM. Where are the wins? Venezuela? Ukraine? But generally speaking the media gave her a pass for a record that had far more unforced errors than home runs.

Now we've got another dullard in the job who looks like he's going to advance Canada's role in the world by sucking up to Washington. Check out this story at CBC. That's got a bit of a huffy tone, eh? You almost figure maybe this guy is gonna bring the zenf!

But check out the sub-head; "Ottawa is the only one qualified to set Canada's foreign policy, says Francois-Philippe Champagne." He's responding to some snippy comments made by China's new ambassador to Canada on the topic of the two Michaels. Our latest laughable strategy is to prevail on Trump (that is, beg him) to intervene on our behalf.

Because, as you know, we're all about the rule of law, just like the Americans! They sent us a warrant to arrest Meng Wanzhou, and we're either about rule of law or we're not, so we had no choice but to do the right thing, the thing the Americans demanded we do, and if the Americans demanded it, it was obviously right...

As is typical in Canadian reporting on the matter, Elise von Scheel neglects to provide the context for Wanzhou's arrest. The Chinese national was allegedly in violation of some unilateral sanctions the US has arbitrarily and illegally imposed on Iran.


That's what we're talking about when we talk about "rule of law;" going along with illegal sanctions the Americans made up to bully Iran. How is it America's job to decide who China can or cannot do business with?

Canadian political establishment alarmed by Trudeau incompetence

Interesting front pager in the Globe today about Jean Chretien inserting himself into the China file. There seems to be deep bipartisan support for someone, anyone, to get this thing unstuck.

What was new to me was that our justice minister has the authority to overrule the extradition process. I don't recall reading that in previous stories about our Huawei adventure. What I heard instead was a lot of gibberish about "rule of law" etc. What I see is feckless toadying to the Trump gang.

Bearing in mind that Meng Wanzhou's original sin was violating America's unilateral and illegal Iran sanctions, her arrest was an outrage from the beginning. If the justice minister has had the authority to free her, why hasn't it happened? These are reasonable questions for anyone remotely capable of standing up to US bully tactics.

Instead, we've had six months of slipping and sliding and dodging the issue on the part of our PM and his laughably inept Foreign Minister. They do great work grandstanding in the media, orchestrating photo-ops, and spewing platitudes.


But what's getting done?

Toronto Star exposes BDS as Iran plot!

In case you were wondering, the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement is a plot cooked up in Iran. That's according to the Toronto Star's Rosie DiManno in her page 2 column today.

Those damned Persians!

Yup, it's all "anti-Semitism, don't kid yourself," Rosie assures us. Rosie came to this conclusion after attending a Al Quds Day rally in Toronto without her cigarettes, a fact her editors somehow find relevant to the story. Or maybe she no longer has anyone edit her idiocy. After all, it's been tough times in the news biz. Tossing the editors over the side was just another cost-saving necessity.

That's why the Canadian media bigs went cap-in-hand to the government to wrangle a $600 million subsidy from taxpayers to subsidize their failing news titles, so they can continue to publish anti-Palestinian hate-speech like DiManno's effort today.

DiManno obviously has high regard for "that sliver of democracy in the Middle East." Good for her, but I think most diaspora Jews under thirty are embarrassed by it. Google we know where every bullet landed and you'll see why. There's nothing praiseworthy about IDF snipers killing unarmed Palestinians.

Nothing.

DiManno gets one thing right; there is no two-state solution. It may take five more years or fifty, but eventually a one-state solution will prevail. That will be a state in which every resident is a citizen, and every citizen has an equal vote. At that point, Israel will be more than a Jewish state; it will be an authentic democracy.

Trudeau more dangerous than Trump - professor

Professor Hamid Dabashi doesn't hold back in this take-down of PM Fluffy. Trudeau's pseudo-progressive fakery is possibly more damaging than the buffoonery of Trump, he says. You'd almost think he's been reading this blog!

Every other day another apology... but what changes? What gets done?

Precious little, that's what.

Trudeau is the perfect pol for the modern era. All optics, no substance. What with our Feminist Foreign Policy, our newfound commitment to Native Rights and Oil Pipelines, and our obsequious toadying to Uncle Sam, we are one Nation from Sea to Sunny Sea, labouring under an utterly massive case of cognitive dissonance.

Called out on the arrest of the Huawei CFO by Canadian officials, Trudeau responds with a load of hokum on how this nation has an independent judiciary, blahblahblah, and oh yes, he did happen to know about it three days before it happened, but what the heck, just because it's independent doesn't mean it ain't leaky!...

This is the response of the leader of a supposedly independent country which just made an arrest on behalf of the US, because a Chinese company isn't obeying America's orders that they refrain from doing business with Iran.

How is it America's business to dictate to China who they do business with?


As an aside, Trudeau is lying when he says no decision has been made about whether Huawei will be part of Canada's next generation internet.

The decision HAS been made, and no, Huawei will NOT be a part of it. That decision about Canada's future was made in Washington, not Ottawa.

Ramping up the hokum at Global Affairs Canada

Never imagined I'd say this, but I miss Bullshittin' Baird.

Those were simpler days, and Big John always wore his heart on his sleeve. When John was "deeply concerned" you always got a sense that, at some level, he probably was.

With the Trudeau crowd, you're pretty sure they're only "deeply concerned" if the object of their concern has passed muster with the usual partisan focus groups.

With the Harper Gang, the hypocrisy was hit and miss.

With the Sunny Daze Gang, the hypocrisy is systemic.

Take a gander at the Global Affairs website. The last three news items are about gender equality in Ethiopia, Canada's leadership in global gender equity, and Canada's leadership role in calling out the horrific human rights situation in Iran.

You know Iran; the only Middle East country outside of Israel where Jews are constitutionally protected, and a country where women have never NOT had the right to drive cars. Ya, that country. We're really upset about their human rights...

Yup, no way we'd ever sell those guys military hardware, because that would just be wrong, and besides, our besties in Likud wouldn't like it. We'll call out human rights in Iran, but we'll spout nonsense non-stop about Israel's right to defend itself while the human rights of Palestinians are trampled underfoot.

And while the KSA is setting liberal hearts a-flutter by allowing some women to drive, we'll not get too bothered about their overall track record on human rights, because, after all, they buy military stuff from US branch plants in Canada that employ Canadian workers.

And how lovely that we're gung-ho for gender equality in Ethiopia and beyond.

By the way, women in Canada are still a good distance away from achieving gender equality, but that's no reason not to champion ideals globally that we've not yet achieved here at home.


How about we address the beam in our own eye before we lecture the rest of the planet about the mote in theirs.

Must have been a slow news week

Nothing much in the weekend papers. Former G-G Adrienne Clarkson got a bit of self-serving twaddle into the Globe and Mail explaining why we should be grateful that she's still sucking hard on the government teat almost fourteen years after giving up that sinecure.

Elsewhere in the Globe we learn that the US will "temporarily allow" eight countries to continue buying Iranian oil after the new US sanctions kick in tomorrow. The wanton twattery of a bunch of American exceptionalists presuming to dictate to the world who can and who cannot buy Iranian oil passes without comment, naturally.

Things are pretty thin in the Sunday Star as well. Drake claims he was racially profiled at a Vancouver casino. Really? My hunch is that casinos are more interested in credit score profiling than racial profiling, and you'd think he'd be golden in that department, but whatever.

The NYT International Weekly (included at no extra cost with your Sunday Star, because actually paying Canadian writers for original copy is prohibitively expensive) makes the case for Colorado Governor Hickenlooper, a made energy industry bumboy from the get-go, taking a run at the White House in 2020. Seriously? I write more insightful shit than that.

Both Kristof and Stephens have op-eds that don't mention Donny J, to my considerable surprise. Maybe Sarah Kendzior is onto something...

Picked up a Toronto Sun just to see what the semi-literate folks are reading these days. With Remembrance Day around the corner, we've naturally got the predictable jingoistic claptrap about how the bold Canucks punched above their weight in the WW I.

What a concept, that WW I. The royal families of Europe had some differences. They're all related anyway, so you'd think they could sort things out with a family picnic or something, but no. Millions of working class schmucks on all sides had to make the ultimate sacrifice. We remember their sacrifice every November 11. Their naivete and gullibility, along with the craven cynicism of those who sacrificed them, we prefer to forget.

Further in we get a few accolades for Doug Ford's war on the poor with his Making Ontario Open for Business Act. But even that isn't enough for guest columnist Peter Gossman, who is pleased to inform us that he's planning to open his next factory in the US instead of Canada.

I'm sure Trump will appreciate your help in making America great again with the few dozen minimum wage jobs you might create there, Pete!

Gossman also informs us, via a quote from another PostMedia title, that "...oil, gas, and coal remain the fuels of the future."

Huh?... oh ya, we're reading the Toronto Sun...

Pres of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce Rocco Rossi gets a guest column too, although it's largely incoherent. Since it's in the Sun maybe the readers won't notice. His members are experiencing both a labour shortage and a skills shortage, so the Ford government's war on the working poor is going to create a lot of jobs...

Or something.

The Sun still has their Sunshine Girl, but she's near the back of the paper now. Used to be on page two or three if I remember correctly. That was a great gig for the photographer back in the day, at least till he got charged with attempted rape or something. I think he went to jail for a spell. Today's Sunshine Girl, Lavender, "is a Sagittarius who is all about Sunday, smiles, and sunshine."


Good to know!

We'll drown you in 24/7 Trump till you beg for mercy

September has been all Trump all the time on the news networks. It kicked off with that nauseating McCain funeral carnival. Did you notice the media made that more about Trump than McCain?

Apparently Mr. President was not invited to the show and played a round of golf instead. Anytime I can avoid a funeral to play golf instead I figure I'm way ahead of the game, but this was treated as a major snub of the Orange Ogre.

Not that Senator McCain wasn't a "great American." Born into wealth and privilege, McCain used his advantages to his own advantage all his life, as great Americans generally do. The one courageous stand he took during his career was against torture, and he was more or less cornered into that to maintain the myth that had grown around his status as a one-time victim of torture.

Then it was the Woodward book. By God, somebody told Woodward that somebody in the White House referred to it as "Crazy Town!" I've never worked anywhere that at least a few folks didn't consider "Crazy Town," but I guess it's supposedly a different thing when you work at the White House.

By the way, do you ever wonder why a journalist whose career peaked over forty years ago is treated as a living legend of investigative journalism, while working journalists like Sy Hersh, who has at least as significant a track record, have been effectively de-platformed in US media?

Then came the infamous NYT op-ed...


When I'm having that much Trump waved at me to the exclusion of virtually all other news, I get suspicious. What's going on? Has The Empire really given up on regime change in Syria?

I think not.

Notice the impeccable timing of the lame-duck May government's latest allegations regarding the so-called Skripal affair. Other than being a convenient excuse to work the words "gas attack" and "Russia" into the same narrative, that story remains as dodgy as it ever was.

Notice too that this comes as the US, UK, and France have all vowed retaliation should Assad "use gas against his own people."

The stage is now set; Syria, and those well-known gassers in Russia, are poised to clean out Idlib. Inevitably, there will be claims that Assad and his Russian backers have resorted to using poison gas, because that's what those people do. Then the Nations of Virtue will rise as one, remove Assad from the scene once and for all, and put Putin on notice that the next time his minions run wild gassing retired Russian spooks in England we're coming for him too.

With Assad gone and Putin's fingers burned, Iran will be isolated. What a perfect opportunity to restore the pre-'79 liberal democracy in that benighted land!

The same crowd in DC who have convinced themselves that they are the shapers of history are about to shape some more.


What could go wrong?

Good news Canada! We can work with...

...John Bolton!

Yup, Trump might be a lost cause, but John Bolton is a stand-up guy Canada can work with! That's according to Michael Byers in yesterday's Globe and Mail.

And why not? He's smart, organized, tenacious, ambitious, and has been relentlessly advocating for war on Iran ever since the Mullahs threw over the Shah's liberal democracy back in '79.

That's our kinda guy!

Elsewhere in the countdown to Trumpageddon, I see where The Guardian's bed-wetter-at-large Simon Tisdall has figured out that Trump is in Putin's pocket, and is bent on "undermining the post-Salisbury western consensus."

What?

That's a thing?... there's a post-Salisbury consensus?

I think the general consensus outside the big-media echo-chamber is that the entire Skripal charade was stage managed by British spook agencies in a lame attempt to throw shade on Putin's party at the World Cup, but whatever. As for the imminent demise of NATO, Uncle Sam's me-too club, that can't come soon enough for anyone pining for a more peaceful world.

And look on the bright side; it'll get those allies off the hook from buying all that over-priced American military hardware that's constantly being foisted on them in the name of "interoperability."

Like the F-35 that so many of the me-too imbeciles have signed up for.

Hard to see a downside. I guess the sparkly new $1.5 billion NATO HQ will be sitting vacant, but maybe Brussels can convert it to housing for some of those migrants who have been fleeing the NATO success stories in Libya and Afghanistan in their millions.

Finally, it looks like Trump's plan to make coal great again isn't going that great. Apparently there's a coal-fired generating plant closing every fifteen days on average since Putin put Trump in the Oval Office.

This too is a good thing!


Just goes to show you should judge politicians by their results, not by their rhetoric.

Hark, the war drums beckon!

Big Steve and a gaggle of like-minded neocon has-beens wasted no time offering Mafia Don props on a job well done.

Trump abrogates the Iran deal on Tuesday and Harper & Company have their rancid diatribe in the New York Times the very next day!

Only the greatest leader since Moses was quicker off the mark than this sorry lot; he managed to launch a major missile attack on Syria even before Harper et al launched their bought and paid for op-ed!

And who can blame him? After Trump's announcement of the US embassy move, after Trump delivers the imbecile MBS to the Israeli camp, after Trump unilaterally dumps the JCPOA agreement, Bibi obviously sees green lights all over the place.

No wonder they love Trump in Israel!

Harper is concerned that Iran "oppresses its people" and "commits violence against the people of Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon..."

Hmm... does Iran oppress its people more than, say, Saudi Arabia?

Is the war on Yemen not a Saudi project?

Has not the US committed far greater violence against the people of Iraq than has Iran?

And no one has inflicted more death and destruction on Lebanon than our good friends, the Israelis.

Even though fifteen of nineteen 9/11 terrorists were Saudis, and none were Iranian, Saudi Arabia is our ally, and Iran is the enemy?

But forget all these trifles! The free world must come together as one and teach those uppity Persians a lesson they won't soon forget.


I'll bet old Eric Arthur Blair is enjoying the greatest stiffy of his life, even though he's been in the grave nearly seventy years!

Sticking it to the Ayatollahs

ACTIONS NOT WORDS screams the all caps headline on page O3 of today's Globe and Mail. It's the only story in the entire paper with an all caps headline, so it must be very important.

The gist of the piece is that Canada must do more to bring freedom and democracy to Iran, where a "freedom movement" erupted into widespread street demos in December. The caption under the picture informs us that "Iranian protesters chant slogans at a rally in Tehran, on Dec. 30."

That was my first chuckle. Those may well be Iranians chanting slogans, but they're carrying placards bearing the likeness of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Some doofus photo editor used a picture of a pro-government rally to illustrate an anti-government screed!

The authors of the piece should set off some alarms if you were expecting an honest opinion piece on the state of freedom and democracy in Iran. Nazanin Afshin-Jam Mackay, we are told, "is a long-time Iran human rights activist." She is also the wife of former Defence Minister Peter "Pinocchio" Mackay. If you follow her "activism" you'll be well aware it consists mostly of pining for the good old days of Iran's liberal democracy that prevailed from 1953 right up until the Ayatollahs came along and wrecked everything in 1979.

Her co-author is Shuvaloy Majumdar, whose last headline in a Canadian paper came after Trump announced the US embassy move to Jerusalem in December. Majumdar thought that a jolly good idea and argued that Canada should follow the American example, just to, you know, promote peace and human rights in the Middle East.

Majumdar turned up in Harper's inner circle after spending a few years in Afghanistan, spreading freedom and democratic goodness on behalf of the "International Republican Institute," one of the numerous US government "Non Government Organizations" charged with meddling in the politics of other countries. He was the mastermind behind Baird's decision to sever diplomatic relations with Tehran in 2012, a self-defeating exercise in idiocy unmatched in recent diplomatic history.

But it got Baird and Big Steve a pat on the back from Israel's PM Netanyahu, another long-time activist for human-rights in Iran. Funny how so many "human-rights activists" who are tireless advocates for the oppressed in Iran never have a word to say about the human rights of people who live under Israeli occupation. By all accounts, Jews in Iran enjoy far greater freedom and human rights than Palestinians in the West Bank.

Given the authorship, the opinions expressed are pretty much what you'd expect. Us good, them bad. We must therefore help freedom flourish in Iran the way it's flourishing in Iraq and Libya and Afghanistan and all the other beneficiaries of our meddling, and never forget that those Ayatollahs have rendered their country an isolated pariah state.

In fact, more countries have embassies in Iran than in Israel, so we should perhaps take more care in who we label a pariah state.

Ironically, the Mackay - Majumber rant shares page O3 with another opinion piece about the December demonstrations, this one penned by U of T luminaries Farhaan Ladhani, Peter Loewen, and Janice Gross Stein. They actually did some research to measure support for the protests by the Iranian public.

Their conclusion? "We found that support for the protests is thin. Only 27 per cent of respondents agreed that they supported them... "

Hmm... looks like the National Endowment for Democracy and the International Republican Institute and the Open Society folks have lots more work ahead of them before Iran is ripe for the plucking.

How to fight terrorism while sponsoring terrorists

This Mohammad bin Salman dude who is now boss of Saudi Arabia has quite a track record for such a youthful world leader.

He's the architect of the collapse in world oil prices, a strategy that has been an epic fail. It has hurt Saudi Arabia more than any of the intended targets.

He's also the architect of the Yemen war, which is an unmitigated disaster and also an epic fail.

And as of this week, he's also the heir apparent to the leadership of the sclerotic state of Saudi Arabia.

Ya, Saudi Arabia is fucked.

Oddly enough, President Trump wasted no time offering congrats to this incorrigible youngster. He sees an eager vassal keen to do the bidding of Uncle Sam, and that's true to a point.

There are any number of policy initiatives taken by this imbecile that threaten catastrophic blow-back not only to Saudi Arabia but to the Middle East in general.

Sucking up to Israel will never fly in the Arab street. Perhaps it's a valid concept among the princelings in the Kingdom, but it will never find favour among the masses.

The Trump initiated quarantine of Qatar is another goose on its way to being cooked. If you've read this far you already know the hilarious demands that MBS and his Arab acolytes (all US vassal states, by the way) have made of Qatar.

Shut down Al Jazeera. Theoretically this should raise the hackles of freedom of speech advocates worldwide, but thus far the condemnation of this initiative has been muted.

Break commercial ties with Iran. After all, as Trump and the entire upper echelon of US power-brokers never tire of reminding us, Iran is the mother ship of terror networks world-wide.

Stop supporting terrorism. There's no question that Qatar has supported terrorism... in Syria. A far bigger sponsor of terrorism has been the very state that MBS is now the putative and temporary head of. The Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas and Hezbollah are only "terror" entities in countries where Israeli lobbying has succeeded in rendering them as such.

How many 9/11 terrorists hailed from Qatar?

How many from Saudi Arabia?

Kick Turkey out of their base in Qatar. This could get interesting. The US has a far larger base in Qatar. The US and Turkey are NATO allies. Turkey is essentially a Muslim Brotherhood hood. That won't change anytime soon. Read up on Erdogan's approval ratings. He's doing much better than Trump.

Interesting times indeed!

We'll see $150 oil overnight if the Iran-Saudi spat becomes a shooting war

Both countries have the capacity to cripple each other's oil infrastructure. Ponder that for awhile when you contemplate the potential ramifications of the scary headlines you're seeing today.

Outrage over Saudi's execution of a prominent Shia cleric has got the entire neighbourhood on a keener edge than ever before. This is a story that has numerous backstories. There's an ongoing power-struggle going on in Saudi Arabia that is both internecine and inter-generational, and all bets are off on who might prevail.

Then you've got your outside interests, primarily the US, Israel, and Russia. The American's have been making nice with Iran, at least at the official level. However, there is a huge cadre of neocons in the beltway who have seen these efforts to normalize US-Iran relations as a stab in the back to our Israeli allies. And of course that's how it's perceived among some elements of the Saudi elite as well.

Meanwhile, there's also been a steady back and forth between Moscow and Riyadh in diplomatic traffic. At least some elements in the Saudi ruling clique recognize that the current "make up for price by selling more volume" strategy is, in the long run, economic suicide for Saudi Arabia. If it goes on long enough, it will cripple the Russian economy as well.

That's a lot of very unpredictable balls in the air.

The prudent investor might want to consider bulking up on crude futures. WTI has gained a couple of percentage points today, but that's nothing compared to what will happen when the Strait of Hormuz is shut down.

And that is a very real and very imminent possibility.