Lots of good reads in the Globe today

When you fork over $6.30 to the Korean Extortionist for a Saturday Globe, and you're done reading anything worth reading in under an hour, you tend to feel ripped off. But not today. Even Doug and Mark had feature articles that I managed to get through without any noticeable rise in blood pressure.

But maybe that's just more evidence of my cognitive decline...

Having said that, Mark's multi-page "Folio" feature on the betrayal of the Kurds is a good example of how the billionaire-owned media chooses what you or I get to read. When is the last time you saw a multi-page feature on the betrayal of the Palestinians in the Globe? Or Canada's complicity in the betrayal of Haitian democracy? Probably never.

My favourite piece was Marty Klinkenberg's profile of the three mountaineers who died on Howse Peak back in April. I'm a big fan of fairly extreme mountain hiking, but I've never been a ropes-and-pitons guy. I have an acquaintance who is. From talking to him, I get the sense that the climbing club is pretty exclusive. You're not in the club until you've dangled from ropes attached to the premier climbing mountains around the world.

Elsewhere, Report on Business has a feature on how "Bay Street whipped up a cannabis frenzy," which completely avoids any mention of how the Globe and Mail assisted Bay Street in whipping up that frenzy.


Without using the actual words, the thought-leaders at the Globe now acknowledge what I've been saying all along; Canada's legal weed roll-out was a classic pump-and dump scam.

Oh Lord, it's hard to be humble...

US gifts 250 armoured vehicles to Kurds - but holds back the armour!

Here's a howler from the Washington Post!

The Kurds are supposedly America's "boots on the ground" in the battle against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. That's why the US gifted the Kurds a fleet of 250 used MRAP armoured vehicles. You'd think that's the least you can do for our indispensable allies.

You'd be wrong. You can do less by having technicians go to the trouble of removing the side-armour before delivery. In the words of one former American officer, that makes riding in the MRAP in a battle zone akin to committing suicide.

Supposedly the rationale for this spot of idiocy is that the side armour is classified technology and might fall into the hands of the Iranians.

Meanwhile, ISIS, the bad guys America has been targeting relentlessly with over 9,000 air strikes in the past year, have their own fleet of MRAPs, and guess what?



Yup, the Islamic State's MRAPs sport the full side armour!

Turkey joins war on ISIS again

Here's a headline from the Times of London on the 25th July; Turkey joins war on ISIS with strikes in Syria.


And here's a Reuter's headline yesterday, exactly a month later; Turkey to join coalition's air fight against Islamic State soon: Pentagon.


So what's up? Is Reuter's just that much slower in sniffing out a story? Not likely. Is this an underhanded acknowledgement on Turkey's part that they've not actually got around to fighting ISIS yet and their war thus far has been on the Kurds that her NATO allies have been busy training?


That's not likely either.


The think tank here at Falling Downs figures the wily Erdogan is stealing a page out of Big Steve's Book 'o Bullshit and Bamboozlement. Why bother fighting Islamic State when you can get adulatory headlines for just announcing that you're joining the fight every month or so? It's like Harper's shipbuilding programs; ten years of announcements, and look, no ships!

Who's fighting who in Kobani?

I don't know about you, but I'm a little confused by all the space the supposed ISIS siege of the Syrian border town of Kobani has been getting in the news.

For the most part it's a story spun to champion the valorous Kurds and demonize Turkey, because Erdogan refuses to go along with the plan, very popular among beltway strategists at the moment, to supply the Kurds with US weapons.

ISIS already have plenty of US weapons, which at the moment are being targeted by US bombs.

We know that the Kurds are the good guys here, because they are fighting ISIS, although they were never fighting the evil Assad all that hard, and remain on the official US terror list.

The evil Assad, by the way, was not considered all that evil until very recently.

Evil Assad has chit-chat with John Kerry

Evil Assad meets her Maj

So now Assad is a bad guy, and the ISIS moderates we trained and armed have morphed into even badder guys, so we have to fly over Syria to bomb the Syrian petroleum infrastructure, which apparently hurts ISIS, who are really really bad because they do not respect the rights of women, whereas the Kurds are the good guys who although they are a culture that practices female genital mutilation, are otherwise all aboard for the equal rights of women.

Or something like that.

Meanwhile, even though this Kobani deal has been spun as the evil ISIS vs. the hard-pressed Kurds, today it emerges that while Kobani may have been a predominantly Kurdish city, it's not just Kurds fighting ISIS, but other Islamist groups fighting ISIS as well.

Like the al-Raqqa Brigades, who are sometimes linked to al Qaeda and sometimes not, and possibly the al-Nussra Front, who are also sometimes al Qaeda, and sometimes not and sometimes associated with ISIS... gosh, it's confusing!

It would probably be just as true to spin Kobani as an al-Qaeda attack on ISIS, with the Kurds throwing their lot in with Qaeda for the moment, and the US Air Force serving, at least for the moment, as the al-Qaeda Air Force.

At least there's one thing not confusing; every bomb and bullet flying in either direction was paid for directly or indirectly by the US taxpayer!

That's got to warm the hearts of the war profiteers.