Happy Mother's Day, Liebe Mutti!

Got in the car this morning for the two+ hour drive to visit my dear mother. The older she gets, the more important it becomes in my mind not to miss it. The old gal is 91, still lives independently in her own place, and just bought herself a new car. I stopped at the Korean's for a fifty-dollar hanging basket on the way out of town. I'm sure they'll be on for half that tomorrow! So I get down there, and Mom has just got home from church. She attends an outfit that is overtly protestant and vaguely related to the Quaker-Hutterite tradition, and as such, are the antithesis of the anti-Christian "Christian Zionist" faction exemplified by US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. She tells me today's lesson came from the Old Testament book of Habakkuk. That Old Testament reference is usually a red flag. That's where Bibi goes to justify genocide; Jehova has commanded us to slay the Amaleks and that sort of thing. But no, the prophet Habakkuk was off on another tangent altogether. He was warning the Chosen People that if they didn't mend their ways the Lord would cover them in filth, "for the violence done to Lebanon shall cover thee." That was predicted almost 3,000 years ago. Anyway, I thank God I'm still able to enjoy my dear mother, and am doubly grateful she's a partisan for a Christianity of Peace instead of the brand promoted by Huckabee and Pompeo. Happy Mother's Day, Liebe Mutti!

Macron gives up saving France, will save Lebanon instead

Finally acknowledging that the French are beyond redemption, Jupiter has thrown in the towel. He will henceforth focus His attention on countries where His efforts are more likely to be appreciated, like Lebanon, and perhaps Mali as well.

Who can blame Him? The Yellow Vesters have been poking sticks in the spokes for what, three years now? The ingrates have no clue how good they have it. Maybe they should move to Lebanon if they hate their country so much.

The Algerian hordes in the banlieues are even worse. You'd think the brown bastards would be grateful to live among the civilized, but noooo... Perhaps they can be given tickets to Mali if they miss Africa so much.

And if that's not enough, the irascible racists at Charlie Hebdo just announced an anniversary reprint of their famed "Blasphemous Cartoons of The Prophet" edition, which could set off a bigger explosion than what thirty tons of ammonia nitrate just did in Beirut.


So goodbye and godspeed, Macron... just make sure you take the unctuous imbecile BHL with you. There can be no redemption for France so long as that charlatan haunts the corridors of power.

What up in the Kingdom?

Doug Saunders, Canada's answer to Thomas Friedman, laid a bit of an egg with his opinion piece in the Globe yesterday, if you want to know my six dollars and thirty cents worth. I mean, what was that other than another not-so-thinly veiled plug for his book?

Ya Doug, we know! You've got a book coming out. Maximum Canada... I hope a hundred million Canadians get to read it someday. Now try to write your column without mentioning that you've a book coming out.

By the way, I'm guessing you've noticed by now you miss-spelled the name of Canada's Immigration Minister. Five times in one editorial. Come on, Doug, pull up your socks! I pay $6.30 every Saturday to read this shit.

But anyway, what's afoot in The Kingdom? Looks to me like the boss princeling is working overtime putting his stamp on things. Let's see... so far, he's engineered the Yemen war.

Epic fail.

The collapse of global oil prices.

Epic fail. As far as I can see, that ambitious strike against Russia and Iran turned out to be a near-mortal self-inflicted wound more than anything.

Let's not forget the brouhaha with Qatar. The only question about that fail is how epic it'll turn out to be in the final analysis.

And now, the putsch. The "night of the long knives" as some are calling it. The KSA hasn't seen this much intrigue since Bandar Bush went AWOL for a spell a few years ago! The Hariri angle is the icing on the cake.

Netanyahu went overboard trying to make hay out of that one. Hmm... maybe Hariri knows something? Maybe he knows that the immediate future of his country is looking rather bleak, and he'd rather spend the next few weeks in Riyadh than in Beirut?

But back to the putsch. One thing I'm wondering; was this a preemptive strike? Did Crown Prince MBS get wind of something and decide he'd rather be the hammer than the nail? In any event, looks like there could be a rush of "high net worth" Saudi refugees looking for a roof soon.

Or a luxury suite. Or a few floors of a five star hotel. Luckily, Canada has the infrastructure in place to accommodate this imminent refugee flow.

The Lebanese won't be a problem either, once the fireworks start. I mean, half those folks already hold Canadian passports. They won't even be refugees... they'll just be coming home!

Hezbollah today, here tomorrow! That's OK too. At least it'll get easier to find a decent tabbouleh. And that divine Bekaa Valley Blonde those people are renowned for.

I wouldn't worry about the Israelis either. Most of those people already hold US or German passports, so let them go there. The rest we can take in as refugees. That would make up for the shame of the MS St. Louis debacle back in '39.

So between a half million Israelis, six million Lebanese, and whoever can escape the clutches of the Insane Clown Prince, I figure we could be welcoming a good ten million refugees in the next few months.

Looks like we'll be well on our way to Maximum Canada!

Israel in the age of Islamic State

The arrogant Likudniks who have been running the show in Israel for the last 25 years today announced another 300 settler homes on Palestinian territory in the West Bank.

As every Israeli who gives these matters any thought whatsoever already understands, that's going to inflame resistance all over again.

The "resistance" these days is largely confined to teens throwing stones at settler vehicles.

Ya, I know there's those deadly Gaza rockets that never manage to hit anything, but by and large, those stone-throwers are the "resistance."

Their resistance has recently been further criminalized by the introduction of a 20 year jail term for the stone-throwers.

While that is going on, the Likudniks have been cynically annexing the Golan, because what the hell is Assad going to do about it?

We'll just help ourselves to those oil and gas resources while Mr. Assad is otherwise occupied.

Does nobody in the Likudnik power structure see where they are taking their country?

There may be folks high up in the IDF who think they have a handle on what's going on across the borders, and at this point the upheaval is ongoing across every border.

You've got a highly unpopular non-democratic government in Egypt tamping down the fires in the Sinai.

Lebanon is practically an anarchic state, as Syria and Iraq are already.

Jordan is on the brink.

And Netanyahu concludes that this is the moment to announce 300 settler homes in the West Bank!

Yes, it may be great PR to humour some of those IS guys who show up at the border seeking medical attention. But is there a long-term strategy at work in the Netanyahu cabinet?

The closest thing that the Likudniks have ever had to a "long term strategy" is the belief that when and if the shit hits the fan, the USA will come to the rescue.

It might be time to give that strategy a good re-think.

Top twit oversees 400+ Twitter accounts

Bullshittin' Baird never fails to surprise. According to this story in the Globe and Mail, Baird's Department of Foreign Affairs runs an impressive 400+ Twitter accounts!

Twitter; propaganda for dummies! The media platform for the content challenged... 140 characters is a lot when you have nothing to say...

Apparently Mr. Baird is also branching out to Buzzfeed, because rampant Twitter addiction does not, in itself, trivialize Canada's foreign policy sufficiently.

So far Baird's minions have only used Buzzfeed a couple of times, to take gratuitous pot-shots at Iran and Russia.

The Russia post last week is particularly embarrassing. As the Canadian dollar swoons to five year lows, Baird uses sophmoric sarcasm to chide Russia on the decline of the ruble. Shouldn't senior Canadian politicians be using their time to solve Canada's problems, instead of publicly gloating over the problems of other nations?

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the UN General Assembly just voted 170-6 to have Israel compensate Lebanon almost $1 billion US for the environmental disaster that ensued when one of Israel's "hard slaps" against "terrorists" blew up an oil hub on the Lebanese coast.

You can pretty much guess who the six naysayers were; Israel, the US, Pacific powerhouses Micronesia and Marshall Islands, Australia, and of course Canada.

That's  embarrassing.

Some thoughts on the international refugee crisis

There's a minor flap afoot in Canada about our shameful response to the Syrian refugee crisis. At this point in time, Canada has admitted a grand total of 750 or thereabouts Syrian refugees.

For all of our grandiose talk of human rights, we pull up lame when it comes to delivering.

Right now well over a million Syrian refugees are holed up in both Turkey and Lebanon. Well over half a million in Jordan. There are almost a quarter million Syrian refugees in Iraq!

How desperate would you have to be to seek refuge in Iraq? Iraq is itself a major source of refugees in the global refugee equation.

The news that Canada is cherry-picking potential refugees based on their religious affiliation should give pause for thought too. A refugee is a refugee. A human being is a human being. Politicizing the refugee process makes Canadian government bureaucrats no different than the Nazi operatives who were charged with deciding who goes to a work camp and who goes to a death camp.

Here's another thing about the refugee crisis. All the top refugee source countries are countries in which the Nations of Virtue (EU, NATO) have been heavily meddling. Until we decided on regime change in Syria, the top source countries were Iraq and Afghanistan. Syria now tops the list. It's not hard to see what these nations have in common.

Here's a policy suggestion that I hope somebody in Ottawa will read; lets eliminate the Temporary Foreign Worker program entirely, and meet our labour needs by bringing in refugees! That's a win-win and win again.

Out with 400,000 TFWs, in with 400,000 refugees.

We have every reason to believe that a Syrian or Iraqi refugee, allowed into Canada, would be every bit as productive a worker as the TFWs from Mexico or Bangladesh. And this would ease the pressure on countries like Lebanon and Jordan, allies who are groaning under their refugee burden, and who are at considerable risk of becoming adjunct states to the Caliphate.

The only downside is this; if the Harper government actually instituted such a humane and sensible policy, those 400,000 new refugee-immigrants might be inclined to vote for him...

Pot apologizes for calling kettle "black"

I see where the dunce Joe Biden has had to do a bit of a climb-down and apologize to Turkey's wily Erdogan for having suggested that Turkey has facilitated the entry of Islamic extremists into Syria.

Biden was correct in making that accusation of course. Turkey has been complicit in flooding Syria with anti-Assad rebels from the beginning of the "Syrian Spring." What Biden failed to mention was that Turkey was doing America's bidding at the time.

Those were the hopeful days when every anti-Assad rebel was a "freedom fighter" and Assad had only a few days or weeks to go before his brutal police state crumbled and democracy bloomed forth in its stead...

Another great example of plans going off the rails...

Now of course those freedom fighters have morphed into the most evil evildoers of all time. They are running wild throughout Syria and Iraq, sporting the best and the latest of American armaments, and threatening to over-run Jordan and Lebanon in the short term, and the rest of the neighbourhood a few months later.

To which the Nations of Virtue, who created this fanatical killing machine, are responding with yet another iteration of a "coalition of the not-so-willing" who propose to eliminate this threat to American hegemony in the Middle East by carpet bombing the Middle East.

That's bound to win us lots more hearts and minds...

How Ariel Sharon created Hezbollah

If you believe what you read in the mainstream media, Hezbollah is now the second most dire existential threat to Israel, right after the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Thanks to intensive lobbying, bribery, and arm-twisting by successive Israeli governments, Hezbollah has been branded a "terror" group by most of the Nations of Virtue.

There was no such thing as Hezbollah before Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. That fiasco, which dragged on for eighteen years at enormous cost to Israel, both in casualties and finances, was entirely a Sharon initiative.

Hezbollah emerged from a disparate collection of Shiite militias in southern Lebanon who congealed around one issue; undoing Sharon's invasion.

Israel is long gone from southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah is stronger than ever.

That too is Ariel Sharon's legacy.