Unfathomable evil: America's extortion of Ukraine's precious minerals

The frightened US puppet masquerading as president of Ukraine will be in Washington today to sign over to Mafia Don the future rights to whatever is left of Ukraine. This will compensate the Americans for the “hundreds of billions” they claim to have invested in support of Ukraine since 2022. The number comes as a surprise to knowledgeable observers, as it is several times the value of support actually given, and seems to be another example of the Trumpian arithmetic that discovered an annual 200B USD “subsidy” to Canada. Furthermore, much if not most of the money never went to Ukraine, but to US arms manufacturers, for game-changing weapons systems that have clearly been no match for the supposedly inferior kit the Russians bring to the party. The rationale for the extortion of this broken country is that America must be repaid for its investments. Let us consider what American “support” has brought Ukraine. The stage was set for war with Russia by egregious US meddling in Ukraine’s domestic politics in the lead-up to the coup of 2014. The coup, or the “Revolution of Dignity,” as Western propaganda would have it, brought to the fore elements of the rabidly anti-Russian Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, who pine for the days when they donned SS uniforms and gleefully assisted in the cleansing of Poles, Jews, and other Untermenschen. The shooting war began in April of that year with Ukrainian attacks on the Donbas states that had refused to recognize the coup government and instead declared their independence. By 2022 the Donbas war had claimed over 10,000 lives, the vast majority being Donbas civilians. In December of 2021 Putin offered an ultimatum of sorts; let’s negotiate a new security architecture for the region to end the blood-letting. He was summarily ridiculed and ignored across the West. In February, as Ukrainian artillery attacks on Donbass were reaching all-time highs, he reluctantly implemented the “military-technical” option to demilitarize Ukraine. There erupted across the West a gusher of hyperventilating outrage over Putin’s totally unprovoked full-scale invasion. We, the Democracies of the world, promised to back Ukraine “with whatever it takes for as long as it takes” to crush Russia, a promise reiterated almost daily in the capitals of NATO countries. When Zelensky’s government sought to negotiate a truce a mere month into the war, the preening weasel Boris Johnson arrived to scuttle it. Three years later, the damage to Ukraine is incalculable. Ukraine has largely been demilitarized, and so has NATO. The West’s warmongers turned out not to have the “whatever it takes” of their pie-in-the-sky promises for nearly long enough. Hundreds of thousands are dead. Millions are broken in body or mind, and millions more have fled the country. The cost of reconstruction will run into the trillions. Three years later, there’s been an election in the country that leads the Free World. The returned Trump is mostly interested in reminding us the war would never have started if he’d won in 2020. Beyond that, he’d like to move on, and normalize relations with Russia. There’s just one little thing. Uncle Sugar wants his money back. Hence, Zelensky's pilgrimage to the White House today, to sign away whatever is left of his country’s future, and thank America for all its help.

Identity fetishism; the putrid heart of wokery at CBC

News today that Buffy Sainte-Marie has been booted from the Canadian Museum of Human Rights. She’s already had her Order of Canada clawed back. This is all thanks to a CBC campaign to root out “Pretendians,” fake Natives who aren’t really Indians. Supposedly there’s an epidemic of this fakery going on, which is somewhat ironic. You don’t hear about Indians passing themselves off as white to steal university jobs from whites, but for some reason the system incentivizes the reverse to happen. Before the colonists arrived, Indigenous peoples decided who was a member of the tribe. The settlers wanted to improve that loosey-goosey system, so they introduced something called Blood Quantum Laws. That enabled them to determine who was or was not Indian enough. Now the Indians themselves have embraced this settler innovation. Buffy didn’t make the cut. She must be destroyed. Also today, news that human remains have potentially been discovered in the Winnipeg landfill search. It will take at least two weeks to determine whether the remains found are human remains, and more time to determine their identity. That didn’t prevent the CBC from interviewing relatives of the missing women to get them to share their feelings at this moment. That’s pretty much the epitome of exploitative journalism. If CBC needs to feature this story, why don’t they focus on stuff that’s known, instead of speculating about what isn’t. One thing we know for sure is millions are being spent in the search for the remains of these marginalized human beings. Why couldn’t we spend the money on them before they died? Nobody would ever die in a dumpster if we made sure they had a roof over their head. Buffy Sainte-Marie was a one-time supporter of Leonard Peltier. She backed away from that position during an anti-Peltier smear campaign run mainly through CBC. The man is free at last. Here’s his welcome home party. Times are changing, but CBC’s identity fetishism lives on.

Bullshittin' Bill Browder still golden at CBC

Whenever CBC runs out of more reliable sources of anti-Putin propaganda, they turn to the serial liar, con man, crook, and indefatigable self-promoter Bill Browder for his insights, and there he was on The Current this morning. According to Bill, these are indeed bleak times for the Free World, especially since Trump has officially thrown his lot in with Putin against Ukraine. You might think he’s getting a little ahead of his skis with that kind of nonsense, but Matt Galloway wouldn’t know that, so his wild speculation goes unchallenged. Bill is introduced as a human rights activist and Putin expert. In the 1990’s Browder was the junior partner and front-man for a couple of senior Israeli banking moguls of dubious repute. They set up Hermitage Capital to “invest” in Russia in the wild west days after the fall of the Soviet Union, and made out like bandits! According to Russian authorities, that’s because they were. Browder high-tailed it out of Moscow in the nick of time, and set about reinventing himself as a corruption fighter, human rights champion, and best-selling author. Back in 2019 the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel published a detailed critique of Browder’s yarns. True to form, Bullshittin’ Bill had a hissy fit and filed a complaint with the German press watchdog. They sided with Der Spiegel against Browder. Here is Der Spiegel's response. By the way, CBC aren’t the only ones to fall for this charlatan. Last year he was knighted for his service to the British Empire. He is now Sir Bullshittin’ Bill Browder!

Trump just stabbed the Free World in the back

There’s a whole lotta gnashing of teeth and rending of sackcloth going round the punditocracy these days. Trump has betrayed Ukraine! Trump is a Putin stooge! Trump has abandoned our NATO allies! The folks who write this stuff are in shock. They’ve made careers out of shilling for Empire, and they’re in denial about what is happening right in front of their eyes. What they’re seeing is the propaganda they’ve been shoveling so vigorously for the past three years being exposed as delusional bullshit. Since Russia’s totally unprovoked full-scale invasion of 2022, they’ve been regaling us with stories of Ukraine’s soon-to-come victory over Putin. Putin is already on the ropes. Running out of missiles and manpower. The economy is teetering. Soon… just a few more months and a few more billions and maybe some battle tanks and fighter jets… Russia’s collapse is inevitable. Anyone who has bothered to educate themselves about the origins of the Ukraine war, knows it was meticulously provoked over decades by the American Exceptionalists in Washington and their NATO vassals. Nor was there in February of 2022 any “full-scale” invasion. What there has been is endless propaganda about Russian aggression and Ukraine’s pending Triumph. And it’s been bullshit top to bottom and end to end. In reality, this has been a proxy war by US and its NATO allies on Russia, and Russia has won. The dementia case propped up in the oval office imagined he ran the world. The guy who replaced him a month ago doesn’t seem to consider “running the world” his mandate. This is a blessing for the entire planet! It’s an acknowledgement that America is a powerful nation among others, but not the world’s only super-power and Boss of Bosses. It’s an acknowledgement that the interests of other nations will need to be considered going forward. It’s a giant step towards peace in the world.

Snowmageddon

Just over a month ago, I wrote an ode to the joys of clearing one’s drive with nothing more than a shovel. No fancy climate-killing internal combustion propelled snow-blowers or tractors required. Well, that was then. We’ve had about another six feet of snow since, and let me tell you, that hand-shovel shit is getting more than a little old. The local school board has declared 25 “snow days” since Christmas. In my twelve years as a student, and twenty-five as a teacher, I don’t recall ever having more than ten. The kids have lost more than a month of teaching days, and it’s barely the middle of February! Truth be told, the only thing that’s saved me from a heart attack is the fact my tenant farmer has taken pity on me, and has run a good-sized John Deere tractor with a robust snowblower up the drive a few times. Pity, perhaps leavened by the fact I haven’t bumped the land rent in fifteen years. There you go. Be kind to people, and they’ll be kind to you. Give it a try!

Miracle in Toronto

That Delta plane crash in Toronto has been the top story on Canadian news networks for days now. But what really gets the Canadians revved is when US networks cover anything that happens in Canada. A lot of Canadians have a bit of an inferiority complex vis-a-vis our big neighbour. We disguise that by pretending to be morally superior. Whereas Americans are xenophobic racists who object to illegal migration, Canadians built a welcome centre for illegals on the famous Roxham Road on the New York-Quebec border. And if that isn’t virtuous enough in itself, they actually closed it down during Covid, only to re-open it when the virus scare, if not the virus, was in retreat. We’ve always been somewhat holier than thou with the neighbours, and I’ve always considered that a spot of compensation for that underlying inferiority complex. That’s why it’s so awesome to see the outpouring of national pride these past few days. On our twenty minute drive into town, there’s a couple of dozen Canadian flags flying in front of folks who never had them before, often not even on Canada Day. You can thank Trump for making Canadian nationalism great again! But I digress. The world’s attention briefly falls on Toronto, and Torontonians are basking in the attention, because it’s affirmation of Toronto’s status as a “World Class City.” There’s no city in the world more desperate to be considered “World Class” than Toronto. While the US and international news outfits have long since pulled their satellite trucks back to the the states, CBC is still opening every TV news show with a picture of a commuter jet lying upside-down on the tarmac at Canada’s busiest airport. For at least the past 36 hours, that iconic photo has been accompanied by a soundtrack of experts trying to convince you air travel is perfectly safe! Maybe… maybe not so much. The fact that all aboard survived that crash strikes me as a divine miracle rather than an argument for the safety of air travel.

Is NATO over?

That wasn’t a mere turd JD Vance dropped in the punchbowl in Munich last week; that was a full-on double-barreled shit. So, is NATO over? It should have been over 35 years ago, obviously, but keeping it chugging along served a useful purpose for the American Empire. It made America’s adventures in Yugoslavia and Libya look like there was more behind them than America’s lust for destruction. It also kept the money flowing to America’s military contractors. As anyone even peripherally acquainted with the facts of the Ukraine war will know, without Washington’s policy of NATO expansion, there would have been no war. Lucky for Uncle Sam, NATO has long absorbed the Baltic chihuahua’s, whose ever-shrinking populations haven’t diluted their historical Russophobia. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, with a combined population less than the greater Toronto area, and no military capabilities to speak of, are the loudest voices for war with Russia in all of NATO. So it’s no surprise they were blindsided when Vance broke the news Washington doesn’t love them anymore. It’s quite a slap in the face to the American Empire Loyalists in the heights of media and academia in Canada. Until very recently, we were treated to multiple Globe and Mail opinion writers exhorting us almost daily that we need to spend gazillions of dollars on fighter jets and submarines so we can “stand with our allies.” Now that we understand how Uncle Sam really feels about us, ie, 51st state if we’re lucky, we’ve suddenly realized all those sacrifices to the national treasury we’ve been demanding, would be made so we can “stand with” Latvia and Lithuania? And we haven’t even got to the best part; Trump and Putin are now solving the Ukraine war without consulting the EU, NATO, or even Ukraine. This absolutely, positively, has to be the last nail in NATO’s coffin. But yet… Just how frightened are the vassals now that Uncle Sam has dumped his Ukraine war in their laps? Are they scared enough to cough up 5% of GDP for US weaponry? Are the scared enough to up that to 10% if the Empire demands it? I have a hunch Trump-Putin negotiations may not end to America’s liking. Uncle Sam could well need a posse again in the near future. If so, look for a lot of kissy-face hypocrisy as the Big Dog and the poodles make up.