This n' That

 Note: I entitled this blog post "This n' That" because I'd planned on venting about a few things.  But topic number one ended up taking too much time.  I have a job and a rather long commute and a "side hustle" and venting here is just venting here.  It's an outlet for pressure, but that's about it.

1.  The First USA-Iraq War

In July of 1990 the Soviet Union was crumbling.  It had about a year and a half left to it before its dissolution on December 25th, 1991.  At that point, its last Premier, Mikhail Gorbachev was signalling the end of the Cold War and was attempting the transformation of the USSR into something resembling a Scandinavian social democracy.  (He failed of course.)

But the era of two military super-powers locked in a pereptual stand-off was clearly at an end.  The re-unification of West Germany and East Germany was already underway.  There was talk of a "peace dividend" now that the great political-ideological-international rivalry between the USA and the USSR was coming to a close with the USA the winner.

Obviously this wouldn't suit the Military Industrial Complex.  Cost-plus contracts; endless waste; gargantuan levels of corruption.  All on the taxpayers' dime.  Why squander the people's money on healthcare for them? Or housing?  Or education?

It's in that context that we should look at the meeting between Saddam Hussein and US Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie.  

July 25, 1990 – Presidential Palace – Baghdad

U.S. Ambassador Glaspie – I have direct instructions from President Bush to improve our relations with Iraq. We have considerable sympathy for your quest for higher oil prices, the immediate cause of your confrontation with Kuwait. (pause) As you know, I lived here for years and admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. We know you need funds. We understand that, and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. (pause) We can see that you have deployed massive numbers of troops in the south. Normally that would be none of our business, but when this happens in the context of your threat s against Kuwait, then it would be reasonable for us to be concerned. For this reason, I have received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship – not confrontation – regarding your intentions: Why are your troops massed so very close to Kuwait’s borders?

Saddam Hussein – As you know, for years now I have made every effort to reach a settlement on our dispute with Kuwait. There is to be a meeting in two days; I am prepared to give negotiations only this one more brief chance. (pause) When we (the Iraqis) meet (with the Kuwaitis) and we see there is hope, then nothing will happen. But if we are unable to find a solution, then it will be natural that Iraq will not accept death.

U.S. Ambassador Glaspie – What solutions would be acceptable?

Saddam Hussein – If we could keep the whole of the Shatt al Arab – our strategic goal in our war with Iran – we will make concessions (to the Kuwaitis). But, if we are forced to choose between keeping half of the Shatt and the whole of Iraq (i.e., in Saddam s view, including Kuwait ) then we will give up all of the Shatt to defend our claims on Kuwait to keep the whole of Iraq in the shape we wish it to be. (pause) What is the United States’ opinion on this?

U.S. Ambassador Glaspie – We have no opinion on your Arab – Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960’s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America. (Saddam smiles)

On August 2, 1990, Saddam massed troops to invade and occupy Kuwait. _____

It is beyond ludicrous to suggest that Glaspie was not luring Saddam Hussein into a trap for her master George H.W. Bush.  (Though, not surprisingly, many of her fellow imperialist diplomats have attempted to do exactly that.)  It is said that this meeting hadn't been planned, that Glaspie had been summoned by Saddam, that her superiors in the USA were asleep at the time.  As if both Glaspie and the Secretary of State and the President had noticed Saddam's build-up, were anxious about it, but hadn't developed any further thoughts on the matter.  As if Glaspie as an expert on the Middle East and the goddamned US Ambassador in Baghdad didn't know what Iraq's claims on Kuwait were.  As if "We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts such as your dispute with Kuwait" is just a diplomatic way of saying nothing and NOT a clear expression of indifference to a threatened invasion!  

Now, I remember one time when I mentioned this (either online or in a meat-space conversation) that some silly person thought that I was justifying Saddam Hussein.  So let me state unequivocally, with my voice not quivering, that's not my point.  My point is that the Bush I Administration orchestrated Saddam Hussein into following his already formulated plan to invade Kuwait so that they could respond with a war that would provide continued justification for the Military-Industrial Complex.  It could establish George Bush Sr.'s "New World Order" ("What we say goes!")  That Chomsky link goes on to talk about the Establishment celebration of the death of the "Vietnam Syndrome."

The same Times reporter goes on to quote the gallant champion [H.W. Bush]  himself: “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” The second national newspaper joined in, applauding the “spiritual and intellectual” triumph in the Gulf: “Martial values that had fallen into disrepute were revitalized,” and “Presidential authority, under assault since Vietnam, was strengthened.” With barely a gesture towards the dangers of overexuberance, the ultraliberal Boston Globe hailed the “victory for the psyche” and the new “sense of nationhood and projected power” under the leadership of a man who is “one tough son of a bitch,” a man with “the guts to risk all for a cause” and a “burning sense of duty,” who showed “the depth and steely core of his convictions” and his faith that “we are a select people, with a righteous mission in this earth,” the latest in a line of “noble-minded missionaries” going back to his hero Teddy Roosevelt — who was going to “show those Dagos that they will have to behave decently” and to teach proper lessons to the “wild and ignorant people” standing in the way of “the dominant world races.” Liberal columnists praised “the magnitude of Bush’s triumph” over a much weaker enemy, dismissing the “uninformed garbage” of those who carp in dark corners (Thomas Oliphant). The open admiration for fascist values is a matter of some interest.⁹

For 20 years, there have been vigorous efforts to “kick the Vietnam syndrome,” defined by Reaganite intellectual Norman Podhoretz as “the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force.” He thought the disease was cured when we were “standing tall” after our astounding victory in Grenada. Perhaps that triumph of martial virtues was not enough, but now, at last, we have kicked these sickly inhibitions, the President exults. “Bush’s leadership has transformed the Vietnam Syndrome into a Gulf Syndrome, where `Out Now!’ is a slogan directed at aggressors, not at us” (Thomas Oliphant); we were the injured party in Vietnam, defending ourselves from the Vietnamese aggressors, from “internal aggression” as Adlai Stevenson explained in 1964. Having overcome the Vietnam syndrome, we now observe “the worthy and demanding standard that aggression must be opposed, in exceptional cases by force,” Oliphant continues — but, somehow, we are not to march on Jakarta, Tel Aviv, Damascus, Washington, Ankara, and a long series of other capitals.¹⁰

So, quite clearly, the MIA wanted an excuse for war.  Saddam Hussein was manipulated into thinking the USA had given him a green light to invade Kuwait and when he did, he was the "New Hitler," a "mad-man" with whom negotiations were pointless.  And Baghdad was bombed and retreating Iraqi soldiers were massacred from the air on the "Highway of Death."  And that tided things over until the dissolution of Yugoslavia could provide for some further US-American pomposity.  Then the "Great Bullshit War on Terror" which (insanely) included the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.  But all the horror and death and futility of these abominations soon soured the US-American people on them.  Luckily for the US oligarchy, Vladimir Putin has been demonized for well over a decade and, evidently, a sizeable portion of the human race is so goddamned fucking stupid that the histrionic ravings of Rachel Maddow and other shameless propagandists are enough to get them braying like jackasses about how maybe a nuclear war is a worthwhile response to whatever atrocities, real or fabricated, that Putin has committed.

Remember, ... in Iraq-Kuwait as in Russia-Ukraine, there is to be no negotiation.  No diplomacy.  Just war, war, war.  This is evil.

2.  Russiagate Re-visited

I'll finish this later.  (Spoiler alert: I won't.)

War Criminals

 

Like liberals, I share a deep hatred for war criminals. And Vladimir Putin is clearly a war criminal.  At least for what he did in Grozny.  That alone is enough to warrant life imprisonment.  But what about his invasion of the Crimea?  Nah.  That should be: The "invasion" of the Crimea.  I'm not even going to discuss why wailing about that is stupid.  It should be self-evident.  If it isn't, then you're too debased to waste my time with.  What about Aleppo? Personally, I'm not so sure about Aleppo.  Yes, indiscriminate bombing killed a lot of innocent people.  But the war itself was started by the United States of America and Saudi Arabia.  And all the crimes of war flow from the first decision to start a war in the first place.  That is what makes a war of choice the supreme war crime.  And the nature of the mercenaries that the USA and Saudi Arabia were employing (deranged, fanatical religious fundamentalists) made defeating them essential for the continued existence of Syria as a functioning state.  For those reasons, whenever I heard about Assad using barrel bombs over neighbourhoods or about the destruction of Aleppo, I restrained my outrage.  Especially after what the USA had only recently done in Iraq, especially in Fallujah.  In its battle against the Jihaadist psychopaths employed by the USA and Saudi Arabia, the Syrian army had suffered horrendous casualties. It is absurd to think that soldiers are going to sacrifice themselves, that they are going to opt for a mode of combat that is highly likely to get them killed, rather than pursue an alternative (such as a bombing campaign) that will spare them.  Even our heroic and virtuous Canadian soldiers in World War Two, during the Battle of Ortona, would toss grendades into rooms before entering them, taking the risk of killing a family sheltering from the violence, to avoid the possibility of being shot by hiding German soldiers.  

And I remembered all of this after the USA did the exact same thing when it re-took the Iraqi city of Mosul back from ISIS soon after it was finished condemning Putin and Assad for Aleppo.  (Again, with the obvious difference that ISIS came out of the deliberate Obama-Biden-Clinton administration's criminal assault on Syria that started that entire mess.)

What of the invasion of the Ukraine itself?  Chris Hedges (and a lot of other respectable and worthy writers) condemns it as a war crime:

Preemptive war, whether in Iraq or Ukraine, is a war crime. It does not matter if the war is launched on the basis of lies and fabrications, as was the case in Iraq, or because of the breaking of a series of agreements with Russia, including the promise by Washington not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, not to deploy thousands of NATO troops in Eastern Europe and not to meddle in the internal affairs of nations on the Russia's border, as well as the refusal to implement the Minsk II peace agreement. The invasion of Ukraine would, I expect, never have happened if these promises had been kept. Russia has every right to feel threatened, betrayed and angry. But to understand is not to condone. The invasion of Ukraine, under post-Nuremberg laws, is a criminal war of aggression.

I still harbour feelings that Putin still had alternatives to war. Not being privy to all the information and not knowing the minutae of all of the diplomatic tools at a world leader's disposal, I'm not totally certain, but I think there were still alternatives to be pursued before deciding on a war that would inevitably kill thousands of innocent people, if not tens or hundreds of thousands.

In recent days though, I've been entertaining some thoughts.  Now, perhaps they come from my deep, burning desire for Putin's cock, or, alternatively, they come from being an adult in a shitty world run by idiots and psychopaths.  If you're an adult, I invite you to continue reading.  If you're a moral child who can never believe that Big Daddy USA could ever do anything wrong, just go back to reading Thomas Friedman or listening to Rachel Maddow or Max Boot or whatever shit-heads feed your infantile worldview.

1.  The USA is actively pursuing what it calls "Full Spectrum Dominance."  There can be no alternative power blocs on the face of the Earth except for itself. 

2.  The USA's oligarchy does not want the best for its own country's citizens, let alone the best interests of the rest of the world's peoples.

3.  The last time that the USA had access to the steering wheel in Russia it was disastrous.

4.  The ultimate goal of the USA's power elite is the breakup of Russia and China to turn the areas under their control into impoverished, Balakanized zones of chaos and poverty (like Iraq and Libya) that can be more easily controlled.

5.  Aside from the provocation of the anti-Russian military alliance NATO absorbing more and more Eastern European countries into it, over the condemnations of Putin, and aside from the possibility that there was no plan to incorporate the Ukraine into NATO (although they would still be coy about it), it is a fact that the USA was building a defacto military alliance with the Ukraine, pouring in weapons and training its military, for the obvious use of it as a hostile power on Russia's border.

Given all that, ... what were Putin's options?  Whatever you think of the man (his authoritarian tendencies, his pandering to social reactionaries, his personal corruption) his own self-interest compels him to seek Russia's continued existence.  And Russia's continued existence was clearly being threatened.  Should he have tried diplomacy?  He DID try diplomacy.  The Biden-Blinken team of racist imperialist fuck-faces dismissed him.  Should he have gone to the United Nations?  The recently un-dearly departed Madeleine Albright showed how (in the case of the illegal invasion of Iraq) the USA would disregard the UN.

As I said in a recent post, in the case of Syria, it's undeniable that Bashar al Assad is a monster.  But in the shitty world that the USA still currently dominates, if one wishes to call oneself an adult, sometimes hard decisions have to made.  I'm starting to think that Putin had no choice.  Failing that, I certainly don't know when it would have been the day that Russia was completely surrounded and that the point of no return had been past when it would have been unable to adequately defend itself from the inevitable US attack.

But!  If you're a Westerner, that is to say, a citizen of the USA or one of its "allies" in the "community of rules-based international order"-respecting nations, and you POSITIVELY HATE war criminals and you're just ITCHING to get your hands on the war criminal Vladimir Putin, I have some GOOD NEWS for you!

Because you must know that it's difficult for us to get at the authoritarian leader of a powerful enemy state. We might never be able to bring Putin to justice.  But there are other war criminals we can go after!  If you're a US-American, George W. Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joseph Robinette Biden and numerous other war criminals are still alive.  Start a movement to go after them!  If you're a citizen of the UK, you can start with Tony Blair.  And we in Canada can certainly bring the hammer down on stephen harper who covered-up evidence of torture and child rape in Afghanistan.

Prove that you're not a disgusting hypocrite and a childish moral imbecile!  Go after your own homegrown war criminals!  I dare you.

The Left is Losing, Pollievre and the Liberal-NDP Deal

 

I can't help mentioning this Jacobin article I read a little while ago: "Capitalists Are Escalating Their Shakedown of American Workers" by James Rushing Daniel:

Americans are more poorly positioned than we have been in nearly fifty years. By almost every measure — inflation, wages, medical expenses, student debt, rent, transportation costs — we are struggling. We are paying more for necessities and experiencing deepening immiseration while corporate profits are higher than they’ve been in nearly a century.

...

Wage theft and opportunity hoarding are perennial concerns, but what we are seeing now is a gold rush on working people’s remaining savings, scant as they are. In this, Americans are being tested to see just how much we’re willing to endure. Capitalists, having been instrumental in creating a workforce too exhausted and disorganized to mount an effective defense against plummeting quality of life, are betting the answer is quite a lot. And while inspiring union votes are being held across the country, the overall lack of any significant and sustained anti-capitalist movement telegraphs that we will still put up with more.

We need to show that we won’t.

...

Broke and bullied, we’re discovering that capitalists are trying to squeeze consumers and workers for all we’re worth — even if that means putting us in positions where we are literally dying for the job.

Inflation has decimated the modest wage gains workers saw last year. An hourly earnings increase of 0.4 percent, reported back in October, was obliterated by nearly 1 percent inflation for the month. Over the course of the pandemic, net hourly wages have declined 1.2 percent, while prices have climbed 7.5 percent over the past year, both due to inflation and because of the padding of corporate profits. Food prices, in particular, are up over 10 percent from a year ago.

Rents have similarly exploded, with some cities seeing as much as a 40 percent increase over the past year. 

...

Student debt also remains a significant burden on Americans. While Biden has forgiven $15 billion of the $1.7 trillion total, including most recently a $415 million package, these drips and drops fall far short of campaign promises. With student loan repayment set to begin shortly, tens of millions of Americans will once again be thrown into debilitating economic stress. 

The effects of the current shakedown go beyond mere impoverishment, which is certainly dire enough. American life expectancy also infamously dropped in 2020, from a previous 78.8 years to 77.3. While in part attributable to COVID, Americans are statistically dying younger from other causes as well — homicide, diabetes, and what Anne Case and Angus Deaton have called “deaths of despair,” including liver cirrhosis and drug overdose.

It goes on and on.  And while Mister Daniel mentions signs of worker pushback, the enormity of this suffering, the inequality gap, the capitalists' power to do as they please, ... the fact that "Americans are more poorly positioned than we have been in nearly fifty years" ... all of this certainly would seem to give the lie to any previous talk of left "victories" and the effectiveness of our "resistance" during my lifetime.

Particularly touching is Daniel's statement here:

And while inspiring union votes are being held across the country, the overall lack of any significant and sustained anti-capitalist movement telegraphs that we will still put up with more.

We need to show that we won’t.

What exactly does he mean by that?  What is ANYONE planning on the left to show genuinely massive worker refusal to continue to take this abuse?  What is happening to make the capitalists and their political hirelings fear the consequences of continuing to abuse us?  MASSIVE one-day peaceful rallies?  MASSIVE petitions?  In the United States a MASSIVE "get-out-the-vote" campaign for the Democratic Party?

As with all things, many human beings within the community of the political left seem to be cut-off from understanding the meanings of the words that they utter.  Just as so many people, within the context of the crisis of Putin's invasion of the Ukraine, blithely discuss the possibility of nuclear war as if they really don't understand that it means certain death for themselves and everyone that they love and the extinction of the entire human race, so too, do these people not understand that their "fighting back" and their "resistance" and their "struggle" and their "coalition building" and their "activism" have accomplished sweet fuck all and that the outcome for the future looks to be more of the same.

People!  Whatever you've been doing, it's obviously not working!

Not everyone on the right-wing is a hopeless deplorable.  (And, yes, nazis of any persuasion are deplorable.)  Some of them are confused and/or ignorant.  (And some are intelligent people who are leery of societal change.)  Hard economic times makes people "conservative."  It makes people retreat into smaller, like-minded (or whatever) groups to preserve resources for themselves and their in-group.  It makes them distrustful of others, "outsiders," seeing them as rivals for those scarce resources.  Some of these people we should try to reach.  If, by any stretch of the imagination, we were winning practical benefits for people on our side we perhaps could have some of these entitled blowhards putting their self-interested activism on OUR side.  (They might be distasteful allies but you don't always have the luxury of choice when you're outgunned and losing.) Alas, our society has degenerated to the point where a vile turd like Pierre Poilievre.  This shit-head was an embarrassment to someone as loathsomely stupid as stephen harper.  And yet, the second-biggest political party in Canada, the one that continues to receive the endorsement of the majority of the capitalist media's "journalism" products, has a good chance of having this imbecile as it's leader.

This career politician who disparages government while serving as a whore for corporations; this asshole who abused public resources for partisan propaganda; this racist scumbag who hates the First Nations even more than Justin Trudeau does, ... this tool represents a sizeable proportion of the Conservative Party of Canada!  Yet more evidence of the incapacity of the human species.

Oh well.  To end on a higher note though I'll celebrate the possibility that the federal NDP salvaged its relevance by agreeing to a "Supply and Confidence Agreement" with the federal Liberals in return for a national dental and pharmacare plan for low-income Canadians.

It's for the best that the NDP and Libs have been able to come to terms on a supply and confidence agreement which should at least provide for substantial material gains for people who need them, and may go further in setting up core elements of a universal health care system which have long been lacking. And it's particularly gratifying to see at least some recognition of the leadership that requires. 

But while it's well worth celebrating what looks like a turn for the better, it's also worth a reminder as to what - and who - has prevented that type of cooperation from happening in the past.

Remember that Jagmeet Singh's message after the 2019 election was one of willingness to work with the Liberals on shared priorities. And Justin Trudeau's response was...to reject any systematic cooperation with a single party, as he preferred piecemeal politics and perpetual Parliamentary chicken to acceding to any NDP priorities in exchange for ongoing confidence.

...

Needless to say, that leaves reason for concern that the same factors will affect both the length of time the current agreement figures to hold up, and the expectations as to what will be achieved while it does. And while the points of agreement may make some major achievements seem like real possibilities, there's a lot of work to be done to keep pushing toward actually bringing them to life before the Libs decide to go it alone.

The NDP disappoints so often and is so uninspiring and hopeless that I have walked away from them on a few occasions.  But this is something that reminds us that they still have their purpose.

Moral Imbecility

 

As evidence of the moral imbecility of liberals I offer you the following:  Sometimes during this recent crisis in the Ukraine I question the sincerity of Biden's concern for ordinary Ukrainians by pointing out his support for Saudi Arabia and the UAE's campaign of genocide in Yemen and for his evident plan to collectively punish the people of Afghanistan by starving them all to death.

The response of these liberals?  Some of them say the [they think] magic word "whataboutism" in the hopes that it makes me disappear.  Others misinterpret me that I'm trying to excuse Putin by bringing up US crimes.  Either way, I'm a Putin-pupper repeating Kremlin propaganda who can be summarily dismissed while they courageously support Ukrainians and do their part to defeat Putin by putting a Ukranian flag on their avatars and calling for no-fly zones over the combat zone.

And then they do absolutely nothing about Yemen and Afghanistan.  The sufferings of millions of people, TENS OF MILLIONS of people, directly at the hands of their own government (our Canadian government in the case of our weapons sales to the Saudi dictatorship) and instead they bray like the good brainwashed jackasses they are about the crimes of official enemies.  Even after I've brought it to their attention they treat it like a distraction.  They don't even write about it.

I find it just as maddening as the shit-heads wandering around wearing masks that don't cover their noses.  Goddamned fucking adults who haven't yet mastered the concept of breathing.  I find it just as maddening as the arrogant stupidity of those who are proudly unmasked.  COVID is invisible and some people have no symptoms and because of the efforts of more responsible people some don't even get infected.  So obviously it doesn't exist!  Obviously they're "Free Men On The Land" and you can't enslave THEM with a cloth mask!

These stupid liberals with their embarrassing continued adherence to "Russiagate" and displaying their inner authoritarians with all their calls for censorship of social media (while the corporate media and the government can obviously continue to lie their asses off) and their so obvious gullibility for brazen and stupid corporate media narratives!!!

One more thing (This is only indirectly related but I've wanted to say it for a while): When I was listening to the Canadian citizen Abdullah Almalki, who had been tortured in Syria at the behest of CSIS (who provided the Syrian torturers with questions to ask him as they abused him) about his ordeal, he mentioned that through the walls of his cell he could sometimes hear the cries of children from somewhere else in the dungeon.

I thought: That fucking monster!  Assad is a fucking monster!  And I believe that is the natural response to such a situation.  But when the USA and Saudi Arabia sent in Jihaadist maniacs to overthrow Assad I opposed it.  Because being an adult in a world as shitty as ours I realized that the wholesale slaughter of a civil-war (or a mercenary invasion in the case of Syria) and the likely consequences of a Jihaadist Syria would be worse than the Assadist status-quo.  This is how terrible the United States' government is: They managed to make Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Muammar Gaddafi, and the Taliban look preferable to what the USA brings.

Sometimes I think that many humans know what words mean on a superficial level but they don't grasp their true meaning.  Idiot liberals pompously "weighing the option" of a nuclear war don't grasp that this means that they and everyone they love will be vapourized or doomed to a terrible death from thrist, or starvation and cancer.  And when they hear the words "vapourized" or "terrible death" etc., ... they don't really absorb what those words mean either.

Liberal Insanity: If You Want to Stay Alive --- Smarten the Fuck Up!!!!

 It's really getting hard to take.  The hysteria, the hypocrisy, the ridiculous chest-thumping war-mongering.  Now, don't get me wrong; I've always said that I find liberals to be intelligent people who I can tend to get along with up to a point.  But right now we're past one of those points.  And these people are losing their fucking minds.

A 1914 Moment

 

As I watch the world descend into COMPLETE insanity and disaster, I've started to think that the times we're living through are going to be world-transforming in a very bad way.  We have the self-created threat of global warming, with all the feedback-loops in place and our governments and oligarchs are still pursuing a policy of denial and profit-taking.  We have a worldwide pandemic that most of the OECD nations have decided to treat as a minor annoyance to be dealt with in a half-assed (at best) way.  We have placed the profits of the pharmaceutical industries ahead of human lives by upholding patent protections for vaccines over the mass vaccination campaign that is so clearly required.  The same percentage of the population that would vote for stupid grifters like stephen harper, Donald Trump, Jason Kenney, Rob Ford, etc., are, meanwhile, still convinced that the virus is a hoax, that wearing a cloth mask equals submission to totalitarianism and that vaccines are evil.  By our own choice (collectively) we have decided to let the virus roam at will, infecting people and mutating itself, while we deny the risk that any of these mutations might become something beyond our control.

And then, ...

And then there's the completely deliberate orchestration of a world war between the NATO countries (plus maybe Japan, South Korea and Australia) against Russia and China.

[Take a look at this map of the world showing the countries that have imposed sanctions upon Russia and those that have not:]

Contrary to the breathless propaganda of a humanity united against the unprecedented evil of Valdimir Putin's Russia, almost the entire Southern Hemisphere has opted out.  You could argue that my source for this map is a pro-Russian propaganda website but that doesn't change the level of accuracy of the map.  My quick search of news sites confirmed that the list of countries matches the information provided by the map.  India has been resisting US pressure to sanction Russia.

Also, contrary to the corporate news' propaganda, these sanctions on Russia aren't just going to hurt Russia.  All you are hearing is that Russia's economy has fallen into a death-spiral under the hammer blows of the sanctions imposed by the human rights defenders of the West, led by the exceptional, essential nation, the United States of America.  But make no mistake: This economic warfare is going to impose massive inflation on the entire world and European countries that depend on Russia fossil fuels are going to suffer.  As a level of just how desperate the USA is to find other sources of fossil-fuel sources, the USA has gone to Venezuela's President Maduro [Wait!  Why aren't they talking to Juan Guano??] to see about access to his country's oil.  Also, they're moving quickly to welcome Iran's oil back into the international community. 

I know for certain that Saudi Arabia's Clown Prince Bonesaw and the privileged asswipes running the UAE have refused to listen to Grandpa Biden's calls to increase oil production.  

What you have to understand is that Joe Biden is an idiot.  He's always been an idiot.  His career has been pandering to racists about school integration; serving the sleazebags who used his state of Delaware to escape taxation and engage in money laundering.  He passed a bankruptcy bill that immiserated millions of US-American and a crime bill that produced a massive increase in the US prison population.  He genuinely [and therefore stupidly] believed that US Social Security was unsustainable and spent years trying to cut into it.  He voted for the invasion of Iraq. 

His Secretary of State Antony Blinken is an anti-Arab racist, delusional imbecile who is able to speak out loud about the dangers of Iran "destabilizing" the Middle East without dying of embarrassment.  

That two such arrogant, hypocritical fantasists could have started an economic war without having fully throught through the ramifications seems to me entirely possible.

Well, that's all I feel like writing about this morning.

Thwap weighs in on the Ukraine crisis

 2022-02-27

At the back of their minds both Biden and Putin have been agonizing over just how Thwap is going to react to this world crisis.  Well White House or Kremlin bureaucrat being paid to monitor my blog in order to instantly alert your boss that Thwap has deigned to speak; TODAY IS YOUR LUCKY DAY!!!!

Ahem!  I think this is mostly Biden's fault but I am angry that Putin has attacked the Ukraine itself.  I had no problem with Putin recognizing the Donbas provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk.

There is nothing to choose between the competing mafia dons in Washington or Moscow.  FWIW I think Putin is far more intelligent than Biden.  But that doesn't take a lot of doing.  Biden has always been an idiot and now his aged brain is incapable of sustained focus and clarity.  I have always said (in the face of the moronic, fanatical Putin hatred embraced by brainwashed liberals) that comparing the foreign policy behaviour of Russia and the USA honestly, one finds that Russia has been far more patient and circumspect and that the USA has been belligerent and provocative.  And that the reasons for this are not Putin's love of peace and respect for the rule of law, but are, rather, due to Russia's relative poverty and weakness.  Russia's GDP is smaller than Canada's.  It's population is over 100 million people larger than Canada's.  Which makes Russians much poorer than Canadians.  Wars are expensive.  Occupations are even more expensive.  Putin (while being as debased and insane as any other garden-variety national politician) is not a delusional idiot.  He can't bully the world the way the USA can, starting wars of choice and meddling in any country on the planet he has designs on.  Because he can't afford to.