fahrenheit451:258

People have short memories. Or rather the Corporate globalist MSM intentionally maintains a dominant popular narrative predicated on selective amnesia.

In broad daylight the Russian investigative journalist,Babchenko is gunned down in cold blood.Russia is denounced as the perpetrator.

Only,the very next day the murdered journo turns up alive and well at a news conference wherein it is explained to the world that it was all a pantomime to thwart an actual Russian effort to kill Babchenko!

Doesn't make any sense ? Nothing in the Ukraine these days since 2014 does.

Remember the much lauded -by the west- Euromaidan protests that morphed into a terrorist insurgent putsch?
Execrable reactionary globalist riff-raff such as US Senator McCain -something of a prominent terrorist cheerleader- alongside a coven of EU satrapy foreign ministers led by Merkel's attack dog  Westerwelle all deployed to Kiev to urge on and reassure the incipient putschists.
REUTERS reported :-

 

DECEMBER 4, 2013 / 7:42 AM / 4 YEARS AGO

German minister snubs Ukraine leaders on Kiev visit

 

7KIEV (Reuters) - Germany’s foreign minister met Ukrainian opposition leaders at their protest camp in Kiev on Wednesday, in a snub to President Viktor Yanukovich, who triggered mass street demonstrations by spurning a pact with the EU and seeking closer ties with Moscow.

 

By February 2014 the hapless ,legitimate and democratically elected Yanukovich was gone, exiting stage left never to return.The Bandera-apologists, jew-hating arm raising turnip-chucking knuckledraggers assumed state power with the blessing of The US and its EUNATO satrapies.

 

 And so it goes..

 

 

fahrenheit451:257

It's easy to get mad.Especially over the burning issues surrounding the European Union.So.let's get really mad.

Around 3 months ago ,the Italian General Election saw the ineluctable rise in democratic popularity of M5S and Lega. These two albeit apparently antithetical ideological formations sharing many common bonds; most notably an abrasive oppositional stance vis a vis the EU and the euro currency,unrestricted mass immigration and a desire to end EU/ECB/ IMF/Troika imposed Austerity.

The astounding electoral successes of M5S and Lega paralleled the broadly similar anti-EU,anti-globalist unrestricted freedom of movement driven national successes of what are now,supposedly pejoratively described as populist parties in a number of EU satrapies. Austria,Germany,France,Czechia,Netherlands,Hungary etc.

These aren't simply the a "movement" these are irreversible tectonic shifts in civil society and national polities all across Europe.

It's no longer a question as to whether or not the EU is in crisis or in decline; the European Union is a rotting corpse crying out for the last rites and burial in an unmarked grave.

The longer the process is drawn out,the greater the degree of resistance to historic evolutionary change that the presiding moribund institutions attempt to exert, the more brutal the response of the new progressive populist forces will inevitably have to be.
 The iconoclasts of the vile,despicable moloch driven ideals of the EU are not about to squirm at the visceral necessity of their historic task.

Epochal judgement isn't about to take place.it's already in progress and cannot be halted.

The EU/ECB/IMF Troika glove puppet President Mattarella and the former IMF pimp Cottarelli will be as the dust underneath the boots of the legions marching on into the future.

How we envy Italy,Hungary,the Front National in France,AfD in Germany,the new government of Austria. Only the UK seems stuck fast in the land of Mordor it's people still held hostage by the twin cancers of Conservative and Labour.

And we all know that sooner rather than later cancers get removed.

fahrenheit451:256

Back in 1982,in the middle of the ColdWar ,British commercial TV aired a mordantly witty six-part black comedy, "Whoops Apocalypse " -a tale about events in the week leading up to WW3.
This extract from Wikipedia,captures the tone :-  The naive and highly unpopular Republican U.S. President Johnny Cyclops (an obvious Ronald Reagan parody, played by Barry Morse) is advised by an insane right-wing fundamentalist security advisor,

And here we all are in 2018 and life is imitating art to the full, a real  President Johnny Cyclops is being advised by the likes of John Bolton and Secretary of State Pompeo.

There was,what was commonly referred to as the Iran nuclear deal - the US unilaterally tore that one up.There was a summit arranged for June in Singapore between DPRK-North Korea and the US.The US has unilaterally cancelled it.

In a recent scathing denunciation of the Iranian government,in the wake of the US abrogation of the nuclear deal, Pompeo tore into Iran threatening the imposition of the harshest sanctions in history if Iran did not swear to forego nuclear technology development.

Washington DC's resident neocon psychopath-in-chief Trump's national security advisor- John Bolton gave a graphic warning that the DPRK would be heading the same way as Libya were they not to in effect do exactly what the US demanded of them at the forthcoming summit in Singapore.

The natural,indeed inevitable corollary of those twin egregious US propaganda assaults is that Iran and DPRK,as sovereign nation states and members of the UN, have reacted with their own barely restrained responses.

In one co-ordinated fell swoop,the world has gone from a functional and functioning nuclear restraining order on Iran involving  the UN Security Council permanent 5 plus Germany (representing the EU ) and a North Korea on a path of genuine reconciliation & de-escalation vis a vis South Korea,to a twin tsunami of belligerent hyperbole and outporing of crazed paranoia spewing forth from the neocon orifices of Washington that has eviscerated any semblance of balance ,order and sanity in international relations.

The World is not in a good place right now.

Obviously the US fancies its chances in simultaneous multi-regionalise confrontations.

For the time being its european NATO satrapies,even inveterate kowtowing bootlickers such as the UK aren't as certain as their Lords and Masters in the Washington Eyrie.

Schadenfreude awaits.

fahrenheit451:255

The Anglophobic,or should we say anti-British sentiment that has suffused Irish political and cultural discourse since time immemorial has attained its zenith.
The Fenian Kneecappers and Bombers and their misbegotten offspring have ascended their very own allegorical Calvary and are awaiting their own imminent resurrection as foretold in the annals of terrorism and bloodshed.
That quintessentially obtuse and arcane shibboleth known as  " The Irish Border Question " has been parlayed into the defining problematic on which the UK's brexit from the EU is now ordained to founder catastrophically.

The Irish Times reported on November 21,2017 :-

After a heated Bundestag debate, Germany voted yesterday to back Ireland’s request to restructure crisis-era loans and save the exchequer an estimated €150 million.

The request from Dublin turned into a proxy battle between Germany’s two leading parties, which are locked in a growing coalition battle.

Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) backed Ireland’s request, along with the Greens and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), calling Ireland a model crisis country.

Amazingly shortly thereafter, the EU's puppet regime in Dublin commenced to orchestrate with commendable alacrity its very own Greek Chorus on the UK's admittedly,feeble,procrastinating attempt at negotiating what is termed Brexit from the EU.
Labour, ( metropolitan elitist,Blairite and Corbynite alike ) and its supine Trades Union running dogs and all the collected detritus of anti-British Irish politics lined up squarely behind The Kneecappers & Bombers aka Sinn Fein and their demented but only marginally less odious political cousins in the republic.
The allure of donning the mantle of messiah -manque has proven too much.for the intellectual leprechauns of irish tribal politics. And Juncker,Tusk and Barnier have played an absolute blinder against ,again admittedly, an all too obviously vertebrae-deficient UK government.

And so Brexit and all the promises made that the Referendum result would be implemented,blah.blah are about to be taken out and executed at dawn.

Expressions of Schadenfreude might be appropriate at this juncture,but for what reason, I don't know.

fahrenheit451:254

In a few weeks time,it will be two years since the historic Referendum on the UK's continued membership of the EU took place.

Leave or Remain.That was the choice placed before the sovereign British electorate.Leave meant,explicitly, the UK leaving the customs union and the single market.

Literally no-one in the corridors of power,either in Whitehall or in Parliament actually believed that the British people would vote to Leave the EU.No-one.Not a single bureaucrat nor any department prepared any plans for such a contingency and neither were they asked to by anyone in government.
Well,it seems that two years on from that historic day the notionally defeated Remain campaign may have triumphed regardless of having only polled 48% of the votes cast.

The British 23 June referendum looks increasingly likely to be added to the long list of referendums conducted by EU member states over the years that somehow,invariably end up being disregarded,annulled or simply re-run.

The UK Deep State is hydra-headed,chopping off one head doesn't do it.The metropolitan-domiciled, Oxbridge academics,political class,commentariat,experts and industry leaders threw everything at the Leave campaign during the referendum and carried on afterwards by throwing even more including the proverbial kitchen sink at " brexit ".

They - The Remoaners - did manage to turn a sow's ear of an argument over mundane facts and figures into a looming existentialist crisis. They did this by quite simply telling the most brazen lies imaginable on every conceivable issue and problem arising from the UK exiting the EU.
They also might just about get away with this coup d'etat-by-stealth,the to all intents and purposes annulment of brexit if their luck holds.The question arises as to whether or not the Remoaners' luck will hold.
They're gambling that the widespread acceptance of parliamentary politics and representation as legitimate amongst the electorate will still prevail after the betrayal of Brexit occurs.

This presents an interesting dilemma for our metropolitan ruling elites and their political class.And given their previous form,they are very unlikely to have any contingencies in place when it all really does go tits up on them.

fahrenheit451:253

Not being content with attacking Syrian military facilities a few days previously, Israel went and repeated its aggression this time against several Iranian bases that are on Syrian territory.Their excuse was that Iranian forces had fired at Israeli territory first.
if anyone had any lingering doubts as to whether or not any State really gave a genuine damn about International Law and the prevailing norms of diplomacy,then this latest Israeli outrage ought to put such jejeune notions finally to bed.
Whatever vestiges of pretend-authority any notional Internationally accepted and binding rule of law is meant to have has been firmly consigned to the naive daydreams and unattainable aspirations of those who pine after some kind of brotherhood of man. Otiose cant and vacuous platitudes based on their respective DNA to western liberal democratic values,which themselves are of course the surviving chimera of such truly awful events of human history as the American and French revolutions.
Bismarckian Realpolitik is back in vogue. All well and good.Assuming of course that the dimwits, especially those in Washington's State Department and their institutional rivals at The Pentagon actually are able to discern and implement such a cunning strategy.
The Israeli MSM platform Haaretz reports on the construction by the US with French collaboration of a military base near Manbij in Syria and the threats made to the US for doing so by Erdogan's Turkey.I don't recall this potboiler of what is a growing classic Mexican standoff ever being referred to or taken notice of at the UN,either at Security Council or General Assembly level.
So,having planned,nurtured,financed,trained,armed & logistically supported the hydra-headed Arab Spring popular uprisings and having watched as they went  "south" one by inexorable one, the US administration rears up on its hindlegs and accuses Iran of being the source of instability in the region! This Punch & Judy show suits Israel's atavistic urges that underpin and motivate Netanyahu's faux-demagougery and pathetic bellicose antics.
Erdogan's Turkey - and let us hope that he might be defeated in the forthcoming Turkish general election- is a Treaty bound member of NATO and aspires to become a member of the European Union.Clearly reality is on the blink,on both counts.
And the legitimate Syrian government fights on with the invaluable assistance of its allies- Russia,Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah and elements of the Palestinian diaspora in Syria.The Kurds though,right in the middle of all this are,no surprise getting royally shafted by all and sundry.That was inevitable.
As is Schadenfreude.

fahrenheit451:252

There really is nothing new under the sun. It's 2018 and we are still stuck with an ossified voting system. Labour and Conservative perpetuate,to their mutual advantage,the FPTP system and so keep the Punch & Judy tropes of British political discourse on an interminable respirator instead of switching it off.

So here's my original blog post And So It Goes...#768 from May 6 2016. A timeless classic...

Democracy.Voting.The democratic process.Ballots.Universal Suffrage. These are terribly important,not only concepts, but practices for the acolytes of that most noble of specious secular quasi-theologies, Democracy.
It has always struck me as an indelible flaw in their national character for the British to have persisted for as long as they have,with the eccentricities of  " The first past the post " system. Back in the days of the Reform Acts, of 1832 and 1867, there was plausibly nothing amiss with such a constricted,parochial settled kind of way of ascertaining the will of the people.
Time-honoured methods have without vigourous renewal become moribund and taken on the characteristics of arcane rituals. Geographic distances within the historically determined British national polity are no longer a precusor for division and rancour to any significant degree.Distinctions and differences matter far less than once they did.
And yet the legitimate expression of this innate plurality is stymied and devalued at every major opportunity. A Vote,the universal currency unit of political expression,is not equal to any other given Vote at any one time.
Parliament ought long ago have instituted a fair and credible system of proportional representation.
Each contending Party's ideological and practical political aspiration and raison d'etre-to win a majority for its policies and goals would not be compromised.
 After all winning a majority of the Sovereign electorate's Votes cast is per se more democratic in truth than winning a numerical majority of arbitrarily defined  seats.
All Votes must be of equal numeric value irrespective of where they are cast.
The alternative, as has been the sad dystopian reality for decades is the " marginals ". Usually calculated to be around 70 seats out of the 630 where historic voting patterns and voter behaviour subject to minimal shifts in opinion poll discerned party policy differences turn these seats into genuine contests which determine the overall outcome of all 630 seats. That is not democracy.
Legitimacy is after all a learned behaviour. Given enough cynicism coupled with disappointment,disillusionment and a powerful,cogent counter-narrative, methods other than the democratic ballot and universal suffrage begin to be contemplated.

Footnote :- I emailed this to the Wakefield Express and Yorkshire Evening Post the day after the local election results were announced on May 6.

Sir - iIrecall being in the Public gallery not so long ago when Wakefield's Labour Councillors unanimously voted through £27,000,000 in Budget cuts. I also recall Council leader Box inveighing against the Conservative government and its Austerity measures. The central point of his lengthy,self-indulgent diatribe was to call into question the legitimacy of the Tories mandate to impose Austerity measures having won an overall majority with only 24% of the votes cast in the General election. Let's put aside for the moment the Historic alliance Labour has with the Tories on the issue of first past the post system.Those two have been brothers-in-arms in colluding to maintain this palpably iniquitous and dysfunctional model of electoral representation. What,I wonder has Cllr.Box to say about last Friday's results in Wakefield ? The turnout was 30%, of the 245,000 registered electors only 74,000 cast their ballot.Of the votes cast Labour got just over half,which means that Labour's mandate to govern and implement without dissent let alone any form of active resistance the government's Austerity measures is 15% of the electorate. Go figure.

Louis Kasatkin ( TUSC Candidate,Wakefield West 2016 )

fahrenheit451:251

Israeli Premier Netanyahu is trying to light a few extra fuses in the Syrian imbroglio and investing an extraordinary amount of diplomatic demagoguery toward that objective.The trigger,he hopes, will be the revocation of what is commonly termed the Iran Nuclear Deal.A Heath-Robinson affair where the 5 permanent members of the UN security Council plus Germany exercise vigilance and constraints on Iran's ambition to create a nuclear arsenal.

The saving grace, if indeed there is to be any in this prelude to WW3, is that,the current US President Trump's predilection for diplomatic anarchy may not on this occasion be allowed free rein.China,France,Russia and the UK,oh,and Germany,all have an intense desire to maintain the present Iran Nuclear Deal.A position and outlook that enjoys a broad spectrum of support amongst the various experts,analysts and ad-hoc international bodies who between them have a good idea as to the degree and veracity of Iran's adherence to the deal itself.

Netanyahu, au contraire just wants to get the US and its increasingly deluded NATO satrapies to bomb Iran on any old pretext.To this end,the reprobate who is facing indictment on multiple corruption charges,delivered a mise en scene before the world's media with apparently 50,000 documents proving Iranian perfidy.

Fortunately sanity and reason are momentarily back in vogue among the western powers and so this byzantine Israeli-conspiracy theory was found to be short of legs. So Iran isn't going to get bombed any time soon.

However this all comes in the wake of what were a series of missile strikes against what were reported as Iranian bases inside Syria.And so the World sinks a little deeper in the quagmire and Israel is doing the pushing down.

The Zionist statelet celebrated its' 70th year of existence recently and  no-one does mass shroud-waving and emotionally vacuous hyperbole better than Israel. Demagoguery.
Then again, who knows what the Washington beltway  neocon deep state establishment might yet get Trump to do.

And therein lies the danger.