fahrenheit451:348

It's easy, often too easy to get caught up in the hyperbole and strident faux-rhetoric that accompanies what passes for war these days.

Routine, indiscriminate usage of emotive language and graphic imagery, in the end do not enhance a particular narrative, they overwhelm it.

The US / EUNATO engineered regional imbroglio emanating from what is still left of the sovereign,independent nation state of Syria underlines the old adage about chickens coming home to roost.

The ruling metropolitan elites sojourning in their western ivory towers do in fact have a low tolerance for when things get, shall we say, a tad more squeamish than they had anticipated let alone planned for.

They always invariably make the same miscalculation ,they always invariably end up shoving their collective heads up their own asses and hope that their specious pseudo-moralistic pronouncements and irritatingly middle class superficial hand wringing shows concern for the orphans,widows,the aged .etc. who are ineluctably maimed and butchered and eviscerated and become an endless stream of online content for the on-going pornographic installation art exhibition that is a world run by the failing ruling elites.

A Century on from the imposition by the triumphant Allies of the Sykes -Picot delineation of the defeated Ottoman Empire's vassal territories have a lot to answer for.Slicing and dicing previously coherent contiguous ethno-linguistic entities into a myriad of contradictory and confusing irrational new entities remains the very epitome of Western imperialist stupidity.

The insane / absurdist revival of Ottoman delusions of grandeur by Erdogan and his coterie of oligarchs and gangsters in the guise of a modern, developing Turkey,are a tragedy of immense historic importance that is hastening inexorably toward their self-created and realised demise.Sooner rather than later.Whether they cleanse all of Syria's north east of terrorist Kurds or not and if the buffer zone and relocation of 2 million Syrian war refugees eventuates or not.

The following gleaned from, Focus Economics tell you what you need to know about Turkey.

Turkey Economic Outlook

October 1, 2019

The economy shrank again in Q2, although less severely than in the first. A slump in fixed investment and a fall in private consumption, amid elevated unemployment, inflation and currency weakness, led the contraction. For its part, the external sector’s performance improved, although this was only largely due to weak domestic demand. Turning to the third quarter, the economy is expected to have shrunk once more: Industrial production fell again in July, although it did so at the softest pace in nearly a year. Moreover, August’s manufacturing PMI remained in contractionary territory, suggesting that the sector is not yet out of the woods. Similarly, retail sales contracted again in July, while private sector credit growth was negligible in the same month. More positively, the Central Bank’s second large rate cut in September ought to boost credit growth and support economic activity.

Turkey Economic Growth

The economy is expected to recover towards the end of this year and into next year on the back of looser monetary policy and a supportive base effect. However, geopolitical tensions and currency volatility remain downside risks, while still high unemployment is likely to weigh on household consumption. FocusEconomics Consensus Forecast panelists expect the economy to shrink 0.8% in 2019. Next year, however, our panel projects economic growth of 2.2%, which is down 0.1 percentage points from last month’s forecast.

Turkey Economy Data

	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017
Population (million)	76.7	77.7	78.7	79.8	80.8
GDP per capita (USD)	12,386	12,026	10,898	10,805	10,542
GDP (USD bn)	950	934	858	862	852

During the same period, the official exchange rate of the Turkish Lira to the USD rose from 2.15 to 1 to 3.79 to 1.
A national economy in recession paying practically double for its fuel & energy imports  (all denominated globally in USD) ,let alone all the other stuff Turkey itself uses but doesn't manufacture domestically.Tanks,Guns,Aircraft,Munitions of all kinds.

Turkey is probably in a more economically parlous state at the start of this Syrian misadventure than Japan was back in 1941 when it attacked Pearl Harbour.

Now, go figure.

fahrenheit451:347

Sudetenland 2.0

Turkish President Erdogan has given the rest of the international community notice of his intention to order a full scale military incursion into North-eastern Syria in order to establish a buffer-zone contiguous with the Turkish border.

US forces currently in that area are due to vacate it leaving their erstwhile SDF /Kurdish allies on their own to face the imminent Turkish invasion.

Military invasions of countries with which the invaders are not at war is in breach of international law.Not that International Law counts for very much in the current derangement paradigm in which the world finds itself.

The very presence of US,UK,French,German,Australian ,Canadian and Turkish forces inside Syria is itself in breach of all diplomatic conventions, rules and international laws.
The much referenced Westphalian system whereby nations respect each others sovereignty and territorial integrity has long been a convenient diplomatic fiction for almost as long as The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 itself has been in existence. That particular treaty brought to a close what  future historians would refer to as The Thirty Years War on the continent of Europe. Its foundational principles just so much existential pie in the sky.

The anti-Trump driven rhetoric over the US withdrawal from the region about to be invaded by Turkey is about as specious as it gets in Washington DC. The Kurds, everyone who hates President Trump says, have been thrown under the proverbial bus and that they'll be subjected genocide by the invading Turks.Even if it were remotely akin to the truth, frankly my dear, we shouldn't give a damn.

The really big and imminently globally catastrophic imbroglio in that region is no longer Syria ,it's the Yemen.Of course the two are intertwined at a strategic level, involving most of the same state actors in both theatres such as Saudi Arabia (your friendly neighbourhood financiers of Islamist terrorism) ,Iran ,the US and of course Israel who basically want to instigate their own arcane scriptural Armageddon asap.

And you thought Brexit was a sh**show.

fahrenheit451:331

Occasionally,very occasionally  a leading world statesman articulates a point of view so cogently as to encompass one 's own outlook on an issue that it makes sense just to copy & paste verbatim. A couple of days ago The President of Russia launched a swingeing critique of prevailing  western metropolitan elitist values. To wit-

 

Vladimir Putin has trumpeted the growth of national populist movements in Europe and America, crowing that liberalism is spent as an ideological force. In an FT interview in the Kremlin on the eve of the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, the Russian president said “the liberal idea” had “outlived its purpose” as the public turned against immigration, open borders and multiculturalism. Mr Putin’s evisceration of liberalism — the dominant western ideology since the end of the second world war in 1945 — chimes with anti-establishment leaders from US president Donald Trump to Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Matteo Salvini in Italy, and the Brexit insurgency in the UK.

 

 “[Liberals] cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over the recent decades,” he said. Mr Putin branded Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than 1m refugees to Germany, mainly from war-ravaged Syria, as a “cardinal mistake”. But he praised Donald Trump for trying to stop the flow of migrants and drugs from Mexico.

 

 “This liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. That migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be protected.” Recommended The Big Read Putin: friendship with China, ‘Donald’ and the end of liberal ideas He added: “Every crime must have its punishment. The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.”

 

 Donald Tusk, the European Council president, said he “strongly disagreed” with Mr Putin. “What I find really obsolete is authoritarianism, personality cults and the rule of oligarchs,” he said.

 As the de facto ruler of Russia for almost two decades, Mr Putin, 66, has been regularly accused of covertly supporting populist movements through financial aid and social media, notably in the 2016 US presidential election, the Brexit referendum and the recent European Parliament elections.

 

 Mr Putin emphatically denied this. He dismissed the conclusion by special counsel Robert Mueller that Russia had systemically interfered in the 2016 US presidential election as “mythical interference”.

 

 Turning to the US-China trade war and geopolitical tensions in the Gulf between the US and Iran, Mr Putin said the situation had become “explosive”. The problem, he said, stemmed from American unilateralism and the lack of rules underpinning world order. Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin talking to FT editor Lionel Barber and Moscow bureau chief Henry Foy © Press office of the President of Russia He expressed concern about the threat of a renewed nuclear arms race between the US and Russia. “The cold war was a bad thing . . . but there were at least some rules that all participants in international communication more or less adhered to or tried to follow. Now, it seems that there are no rules at all,” he said.

 

 On a positive note, Mr Putin said there were tentative signs of a thaw in Anglo-Russian relations ahead of his meeting in Osaka with Theresa May, her farewell summit as UK prime minister. “I think Russia and UK are both interested in fully restoring our relations, at least I hope a few preliminary steps will be made.” Relations between London and Moscow have been frozen after the attempted assassination of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England. Treason is the gravest crime possible and traitors must be punished. I am not saying that the Salisbury incident is the way to do it . . . but traitors must be punished The UK government blames the Russian government for the nerve agent attack, but Mr Putin said there was no evidence to support this. Mr Skripal had served a sentence in Russia before being released in a spy swap with the UK, he noted. Mr Putin made clear, however, that he had zero tolerance for spies who betrayed their country. “Treason is the gravest crime possible and traitors must be punished. I am not saying that the Salisbury incident is the way to do it . . . but traitors must be punished.”

 

Echoing nationalist populists such as Mr Salvini and France’s Marine Le Pen, Mr Putin said liberal governments had not acted to reassure citizens. Instead they had pursued a mindless multiculturalism embracing, among other things, sexual diversity. “I am not trying to insult anyone because we have been condemned for our alleged homophobia. But we have no problem with LGBT persons. God forbid, let them live as they wish,” he said. “But some things do appear excessive to us. They claim now that children can play five or six gender roles.” “Let everyone be happy, we have no problem with that,” he added. “But this must not be allowed to overshadow the culture, traditions and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population.”

 

 

 

P.S.

My deepest schadenfreude goes to,amongst others :-

#PeoplesVote #MeToo #Bame The pro-death Abortion Lobby #ExtinctionRebellion

 

 

 

fahrenheit451:301

A few days ago, POTUS Trump announced the withdrawal of the US forces ( The figure quoted was 2,000 personnel) currently illegally stationed in Syria.

This caused immediate consternation and hyperbolic over reaction from the Washington Beltway NeoCon establishment and their symbiotic liberal foreign interventionist partners aka the Democrats. DefSec Mattis resigned in the wake of the Commander-in-Chief’s welcome and somewhat unduly delayed strategic decision.

The western -backed ( funded,trained,equipped and armed ) disparate terrorist gangs ranging from AlQaeda to ISIS/Daesh have proven several veritable hornets’ nests too much for the meddling US and its equally delusional and inept NATO satrapies to deal with let alone forge any worthwhile conclusion from.

The Syria domiciled Kurds are the patsy in the middle getting lined up for another historically royal shafting from their supposed foreign friends and allies.Composing the bulk of the SDF fighting forces,the Kurdish fighters have done the proverbial ” heavy lifting ” on the ground in extirpating ISIS territorially.

Their undoubted and welcome efficacy and success in this matter has, from a Realpolitik perspective pushed Erdogan’s nose out of joint and thus led him to hurl the Turkish army into Syrian territory largely in a ethnic cleansing of all land along Turkey’s borders.

Apart from Russia ,Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah who have all been invited by the sovereign legitimate government of Syria to assist them in its fight primarily against ISIS, all other military ” state actors ” -The US,UK,France,Germany,Canada and especially the genocidal,slavering warmongering dogs of Turkey are all there in contravention of International Law.They are committing war crimes.

Still, having one less drunken,boorish,knuckle-dragging thug to deal with at an illegal rave is welcome.

Thank you President Trump.

fahrenheit451:276

Erdogan,that erstwhile ravening Turkish warmonger looks as though he's about to hit the existential jackpot in Syria.

From funding,harbouring and arming ISIS/Daesh as well as Al Qaeda affiliates, and his subsequent de-facto annexation of sovereign Syrian territory through to building walls,watchtowers and entire military supply bases and depots inside Syria and deploying a commensurate invading Army,Erdogan has doubled down like the chronic high risk gambler and demagogic chancer that he is.

And its all begun dropping apart in spectacular fashion.All his so-called NATO friends are deserting him and his allies have set a trap underneath him. The Turkish military haven't somehow heroically liberated their ethnic kinfolk from the clutches,as they see it,of Assad,but have been sucked ever deeper into a bottomless quagmire with no prospect of withdrawal.

Credit in fair measure,for helping to bring out these dramatic changes in the circumstances on the ground in Syria must go to President Trump's administration for its forthright dealings in matters of trade and commerce with the perceived abuses perpetrated by a number of its major trading competitors. Amongst the many nations targeted by these harsher tariffs is the export to the US of Turkish steel and aluminum.

The US has also gotten itself into an intra-NATO row over the sale of aircraft and missile systems to Turkey or rather the withholding of such deals at this present moment in time.

Neither of which has improved Erdogan's innately obstreperous demeanour.

And to cap it all the value of the Turkish Lira has depreciated catastrophically vis a vis the US Dollar on international markets.At the start of 2018,it was trrading at 3.76 Lira to the US Dollar by the start of August the rate had increased to 5.49 to the dollar.National economies cannot withstand 50% depreciations of their currencies against the Dollar.

Technically currency depreciations would be great for exports,but in Turkey's case domestic inflation,massive economic displacement and increased unemployment all begin to add up to Erdogan cutting nobody else's throat but his own in Syria.

Afrin, Idlib, Manbij: the entire paranoid scenario vis a vis the Kurds and their militia groups costs Turkey more in fuel and munitions and all the other logistics that have to be paid for in US Dollars.Which in turn have to be borrowed on International money markets against the sale of Turkish government bonds that in turn become increasingly junk as the screws tighten.

Ain't Capitalism wonderful ?  Schadenfreude is trading well these days.

fahrenheit451:265

Supreme court rules in favour of anti-abortion clinics in free speech case

Judges rule faith-based ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ are not obliged to tell women that free or low-cost abortions may be available elsewhere.

So reported the Guardian online on the June 26 announcement from the SCOTUS latest rulings. Other notable on the day rulings included the upholding of President Trump's targeted travel ban on citizens from a number of predominantly muslim countries to the USA.

Matters then generally seem to have improved a great deal in the wake of those SCOTUS decisions.The world is a sunnier place and liberal snowflakes get to bleed their consciences over the rest of us some more.

Those once towering bastions of corporate globalist MSM,such as New York Times and Washington Post, have gone so far as to concede defeat on the upholding of Trump's travel ban and acknowledge the importance to the Trump presidency of the SCOTUS decision.

And that's how it's meant to be in the US. Somebody challenges someone else's ruling /law in the Courts,there's an appeal,the original ruling /law is upheld or otherwise and then with both sides committed to their cause and the lower court rulings having implications for the Constitution it winds up in front of SCOTUS.

Liberals have for decades defecated all over the Constitution with their political appointees /careerist judicial cronies on SCOTUS approving.i..e rendering constitutional ,acceptable  and normalising egregious outrages such as abortion on demand ( Roe v.Wade 1973 ) ,sodomy and same- gender marriage. Liberals were only too happy,in those instances to extol the virtues of their wonderful tripartite separation of powers.

But not now. Everything is terrible,Trump is a maniac and America has morphed into some kind of quasi-fascist dystopia. Clearly it doesn't take much to upset the PC multiculturalist,globalist snowflake opinion formers and corporatist agitators of the Democratic Party and lesser ,vertebrae-free denizens amongst the Republicans.

And long may that state of fear and self-loathing continue; Schadenfreude is now in vogue!

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.

fahrenheit451:251

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.

fahrenheit451:246

Marking the occasion of the anniversary of Trump's ordered missile strike on Syrian airbases in 2017,Israeli aircraft launched their own missile strike against a Syrian airbase. As per their protocols for such incidents,the Israeli high command refused to confirm or deny any such event.But it was Israel.
There are several previous recorded and verified incidents of Israeli airstrikes against Syrian airbases,their excuse being that they were targeting Iranian military facilities at those bases.Well,that makes it all hunky dory then.A country that is officially not at war with another country can pop across the border and do a bit of bombing,run off back home and thumb their noses at International Law.
The world just took once huge irrevocable step toward triggering a Nuclear 1914.Apparently the Israeli regime was incentivised ( or thought it was jolly good idea ) to strike at Syria prior to the US doing so because it seems that Herr Trump is once again hugely aggrieved at reports emerging from the imbroglio that is the foreign-engineered Syrian civil war,of poison gas being used against civilians.
Erdogan's blitzkrieg and the meticulous ethnic cleansing of Kurdish populated regions bordering Turkey are not so much of a concern to the pseudo-moralistic posturing on Syria by the US and its NATO satrapies with,of course dutiful bootlicking lackey Tory UK austerity regime to the fore with its otiose cant.
Turkey is a NATO member,Erdogan's original wheeze of a scenario was to try and persuade the US that the Kurdish Syrian militias-part of the US backed SDF anti-Assad coalition- were themselves posing an outside existential threat to the Turkish state,which if it were actually true would oblige all NATO members to come to Turkey's ( Erdogan's ) immediate aid and declare all out war on the Kurds. Who,darn it from Ankara'a point of view are not a state actor;which is why NATO legally can't act.
And on and on.The Saudis and Qatar continue to ply Syrian based Al Qaeda affiliates,who've undergone dozens of changes in nomenclature to try and fool the CIA ( not all that difficult) with vast amounts of money,arms and intel support.This Wahabi ultra extremist strategy marries up nicely with the super scale atrocities the KSA is perpetrating in Yemen even as NATO member states including the UK has military advisors on the ground witnessing and sanctioning this unspeakable barbarism being carried out with a knowing nod and wink from Washington.

Head for the hills,is I fear no longer a viable survival strategy.

fahrenheit451:232

A year ago Guido Fawkes  published a map of the constituencies with the most signatories for a petition opposing Trump's visit to Britain.
The map from Press Association shows that 15 of the top 20 constituencies with the most signatories in favour of cancelling Trump’s state visit are in London. The rest of the country doesn’t seem bothered, other than the student towns of Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Brighton and Edinburgh.
One year on from the visit that never eventuated,and it's all back on again.Apparently; albeit with no firm date as yet.
This means that the uni student common room slackers aka  SWP /Momentum /Green heroic vanguard of proletarian consciousness will be repainting their placards and practising their litanies of otiose cant and vacuous platitudes which they'll seek to deploy on the day itself.
Pseudo-moralistic posturing ( aka virtue-signalling ) ,will once again be to the fore in the ever shrinking realm of MSM  public discourse.All the visceral worthwhile polemic will be on social media as usual and which MSM still doesn't quite get yet.
Metropolitan undergrad,middle class, hipsters purposefully dressed down to be conspicuously inconspicuous believing themselves to be camouflaged as ordinary folk will assemble in their termite swarms in all the usual places.
Quite why " they " even bother to manifest such faux-outrage remains a mystery to any rational person,especially those who have a grasp of  Realpolitik .
Welcome Mr.President! Hope you have a nice visit.

fahrenheit451:193

Another day, another test missile fire from DPRK aka NorthKorea. The missile was again reported as flying over sovereign Japanese airspace.
US Secretary of State Tillerson has  " demanded " that both China and Russia take firm measures against DPRK.
This is what an international  diplomatic relations kind of Groundhog Day looks like in a world of supposedly independent sovereign nation states.
The UN security Council is due to convene later on today in order to discuss this latest North Korean missile incident.
It's only a few days ago that the security council passed a resolution imposing additional sanction against DPRK for its nuclear bomb tests.
Business Insider UK of 11 September applied lateral thinking to this seemingly intractable and worsening Korean imbroglio.
" When Jocko Willink‏, a former US Navy SEAL who is now an author and occasional Business Insider contributor, was asked on Twitter how he would handle the North Korean crisis, he gave an unexpected answer that one expert said just might work.
Willink's proposal didn't involve any covert special operation strikes or military moves of any kind. Instead of bombs, Willink suggested the US drop iPhones.
"Drop 25 million iPhones on them and put satellites over them with free wifi," Willink tweeted last week.
While the proposal itself is fantastical and far-fetched, Yun Sun, an expert on North Korea at the Stimson Center, says the core concept could work.
"Kim Jong Un understands that as soon as society is open and North Korean people realize what they're missing, Kim's regime is unsustainable, and it's going to be overthrown," Sun told Business Insider.
For this reason, North Korea's government would strongly oppose any measures that mirror Willink's suggestion.
Sun pointed out that when South Korea had previously flown balloons that dropped pamphlets and DVDs over North Korea, the Kim regime had responded militarily, sensing the frailty of its government relative to those of prosperous liberal democracies. "
The off the cuff proposal has the major advantage of not involving as a central feature of its implementation the thermonuclear annihilation of several million people.
China and Russia  have seemingly been placed in the onerous position of having to do a favour for their greatest adversary and most potent military threat aka the USA.
And its all China and Russia's fault if the USA has to resort to military action against DPRK if events don't work out as the neocon Washington establishment wants them to.
I'd go with the iphones strategem.

fahrenheit451:189

Here's a terrific quote :-

It is difficult to talk to people who confuse Austria and Australia. But there is nothing we can do about this; this is the level of political culture among part of the American establishment. As for the American people, America is truly a great nation if the Americans can put up with so many politically uncivilised people.

Vladimir Putin

As of Wednesday,September 5th. 11:00 ,the DPRK is still standing. That this fundamental existential state might alter at any given moment ought to be a cause for worry among most rational minds.

But if you look back at the introductory paragraph,the quote from Putin, it is precisely the absence of rational minds within the United States Leadership echelon that is the cause of our present predicament regarding the sovereign nation of North Korea aka DPRK and the development of its nuclear weapons capabilities.

Something seen as alarming by the US Ruling Elites and their NATO satrapies. Who not entirely incidentally have,on entirely falacious grounds unilaterally imposed, as a kneejerk reaction to some other imaginary impropriety committed against the US, a plethora of economic and financial sanctions against Russia and its government and various private citizens.

These self same western ruling elites are currently, as part of their supposed containment strategy against DPRK, trying to inveigle Russia into agreeing that sanctions be imposed against DPRK!

Russia and more so China ( and truth be known probably 90% of UN member states  besides ) are endeavouring on a heretofore heroically diplomatic scale, to de-escalate what is a one-sided escalation of tension between DPRK and an increasingly irrational and bellicose USA.

The fact that venal,posturing globally unimportant non entities such as  the UK Defence Secretary Fallon or the equally vapid Prime Minister May have waded into this imbroglio by shooting off vacuous platitudes and otiose cant in all directions does nothing to stabilise this faltering regional house of cards.

I'm not quite sure whether schadenfreude, a usual response to such a pantomime is necessarily apt in this instance.

fahrenheit451:185

There's an old saying about the definition of insanity being someone who keeps on repeating failed actions over and over and expecting a different result.

Syria.The Middle East in general. United States foreign policy.

Gleaned from today's  South Front website

ISIS AND ‘MODERATE REBELS’ UNITE EFFORTS AGAINST SYRIAN ARMY IN EASTERN HAMA COUNTRYSIDE. GOVT FORCES COUNTER-ATTACK

 Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) and its allied groups of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have united efforts with ISIS in an attempt to cut off the Salamiyah-Ithriyah-Khanassir-Aleppo road, the only government supply line to Aleppo city.

On August 23 and August 24, HTS artillery units conducted a massive bombardment campaign shelling Syrian Arab Army (SAA) positions along the road. At the same time, ISIS attacked the SAA at Wadi al-Adib and Shayk Hilal and even temporarily cut off the road near as-Saan.
Pro-militant sources, including the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), claimed that the SAA suffered a number of tactical setbacks and that ISIS could use the situation in order to recapture a large area in the Uqayrabat pocket.
However, then reports started appearing that the SAA, the Qalamoun Shield Forces and the National Defense Forces (NDF), backed up by Russian attack helicopters, launched a counter-attack in the area and recaptured some points that had been lost to terrorists.
Clashes are ongoing. The situation remains tense.

It's only a few short weeks ago that the CIA ( aren't they part of the US state ? ) announced its withdrawal of military support for the ragbag coalition of forces commonly referred to as the Free Syrian Army. Then again elements of the US military are still actively stationed inside fortified installations inside Syria assisting and advising the very same FSA.

Meanwhile the clowns of the Turkish regime's governing elite have let it be known that they are mightily displeased with the US continuing its support- military and financial to the YPG ,the Syrian Kurdish faction who themselves co-operate with some elements of the FSA.

Erdogan's genuinely racist,xenophobic authoritarian regime despises the very existence of all Kurds everywhere and considers them an existential threat to his greater Turkey.

There is nobody in Washington, either in the Trump administration itself or amongst the politicians in Congress or amongst the Military/Security apparatus, who has ever been called upon to debate and explain in public the strategic rationale and constitutional justification for the US opposing the legitimate sovereign state of Syria and for supporting Al Qaeda and ISIS.

The ongoing Islamic terrorist outrages across , not only the european continent but in south east asia,the horn of Africa and a broad range of countries stretching from Nigeria in the west to Kenya in the east of Africa seems to be of little concern to the Neocon/ liberal interventionist warmongers in Washington. Maybe they can't bomb or threaten to bomb or regime change everywhere all at once like back in the good old old days.

We are most assuredly dans la merde.

fahrenheit451:154

Today is not a good day here in Great Britain.We have suffered yet another Islamic terrorist outrage.Yet more innocent civilian lives have been lost. And there are bound to be another thousand and one blog posts along discouragingly similar lines that have yet to be written at some point in the not too distant future. The usual PC, multiculti #PrayFor #StandTogether hashtags have been enlisted to the cause of appeasement and acceptance. The usual vacuous,sanctimonious platitudes and calls for tolerance and good neighbourliness are out in force. Our enemies are digging our graves for us and our political Class,our metropolitan elites and their commentariat are lining up to ( do what they always do at times like these ),piss on the graves of our own fallen.Because that's the way Western Christian civilisation is supposed to react. Any expression other than a group hug with the adherents of the desert sands death cult is in effect treated and recorded as a " hate crime ". Pathetic. Perhaps the stupid neocons and dimwit Trump might've considered expending 59 missiles against ISIS/DAESH and AlQaeda instead of those who are fighting them. And so it goes...It's not been a terribly good day here in appeasement,Petainist Britain.

fahrenheit451:141

Having manufactured and assiduously promoted the straw man of Russian electoral skulduggery, the Democrats and faux-progressives have been hoist by their own petard. We are now seeing an enhanced version of US foreign diplomacy which invariably begins and ends with toys being thrown out of their prams. The only noticeable difference this time is that there's a whole lot more crashing and banging accompanying the latest outburst of Washington neocons' customary hubris and immaturity. Having long ago sidelined the Constitution and ceded its war making powers to the Presidency, Congress is de facto complicit in everything every holder of the Office of President does and has ordered done since WW2. For decades now even the most genuine opponents of military intervention abroad have proven wholly impotent in the face of a determined President. This time around it happens to be Trump;a man whom the Democrats to a large degree and Republicans to a surprising degree smeared and denounced as somehow being in the thrall of Russia. A country whom Democrat and Republican politicians and commentators and mainstream media swear engaged in heretofore unimaginable and widespread electoral skulduggery in the US electoral process in order to ensure his-Trump's election! These very same forces now applaud and welcome Trump's actions in Yemen, Syria,Afghanistan and when it does all go tits up, in North Korea too. The supine, servile nature of NATO's response to all this merely underscores the organisation's peripheral auxilliary role as Washington's global lackey.

fahrenheit451:119

 A few days ago ,once upon a time,barely remembered Civil rights agitator, now Congressman, John Lewis slandered,defamed and demeaned the American Constitution, the legitimacy and outcome of democratic elections and the office of POTUS,whilst making a clearly intended libellous attack on President-elect Trump himself. The MSM and virtually all media platforms reported the basic facts as:-

On Saturday, Georgia congressman  and former Civil rights activist,Lewis told NBC News that he did not regard the incoming president as legitimate. Within hours,Trump criticised the Democrat congressman in a tweet, " “Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart".

The " Guardian " somewhat triumphantly noted that :-

Hours,after Trump tweeted: two graphic novels and a memoir by Lewis took the top three spots on Amazon.

Here's how the " Guardian " in its usual exemplary PC liberal,global multicultural elitist tones concluded its massively distorted " report " on what began as  Lewis' egregious verbal broadcast assault on Trump.

" Donald Trump’s attempt to discredit US politician and hero of the civil rights movement John Lewis in a series of tweets has backfired. "...

Defending one's own integrity and the Office of the President by countering an initial unprovoked assault is somehow rendered as " Trump's attempt to discredit Lewis.."

Clearly, the liberal elites and their MSM lackeys have deep seated issues, not least of which is their innate propensity to mimic Goebbels whenever the going gets a little too tough even for them.

Citing Humpty Dumpty or even " 1984 " would be lost on those liberals.