STRANGE TIMES

Syria 6yrs further on!
I wrote this back when Putin and Lukashenko were sending refugees into Poland so I may as well post it now that millions are on the move from a fascist invasion of Ukraine.

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The handful of Australian communists who years ago commented at Strange Times fell out about what was happening in Syria in 2015 but now it’s happened.  The issues in dispute were resolved.  So why has there been no reconciliation?  What became of the former commentators?

The refugee stream into the USA is currently being crowded out of the international news reports.  Even within the US, the mostly Democrat biased MSM (still traumatized with the incurable version of the Trump Derangement Syndrome) is turning a blind eye to the smouldering wreckage of a human tragedy that this reality of modern global capitalism is.  Yet despite the variable interests of the liberal elements and the obviously non-solutions of their more ‘woke’ pseudo leftist brethren, that ongoing refugee problem remains the ongoing life-impacting issue for the more precariat masses on both sides of the US border.

The problem will undoubtedly explode again and especially so after the covid pandemic gets to be a rearview mirror issue over the next 1-2 years.  Trump or his chosen successor will thus be marked up by the ‘returning’ voters in the crucial swing states.  The widespread buyer remorse is well deserved so, despite the best efforts of Border Ctzar history maker Kamala Harris and the autocue Reader of the FreeWorld Jo -what’s my name oh yes- Biden, nothing is actually working on this front of what is transparently a world wide phenomena.

Currently, the refugees all over Europe are back in the news reports as the bodies are currently being gathered up in the cold forests of Poland and the English Channel rather than in the usual Mediterranean or now more rare -as a result of the massive efforts of the Turkish government- Agean seas.

What to do about this permanent feature of the 21st century is brutally thrown before us.

Putin policy is blatantly involved in feeding this steam of people into the west!  Lukashenko would not now act against the interests of Putin.  The dramatic events on the Belarus borders with its neighbors -principally Poland but this involves  ALL 3 neighbours.

So; 6 years after its posting, I want to remind people of this post; ‘Syria: the facts and figures – the Syria Campaign’.  Posted on September 25, 2015 by c21styork

‘As Europe struggles to deal with a surge in refugees, attention is now shifting to Syria where most people are coming from. But what is the violence they’re fleeing?   …

It’s crucial that we get the story right.    James Sadri – The Syria Campaign’

Barry posted this just after Putin had in a surprise move sent the first deployment of his air power and special forces into Syria.  At the time, Barry, myself, Arthur, and all the relevant western leaders understood who was doing the vast bulk of the killing in Syria.

Whatever were the delusions that were about to befall Arthur and Barry over the purpose of the Russian deployment, western leaders were like the comrades just not suffering a delusion on that more fundamental starting point either. They knew the Assad regime was a murderous regime standing in the way of the democratic revolution and that it was responsible for the vast bulk of the killing!

But there was clearly a dispute in western ruling elites and in leftist and pseudoleftist circles over what a ‘level one’ democracy would bring forth in Syria.  There was by late 2015 an open worry that now that the complex Syrian civil war had unfolded in the manner that it had the Islamofascists would win out and so a level one democracy would not be achieved!  So a large (even dominant) faction of the western ruling elites held that it was better to leave Assad in power!  With this view if not dominant at least very significant, Putin had more than just something to work with!  He opened his mouth and out came the lies, but all he wanted to do was credibly play for time; so he simply told people what they wanted to hear and then as time went on explained his various ‘problems’ that he would like their understanding over when ‘delays’ emerged.  Some people wanted to believe the lies but others knew it was a lie and cared not one bit that it was.  That is the way of the realists (right or ‘left’).

Our own half theorists were so full of their own genius in working out what the real purpose ‘MUST BE’ that they just left planet earth behind and ‘cancelled’ anyone like me who disputed the very notion they had any fucking clue what was going on!

Putin’s move was just one slice of what had to be understood about the complex war in Syria.  The war that had now dragged in the Russians directly and had already indirectly and directly involved the Turks was becoming clearer as the enclaves were solidified and the rubble spread.  Creating refugees was both an Assad and a Russian policy and -as is now clearly being demonstrated-  refugees remain a central part of the policy mix.

ISIS was the MSM focus at the time so the essence of events in Syria was very often not understood by all manner of people on the left and right.  Instead ‘surface issues’ like ISIS dominated the MSM and the western ruling elites thinking and in the tide that rose Islamic democracy was of course just scoffed at.

Attitudes to the Russian revisionists’ invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 point to the bigger issues of what is often referred to as the western left.  I won’t call it the Soviet invasion for obvious -Maoist- reasons despite the formal existence in a zombie form of the USSR and the inclusion of all manner of nationalities in the troop mix.

8 years later (in 1976) communists who were then known as ‘Maoists’ called the current Chinese regime fascist when this regime first emerged via a coup just when Mao died.  At that time our western ruling elites and their MSM ridiculously referred to those that made the coup as the ‘moderates’.  These days -no surprise- these viciously anti-communist Chinese bureaucrats and elite business owners are proclaimed not as the wonderful moderates but as the dreaded communists!  What do ya know!  Once again ‘totalitarianism’ will get its run in the propaganda of the anti-communists.  Mind you it didn’t get much of a run in the MSM when Sissi took power in Eygpt!

Actually, people like Tony Abbott were glad that the Muslim Brotherhood had been overthrown by Egyptian fascists.  So rather obviously he never got the memo of what the drain the swamp strategy was all about that had been proclaimed over Iraq when he was right in the thick of the Howard government.  So that memo was never ‘sent round’.  The theory was self evidently not understood or accepted.

Sisi is one thing but ‘dictator’ and ‘authoritarian autocrat’ are terms regularly hurled at Erdogan even months after people tried their best to kill him and run a coup of their own!  Go figure.

Putin probably won his elections but they are not free and fair so who cares!  At any rate, Alexander Lukashenko did not win his!

2001 is a long time ago.  By 2015 without the ‘drain the swamp’ theory as a foundation total confusion was the order of the day right across the western ruling elites.  An explanation for why the Arab Spring broke out and what (if there is to be any democracy now for the people of the MENA) is the role of the religiously minded masses is of little interest to these people when set against Islamic terrorism as the western problem that they place 1st on the worry tree.   So there was little hope in western mainstream politics and in their MSM of getting the ducks to line up. Evidently, these people who contest for dominance in two-party dictatorships don’t do theory very well!

So the people at Strange Times had a grasp of the basics and something to contribute and in the washup did fuck all.

Without a Maoist attitude to the democratic revolution and an understanding of the requirement for a people’s army (or the people will have nothing), people were bound to fall into profound errors and they did.

What is real and what is formal but not real is often an issue.

‘Totalitarianism’ as a start or finishing point is not going to cut it when there is -during armed revolutions- life or death at stake for the revolutionaries.  There is nothing more total than death to your enemies and the revolutionary left has always believed in the slogan ‘death to fascism’.

The issue that stands out starkly in 2021 as it did in 1921 is that ‘bourgeois democracy is a fraud’ not democracy is a bourgeois fraud as the fascists have it.

The revolution for the whole MENA would suffer what was to unfold because the Syrian people did not have a people’s army nor a liberating army to invade.  Iraq like Germany, Italy and Japan all those years ago had that liberating army.  The difference is both obvious and yet hardly understood right across the spectrum of humanity. Self evidently, more than just political players in the west don’t do theory very well.  No surprise that Australian Marxist theoreticians did do theory very well; it is exactly what we have been doing for more than 50 years!

Obviously, the people of the whole MENA are by my standards extremely conservative; but so many issues were not understood and causing further errors across the western world (Kurdish issues, Zionism, the national question, the great Shia V Sunnie schism, green issues V oil, globalization, refugeeing issues, on it goes…) but the interests of actual existing western democracies in being required to pitch in the real boots of armed revolutionary forces -if this revolution was not to suffer huge casualties and massive long-term setbacks- was the key strategic error.  That strategic interest was never firmly grasped.  So when the pressure was on it was not grasped at all.

Because of the usual claptrap from liberals, what was an obvious success in the liberation of the peoples of Iraq from the monstrously fascist ‘totalitarian’ Baathist regime of Saddam Hussain was seen instead as a disaster that ‘must not be repeated!

Yet within days of this post by Barry, (‘Syria: the facts and figures – the Syria Campaign’) we Australian communists fell out over the issue of what was Putin’s small deployment sent there to do!

Soon it will be 6 [7] years since Arthur would not be told he was not making any sense and that what he a few months later was waving about as the peace in our time document was a worthless Munich-style piece of paper from Putin.

But as we see, even the decency of total silence would not be forthcoming!

We know that Arthur said the Russian forces were sent to end the regime and thus end the war by bringing on elections and consequently the rebels to power and the sort for basic democracy and so on.

I said the Russian forces were there to kill the rebels then known as the Free Syrian Army that I was supporting.

History has unfolded and we can now say definitively that the Russian forces were sent there by Putin to kill the rebels and not to escort Assad out of the country etc!  We know Assad is still at least titularly heading up the regime that is in control of the big chunk of what used to be Syria but is now just the biggest of the various enclaves that have solidified from the fighting.  The Syrian enclaves – predicted and scoffed at 6 years ago- have become real and are currently -as Putin directs his attention closer to home- in a typical frozen ‘season’.

6×365=2190 the same length as what most people regard as the timespan of WW2!  But ‘civil wars are like that.  Consider for a moment the length of effort of the democratic revolutionaries in China and by that, I focus mainly on Mao and the revolutionary CCP but Sun Yat-Sen before that.

As all communists know the Syrian enclaves won’t stay frozen.  For example, the millions of Syrians living under a democratic regime in Turkey are continuing to build their revolutionary army.   As we saw without a revolutionary people’s army the people had nothing and were bombed into refugees; the fleeing soldiers who would not shoot down unarmed demonstrators that instead formed the FSA started from scratch and were, despite their very great sacrifices over those first five years slowly winning.  Then Putin’s thugs turned up with their mates from Iran and Hezbollah and reversed the direction of the war.

Erdogan has stood firm against the audacious informal Czar as the US is pretending to in the case of Ukraine while Mrs Biden as chief reminder prompts Joe to focus on the autocue.  (Good news for Biden as a new treatment for Alzheimer’s has been approved the other day!)

But at this time last year [2020], Arthur noted that the ‘EU response (presumably to the whole period of the Syrian revolution Arab spring and all the way back to the liberation of the Iraqi peoples from the Saddam Hussein Baathists) is as disgusting as the pseudoleft.  Erdogan is not “blackmailing” them but exposing their stupidity.’

Arthur is in effect saying that nobody, like say John Kerry or David Cameron got fooled by the Russian diplomatic efforts.  He says clearly, they wanted what unfolded!  Bullshit they did!

The reality is that Turkey has systematically in three tranches deployed massive numbers of well-equipped troops that will now shoot down anything that flys in any threatening manner to drop bombs near them or the civilians that they are protecting!

Turkey is caring for 3.6+ million refugees that are sheltering within its borders.

Turkey fronts Russian forces in the Azerbaijan / Armenia conflict as it does in Libya as well.

Turkey just for starters has not wanted what unfolded!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQvZ6ct6iLM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaBIDUYWKzA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb5dvXwDL3Y

Around WW1 the industrialized empires of Britain and France with their very powerful navies smashed up much of the backward Ottoman empire.  But those naval forces were not very important in the final analysis. In the 4 decades leading to WW1 the Ottoman empire had often been the target of the equally vicious and murderous European imperialists.  An ongoing and massive dismemberment of its once vast empire was both historically important and was achieved during and after the world war by the land forces sweeping in from the deserts, from Greece and up from Egypt etc. Even Italy had jumped in with the support and encouragement of the British and the French, creating Libya from two of the Ottoman empire’s territories.

The pre-war activities and the success they had met with, was I think what lured the ‘believers’ like Churchill into the overreach disaster of the Gallipoli campaign .

It turned out that the big ships were a vast waste of effort when countered by the, mostly German-made, big guns on the land.  This was the period when the dreadnoughts were still thought to be the apex beasts and it was soon to be proved that they were no such thing.  Like the dinosaurs their time was coming to an end and yet even the upcoming military powers did not foresee this and expended huge effort on building and manning these massive money pits.  The new era required a new navy.

What all actually needed particularly the central powers, was U and E boats and lots of little aeroplanes.  The era when aircraft carriers were queen of the seas had arrived.

In the end, the Turks were pushed back by the army that did the work coming out from Egypt and then mostly with T E Lawrence mobilizing the locals and using them to do the bulk of the killing and dying or so the story goes.  The truth is a bit different as the conventional army pushed up the east coast of the Mediterranean.  But even the colonial cannon fodder Australians, New Zealand and Indian soldiers did much of this work for nothing but the ‘glory’ of allowing the wealthy English and French imperialist minded ruling elites to map make at the end of the war and carry on with their colonial claptrap for another few decades!  An era now so thankfully gone with the wind.

The Ottoman Empire was reduced to a country that was made ‘secular’ by a modern military man’s diktat.  The leader that began the transformation of what remained of the collapsed Ottoman empire and so modernized the Turkey that emerged, was a general, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.  After a few years at the helm, he turned the Hagia Sophia into a museum.  This doing has now been undone by the Islamist Erdogan and it has been returned to the -second hand- religious function it once had.

Hagia Sophia was once the greatest cathedral in Christendom and that’s not been forgotten by some prominent Christians! But there we were in 2020 and a Turkish court (not to be confused with a puppet Egyptian court mind but not a fully western court either) and then a democratic Islamist leader (who continues to modernize Turkey and again not to be confused with an Egyptian military coup leader but who is both a democrat and a conservative) took quite predictable steps.

Whingers the world over like the inbred journalists of the ABC/BBC started carrying on as if this was some kind of outrage! It wasn’t. I say it’s a TINA issue for democrats!

Islamist’s have control of a country as a result of peaceful democratic contest and they wanted the building back.  The democrats that run Turkey have said that it will be treated by the Turkish state just like Europe’s great cathedrals.  How good is that compared to the KSA or IRAN?  Compare Turkey to Pakistan.

100 years on and after a huge struggle it’s not run by a military man’s diktat anymore! Democracy has taken root and naturally conservative Islamists win the vote and form the government.  But we all recall that the struggle against the military taking over in a bloody coup is still a real, life and death struggle.

If you were wanting to go to 21stcentury western style democracy you wouldn’t want to start from anywhere else in the MENA.

This building has been subjected to a legitimate bourgeois legal process and so the outcome is obviously good news for democrats!

Democracy continues to unfold in Turkey.    The Islamist peoples that vote for Erdogan continue to insist that they can believe what they want AND systematically undo the work of others!   Now that’s the way to ‘pull down’ a statue!   Put a whole museum under the microscope.  How did ‘their’ building get taken over for a museum?  If democracy now is to mean anything why are they not to have it back!  Court cases are decided that don’t please everyone.  After all, they stole it fair and square in the first place.

In the corporate liberal media off we go on a wild romp of but-what-a-bout and quite a bit of sympathy for the military and others caught up in the coup.  The struggle goes ever on.

There is -for just one glaring example- no gay marriage in Turkey!  Just like there wasn’t under the Australian government of Julia Dullard (don’t you love spell check)!  But then gays are not thrown off high buildings like they were and are by gangs in places like Libya and Syria!  That is how the Islamofascists in Iran have carried on for all my adult life.  In Syria and Libya they are not thrown by the government’s laws!  But they are ‘thrown’ and are as dead as those at the foot of the Sydney cliffs 3 and 4 decades ago!

The Islamists defeat their islamofascist foes in Syria and Libya and in their home base of Turkey not by becoming secularists but by declaring that -just like the great Western churches- their world-class church will be open to all even as it is used as the religious building that it is.

Naturally, the BBC/ABC has a vastly different spin on how decisions taken by ‘secularists’ can’t or at least ought not to be undone!  No surprise that some secular-minded people don’t like religious services resuming in this old religious building.  But TINA for democrats!

I wonder what the 1/2 theorists make of this demonstration of what a democratic country looks like in action.  Being a persona-non-grata among my old crowd what the almost silent Australian Marxists think is unknown to me.

From the mess that emerged from a defeated WW1 Ottoman Empire, a modern state was created.  Like the USSR that emerged from a VERY similar mess, it was born and carried on in grand style with more than just a few glaring blemishes.   The sight of these blemishes to any 21st C western liberal is of course disturbing, but though shocking to say yet it’s true that by Ottoman and Czarist standards even Putin’s Russia is progress! That is just not much to write to another continent about! So western liberal democracies are currently with no peers! That might be pathetic but that is where humanity is at.

So along comes yet more struggle for democracy!  2 forwards 1 back goes our little dance and here we are with Russia and Turkey in a ‘proxy’ war again.  The fascists make war every day and the democratic Islamists fight back every day but the Australian Marxists are silent.

What strange times we live in!

‘Why bother?… because I believe in a bright future and want to help make a difference. And I refuse to allow the likes of John Pilger, Tariq Ali and Tim Flannery to be seen as leftists.’  Good oh!

To add to my off used military saying of ‘slow is smooth and smooth is fast’ I just picked up on this old Russian army saying that goes ‘never send a soldier somewhere that an artillery shell can go first’. Yet that is essentially what Putin’s fascist army has been doing for these first 3 murderous weeks.

But there’s always the particular for us to consider. In this case the peculiar envelope this internationally isolated second rate mostly old fashioned and joylessly unmotivated steam roller of an army has had to work in.

The working envelope in the pre-launch marshalling period, was the displayable limit of Russian resources in both men and ‘shells’. Yet even though it did not suck me in, it has to be said that Russian deception mostly worked. Further, I think it has also worked for the first-month requirement to hide what the fascists were and are up to for their next move.

It’s been very common (after week 1 or 2) to hear how Putin can’t win! But we all recall how little time Assad had left as the Syrian tyrant back in September 2015! That short time will be seven years this September! Perhaps it may be best to cast away all these soft headed illusions and prepare for the hard reality of struggle.

Putin’s fascists have had to do this massive invasion while they remain in plain sight under US spy satellites. Yet despite the size of the aggressive warfare they’re tasked with they have in these three short opening weeks achieved a lot. All of the Russian generals know that they are fighting a long war and also that it’s only ultimately directed against the spread of democracy into Belarus and Russia. Their job is to deal with the Ukraine issues and let Putin deal with the ‘ultimately’ bit down the track. Not that that will work mind!

So basically they have been pushing forward into the positions they actually require just in order to get started on their current main job! That job is a process. The drawn-out process is well known from Syria where as a result of the closure of the Bosphorus supply route I suppose Egypt might now be expected to step up to the HIRISE ‘leadership’ role. (HIRISE is my own acronym for the loose coalition that is involved in stopping the spread of democracy in Syria, it consists of Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, Iraqi Shia militia, Assad’s own Syrian ‘Government’ forces and a token commitment from a regional giant Egypt)

Apparently ‘There’s a Russian word maskirovka which means military deception.’ Perhaps the first case of maskirovka was in the logistic train that was absent. ‘It must be a bluff’, most of the experts shouted in unison, because ‘they haven’t got the logistics in place to do it’. But the question was what was it? The ‘it’, turned out to be no more than deal with stage 1 and then set up the new logistics that are required for stage 2. These are very different logistical issues than were the so-called ‘disaster’ of stage 1. I’ve been informed that 60% of the Ukrainian masses were of the view that Putin would not launch this war and if that is true and I have no reason to doubt it, then the first maskirovka was remarkably successful.

At stage 1 the job appears to have been to funnel the troops forward despite the costs and ‘quickly’ get the artillery into position to pour fire on the cities where there is a strategic purpose for the war. The infantry is only now deployed to protectively screen the artillery and the -so far substantially held back air power- can now both screen the infantry and be the main general terror bombing instrument beyond!

Airpower does not win wars but terror bombing is a big part of what Russia has shown in Syria over the last decade. The cheapest method to drive the civilians out and into the democracies is the Assad barrel bombing process. All this is just one form or another of artillery.

Now we know from Napoleon that artillery conquers but only if infantry can and does occupy; otherwise, it simply drives off the people from the territory that’s been for the time being laid waste. Without infantry occupation, it leaves those that manage to somehow remain living in the zone in abject poverty but still randomly in the fight. In these enclaves, the defenders are subject to constant threat and intermittent terror attacks. These zones become too dangerous to report from and regions for the plausible denial of the various Putinesqe atrocities such as chemical weapons use; even extermination drives become ‘expected’. The Putin method is to establish what is then recognized as nothing less than a free-fire zone! The fascists then kill who they want when they want or can.

We have seen this process play out over many years in Syria. Vast tracts of territory were cleared by the barrel bombing of everything that sustains civilian life. Medical facilities, breadlines all are vulnerable and systematically attacked, until finally, the troops kill at close quarters as they occupy the territory.

The woke world looked on and after a time it was all normalized especially so after some well respected public intellect would point to the US ‘crime’ of illegally liberating the Iraqi people from Baathism! Then every good liberal can tut tut in unison and note that ‘they all do it’ and are ‘all as bad as each other’; so we see a modern fifth column is in this way working just as effectively as if they were paid to disrupt a useful enquiry into how any legitimate struggle for democracy is ever to be fought and won.

I don’t know the exact numbers but about half the Syrian population has in the course of a decade been displaced. At least half of those were driven out of the country altogether and if it were not for the intervention of a massive Turkish ground force the ‘Putin plan’ would have continued. Turkey the NATO no2 giant did the required job and the ½ theorists can’t even talk about it! Anyway I still do. But I digress.

The strategic purpose of this stage of the Putin plan is to terroristically level all the cities that are part of the currently unknown plan; they will be leveled over time to whatever extent is required to take control of them. The shelling required for that task has now started. So supply lines war is the answer and the Turkish and Israeli drones a big part of the effort. The putin plan is for murder in the countryside and mass refugee flows from the selected cities. Ukraine is going to be brutally ‘forced to sue for peace’.

Putin has real form and he does not play. It turns out he doesn’t really bluff either! The shelling will go on for as long as it takes to get the map looking like and also populated as the tzar of all the russians desires it. Make no mistake, as the fascist supply lines get disrupted and Putin’s demoralized troops get bogged down against a growing resistance to these occupation forces, the use of chemical weapons will come up. At some point we can be sure that he will escalate; he is that predictable! Just look at his form and how people got him wrong again and again!

The first 3 weeks of the resumption of this war was about positioning for the next 30 weeks. By about next September I wonder how Biden’s dementia will have progressed. That’s worth thinking about given who is ‘the leader’ and who’s the alternative leader of the free world! My giddy aunt, just how bad does this get?!

But for now the fascist army of Vlad Putin the Audacious is positioned to start driving the mass of unwanted Ukranians out of the territory that IS according to him in play. The rate they have achieved up to this point is 1,000,000 per week for a grand total of 3million. That rate is far in excess of what can be achieved for the next 10,000,000 that Putin wants to be rid of but he has shown what he has the stomach for and we can all recall the time spans that this takes. Syria has already resulted in more than that number of refugees! The fascists must be extraordinarily pleased with the rate of refugee generation at over 1 million per week when less than a month ago 2 out of 3 Ukrainians didn’t know this war was restarting in a big way!

The western world is now in a similar delusionary drift. I doubt that is true in the front line states of Poland, the Baltic 3 and so forth. The Turks under Erdogan will not be so delusionary! They know why they have all those millions of Syrians that the Europeans never wanted and did fuck all to stop being generated. Thank you mother Merkel for all your failed policies! Anyway we ought to know now that the fight is only starting in Ukraine but because it’s ultimately directed at preventing the spread of democracy it won’t stay there. So western democrats out of nothing more than long term self interest are in this fight and in it to the finish.

Comfortingly for me a majority of western generals I’m now hearing in my wide media wanderings are catching on to what’s at stake in this war and more often as not also beginning to express some measure of confidence in the West’s capacity to eventually prevail. Even the Americans! Consequently in the lower ‘ranks’ of the comentariate the will to fight spirit will soon begin to step over the pile of surrender monkeys of the realist right, pseudoleft and the hopelessly woke that have for virtually the entire 21stC dominated in western mainstream media.

The first problem was the phony pacifism snark complaining that the Western world would fight to the last Ukrainian often followed by the demand for a declaration of war against the Russians and declaring a no fly zone is declaring war! The notion that not only can the west help the unfortunate Ukrainian victims to resist until they eventually have to surrender, is however giving way to the view that the west can more slowly enter the fight and we can and will prevail provided we take the path of protracted war! There is no short term solution and there is nothing other than a military solution. It’s the Russians that want to talk while they terror bomb and drive out refugees. The sheer horror in the notion of surrender to what the MSM are now calling the ‘autocracy’ that is attacking them is what has stopped the rot. The ‘autocrat’ is demanding new maps and setting disarmament conditions while his people are not even in support of his adventure. That’s what it is, adventurism writ loud. He’s got more than enough rope now so I hope I live long enough to see him hang with it.

The west is not yet fit for the fight but at least we know we are in one on both sides of the world and we are capable of winning both!

Belarus en passant as war resumes in Ukraine. Nothing is no longer an option.

A proven anti-viral!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVW2QqHUJUw

Game changer!!  Just the first cab off the coming rank, so the price will drop very quickly.

and possible eradication if…  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bamaEMftg4

where we are now  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt7T-26qQH8
update 2nd cab of the rank!  Paxlovid.  (less than a month) Both treatments are very effective if given in the first few days after testing positive.

All that really remains of this pandemic is to get the world’s people fully vaccinated and treated as required.  Aboriginal leaders (who did so well early on with the shutdowns have self evidently gone missing over the vax rates right across the remote parts of the country.)  These ‘leaders’ are the problem!  Time for some new leaders.

It looks like the 1/2 theorists at 21stC will not be saying much more on this issue either!

https://www.skynews.com.au/business/media/paul-barrys-failure-to-apologise-for-lack-of-journalistic-integrity-shown-by-abc-over-pascoe/video/a97395bd80a2e6e3c7824046fb4dd4e1
Bolt is spot on in this example!

The nature of the 2 party dictatorships across the Anglo world is that luck plays a very big part. It has to be said that were it not for Covid19 Trump would have romped it in, but if my sister had balls…Covid19 was the only thing that stopped Trump from romping it in!

But now a divide and rule situation has arisen in the US.  Whatever was the situation prior to the Capital Hill fiasco, it no longer matters. Disunity is death, is one of the great working maxims to anchor our thinking when pondering what ‘next’ for the Trump show.

If Trump were to run in 2024 then the GOP would not be fit for purpose.  He is still very popular but he also unites the democrats and mobilises the woke.  The GOP is now his party and there is some buyer remorse over Biden who is so clearly suffering from a cognitive disorder that renders him unfit for the job.  The ‘liberal’ mass media are carrying him and it has reached joke level!

But the GOP is now in a state of disunity that’s way past the ‘normal’ bounds of parties being taken over by a different faction or swapping radically different leaders and taking a very different path as a result. It can’t revive with Trump and it probably can’t revive without him so he will have to play kingmaker for the GOP to get anywhere on this cycle -all things being equal and I suppose they won’t be.

If a credible ‘new leader’ were to emerge and Trump swung his supporters behind such a person then the GOP would be fully competitive. On the other hand, if Trump were to take on all comers in the primaries and wipe the floor with them to the point that the party had to put him forward against Harris then even though this election was close and he was well-positioned for another tilt in 2024 it would not now work!

In Australia, Howard was again made leader a ¼ century ago by the Liberal party for a good reason, and he became PM in drovers dog style simply because the voters were going to throw out Keating in 1996! Howard then did a good enough job to win a second term when he took an actual policy to the people in 1998 (and people knew that Keating had also wanted this policy anyway). But then fate stepped in and he became a wartime leader in 2001, (and there were difficult refugee issues) and finally, the people elected him again when the complexity of war got thrown on the table for his fourth electoral win in 2004.

But times up came along and ‘Kevin 07’ saw the end of Howard in a predictable and unavoidable exhaustion of Howard’s luck.

Anyway; Australians saw what a return of disunity meant from both sides when the Howard era ended! The country went through a farcical period of PM swapping Rudd – Gillard – Rudd – Abbott -Turnbull – Morrison; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_Australia_by_time_in_office and we ended the period with Scotty from marketing who is however up against Albanese, and so is IMV despite the best efforts of the ABC / ALP / Greens ‘destined’ to win the next election.

So the ALP is looking for a new hope right now!

President Biden’s inauguration today represents a triumph of hope over fear, of common purpose over division. pic.twitter.com/awMh8ZsrPY

— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) January 20, 2021

Trump got lucky in 2016 and won against a hated alternative who had insulted GOP supporting workers across America as ‘a basket of deplorables’. His luck has however just run out and from his own actions!

It’s only the fact that it is the looming woke madness of Harris and sleepy Joe that is now underway that could even potentially revive him.

The Dems… well they now have at least enough rope to hang themselves with – president sleepy, plus control of both the House and the Senate. So even though they would get a honeymoon period from most swingers and swingers are all that counts in this game, they also have the women’s vote and color card to play to hold the battleground 3 or so states that count.

But the enemy for the GOP is only theoretically the Democrats.

Trump has however by his own mistaken actions -in pushing beyond what was reasonable to end up in the 5 deaths in the Capital Hill fiasco – despite all the other issues involved buried himself past where a revival is now possible! The GOP will not after a few years struggle again unite behind him. It is split.

It’s far too soon to work out what will emerge from this mess with the GOP and the Trump rump and if that reunified effort can win in 2024 but the Obama style rubbish is going for another four year run and Joe despite all the minding by his wife and family is not going to be there in 3 years time! Harris is on the way! So the question of who will win when the fight is X v Harris is wide open -IF- Trump does not split the vote!

But Trump is NOW not going to win in 2024.

*************

Still no sign of sense from the ½ theorists about Syria, Erdogan, Libya, Ukraine or even Nagorno Karabakh and plenty more besides like Brexit!

The MENA notably is off the comment about list of topics and Trump is about all that’s left and there’s not much sense there either!

Covid19 comment has also been a bit silly and even the Premier of NSW makes more sense on reflection.

https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6224016703001

And as I have pointed out this is worth a read.

This is the alternative that has always been worthy of thinking about and as we have seen in Victoria has not been.  The vulnerable must be protected and that is the key question.  We are not all in this together!  Over 60 or overweight etc and you (we) are in this in a big way …shelter from this storm.  Fit and under 60 carry on.

A 1,000 fold risk difference must be taken advantage of.

Turn off the Air conditioners.  Get out in the open.  Wash hands.  Isolate if your over 60.

I’ve been following the work of this Dr (a very experienced nurse educator not MD)for some time and think he’s one of the better examples that’s been steadily working away at getting a real handle on this mind-numbing virus

I must admit that I’m a little more optimistic than he is but with the experience of Trots and ‘Maoists’ and the Melbourne 1/2 theorists over these last 5 years I honestly can’t imagine why other than it’s a personality quirk of mine.

I haven’t had much to record and what I have is still standing up.
This virus does not like the hot humid conditions; it has a seasonal aspect to it; viral load is important, and so on.

My family were involved for many years in nursing homes and I once worked as a nurse in a major nursing home. So I have a bit of understanding of how these places work. I am not at all surprised that Victoria is now a disaster area for these establishments.

As I said elsewhere Andrews is a walking disaster.

This thread is just a place for me to make public some of the links I regularly collect for anyone who would want to use them.

Naturally, I’ve had virtually no respect and not much use for the ABC / BBC or the rest of the MSM for many years but now I barely look or listen to them as other than background noise while I search the net for some credible material.

I do however find myself increasingly suffering Sky news (in the manner of ‘give me an honest right-winger against a pseudoleftist any-day’) as the Oz MSM of first choice.  At least there is an effort to doubt the ALP/Greens/Woke madness and put some form of intellectual opposition on display.  At least the Sky hive mind is a slight improvement on the hive mind propaganda streaming out of the -government funded- alarmist headquarters with their pretense of balance over time etc!

Virus watch

If people are not keeping up with Dr. John Campbell  all I can say is that they ought to!  He’s been talking good sense all through this crazy year.  IMV there is no excuse now for a lack of optimism as death rates are currently tumbling as the treatments often very cost efficient are coming on stream at a rapid rate!

NOTE!

labels for these links done here!

p1    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q5teMsw2h4
The jury is in on Hydroxychloroquine – ‘it saves lives’: Rowan Dean to Bolt

p2    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK4Xm-l0gYA
Coronavirus lockdowns, a good idea says Campbell Sep 9 2020

p3    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5fKWr_Dx1A
Russian Vacine and recent research Sep 5 re 4 studies published 3= Viral load important

p4    https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6188159990001
Sky reports ‘Studies show hydroxychloroquine cuts ‘virus mortality in half in high risk groups’

p5    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8Ks9fUh2k8Vitamin D
Campbell re Vitamin D First clinical trial more positive than I could have imagined! September 6! What gives when the data is so clear!

p6    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZRUq3Igf-k
Immunity and vaccine optimism sep 8

p7    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-oQI2RoXPI
Pandemic Science, Vaccines soon Sep 2

p8    https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6188680157001
Kenny Melbourne GP says Ivermectin treatment is ‘very effective’ Sep 8

But what is to be done?

p9  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XE5FVEzz-U

Turkey watch

p10    https://www.dw.com/en/turkey-threatens-greece-over-disputed-mediterranean-territorial-claims/a-54828554

Bolt watch

p11    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H957CJPmRXI

Climate watch

p12    https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2020/09/climate-trials/

P13    https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6188418470001

P14    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPoGoXhFL2E

P15    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dbjo47fUxRM

Barry recently published a reminiscence about his 1971 trip to China that I very much enjoyed reading.

Nevertheless the following paragraph struck me as just the sort of thinking that people used to get away with in the sheltered land of communist youth groups and perhaps such thinking is still lingering with Barry.

‘3. Who needs a Navy? I’ll never forget meeting with party cadres and discussing the military threats to China from the Soviet social-imperialists (the Ussuri River border being a dangerous hot spot where fighting had broken out in 1969) and from the US imperialists in Indo-China and the Pacific. We were told that China’s military strategy was entirely defensive and based on the Peoples Liberation Army and civil defense. My ears pricked up when mention was made of a coastal naval defense force. I asked, “Why doesn’t China have a conventional Navy – why just a small coastal guard?” The reply, which I’ll never forget, was that “China does not need a Navy because we have no intention of expanding our interests beyond China. We shall never become imperialist! Only imperialists need a large powerful Navy!”’

So now that China has a vast blue water navy and is so obviously a blatantly vicious imperialism Barry recalls the statement and it becomes a sort of ‘ah ha’ moment for him about what the attitude of revolutionary China was in comparison! But it’s clearly not so simple. (I may have misunderstood where Barry was going with this thinking, but it’s worth teasing out…especially given how we fell out so completely over Putin turning up in Syria and what it would mean to the democratic revolution! Having got it completely wrong Barry has never managed to backtrack through the issue, so I’m not hopeful.)

But that statement from the Chinese side was silly at face value. That is to say even at the time it was made it was silly! People that didn’t spot or face up to this type of statement as just a foolish ‘propaganda’ style explanation all those years back might want to think again now. If you can’t spot either the self serving duplicity or actual naivety involved then you might be vulnerable to similar thinking. That’s one thing for a young person but I’d have to question the worth of the wisdom growing years in between if such a view is persisted with now.

So am I building a straw man? I hope so in the narrow sense; but in the broader sense definitely not. The style of thinking involved here is spread right through the progressive element that I have known over the decades. These are people who are not outright pseudoleftists, but are drifting, or have long ago drifted to the methods of the cancel culture and who now – with perhaps the excuse of ‘good’ manners regularly operate on silence when they know full well they ought to speak up. They live a pretence that they as individuals are scientifically minded and open to debate when they are nothing like involved in the search for understanding. They long ago stopped operating in the manner Mao advocated in combat liberalism so that ‘open honest and above board’ is just an old slogan they might remember, but it has no effect, no substance in their current world.

After Putin signed up to some comforting words about democracy and elections in Syria half theorists – who were people that used to regularly post or comment at Strangetimes – totally abandoned the Strangetimes project. In never walking this issue back they demonstrated that they most certainly are vulnerable to a delusionary drift.

Lately we have had the anti Erdogan claptrap from Tom G and silence from all the others who know full well that it is claptrap! Or they ought to! Who can tell with the silence! If based on any draining of the swamp theory then Tom G’s view has no connection to a democratic revolutionary’s standpoint but who can tell with such people. Silence. Cancel culture. Talk to themselves. Drift…

This Chinese blather from 50 years ago is not the sort of thinking that could sink the Bismarck and of course the Bismarck had to be sunk! I don’t think you would get the leftist child of a WW2 sailor making such a comment! But then who would think that someone from Malta could accept such twaddle either. Yet…

Chinese ‘red’ blather was never the sort of thinking that could have occurred to the American revolutionaries like Jefferson. He immediately built a blue water navy to deal with the Barbary pirates. From the very beginning of that revolutionary country the navy was integral to its survival as a beacon for revolution.

Whatever line was being pushed in 1970, in reality Mao would not have accepted such blather any more than Zhou En Lai. (Both had lived through WW2 and both had watched Battleship Potemkin.) China was too poor to build a big blue water navy at the time so it just didn’t matter! China did however build an atom bomb; and they built their bomb despite the Mao stand that atom bombs were in the final analysis ‘paper tigers’! Building of Atom bombs was something that the young communists of the time managed to rationalize and I for one would be keen to learn how those that did so argued about it.

Singers of the Internationale can’t forget seafarers! Shipping is the reality of globalists. The Internationale can’t be sung by anti shipping land-lubbers with ‘a coastal navy’ and make any sense.

In the past, even the suppression of slavery by the British navy would become someone else’s job with this type of no blue water navy thinking! On its face this is rubbish where Japan’s WW2 navy disappears in a puff. It’s ‘other people’s job to deal with that’ is the consequence of this style of thinking. Proletarians have a world to win and we crew big ships that we build and fill and consume the contents of. We are not the slightest bit interested in ‘food miles’ nor with small is beautiful thinking.

Simply speaking the democratic revolution does not go global from the start so revolutionaries do have naval issues to consider! The communist revolution is not yet in sight.

Despite appearances created by the current victories of revisionists, genuine communists are the cutting edge of the democratic revolution, and we are very interested in the navy. In 2020 when there are still no revolutionary countries in some kind of socialist camp to bother us, piracy still creates a stupid thought pattern among pseudoleftists.

Workers crew ships full of cargo, yet are supposed to be left to fend for themselves while these so-called ‘lefties’ condemn the big ships and the multi-national transport conglomerates as well! The greenies even try to stop the coal and other fossil fuels being shipped to save the planet no less. Just consider the green scaremongering when a bulk carrier ran aground the other day! Totally pathetic scaremongering of a very minor mistake made by careless workers. The ship’s crew were responsible for the loss of that bulk carrier. The workers stuffed up!

Of course Barry gets the stupidity of a stand that leaves seafarers at the mercy of pirates, but he might be a bit weak on just how you deal with pirates! I don’t know. I do know the ½ theorists are totally weak on Turkey and the PKK issue. The Mediterranean and MENA issue have just drifted away over these 5 years!

This type of soft thinking from 50 years ago jumps up to bite almost everyone with a leftist disposition when it comes to people sloshing around the world as refugees. The vexed issue of refugees brings on more silence. Not just people being bombed into sloshing around by the current crop of fascists led by the audacious Putin either.

We know there are 3.6 million of these people sheltering under Erdogan’s protection in Turkey and as many more protected by the Turkish army in Syrian enclaves! I suppose 3-400,000 Syrians made it to the safety of the west! The lucky ones who are enjoying the good life! But Putin’s policy was to continue the Assad policy of creating refugees. They had policies of attacking hospitals and making lots more refugees; so what is to be done? Put in troops to resist him and shoot down his aircraft if they come near that is what a modern mechanized army can do. That is what the Turks are positioned to do. That is how the world must deal with Putin’s refugee making policies. That is how Erdogan is dealing with the issue.

The other far more humble entrepreneurial type people smugglers who just know what they want and have the get up and go to go and get it are also audacious in their own way. But are they the solution to the peoples problems? NO and that is obviously so.

Open the borders, let the people of the world roam free is the -quite frankly- dishonest or dim witted easy answer that neither Zhou En Lai nor Mao were themselves prepared to countenance in their day. These real revolutionary leaders faced up to their responsibilities of leading almost ¼ of humanity. They never took charge of China just to issue such a declaration of ‘freedom’. They did exactly the opposite. What is more everybody knows they did and so everybody can see the giant double standard that ½ theorists carry. Stay at your post was the order in China. Do not flood the cities but urbanization was required and proceeded in a measured kind of way. Mao did not betray the peasants or just use them and move on. The historical tasks were not avoided by policies of silence either. China had to be functioning as well as changing as rapidly as possible. What was possible was always at issue but make yourself useful was never in doubt! So those seeking the easy life are simply not first priority when the real problem is millions in poverty.

Being bombed by the fascists to the point where there is for them no alternative but to run to save their lives is one thing. Having for example made it to Turkey ought Turkey shuffle them on to Sweden? Ought all the doctors go to live in Paris? How about all the engineers? Will the emptying countries be left with the old and no one to care for them as parts of many countries actually develop right now?

So to recap. September 2015 was when the Russians turned up with aircraft in Syria! The now silent Australian communists post no current content on what is now several years of important developments in the MENA region. Indeed some comments from as little as a couple of years ago were nothing more than a doubling down on the previous foolishness! We are now about to enter the sixth year after the intervention and Arthur retained his thinking from the last months of 2015 that reality had shattered with Russian barrel bombs in the first 6 months. Since then not much for me to even bother to reply to. I poke a stick at them every now and then, but the corpse doesn’t stir!

Silence from reds is nothing less than a disgrace! If people are to contribute to the world wide people’s revolution that all manner of progressive people and the all important industrial proletariat is interested in, it does matter what ‘we’ theorists think even if revolutionary minded people currently control almost nothing at all.

Big problems requiring revolutionary solutions are in the here and now! No involvement in the political struggle, no involvement in the economic struggle and no involvement in the theoretical struggle is just no involvement at all!

Revolutionary states will maintain blue water naval forces long into the future!

Apparently it’s all a bit of a Minsk up!
‘The crisis in Belarus has developed at a scorching pace and some analysts said Putin had misjudged the momentum of the protests.
“Putin has been surprised, perhaps no less than Lukashenko himself, about what’s happened,” said Gould-Davis. “And they don’t know how to effectively respond to a rapidly changing and inherently unpredictable situation. No one does. But they will want to control it.”’ Duh!

Lukashenko has been on the phone to Putin and in desperation would have said something like; ‘If I go, who do you think will be the next cab off the rank Vlad?’  But that logic won’t impress Vlad the audacious!  Anyway a TINA moment has arrived for Vlad or -as he sees this- him on behalf of Mother Russia no less.

A week after the phony elections and the unrest is now peacefully growing but the police after just one death of a demonstrator -from their brutality- have eased up and clearly they are unable to stop the large scale milling around that will now – in the grand tradition of such struggles- become a daily feature of Minsk life as the main square or something has to be occupied immediately.

It may look to the police a bit like visions of the old East German police and look what became of them!  They might not see this as a good bet to stay out of jail themselves now.

Lukashenko is clearly finished if the demonstrators press their advantage now!  The only thing that could keep him going for even a couple of weeks is a lack of immediate action to send him on his way!

Lukashenko is gone but not in the way that Assad was ‘gone’!

BBC reports from Moscow say Lukashenko is seen by Russian insiders as ‘a dead man walking’ and that seems reasonable enough to me so I wonder why he was congratulated for his ‘win’.  Vlad and Jinping, just last week congratulated Lukashenko on his ‘win’.  That was a stupid blunder!  Silence was a no brainer!  What do they look like to the people of Belarus now!   Not pretty!

This is now an inevitable turn to the west and a link to the peoples of the Baltics and Ukraine.

So this week all is apparently forgiven from the recent arrests of Russian mercenaries; whatever that was all about.

The world is starkly divided with such idiocy on full display.   Previous generations just didn’t hold such elections in the first place!  That old form of tyranny makes a bit more sense to me than this farce and that is what it is.  Anti democrats of the world unite because you have empires to lose!  So just as Jinping is reacting to Hong Kong so will Putin react to his ‘territory’ Belarus!  Putin really believes that territory is Russian!  He is not going to bow out of this contest.  That is not the nature of the little Czar.

Yet there is much more than a little truth in this;  ‘While monitoring Belarus closely and discouraging further state violence, U.S. and EU policymakers must start preparing for the potentially much more devastating flashpoint that is Russia. No dictatorship is permanent, and in reaching for an outer empire in Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, Moscow’s inner empire could start to crumble.’ 

Like everyone else I’ve watched the slow train from Minsk for the last few weeks and so far… no surprises!  The week after another election has been blatantly stolen by Lukashenko (as he has done often enough before) and naturally his police state thugs were out beating and arresting anyone who objected.  Calling a clear and big election win a gigantic loss is bound to deliver a mass turnout on the streets so they had quite a few to put in the slammer and it just got bigger.  But his thug state is only going to hold together for a couple of weeks because the rally’s are just not big and angry enough.. just yet.  But events are moving to fast for either tyrant now that me thinks this is starting to get a bit of the Nicolae Ceaușescu feel about it!

So curiously  the ½ theory makes some sense in this instance but why not?  After all, I have always half thought along the lines of the half theorists!

‘Andrej Babiš, the prime minister of the Czech Republic, tweeted on Sunday: “What happened to us in 1968 must not happen in Belarus. The European Union must act.”’ I wonder what he thinks they will do exactly.  They will undoubtedly offer a great deal of revolutionary advice!  That will start by;  ‘keep up the pressure’, ‘keep the masses on the streets’; all the Lenin and Mao stuff for sure!

There has been an election and this can now only be resolved in a hand over to the real winner; for an eventual re-run under proper free and fair conditions and thus for her husband a very probable 2nd win.

Putin is scrambling because there is no legitimate candidate for him.  This is a country that has to go western and that does not fit Putin’s plans in any shape.  The new leadership won’t be any ‘worker’ politicians or Marxist types that’s for sure!  This struggle is for western style democracy in the same manner as the Iberian peninsular in the seventies but it’s without a workable future!  The resolution of this one simple democracy issue is whatever else it is economically doomed from day1.  It will fix nothing of the peoples livelihood issues.  Capitalism is not capable of fixing the current crisis in Belarus. Putin might have to play the long game to get back in to Belarus but I can’t see that working.

Will a big Russian meddling work and Belarus settle down for decades like a 1968 Russian intervention in Czechoslovakia?  Of course not and Putin can’t believe that it would.

On the other hand what else can he do other than meddle?  He might ask his advisors the difficult question ‘Does anyone have an alternative?’  He could be met with silence and a perception of TINA resolves a lot of issues for tyrants.  Let’s see what turns up might be the shrug of shoulders casting of the die.

The more probable course is a stall in the democratic struggle after a short term hand over and then a much more bloody building-up period being required to even get to the first stage of freedom from the gangster rule.  If the army cracks all bets are off. Here’s hoping of course!

So TINA for Russian meddling at some point!

The Russians are making all manner of noises that will either end in some kind of meddling -for the sake of law and order- or the beginning of the end for Putin will have started.

Anita’s aunt lived in a small country town in South Australia. About a fortnight ago the family in Adelaide were contacted with the news that she was going downhill fast and that they had better come and visit; so Anita and her mother did.  Aunty was very frail but they had a nice visit. Two weeks later she was dead of pneumonia, aged 90.

Aunty’s death highlights that every day of our short lives we live in a bug soup world.  In the last few days of her life her body could not fight off any bugs at all as her immune system was failing with all the other systems. In the end, as many of us do go, an elderly woman was taken out by one of these bugs.  Taken out 2 months after moving to the nursing home.

Of course nobody was surprised and nothing much could have realistically been done to prolong her life, nor did she want to.  Of course she could have been taken to an even ‘more germ free environment’ and been given more antibiotics while barrier nursed and she may still have lived to next week or the week after; but the point that I’m making is clear; she was in one of ‘God’s waiting rooms’ for a reason; just like those of us who will be lucky enough to live long enough to follow her.  On the other hand there are plenty of us that would hope to not quite make that move and instead (perhaps with just a little extra help in our last few years) shuffle off just prior to that short stay.

So here’s the drum.   All the authorities that are running this covid19 response and those that are running the ABC/SBS scare-machines have IMV got it fundamentally wrong and that ought not surprise anyone.  It’s not just Dan Andrews who is as wrong on this as he is on the litany of issues that make woke people what they are; it’s a case of ‘Wrong Way, Go Back’ for the lot of them!  Here is Peta Credlin on the Victorian cock-up and Dan’s refusal to answer questions.  https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6178312566001

Sure the second bad result in Victoria was after Andrews had fumbled with the hotels and was busy dodging his responsibility for that stuff-up with the quarantine security.  But all along all the politicians in power in Australia have been looking the wrong way.

Dan’s approval drops from 65% to 49% and is still falling but the problem is country wide.  They are all following muddle headed policies.  This far out and the one thing that is clear is that Dan will not survive as Premier for or at any rate after the next election 27 long months away.  The Victorians have fixed terms.

Andrews has been too preoccupied to be critically or creatively thinking about what next, or making any reassessment of what path was adopted.  But none of them were or are.  Unlike the Swedes the people were not being trusted nor properly worked with; they were just being ordered around by the 2 party state authorities and ‘medical experts’ who the politicians are blindly following, and who are, in Australia, apparently all still in lock step and consequently forcing the people to find the alternate views on what to do from their own research efforts!

Only now -perhaps- are the ranks of the authorities starting to break! Only now ‘the little grey cells’ are stirring.

All along there was an alternative. The Emperor has in this case, almost no clothes. The political class that have been getting issues wrong for years are simply wrong again! But they are so heavily invested in their views and consequent actions despite them being devastating fails, that they are completely deaf to reason. They are quite unable to doubt themselves in any effective manner. They have brought on an economic disaster, and people in their millions in a great many countries are now going to be forced into thinking.

I think we have now reached a hide tide of woke madness. I conclude this because the woke can’t fix what they’ve just smashed! The ruling elites have stuffed up big time so TINA… the peoples’ across the world are going to have to fix this one!

In essence Sweden was and is correct! That’s despite the Swedes not being able to protect their most vulnerable EITHER; their overall methods were sound. Their societal structure is more like the Netherlands and the results they obtained were not that different from any of the comparable countries.

They have not done as well as the Netherlands as yet, (and the smart money would be on a vaccine now so that would be game set match) but it’s still far too soon to tell what the real end result of this is going to be.  In the end there will be all manner of deaths that have to be properly accounted for and it might turn out closer than it currently looks.

Most importantly the Swedish authorities accept and are dealing with their failures and that is refreshing; their opponents in countries like Australia have not, and with their world view cannot accept theirs! On the contrary, at this stage they are doubling down!  The vaccine and the always developing better treatments might save them or at least appear to.

The Swedes continue to rethink what they are doing, without accepting that what is being done elsewhere is in any way better than what their public policy has managed. The ‘normal’ deaths from the conditions for their ‘flu’ season was expected to be about 2,000, and it has now on August 7 (after what they accept is a very bad run) risen to 5,760 for this corona-19 enhanced viral or ‘flu’ season. That is a better way to think about the issue because it’s really an issue about deaths above usual and authorities are obliged to think about what is happening with THESE numbers.

A case of all lives matter but when you are living in God’s waiting rooms all manner of the normal bug soup we exist in will knock us off our, ‘ever thinning, pedestals.’

Disregarding the anomalous inclusions of San Marino, Andorra and Sint Maarten, Sweden is actually number 6 in deaths per million, but the more you test the more you find and that has produced some interesting results to ponder about;

Here is Sweden a couple of days apart and we can both see issues with the data but also note that critical cases are low and still falling!

649 more cases 3 deaths and no increase in critical numbers.   The death rate from cases is now falling and that is not apparent to Australians.  Treatments are producing better results as well.

This is the Swedish deaths age profile.

6 Sweden  population 10,106,111

Sample 4  (11thAug)   82,972 cases  5,766 deaths 

recovered N/A  active N/A   critical 34 cases p mil 8,210

death pmill 571   total tests 863,315   t pmil 85,425

Sample 3  (8thAug)   82,323 5,763

N/A N/A 34 8,146 570 863,315 85,425

Sample 2 (?)    81,967 5,766

N/A N/A 38 8,111 571 863,315 85,429
Sample 1  (?)   81,540 5,760

N/A N/A 41 8,069 570 863,315 85,431

What about the country they would like to be compared to?
Netherlands   population   17,138,756

56,982    6,153

N/A N/A   37   3,325   359    1,079,860   63,007

So far the Dutch who have tested less per mil are well ahead of the Swedes who are well ahead of the Belgians and the Brits for example.  But this is still playing out.  And the rate of deaths per cases are a different matter!  Why so starkly different?

Sweden             82,972  cases    5,766  deaths 

Netherlands   56,982   cases    6,153  deaths

on top of that here we are days later (14 August) and the numbers have gone up in Sweden by 880 cases and 4 deaths but in Netherlands 4222 and 12 deaths!  So the gap closes a tiny bit.

Sweden  1 dead : for every 1751.5 people V  1:2780  for Netherlands

1028.5 people!

Thankfully, the rapid improvements in treatments and the probable success of a vaccine in the very near future suggests that this gap will not close.  What that will work out in average years lost will be very interesting and especially so when then compared to other deaths that must be also accounted for.

Now just as Trump tried to tell the Trump deaf media that the more you test the more you find, (my little spread sheet), and that this is an important point to think about when cases range from no symptoms to death in days; let’s now think about this regardless of who reminded us to do so.

Why are some countries so deadly in their ratio of deaths to total case numbers? Countries like Mexico are just not testing all those non and mildly symptomatic people that Australia and the US for examples are.

Perhaps an intellectual fightback against what is now a manifest stupidity in public health care policies is starting to crank up?

Here are 9 links that people may want to review starting with the 2 researchers in evidence based medicine..

‘Must be motivated by hatred!’ ‘The cruel negligence of the lockdown’, with Dr John Lee. BRAVO!

****************************  End

May as well post this as well… Followed by week 2…and expose others on Monday; expose more on Tuesday, etc.. Yet, in Dan Andrews land, this simple concept was not routinely stamped into the consciousness of every person that turned up for testing! If you went for testing you must have suspected your health. So you must then quarantine UNTIL you get the all clear in a couple of days. And if you get a positive result the period extends. Simple.

It seems to me that the only people that really ‘got it’ in Australia were the Aboriginal leaders who understood that their already isolated communities were full of vulnerable people and that they would lose quite a few if they did not shut the world out! Only supplies were allowed in, not people. They still understand just how vulnerable their communities are. They took firm action and it worked and will continue to for as long as they carry on with it.

This isolation procedure has to somehow work for the vulnerable non isolated town and those in the cities and that last category is where it’s difficult to believe that it can! The elderly who are still living at home and caring for themselves can clearly make it work. It may seem like quite a bit of effort but it’s clearly worth it to make a reasonable attempt at isolation. It seems to me that the well and otherwise healthy elderly and the wealthy in particular have no excuse for not staying isolated. And those that require a bit of help like Meals on Wheels recipients can expect that good procedures have or can be implemented that can give them a fighting chance to still be isolated. But those procedures must be audited.

The missing method in all of this is to appoint someone to do the task and another to check that the task is really being done. People ought to have been designated from the start whose 1 task was to deliberately try to point out the holes in all actions that were underway before the new cases made a ‘hole’ self evident.

As for the nursing homes right across the country NOBODY had a clue what to do and though they are attempting to do barrier nursing NOW it will not work in any long term sense!

Meanwhile the country has been shattered and the just as real but unseen deaths are piling ever higher!

Those that ran the testing in Victoria dropped that ball, just as those who were running the quarantine hotels for returning travelers dropped the one ball they had! Dan Andrews was ultimately running both programs and he couldn’t even get that 2nd message (simple testing and a 3 day quarantine) right.He didn’t have a soldier at the service of a dozen or so of the potentially infectious individuals.

These people had to stay put till the results came a few days later, when most would get the all clear and safely go their way! Whatever was the practical number of short term quarantining people would be effectively served by each soldier. (to ensure they got what they needed etc.) It ought to have been worked out and delivered day 1, it is being done now after the failure BUT it was a predictable action from the start.

Those who got the bad news of a positive result would have to start on the second quarantining period with all of the complications of their various living conditions to be sorted out immediately. These people had either to be quarantined where they were or if that was impractical because of others in their home etc., taken off to a quarantine station/medi-hotel, until they tested negative! Obviously, the very few who then actually did get sick or sicker would just have to progress through the healthcare system till they either got better or died. All of this is such basic stuff that it is astounding how grossly incompetent was the Andrews government..

But even after people got sick enough for a hospital admission they ought never have been taken into a general and multi story hospital with this air borne infection. Emergency isolation hospitals as we had for infectious diseases in the past ought to have been re-activated. Instead the medico’s were wrongly focussed on ICU’s and ventilator machines, and they were never really the issue! Seperate ICU’s ought to have been developed as well. There was a mass hysteria, and a vast over reaction about ventilators was the case even in New York! We all ought to know this and yet months later most people are not thinking about why this happened nor what went wrong next. There was what amounts to a massive misdiagnosis. The experts were stampeding and the ABC type media compounding the problem. Even now as death rates from the hospitalised steadily fall this good news is being missed completely in the woke media.

All of the above control measures are straight forward and well understood quarantine procedures! But not in Victoria under Andrews. Instead Dan was the most ‘woke’, of all our alarmed ‘leaders’ following ‘the science’!! This premier had army people out strolling around with his idiot police force bullying people instead of being in anyway useful! Dan proved to be the biggest idiot bully of them all and he’s up against stiff competition.

Some earlier comments by date from Taiwan thread cartoon and other stuff in the copy here…

Biden https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6179743756001 he can ride a bike! I think that’s quite deliberate hiding in plain sight! Probably the last thing you would forget and he gets through yet another day! And then there is Trump! God and guns! Oh boy this is the leadership of the ‘free world’ no less!

PBS Newshour this week put on Dr Jill Biden with the excuse to talk about her book! NOT interviewing Joe (who is so obviously under wraps) but the wife! The softest interview imaginable! Just a cheer squad! All about how wonderful Joe is and how he is all go go go! So many plans so little time in the day!

Biden is undoubtedly suffering some cognitive issues and it’s perfectly clear that he’s unfit to be POTUS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVDo3BY190Q But there is also no doubt that’s perfectly clear to leading democrats so the question is why is this farce continuing? The democrats have got themselves in this mess because of a ‘we must stop Burnie Sanders’ problem. They could not demand Biden step down months ago because Bernie would have then tried to step up as the 2nd place getter. Even if he didn’t the Bernie followers would be ropeable and unpredictable to the point of perhaps wrecking democrat hopes.

So Biden had to be kept going till either just a couple of months out from the election (a real October surprise) or if he can win then perhaps just a few months after! It’s just that no one collection of party insiders have been able to control this process! The insiders of the party are horror struck that he has gone down hill this fast but he has and this is a typical case of how most stuff ups slowly develop. It was worse than they thought!

The VP is now the great hope and that’s why they are delaying this announcement! The announcement was going to be in the first week in August but it’s been put off till next week and the days tick by. With every day that passes the election is 1 day closer! It’s as simple as that. The fact that Biden is mentally unfit is just not going to stop the democrats from putting him forward nor what is more will it stop him being elected. Everything now is about delay.

Looks like it will be Harris and if it is then this is who they expect will be the Potus within months of Biden being sworn in. He is that far along now that a yr in the role seems far fetched to me even with the example of Regan to demonstrate how it actually can be done.

Biden can’t debate Trump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVDo3BY190Q so IMV they will find an excuse for not doing so OR perhaps only doing it once or something just as silly. They might say that Trump is just too insulting with his adverts and so on to bother to debate. Who knows.

Will Obama get Michele up as Bidens VP? No…but it must have been run through the focus group type studies. I just can’t imagine it as a serious proposal but look where the world is! So even as silly as this thought is I have to say; possibly! It’s all so unbelievable but true!

Not long now and they will have to tell who is this most important VP since Truman or even Johnson!

Who knows what will unfold but Trump policy wise is undoubtedly a better bet than the Dems and Trump is a shocker!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp_Uuz9k7Os this guy thinks Trump will win
Or
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHiczDwhYZk ah Corey..

Why BLM in US was coming for the statues!

Oh well. Here is an update
https://apnews.com/article/robert-e-lee-statue-virginia-removed-92955a351d9fda6319f379ddc28df8a0

HIRISE, is my acronym for the loose ‘coalition’ of forces from Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, Iraqi Shia militias, Syrians still backing Assad, and Egypt that have collectively kept the Assad regime going, and that control various parts of what used to be Syria.
****

The ‘new’ HIRISE developments in Libya point to the spread of the complex region wide wars that are now a permanent state in our current era of a slow-motion great depression.

Egyptian thug ruler Sisi has just threatened to intervene if the Libyan government continue their offensive saying “Sirte and Jufra are the red line.” so naturally there has been a response from the Libyan government

I don’t think a major war is imminent but if a major war eventually breaks out, after the years of slaughter in Syria, it wouldn’t surprise many in the region. I wonder how many Marxists it would surprise?

No doubt ½ theorists are all aware that penniless Putin-not-quite-Tsar of all the Russians, has sent a small ‘mercenary’ (Wagner group) air force contingent to a Libyan base and that those aircraft have overflown Sirte.

Then a couple of days ago the Egyptian coup leader Sisi declared this Jufra air base right at the center of Libya part of his ‘red line’ Club Med Protectorate.  This coalition of the willing anti-democrats includes the UAE as a banker for the project and has both Saudi and even French support. This coalition is defying the UN arms embargo, and the UN recognized government, protected as it is by Turkey (supported by Italy).

Having lost the fight for the whole of Libya another enclave ‘solution’ is being established with a foundation of Russian air power. The inland air base and the city of Sirte on the coast splits the country. Libya is currently being broken into chunks -like Syria, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine have been from previous renditions of the Putin playbook.

Putin obviously has a belief in Russian ‘greatness’ and the basic method of war fighting that made it a great power.  Peter, Catherine even Stalin and now Putin apparently.  Grab and hold territory seems to be about as crude as it gets. He knows how the territory he controls was historically established; looks like he didn’t get the memo about this being the 21st century.  But I suppose he could reason that if it’s good enough for Israel to annex other people’s land…

In the 21stC, long after it was well known that nation’s want liberation and ‘countries want independence’, the democratic revolution for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is being vigorously resisted by the fascists in a peculiar new COW.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and the UAE have got on board with Russia and Egypt and at the same time have backed right off in the case of Syria.  The KSA having threatened the country of Qatar (that was then granted complete protection by the Turks as a response) and then after murdering Khashoggi in Turkey have fallen out with Turkey completely.  They know that Turkey is serious about bringing their own system -democracy- to Syria.  The ruling elite of the KSA and UAE know what’s in their interests and it’s not democracy.   Wahhabi extremism is however being wound back in the UAE and the KSA.  Even as the hated Shia are still being targeted in the northern parts of the country and down in Yemen.

Predictably, the currently in power cliques are fighting back so that gangster-ism is preserved in these countries just as it is being extended or more accurately deepened across the world in places like Hong Kong.  ‘All political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’

Push is at shove and western leadership is not up to the task of effectively resisting the gangster regimes, so western interests that actually start with the spread of the democratic revolution are and will continue to suffer. The ‘west’ is a headless chook and sanctions are virtually all the current western ruling elites are using to push back.  Like a Maginot line policy, it can’t work!  The US military sits brooding on the sidelines while the enemy flaunts their interventions and simultaneous shameless denials.

Putin started his rule by turning the Chechen capital of Grozny to rubble; and then running the whole region as a gangster region. He couldn’t hold all of the Ukraine so he simply invaded and took what ‘Russian sectors’ he could get hold of. He did the same earlier with Georgia when the Georgians wanted to stop gangsters operating in their country. It’s what he has done in Syria where he has run up against an immovable opponent in democratic Turkey. Putin can’t put in the effort that the democratic Turks can and do, so thankfully, this ‘problem’ of the democracy seeking Syrian peoples -now with a people’s army backstopped by Turkey- won’t go away.

Putin can and does make sure that they do have to put in that huge effort for every square kilometre.

Putin thinks he’s a world scale map maker. He isn’t. He’s a slow acting poison that’s destroying the Russian economy. He makes enemies on every border and he has distant but unstable ‘friends’.

Eventually, Europe will have to accept the price that must be paid for it’s clear self interest and effectively help Turkey as it continues pushing back against Russia. Eventually, so the theory goes, no respectable country will do business with the Russians and a repeat of the collapse of the USSR will unfold. But how long that takes is an unknown known.

How many ‘non-respectable’ countries will do the required business is a relevant factor. How long can the fascists in countries like Egypt and Iran keep their people terrorized and prevent them achieving democratic norms?  Democratic revolution for the MENA is underway and will not be stopped because draining this swamp is the big picture. Syria has shown the world what preventing democracy looks like and does so is a direct comparison to the US enabling democracy in Iraq by destroying just the mechanized aspect of the Baathist army.  That revolutionary destruction still left the vast bulk of the trained human element of that fascist army still around for the untrained Iraqi masses to take on over a protracted period of war.  There had not been the years of systematic fighting comparable to the annihilation of the Nazi troops in WW2 and of course there had to be.  These fighters were not just going to vanish.  BUT the Iraqi peoples could now realistically deal with them and they did!  All through this period the rotten western liberals lamented the new conditions in Iraq.  Lamented the terrible mistake of this war of liberation!  We can all see the price that dealing with these fascists cost in an inescapable war that democrats must wage and we can all see the comparison with not destroying the mechanized element as Obama who agrees with Trump demonstrated to the world in Syria!

Jump to 2020 and ‘In late May, USAFRICOM reported that at least 14 MiG-29s and several Su-24s were flown from Russia to Syria, their Russian markings were painted over to camouflage their Russian origin! These aircraft were then flown into Libya in direct violation of the United Nations arms embargo.’ https://www.africom.mil/pressrelease/32941/new-evidence-of-russian-aircraft-active-in-li

This is a textbook Russian deployment to oppose democracy. These airplanes are more than ‘ trip wire’ platforms and they will be at work soon enough killing any advancing revolutionaries. The Russian and the Egyptian fascists know they will be fighting ‘soon’. When they eventually start their attacks the danger of a clash with the Turks-or the US-is very real. So they would rather win by bluff.  This is push and shove enclave building! But if something does go wrong what then? Would this spread a consequence back to Syria? Who knows.  Often enough ‘from little things big things grow’ so we’ll all watch this space with more than just a little interest.

I for one hope something does ‘go wrong’ because it’s better to fight now than to let the Russians and the Egyptians take over half of Libya (and the oil rich half at that).

It seems that the Turkish ‘push’ in defense of democracy has brought on the anti-democratic shove back and the big picture for the MENA is all moving along as not much more than another front to the Syrian adventure for Russia. All just another logical step for the Russian military adventurers. But in 2020 NATO is split and the US is openly in LA LA land with a self obsessed POTUS. The prize for Russia could be seen or imagined to be potentially very big and the UAE and even the KSA is footing the bill no less. That thinking is a total illusion but look at the track record of Russian war making since Putin took charge. His type rather obviously sees the world very differently than I do.

At this point (4 years into the ‘Wagner’ meddling in Libya) it resembles a rerun of the Syrian play of almost 5 years ago. So it looks like Putin is a reasonably predictable gangster and this time he has huge numbers of allied ‘infantry’ from Egypt ready to occupy. This time Russia is fully backed by the neighborhood power who has made everything crystal clear. This time it ALSO includes the KSA and the UAE and has French and even some US support -sort of- yet it’s almost the same beast that has turned vast amounts of built Syria to rubble.  Russia is still central to the whole coalition project. Russia is a massive arms dealer!  What could be better than another display and the constant rat-a-tat use of the expensive ammo?  Not to mention some blood for the oil that Libya is full of, and boy are the Russian and Egyptians keen on that black ‘gold’.

It’s not really a major escalation to this part of this region’s wars at all. It’s as predictable as reminding everyone that Sisi and Putin are world class gangsters. It very effectively lays a godfather’s claim to dominating not just ½ the country of Libya but as time goes on it must be expected to build and eventually present a size 14 footprint in Africa where Russia is already, according to a US report ‘… the number one arms dealer
in Africa. Russia continues to profit from violence and instability across the continent. Russian government backed PMCs, such as the Wagner Group, are active in sixteen countries across Africa. It is estimated that there are about 2,000 Wagner Group personnel in Libya.

These Russian aircraft are being run by so-called mercenaries! Please…the Russian state even orders the murder of people on the streets of England! They have given the US a chance with silly denial to go to war against ‘mercenaries’ but they are dealing with Obama’s replacement, so that is no problem for them. The Russians will get away with this! The Club Med stop over in Syria now has a further purpose for transit movements even further south.

Now you would expect that if say Bolton, were POTUS, he would crush this move right now but HE was on the wrong horse from where he would have had to back flip, and anyway despite Bolton’s errors, alas Trump is POTUS. Macron and Trump! How bad can this get? The world still has 6 months of this farce and then we get Joe Alzheimer!

Speaking of Joe, why NOT select Michelle Obama for VP, and let Mr Charming loose on the Corona restrained campaign trail? After all Bill and Hillary almost pulled it off and there is this big Black Lives Matter movement to exploit. Every 4 years like clockwork, out comes the Democrat race card and they have played it early this time. Now given how much I despise his 8 long years of ‘anti-war’ Syria policies – of turning away from mass murder- I can’t say I’m keen for another dose in the form of Bumbling Joe and Mrs O. I am however fully prepared for it.

2 years into his term Joe Biden might even hand over the baton! Reagan didn’t though and they got through that. I’m keen to see what’s going to unfold over in LA LA land. We will all just have to wait to see the morning come when all these gifts to humanity have been unwrapped. How exciting for the hysterical anti-Trumpers. I expect even more idiocy from the US in the face of aggressive Chinese and Russian fascism. I expect nothing sensible from Boris and the Euro in-breds for a few years yet.  In short, the government I expect to carry the burden is headed by Erdogan as has been the case for the last 4 years.

Anyway; so everyone currently knows what is going on in Libya and yet…silence.

The Egyptians are now standing up as a senior member of the messy HIRISE cow.

The US military in the region are furious but so what? The US military leadership are not happy they don’t want advanced Russian weapons systems targeting them from Libya! Trump’s military advisors may even think like Bolton and even be able to execute the back flip, but given Trump’s current anti-war stand they would be very slow to get any progress with him. I’m sure Trump could care less about a major point of conflict developing in Club Med land. He’ll easily resist getting drawn in and is to the extent that he would understand it, opposed to drain the swamp theory because he likes the old policies of backing strongmen. People that he thinks he can understand and do business with! His moves with Israel are the antithesis of a sensible retreat from the failed war for Greater Israel. Trump would rather go with the old policies that kept thugs like al Sisi in power, though even Sisi knows it’s against the US interests as famously spelt out by Condoleeza Rice in Cairo no less.

Something very dramatic would have to happen for Trump to win re-election from here. The only thing he has going for him is that he is up against Biden. But on the assumption that nothing that dramatic unfolds AND that Biden doesn’t just implode in some manner (and that can’t be ruled out) I’m calling Trump gone! Trump’s presidency will have ended before anything dramatic happens unless somebody spectacularly miscalculates and events run well ahead of all expectations.

Unfortunately as far as the next 2-3 year period is concerned this next 4 months is crucial for the MENA’s democratic revolution. Turkey is now carrying a huge load, and Egypt in throwing it’s ‘reserve’ strength on the scale is bound to bring on a cautious next step from Turkey. Actually, Erdogan has always danced this revolution backwards, while the HIRISE take the lead in direct opposition to the masses striving for the ‘Arab Spring’. He’s a conservative and has always behaved like one. No doubt with the rear view mirror he would have done things differently but so would ½ theorists! The real issue is how do we all stand now?

In this global supply chain era, the catastrophic disruption of this interestingly inconsistent pandemic has brought on an inevitable long term economic ‘unwinding’. That’s simply because capitalism in recession is musical chairs and the music has stopped; consequently who owns what is an international issue that is resolved right at the top of countries like Russia and China; just as is on display right now in Syria with their massive falling out at the top of the dung heap. It will take some time, and currently no one knows where this depression is headed off to; but as this all attempts to work through over the next few years the one clear issue that we can predict is that it just can’t be good news for the people’s in countries like Iran, Egypt, Syria etc. They are held in blatant open bondage while mass poverty now spreads in all directions. Once the sullen masses are on the streets again all bets will be off. But these ruling Cabals have focused their minds on how the Syrian tyranny has clung to power, as the alternative is a grim prospect for them. In the end these countries are ‘giants with feet of clay’.

The current gold medal of hanging onto power is the Syrian model. The anti-democrats around the world have learned by this example to resort to mass murder as rapidly and savagely as the Assad regime. Terror is now the first and only choice for Egypt and Iran and similar places. And they need a Godfather gangster supply chain like Russia has been!

A great example of the shrinking Russian play pond is the behavior of the thug leader of Belarus who has just arrested his political opponent prior to upcoming elections. They move on their opponents because they are worried! Police state Russia is rapidly heading in the same direction as Egypt and Iran.

Meanwhile al Sisi has simultaneously drawn a clear and blood red line that divides the ‘former’ country of Libya and denies the right of the current Libyan government to recover the rebellious east! Given the history of Obama and his Syrian red line – that turned out to be no line at all, there ought to be no mistake about what this statement is about. Turkey is standing firm but, without the US and a united NATO, is I think a little overstretched. If Egypt intervenes in a really big way, and I think that they have then Turkey will be stretched in just recovering Sirte. Uniting the entire country is beyond them at this stage. So without the US and Europe, Russia is now putting down it’s footprint!

Egypt and Russia (funded by the UAE) have in a business as usual manner for Putin effectively divided Libya with a small military force and the threat of a much larger one – all while talking about a political settlement. They are (on this front as they are in Yemen once again supported by the Saudi regime that is (or were) at one and the same time opposed to their Syrian HIRISE developments. Welcome to the MENA. HIRISE have established either a ‘state of war OR enclave’s; take your pick!’ This is the situation in another ‘civil war’ that they have been meddling in for 4 years. The Turks had turned up some months back and undone the situation and this is the response to that reversal.

From a revolutionary democrat POV (and in this region that means an Islamist POV) HIRISE elements can’t be permitted to get away with this if the revolution is to make any progress! But note this; the Islamists in the Libyan regime are so infiltrated with Al Qaeda sorts, that the Macron led French are stupidly collaborating with the Russians and the Egyptian thug regimes!  Macron in this practice does not accept the drain the swamp theory! This is particularly confusing to me as the French have been involved with fighting Islamofascists all around Libya for some years now, with the Mali intervention being only perhaps the most public.

The Italians are on side with the Turks so NATO is thus divided! Unfortunately the latest nutter attack in England is from a young man with Libyan background! That is going to color public attitudes to Islamist led governments. Erdogan has got a hard row to hoe and is currently (because they are still at war) intervening against the PKK in Iraq. There are however good signs that the Kurds in Turkey want this war ended and the democratic developments they were enjoying under Erdogan resumed. I for one hope the PKK leadership wake up to themselves and stop their collaboration with Assad and return to the productive ceasefire that existed prior to the Syrian war destroying that better situation. The Kurdish peoples’ of the region have much to gain from the democratic revolution and nothing to gain from Assad style tyranny continuing to exist.