|
|||||
|
Ok, so a third of the country has been over run by blood thirsty Sunni Einsatzgruppen, but you know what? The Really Important Thing is not getting the national shit together, it is holding onto personal power in Baghdad! Forming pragmatic coalitions in wartime is for sissies! Thank goodness for all those years of democratic nation building! August 11th, 2014 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 And whilst attention is focused on the horror in the Middle East…does that later day Mussolini (Russian edition) and gay icon Vladimir Putin invade the Ukraine? Probably. The real question being, where is the Stop Line? August 11th, 2014 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
As I expected, the usual suspects are happy to take to the streets of western cities to protest against Israel and the USA, ostensibly for killing or being a party to killing people, but I have yet to see large scale demos in London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Dublin on behalf of the Yazidis and Chaldean Christians being murdered by Islamists. I look forward to this changing but I will not be holding my breath in the meantime. August 10th, 2014 | 62 comments - (Comments are closed)
I expect many afflicted with Obama Derangement Syndrome will be dismayed to see Obama praised for anything, but the actions in Iraq seem to be pretty much correct, at least so far. My views on Iraq (and Afghanistan) are well know and can be summarised thus: it was right to go in and topple the governments, whereupon the US (and its allies should have) should have declared victory and got the hell out many many years ago, saying only “now that you have seen what will happen to any government who annoys us enough, keep that in mind when you sort it out amongst yourselves who will be your subsequent rulers. Our armies have gone home now but we own your sky any time we wish to, so you need to realise we will not tolerate any jihadi lunatics running the country.” No futile democratic nation building. So Obama is right to not put any substantive forces on the ground beyond the barest advisers who are there now (and perhaps some forward air controllers). And he is right to strike this most deranged lunatic strain of jihadis yet seen from the air. If I have any criticism, it is that as the IS nutters are currently exposed targets out in the open, having transitioned from guerilla war to out-in-the-open war, the intensity of strikes should be increased rapidly whilst the opportunity presents itself. Kill as many of these islamo-fascist barbarians as possible as quickly as possible. Just as Kabul was actually taken by the Northern Alliance with US air support, so too can people like the Peshmerga do the ground work with US assistance from the air. But so far at least, well done Obama. That is the first time I have ever said that particular combination of words. August 10th, 2014 | 58 comments - (Comments are closed)
Our spam filter seems to be a bit out of control and for some reason has taken a dislike to several regular commenters! If you get smited/smote/smitten by the crazed bot, drop us an e-mail so we can administer a kick to the system to un-smite you 😉 August 8th, 2014 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
The rage metre has been in the red for a while now, with Baroness Warsi, a Muslim in case you did not know (or Baroness Token as she is known in some parts), quitting over the UK’s policies towards Israel (yes it is said the UK actually has a policy on the subject). Strangely she did not quit the government in protest over UK support of Pakistan, at a time when several hundred thousand people have been displaced by strikes against the Taliban in Waziristan. Go figure! I wonder why? Actually, no I don’t. So what will be the reactions and suggestions from within the BBC/Guardian Bubble to the rapidly building catastrophe in Iraq amongst the Yazidi and Christian communities, I wonder? I realise these communities are being ethnically cleansed (i.e. murdered and dispossessed) but as it is not being done by Jews or Westerners, does it really matter? Indeed can it even be said to be truly happening? It will be interesting to see and contrast I think, in a nightmarish kind of way. August 7th, 2014 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
Apparently, there is a tremendous run on high quality cheese going on in Moscow. This wonderful range of delectable products is vanishing rapidly from supermarket shelves as customers stock up before the sanctions that Russia is imposing on Russia come into force. August 7th, 2014 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
So my question is why were rifles and RPGs and a few truckloads of ammunition not deposited in these communities weeks ago? The Yazidi and Christian communities should have been armed to the teeth by now. If 100,000 people from the region have been displaced, at least 10,000 of them should be viable militia, no? Why leave such things to various state armies? August 7th, 2014 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
According to the Guardian, in a meeting with SNP backbenchers after his disappointing performance in the debate with Alistair Darling, this:
Mr Salmond may have been misquoted. I may have misunderstood. But the notion that if an independent Scotland decides to use the pound in the manner that Panama or Ecuador uses the dollar (a quite sensible idea in itself, though it would require fiscal discipline), that somehow negates Scotland’s share of the UK national debt sounds delusional to me. At least, I suppose Scotland could default – Argentina does it all the time – but there are huge practical penalties to that. Lenders demand a high risk premium before they will lend to defaulters, particularly unrepentant defaulters. Having written the above, I’ve just found another link confirming that Mr Salmond was not misquoted. He really is claiming that the famous missing Plan B is, in the event of the remainder of the UK refusing a currency union, for newly independent Scotland to refuse to take its share of UK debt. Alex Salmond defends Plan B currency stance after losing Scottish debate on TV.
Wow. To me, those words above look like a bigger misstep than anything he said in the debate. August 6th, 2014 | 55 comments - (Comments are closed)
Warsi dismissively described Osborne as “a good friend of the Israeli government”. The more subtle truth is that Osborne, along with a handful of other senior politicians, is prepared to step back historically and geographically, and to remember that the state of Israel was founded by a people that had heard the approaching silence of absolute extinction, and resolved never again to face that void. Israel is bigger than Gaza and the West Bank, but it is smaller than almost everywhere else. Less than a century old, it is a democracy surrounded by hostile nations and under permanent attack by terrorists who wish to see it wiped from the surface of the Earth. What is a “proportionate” response to a hydra-like enemy who sees the Final Solution as work in progress? All terrorism aimed at Israel is genocidal in spirit. What would a “proportionate” response to that ambition look like? August 6th, 2014 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Keynesians were initially mystified by this dramatic breakdown in the supposedly stable and manageable relationship between growth (or employment) and inflation. Their models said it couldn’t happen, so they looked for an explanation to deflect mounting criticism and soon found one: The economy had been hit by a ‘shock’, namely sharply higher oil prices! Never mind that the sharp rise in oil prices followed the breakdown of Bretton-Woods and devaluation of the dollar: This brazen reversal of cause and effect was too politically convenient to ignore. Politicians could blame OPEC for the stagflation, rather than their own policies. But an objective look at history tells a far different story, that the great stagflation was in fact the culmination of years of Keynesian economic policies. To generalise and to paraphrase Friedman, stagflation is, always and everywhere, a Keynesian phenomenon. – John Butler, on the Cobden Centre website. August 5th, 2014 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Talk about a fine bit of opportunistic business! Well done! August 4th, 2014 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||