HARBINGER

Donald J. Trump tweeted :- @realDonaldTrump Big WIN for us in Iowa tonight. Thank you! ………………………………………………………………………….. In the wake of an untimely and unforseeable(?) technical/administrative cock-up ,the commencement of the Democratic Party’s process to elect its candidate to challenge Donald Trump in November’s Presidential election,got off to a lamentably worse start than could ever have been contemplated. Media is everything and Social media is hegemonic;you look bad across its platforms and the stench lingers for a very long time afterward and becomes a kind of urban myth,a legend that is told and retold-where the cause of its initial telling becomes just one more source among many. Not that the Iowa Caucus or whichever candidate is announced as its winner truly matters. Donald J.trump will be re-elected President come November. Lies,lies and bigger lies wrapped up in a  paranoid conspiracy theory involving the government of Russ...

We do indeed live in interesting times. And that's cold bloody comfort for the 99.999% of human society who are at best mere spectators of the events unfolding in the Middle Eastern imbroglio aka Iran /Iraq /Syria. Having brazenly violated recognised tenets of International Law as well as long held diplomatic norms and conventions, POTUS Trump as Commander-in-Chief threatened in the most egregiously graphic terms to annihilate Iranian cultural sites should the government in Tehran consider some of retaliatory action against the US for its assassination of General Soleimani. Even the most reliably docile and compliant lickspittle NATO lackeys of the US were moved to point out that Trump's apocalyptic threat,if enacted,would constitute a war crime. Trump and his coterie of war-mongering Neocon hawks -Pompeo et al blithely acknowledged this a couple of days later and muttered something about of course the'll be obeying international law on this matter. Meanwhile, ele...

There is no need for a disquisition on this matter.Brevity will suffice. On the third day of the beginning of a new decade,POTUS Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iran's leading military Commander General Soleimani. The drone strike took place at Baghdad International airport in Iraq. You could argue that several ,what are considered inviolable,tenets of International Law were violated. One head of state ordering the killing of a prominent general of another state whilst they are not at war with one another, on the territory of a third state is indisputably gangsterism. Then again, the conservative Republican neocon faction and their liberal Democrat overseas interventionist counterparts in Washington DC are the very bedrock of US imperialist foreign and military policies.They are both the authors of chaos and the harbingers of cataclysm. The Rubicon has been crossed. The only scenario left to ponder is,when it will be deemed expedient to eliminate a Chinese or ...

This should be my final blog posting for 2019. If nothing else the year brought to mind the time worn adage,attributed to Karl Marx, that History repeats itself,first as a tragedy then as a farce. 2019 is drawing to a close with the US House of Representatives voting to have President Trump Impeached.The so-called impeachment trial will take place in the US Senate,who it seems from a party partisan perspective will in effect nullify the charges which the Democrat party controlled House of Representatives have passed against POTUS. The Democratic Party's insidious Long War to overturn the 2016 Presidential election result enters what are,its final stages. The malevolent,anti-populist campaign that sought unceasingly to slander,defame,denounce and vilify Trump's upset victory over the odds-on favourite,globalist,deep state warmonger champion Hilary Clinton has now gone on for so long that the constitutional electoral cycle is now prepping for the 2020 Presidential electio...

Occasionally,very occasionally  a leading world statesman articulates a point of view so cogently as to encompass one 's own outlook on an issue that it makes sense just to copy & paste verbatim. A couple of days ago The President of Russia launched a swingeing critique of prevailing  western metropolitan elitist values. To wit-   Vladimir Putin has trumpeted the growth of national populist movements in Europe and America, crowing that liberalism is spent as an ideological force. In an FT interview in the Kremlin on the eve of the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, the Russian president said “the liberal idea” had “outlived its purpose” as the public turned against immigration, open borders and multiculturalism. Mr Putin’s evisceration of liberalism — the dominant western ideology since the end of the second world war in 1945 — chimes with anti-establishment leaders from US president Donald Trump to Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Matteo Salvini in Italy, and the Brexit insurge...

A few days ago, POTUS Trump announced the withdrawal of the US forces ( The figure quoted was 2,000 personnel) currently illegally stationed in Syria. This caused immediate consternation and hyperbolic over reaction from the Washington Beltway NeoCon establishment and their symbiotic liberal foreign interventionist partners aka the Democrats. DefSec Mattis resigned in the wake of the Commander-in-Chief’s welcome and somewhat unduly delayed strategic decision. The western -backed ( funded,trained,equipped and armed ) disparate terrorist gangs ranging from AlQaeda to ISIS/Daesh have proven several veritable hornets’ nests too much for the meddling US and its equally delusional and inept NATO satrapies to deal with let alone forge any worthwhile conclusion from. The Syria domiciled Kurds are the patsy in the middle getting lined up for another historically royal shafting from their supposed foreign friends and allies.Composing the bulk of the SDF fighting forces,the Kurdish fighter...

Erdogan,that erstwhile ravening Turkish warmonger looks as though he's about to hit the existential jackpot in Syria. From funding,harbouring and arming ISIS/Daesh as well as Al Qaeda affiliates, and his subsequent de-facto annexation of sovereign Syrian territory through to building walls,watchtowers and entire military supply bases and depots inside Syria and deploying a commensurate invading Army,Erdogan has doubled down like the chronic high risk gambler and demagogic chancer that he is. And its all begun dropping apart in spectacular fashion.All his so-called NATO friends are deserting him and his allies have set a trap underneath him. The Turkish military haven't somehow heroically liberated their ethnic kinfolk from the clutches,as they see it,of Assad,but have been sucked ever deeper into a bottomless quagmire with no prospect of withdrawal. Credit in fair measure,for helping to bring out these dramatic changes in the circumstances on the ground in Syria must go t...

A few days ago,POTUS told the NATO conference attendees to start stumping up more money on defence .The Corporate and  globalist MSM and hack commentariat admonished President Donald Trump variously for what they asserted was an unforgivable diplomatic/politically strategic faux-pas and downright bad manners. POTUS made a valid point from the perspective of the US taxpayer ;the member nations  of NATO need to increase their defence expenditure,quite dramatically in most cases,if they want to enjoy the level of military security and preparedness which they are quite happy for the US to provide at its expense. Advocating a liberal interventionist agenda ( that bears remarkable similarities to what the neocon US agenda actually looks like in practice) and joining in on sanctions devoid of any legitimacy in International Law against Russia,Iran,North Korea et al costs taxpayers- the Electorates in all NATO member states, money. Days after this masterly exposition of Basic Econo...

Supreme court rules in favour of anti-abortion clinics in free speech case Judges rule faith-based ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ are not obliged to tell women that free or low-cost abortions may be available elsewhere. So reported the  Guardian online on the June 26 announcement from the SCOTUS latest rulings. Other notable on the day rulings included the upholding of President Trump's targeted travel ban on citizens from a number of predominantly muslim countries to the USA. Matters then generally seem to have improved a great deal in the wake of those SCOTUS decisions.The world is a sunnier place and liberal snowflakes get to bleed their consciences over the rest of us some more. Those once towering bastions of corporate globalist MSM,such as  New York Times  and  Washington Post, have gone so far as to concede defeat on the upholding of Trump's travel ban and acknowledge the importance to the Trump presidency of the SCOTUS decision. And that's how i...

There's a quote that's been mis-attributed to Winston Churchill about jaw,jaw being better than war,war. it's a good quote,mis-attributed or not. Back in January 2003,I planned and curated a Poetry exhibition at Wakefield Cathedral on the Iraq war at the time using  the title , "Jaw,jaw war,war". Anyhow... It's a good day today, June 12 2018 ; the world has opted for more life in preference to nuclear self-immolation. Presidents Trump and Kim Jong Un shook hands and called each other friend. And the Washington DC neocon neanderthals and their liberal global interventionist cousins are pissed off beyond belief. Clearly they didn't see this one coming or they might with the benefit of hindsight in the next few days,as the new reality sinks into their troglodyte consciousness, claim to have done so but are not best pleased about it at all. The inimitable practitioners of  Realpolitik such as  Bismarck and Talleyrand however,would no doubt be enorm...

Back in 1982,in the middle of the ColdWar ,British commercial TV aired a mordantly witty six-part black comedy, "Whoops Apocalypse " -a tale about events in the week leading up to WW3. This extract from Wikipedia,captures the tone :-  The naive and highly unpopular Republican U.S. President Johnny Cyclops (an obvious Ronald Reagan parody, played by  Barry Morse ) is advised by an insane right-wing fundamentalist security advisor, And here we all are in 2018 and life is imitating art to the full, a real  President Johnny Cyclops is being advised by the likes of John Bolton and Secretary of State Pompeo. There was,what was commonly referred to as the Iran nuclear deal - the US unilaterally tore that one up.There was a summit arranged for June in Singapore between DPRK-North Korea and the US.The US has unilaterally cancelled it. In a recent scathing denunciation of the Iranian government,in the wake of the US abrogation of the nuclear deal, Pompeo tore into Iran ...

Israeli Premier Netanyahu is trying to light a few extra fuses in the Syrian imbroglio and investing an extraordinary amount of diplomatic demagoguery toward that objective.The trigger,he hopes, will be the revocation of what is commonly termed the Iran Nuclear Deal.A Heath-Robinson affair where the 5 permanent members of the UN security Council plus Germany exercise vigilance and constraints on Iran's ambition to create a nuclear arsenal. The saving grace, if indeed there is to be any in this prelude to WW3, is that,the current US President Trump's predilection for diplomatic anarchy may not on this occasion be allowed free rein.China,France,Russia and the UK,oh,and Germany,all have an intense desire to maintain the present Iran Nuclear Deal.A position and outlook that enjoys a broad spectrum of support amongst the various experts,analysts and ad-hoc international bodies who between them have a good idea as to the degree and veracity of Iran's adherence to the deal itsel...

The Western powers aka the United States and its kowtowing,toadying satrapies with the UK to the fore,insist that other nations,for example the likes of North Korea,Iran ,China and Russia,et al abide by what they assert are the generally accepted precepts of the so-called international rules based order,or " Westphalian System ". Rules based. International order.Supposedly brought into being by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that brought to a close what has since be called  " The Thirty Years War ",it established the legal fiction of territorial integrity and the sovereignty of individual nation states. Hasn't actually ever really bloody worked out in practice,but it's a convenient comfort blanket. This rules -based Order presumably applies to its most vociferous proponents; the likes of the US,UK and France for example,no? Just to be entirely consistent and thereby avoiding the charge of outright hypocrisy. Here's what Oona Hathaway, Professor of ...

A year ago  Guido Fawkes   published a map of the constituencies with the most signatories for a petition opposing Trump's visit to Britain. The map from  Press Association  shows that 15 of the top 20 constituencies with the most signatories in favour of cancelling Trump’s state visit are in London. The rest of the country doesn’t seem bothered, other than the student towns of Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Brighton and Edinburgh. One year on from the visit that never eventuated,and it's all back on again.Apparently; albeit with no firm date as yet. This means that the uni student common room slackers aka  SWP /Momentum /Green heroic vanguard of proletarian consciousness will be repainting their placards and practising their litanies of otiose cant and vacuous platitudes which they'll seek to deploy on the day itself. Pseudo-moralistic posturing ( aka virtue-signalling ) ,will once again be to the fore in the ever shrinking realm of MSM  public disc...

Both nominally " Left " and  " Right " have spent decades progressively infantilising political discourse. With few exceptions, mainstream political parties and a significant swathe of extra-parliamentary fringe groups have embraced and conformed themselves to the prevailing hegemony of Politically Correct,globalist metropolitan elitist thought and all that entails. Daily life in civil society is awash with the sacrosanct shibboleths of -isms.A veritable faux-litany of " gender " and " race " has metastasized across western democratic nations. Otiose cant and vacuous platitudes are the default responses of the metropolitan-domiciled cultural/political elites and these twins of evil are again rearing their foul ugly heads. Brexit, aka the stumbling ,fumbling half-witted series  of impotent actions undertaken by HMG to enact the Will of the Sovereign Electorate on the matter of withdrawal of the UK from its bondage and servitude under the E...

It's really hard trying to keep a " straight face ", whenever something otherwise minor and insignificant gets shoved to the top of the MSM agenda for the day. President Trump retweeted links to some highly contentious video content which purported to show certain egregious acts perpetrated by islamic extremists. Of and by themselves the video footage are not particularly informative and are singularly devoid of any semblance of gravitas and credibility. Apparently Sharks have the ability to sense 1 globule of blood amid 25 million globules of water. It took no time at all for the full panoply of Corporate MSM and every social media platform under the sun to join in the feeding frenzy over what charitably might be described as the President's gaffe. What exacerbated the whole incident was that Trump directed his initial tweet at the UK Prime Minister,after having initially tweeted the wrong Theresa May.There followed,quite naturally a response and of course PO...