RANT: BITS AND BITES

 

Brave Boaters—We’ve all been following the progress of the latest attempt to break the blockade in Gaza by a civilian-led flotilla delivering humanitarian food and medicines via the Global Sumund* maritime initiative. Over fifty ships of varying sizes, embarking from several Mediterranean and Asian ports, will converge by mid-September off the Gazan coast and attempt to off-load food and humanitarian supplies to the starving Palestinian population. Thus far, two of the flotilla’s ships have been attacked by drones, one, the Portuguese Familia Madeira reportedly had the young, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, on board.  Presumably it was an Israeli attack, though with only minor damage and no injuries in either of the attacks. We’ll see how things percolate as the convoy grows in number on its voyage to Gaza.¹

 

PRINCIPLED PATRIOTS—On 3 September in Washington, former Army Intelligence officer Josephine Guilbeau and retired Green Beret Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Aguilar were arrested and led away in handcuffs after disrupting a Senate hearing, where they shouted accusations at  the politicians, saying they were complicit in the Gazan genocide because of their unquestioning support for Israel. Aguliar, you may recall, was the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) private contractor who blew the whistle last July on the activities of GHF and its complicity in the genocide there. Anthony and Josephine demonstrate what’s best in us as human beings: courage, honesty, and doing what's necessary regardless of any consequences to their personal and professional lives. They embody the needed change all of us will be called upon to make in the months and years ahead.

 

AND ACROSS THE POND—On Saturday, 6 September over nine hundred protestors², gathered in support of the now-proscribed activist organization "Palestine Action", were arrested in Parliament Square, London for peacefully demonstrating against the British government’s labeling the group as “terrorists". Amnesty International UK monitored the protest, calling the scenes of the arrests "a shocking demonstration of how the UK’s overly broad terrorism laws are being used to suppress free speech”. (Aljazeera) 

It remains to be seen whether the British court system can handle the increasing case loads brought about by such appalling mass arrests of peaceful protestors. Clogging up the courts might move the government to rethink its position on Palestine Action. Before it’s too late.

👉Also, in London on Saturday there was a separate pro-Palestinian march attracting around 20,000 participants, according to police estimates.

👉And on Monday, 8 SEPTEMBER, the announcement that Israeli President Isaac Herzog would visit Downing Street sparked protests with thousands in the streets demonstrating the people’s strong objections to hosting a visiting dignitary whose country is committing genocide and ethnic cleansing. The protests continued during the Israeli politician’s three-day visit. Just when you think Britain’s PM Starmer couldn’t be more disliked by his fellow countrymen, he goes and hosts a genocidaire.³ UCMTSU! 😆 “Starmer defended his decision to meet Herzog, rejecting calls to cut diplomatic ties. ‘I will not give up on diplomacy,’ he said. ‘That is the politics of students.’"

 

APPARENTLY, Starmer has taken on the mantle of 'teacher' in order to school the British electorate on Politics-101. What goes around, comes around, and he and his government may be taught a lesson or two themselves come ballot box time when they learn how the Great Unwashed have long ago given up on them.

👉IN PARIS, there have been demonstrations against the government of Emmanuel Macron. Other European countries are experiencing the growing restlessness of their populations. So, watch out for flying bricks!

👉FINALLY, in London, during the recent protests and arrests of demonstrators, the street artist “Bansky” stenciled his (or her?) take on the increasing heavy-handedness of the judicial system against members of the public. (Remember the lawfare antics of the British courts that kept Julian Assange in a maximum-security prison for over three years?) The artwork appeared on the wall of the Royal Courts of Justice in London. It was erased on 10 September.

 

CHEERS, JAKE. ____________________________________

* “Sumud” (Arabic) “steadfastness” or “steadfast perseverance”. It is a common term used to describe Palestinian nonviolent everyday resistance against Israel's occupation.

 

1. This is Greta’s second try at breaking the blockade on Gaza. In June, her vessel was attacked in Maltese waters, ending her attempt at bringing food supplies to Gaza. This time, she’s part of a convoy of over fifty ships of varying size. Question is: What will the Israelis do? Israeli government officials say they will charge the activists under Israel’s terrorism laws to dissuade such actions in the future. Stay tuned.

 

2. That figure is up from the 532 arrests in early August for the same ‘crime’ of carrying signs or in other ways displaying public support for a “proscribed” group⁴  the government has labelled as “terrorists”. By typing the words "Palestine Action", like I've done here, I could be subject to arrest if I lived in the United Kingdom. What's next “Thought Crimes”? Orwell must be spinning in his grave!

 

3. Of course, PM Starmer wouldn’t be backpedaling over his government’s support for Israel, even as it commits war crimes in Gaza (and increasingly in the West Bank), if it wasn’t for social media’s ability to lay bare to billions the world’s first—though sadly, perhaps not the last—live-streamed genocide. To a certain extent, even the feckless Starmer is ready to drop the hot potato Israel has become or face the increasing ire from his population.

[Jake has said it before: The world needs to shun Israel in the strongest sense of the word: cut off completely all diplomatic, social, military, and economic ties with the “Jewish State”. The United Nations needs to grow a pair and strike Israel's membership from the world body. Let it twist in the wind until sanity or decay takes hold. Ed.]

👉Apparently, PM Starmer and Herzog had  frank and uncomfortable conversations, with the British PM raising objections to Israel’s conduct in Gaza. But, if he really, really objected to the genocide, he’d take Jake’s advice and turn away—and not continue to send support aircraft, sell arms to, buy tech from, or support politically, the Jewish state. Talk is cheap. Just sayin’.

 

4. RECALL how, earlier in the summer, on an RAF airbase in Oxfordshire, Palestine Action activists spray painted the engines of parked transport jets used to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza as well as in other war projects it conducts in the Levant and elsewhere. After this episode, the Starmer government quickly brought forward legislation to ban (“Proscribe”) PA and label it a “terrorist organization”. “Proscription made it a crime to publicly support the organization. Membership of, or support for, the group is punishable by up to 14 years in prison.” (Aljazerra). 

It will be interesting to see if PA members or demonstrators arrested in support of the group, when they are brought to trial, whether there will be any jury in the UK that will find them guilty of not so much as a parking ticket! 😝

 

RANT: WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?

  

"Soldier and Death" by Hans Larwin

LAST MONTH, Canadian PM Mark Carney visited Kiev, as well as attending a meeting in Brussels to sign on to an EU arms deal that ensures military equipment gets to Kiev. [See PURL, below] He also went to a NATO summit in The Hague that discussed raising to 5% of GDP* the military spending of member states. So, Carney’s been a busy beaver. But what does signing various agreements around military expenditures mean for Canada and Canadians?

According to gov.ca, Canada has given Ukraine nineteen-billion dollars since Russia’s invasion in 2022. In last month’s Kiev stopover, PM Carney announced an additional two-billion or so down the rat hole for Zelensky’s war efforts, including additional arms and munitions, and humanitarian funding such as emergency food and medical aid. This most recent Canadian donation to Ukraine is through NATO’s new “Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List” (PURL) scam which organizes member states’ donations in handy half-billion-dollar tranches for weapons purchases. PURL greases the wheels to more efficiently restock Ukraine’s depleted equipment and munitions’ stores.

In June, Zelensky said Ukraine would require 40-billion dollars in aid annually and urged everyone to get with the program. Forty-billion bucks a year! Golly gee! Ukraine’s “Churchill” has come back in a big way following his disastrous February visit to Washington and that White House dust-up with President Trump we all saw on our screens. [Ouch! Ed.] After that fiasco he looked like he was on life support, but now he’s got the spring back in his step and, with the Eurocrats behaving like a mob of wet cats hosed into submission by the American president determined to make them pick up the tab for project Ukraine,  Zelensky is all smiley-face and kisses now that he got a transfusion of money and arms, coming primarily from European countries who will purchase the weapons from the US and pass them along to Ukraine. Now, all he’s got to do is defeat the Russian army and lay siege to Moscow. [He’d better have his lucky dice with him because facts on the ground will turn his gamble into a crap-shoot right quick! Ed.]

 

DOES THE TERM “money pit” come to mind? Though, Ukraine is more like the “Grand Canyon” of slush funds and money laundering operations, methinks. Has everyone forgotten that as late as October 2021, Zelensky was implicated in a financial scam involving offshore bank accounts and tax avoidance that he’s been running since before he became president in 2019. Folks, Mahatma Gandhi he ain’t! (Nor Churchill, for that matter.) With billions of dollars flooding Ukraine over the past three years, with little accountability and a president with sticky fingers…well, you connect the dots….

 

PM CARNEY also announced that like a good lick-spittle Canada would, “…be lowering the price cap for seaborne Russian-origin crude oil in alignment with measures announced by the EU and the UK…” in the hope this eighteenth package of sanctions (there’s been so many I’ve lost count!) will do the trick and sink the Ruskie economy once and for all. Good luck with that.😝

 

👉I guess the point I’m making here is that the collective West, for the most part, is run by Lilliputian leaders out of touch with their electorates, their priorities serving personal agendas or else promoting last year’s solutions for tomorrow’s problems. They're out-of-step and out of time in other words. And Canadian taxpayers will be picking up our share of the tab, along with our EU buddies, and we will continue to do so apparently until the end of time.

👉If things go pear-shaped in a big way, and the West is foolish enough to engage Russia in a land war in Ukraine, instead of pouring Canadian treasure onto Ukrainian soil, those two-thousand troops stationed in Latvia will be pouring their blood instead.

 

QUICK TAKEAWAYS:

👉Ukraine has a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning this conflict. It’s a numbers game: Russia has more manpower, more weapons, more industrial capacity to produce weapons than Ukraine. Far more. More, even, than the collective West combined (including the USA). That’s not going to change for some years to come.

👉Ukraine becoming a member of NATO is an existential threat to Russia and it will not tolerate such a state of affairs on its borders. Period.

👉Russia is willing to negotiate, but only if facts on the ground are recognized and its legitimate security concerns are addressed—like Ukraine adopting a policy of neutrality based on the Austrian model, for example.

Despite months of gab fests, discussions, proposals, tweets, and ham-fisted politicking on the part of the United States and its posse, the EU (and…sigh, Canada), Russia has concluded the West is “agreement-incapable” for addressing its concerns through diplomacy and will therefore solve the Ukraine problem on the battlefield.

The hashed lines represent possible Russian advances by war's end

👉The Russians are poised to advance to the Dnieper River by the end of 2025 and may then march on Kiev or Odessa (or both).

Providing Kiev with more weapons and money only prolongs the outcome—a Russian victory is inevitable. In the meantime, there may be as many as one-and-a-half-million dead Ukrainian soldiers.

👉How many more must die? How much territory will Ukraine lose to the Russians because Zelensky and the United States et al, refuse to acknowledge the fact that Ukraine is losing and  that they need to settle the conflict through diplomacy?

The political class and ‘talking heads’ of the West refuse to acknowledge reality: As valiantly as Ukraine’s soldiers have fought over these past three years,  they have lost. Their front lines are fraying and their infrastructure is crumbling under increasing Russian missile and drone attacks. Ukraine has nowhere to go but down. 

👉So, they need to make a deal now to save what’s left. But, Zelensky continues to sing the same song while the flower of Ukrainian youth dies along the front lines.

  

CHEERS, JAKE.  ____________________________________

* Canada currently spends 1.37% of its GDP on defence, but it’s looking to up that to 2% in fiscal 2025-26. And like a kid playing hopscotch, Carney hopes to land on the 5% mark by 2035, at least on paper. However, it's unlikely that any NATO member will reach this target except, perhaps, Germany and Poland. Most will wait for Trump’s term in office to end and a more congenial president is elected in 2028.👌

 

    "I am the king..."

 

 

 

RANT: YOU’RE UNDER ARREST FOR…WORDS?

 

SOMETIMES, YOU DON’T KNOW WHETHER to laugh or cry. Last weekend over 532 people were arrested for conducting a peaceful protest outside the Parliament buildings in London, England. The reason for the mass arrest was simple: The protestors  carried placards stating their support for the pro-Palestinian, direct-action group “Palestine Action”. Until last month, Palestine Action (PA),  had been a UK based protest group that staged non-violent acts in support of the Palestinian people of Gaza (and  the West Bank and East Jerusalem). On the night of June 20, PA broke into the RAF base at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire and spray-painted the engines of two Voyager cargo jets, aircraft used in mid-air refueling of spy planes over Gaza and U.S./Israeli fighter jets in the various conflicts Israel has instigated in the region. PM Keir Starmer claimed there was “millions” of pounds damage done to the two aircraft.

IN HINDSIGHT, PA should have known that staging a direct-action protest that would entail such repair costs (True or false? Who knows) was something that would put the group in the crosshairs of authorities.  But, for the Keir Starmer government to label the organization a “terrorist” group and to arrest Saturday’s protestors “under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act for displaying supportive placards or signs”, (Guardian) was overkill. As intended, this law, and others like it, will have a chilling effect on protests, demonstrations, rallies, marches, pamphleteering etc., going forward. Nevertheless, on Saturday, June 20, hundreds of peaceful protestors challenge Britain’s new anti-terrorism law that bans any support for the now-proscribed Palestine Action* organization. Even carrying placards or T-shirts displaying the group’s name is outlawed by the government and its increasingly Draconian laws inhibiting freedom of expression and the right to peacefully protest. It was an ABSURD SCENE of mass arrests, with protestors handcuffed and led away to waiting police vans. Many were over sixty years of age and unlikely candidates for radicalization by Al Queda. 😝 One was in a wheelchair. All this from the land that gave us the Magna Carta and British jurisprudence! 

 

Recall that ALL THE PROTESTORS were released the next day. There’s a simple reason for this: Breeching Britain’s Terrorism law comes with a stiff sentencing regime, including a maximum penalty of fourteen years in prison. By law, this mandates the accused be tried before a jury of their peers. Thus, the authorities realized, belatedly and with much chagrin, that no jury in the country would convict them. And so, they were released.

SO, was it against the law for Palestine Action to spray-paint those planes? Yes. Does the death and destruction those Voyager aircraft facilitate by being links in the logistics chain that allows Israel to bombard Gaza and other parts of the Levant, does their sordid legacy far outweigh in criminality any physical damage done to the aircraft by PA? Yes. Was it morally justifiable? Yes. Was it the right thing to do?  Again, yes. 

 

 Cheers, Jake. ____________________________________

* If I were living in Britain and I were to publish this post like I’m now doing, a post that mentions "Palestine Action" (as I do here), I could be subject to arrest and face a possible prison sentence of fourteen years. Just for writing the words "Palestine Action." (Oops, I did it again.) 

 

 

 

RANT: TOMORROW

 

TOMORROW (August 6) is the eightieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing by the United States, the first time a nuclear weapon was used in war. (The bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, was the last time such a weapon was used. So far.) Much has been written about these two Japanese cities, destroyed by America’s atom bombs, because they represent the ultimate of cautionary tales. If we treat nuclear weapons, of whatever size, as somehow ‘useable’ in a conflict, as tactical weapons that can draw a line in the sand to make your opponent stop and reconsider their actions, and if we assume such weapons can be contained on a battlefield and not spread to a broader, even a global, conflagration, then we are kidding ourselves. Escalation is almost guaranteed following a nuclear detonation, particularly if the other side is also a nuclear power. 

 

The BBC recently published an interesting article on a subset of victims of the Hiroshima bombing, namely Koreans living in the city at the time. Of Hiroshima's 420,000 people, 120,000 were Korean (IIUC the population statistics from the article). In addition, of the immediate dead following the detonation, which was some seventy-thousand people, 20% were Korean. 

Korean nationals were in Hiroshima as part of a conscripted work force or else they had come there to escape poverty in their homeland. Note: Korea had been a colony of Imperial Japan for some thirty years prior to WWII and tens of thousands of its citizens were dragooned into supporting Japan's war effort, in its factories and other sectors needing manpower. Following the bombing, the conscripts were given tasks like retrieving and burning the dead. This exposed them, disproportionately, to dangerous levels of radiation.

 

Granted, the dangers of radiation poisoning were not well known at the time, still the Koreans were treated as essentially slave labour before, during, and for a time, after the war. Many of the survivors returned home and many suffered the aftereffects of radiation exposure with higher rates of cancer, heart and kidney disease, etc. According to one survivor, a Mr. Shim:

 

“Koreans were second-class citizens – often given the hardest, dirtiest and most dangerous jobs… In the aftermath of the bomb, this distribution of labour translated into dangerous and often fatal work for Koreans in Hiroshima. Korean workers had to clean up the dead… At first, they used stretchers, but there were too many bodies. Eventually, they used dustpans to gather corpses and burned them in schoolyards. It was mostly Koreans who did this. Most of the post-war clean-up and munitions work was done by us." (BBC)

 

SCORES of returnees, including Mr. Shim, settled in Hapcheon, a small county in South Korea, dubbed “Korea’s Hiroshima” because so many survivors chose to live there. Long term studies of the survivors suggest higher than normal mortality rates when compared to Japanese survivors, and higher rates of disease and genetic disorders affecting their second and third generation descendants. Eighty years on and the peoples of two countries live with life altering effects stemming from the detonation of a single atomic bomb. Imagine the effects today’s nuclear arsenals would have on our cities should they ever be used.

👉Let’s hope that never happens.🙏

 

Cheers, Jake.

   

[The Day After and Threads are a couple of movies that should scare the pants off any viewer. Both depict life in a city following a nuclear attack. Hang on to yer knickers!]

 

 

 

RANT: RUB-A-SUB-SUB: THEM’S FIGHTIN’ WORDS!

  

 

WE ALL KNOW how hurtful name calling can be. It makes the recipient cry, or it can fire them up to punch back with words or fists. And mean tweets? We’ve all had them (well, I haven’t, but no matter). They’re like digital gauntlets thrown down or, better yet, smacked across the kisser of the addressee for all to read. Like a red flag to a bull, they've launched flame wars across the internet ever since ARPANET was born in the early 1970s.

Today, of course, name calling and mean tweets are the daily slings and arrows we all face online if we engage in anything other than posting cute kitten pics on our personal blogs. If we get a mean tweet or a half-star rating on whatever it is we post for review, then it’s BAMB! We come back with a zinger of our own. Folks, it’s one thing for losers those who have lots of time on their hands to wield sharp words like Ninja warriors brandishing ninjatō swords in battle. But, after a while, if you're like most people it's ho-hum. Time to scroll on. Except, if you’re the notoriously thin-skinned President of the United States that mean tweet is another matter altogether. 

 

SO, LAST WEEK, there was a flame war on social media between President Trump and Dimitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and current Deputy Chair of the Russian Security Council. Medvedev, who loves to troll Western elites, got a rise out of Donald Trump when he mocked Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on Indian goods into the US as a penalty for India continuing to import Russian oil. Trump responded (on Truth Social), calling the economies of Russia and India “dead” and that his tarriff warnings should be taken seriously. Medvedev responded by saying that Russia and India were far from dead and reminded the American president that Russia has a "dead hand" and that Trump should not forget about it. The Russian was referring to the “dead hand” strategic defence system first activated in the 1980s. It ensures a launch of Russia’s ICBM missile force should there be a decapitation strike on Moscow. [BOAKYAG time. Ed.] It’s definitely provocative trolling but just that--trolling. Just words in the ether. Nothing more.

 

👉EXCEPT TRUMP,* called Medvedev’s X-post a “threat” and announced last Friday that he was repositioning two “nuclear submarines” closer to Russian shores (presumably one in the North Atlantic, the other in the Pacific). Whether they are nuclear “armed” or merely nuclear “powered” is unknown. Instead of an angry reply to Medvedev’s comment, Trump decides to threaten Russia with nukes.¹

👉WHAT THE FUCK?!! Moving subs closer to Russian shores and shortening the time SLBMs (Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles) take to reach their targets, how is this a good thing? If you think Russia is treating this as a joke, you’re either kidding yourself or you’re an ostrich with your head in a hole and your feathery ass in the air! Think about it: WWIII because of a mean tweet! Perhaps we don’t deserve to exist as a species if this is the best and brightest we have leading us. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in an idiocracy. Or at least next door to one. Just sayin'.

 

 

 Cheers, Jake. ____________________________________ 

 

* I think we should consider the possibility that Trump is losing his marbles. Such a dangerous, pig-headed decision suggests to me that the American president is increasingly non compos mentis. Is America so  lacking in leadership that they must pick candidates from nursing homes? This is crazy! Thank our lucky stars there’s someone with a normal brain in the Kremlin! 

 

1. Recall that Trump recently okayed the transfer of nuclear bombs from America to an American base in Great Britain, the first time in nearly twenty years that B61-12 gravity bombs have been deployed there. Provocative? Yes. A threatening gesture? You bet. And you can rest assured that's how the Russians view such a move. And an American four-star general commented last week how NATO could overrun the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad lickety-split. These are not signals of diplomacy, tolerance and good will. Earlier, in June, there was Ukraine's "Operation Spiderweb" and those drone attacks on Russia's strategic bomber fleet. Also that month, NATO member states (including Canada) agreed to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. 😆  What message is Russia to take from all this? Our 'betters' are playing with fire. And all of us are liable to get burned.☮

 

[For a discussion on this serious matter, watch the short interview George Galloway has with Scott Ritter, former  United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspector, author and commentator, here at the 1:07:57 mark of Galloway’s YouTube show. If Scott is worried, all of us should be worried.]