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..."

 

 

 

HOTEL GAZAFORNIA: YOU CAN CHECK OUT ANY TIME YOU LIKE, BUT YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE

 

ADOLF HITLER AND HEINRICH HIMMLER must be jumping for joy and high-fiving amid the fires of Hell where their black souls are sequestered for an eternity or two. Why do I say this? Check out what an Israeli parliamentarian, a member in good standing in the Knesset, said last week. It’s a short clip at the 10:05 mark on Judge Napolitano’s go-to "Judging Freedom" YouTube channel. Judge Nap interviewed retired American diplomat Chas Freeman and asked him to comment on MP Zvika Fogel’s poisonous rant. Ambassador Freeman says:

 

“Well, it's both the best impersonation of a Nazi that I've ever seen and it does represent the government policy of Israel. That's why they're talking about building concentration camps as a way to expel  the Palestinians from that part of Palestine. Meanwhile, of course, while no one's watching, they're busily expelling everybody from the West Bank. There's quite an effort going on there to achieve what is called ‘transfer’, which is ethnic cleansing and expulsion. So, you know, one of the crazy things that's been going on is that normally when you deal with genocide, you have great trouble demonstrating intent, but [here] there's no question about the intent. You just heard it. That is, as I said, the best demonstration of Nazilike thinking that you could possibly imagine. And it is now the majority opinion in Israel.” (ret. U.S. Ambassador, Chas Freeman on the "Judging Freedom" podcast, 8 July 2025)

 

THE "CONCENTRATION CAMP" plan the ambassador mentions comes from the very real, recent proposal by Israel’s  Defence Minister, Israel Katz, to establish a “humanitarian city”, as he calls it, in the southern Gaza district of Rafah near the border with Egypt. The first stage of the plan is to entrap house several hundred thousand Palestinians from the local area inside a fenced off zone and keep them there until they ‘voluntarily’ choose to leave Gaza or until other arrangements can be made to “transfer” them abroad to a country willing to host them. [That's a war crime, the forced displacement of an indigenous population from their homeland. Ed.] To this end, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation will build feeding stations and work with “partners” to construct housing (tents, actually), water and sanitation facilities, medical clinics and even a school. It will be policed internally by mercenaries private contractors while outside the fence, IDF soldiers keep watch. The idea, according to Israel Katz*, is to screen all entrants, digitally identify and “tag” them, and arrest any Hamas militants that may be uncovered during the screening process. Food and humanitarian aid would, of course, be distributed inside the camps. And, one more thing: once you enter the camps, you can never leave (except for 'voluntary' migration outside of Gaza and the state of Israel).

 

    "Barbed Wire" by David Ludwig Bloch

THIS FIRST prison camp will be a demonstration model where all the kinks in the system can be worked out. Minister Katz envisions that the place, and others like it, will eventually come to house two million Palestinian Gazans. These are “transition” camps, temporary stops for inmates as they make their way out the door and out of Gaza forever. Where they will go is a good question. Recall that in 2024 Egypt constructed a sixteen-square-kilometer fenced-off area abutting the Rafah Crossing into Gaza. I’d like to think they cleared the land for vegetable and flower gardens but it’s probably more likely the Egyptian President El-Sisi cucked to pressure from the Biden administration and threats and cajolement (aka “bribes”) from the Israelis and new Trump administration to prepare for an eventual exodus into the Sinai of some or all of the Gazan population. And Egypt may not be the only potential 'landing pad' for all those Palestinians soon to be bottled up in concentration camps in southern Gaza. I read recently that Cyprus may be petitioned to set up reciprocal “transition” camps to help Israel offshore its unwanted millions. We’ll have to wait and see which governments cuck first to the U.S. and its Levantine pit bull. It should be noted: There’s a fair bit of walking around money to be had in offshore oil and gas fields. Will Israel work a deal with Cyprus to share in the petroleum profits with a quid pro quo that Cyprus take in Gazans? Stay tuned.

 

👉ONE HOLD-UP to Minister Gatz’s wet dream of Gaza ethnically cleansed of Palestinians is that he needs a sixty-day ceasefire with Hamas to give him time to build his “humanitarian city" that will be sited atop the ruins of Rafah. It should come as no surprise that the idea of screening and “concentrating” Gaza’s population into IDF-controlled camps doesn’t sit well with Hamas and, so far, there is no ceasefire agreed upon, though negotiations continue in Doha. If the camps are filled with non-combatants, it stands to reason that anyone outside the camps will be considered a militant, whether they are one or not. And it’s quite probable that many Palestinians will refuse to enter the camps because they see what fate has in store for them behind the wire, meaning they will be considered “militants” by the IDF and treated as legitimate targets. 

Ethnic cleansing is still very much on the agenda in Tel Aviv and in Washington. Recall that the American president mused earlier this year about "deporting" Palestinians from Gaza, taking over the Gaza Strip and turning it into a "Riviera of the Middle East", with "big and beautiful" condos and casinos.

 

Pipe dream though that is, there are serious players in West Asia and elsewhere who are interested in turning Israel and Gaza into an "energy and commercial hub" with rail lines, oil and gas pipelines, and shipping lanes linking India, the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia Israeli ports⁺ and eastern Europe. The proposal by the Balsillie Paper think tank [see above link] envisions a rebuilt Gaza with Palestinians participating in an energy and commercial network (the "India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor"), and by having Gazans share in the growing regional prosperity, the besieged Palestinian enclave would stand a better chance at becoming a stable and peaceful entity. Growing indigenous Palestinian wealth is a legitimate goal which should be discussed and analyzed. But, I don't see the Israelis wanting to share their toys with the Palestinians. Do you? Their racist project of ethnic cleansing and genocide has gone too far. Too much blood has been spilled. And the IMEC corridor, should it ever come to pass, would bring onto the scene global financial interests and energy corporations whose bottom lines might not be in the best interests of Palestinians. So, there's that. If I were to hazard a guess, by the time either Trump or an IMEC consortium ever break ground to redevelop Gaza, there will be no Palestinians left; they will be gone, one way or another. 

👉BUT, FIRST THINGS FIRST. Minister Katz’s plan for a “humanitarian city” in Rafah, something Ambassador Freeman sardonically calls: “Auschwitz on the Mediterranean”, is still on the drawing board. How long it will stay there, we’ll have to wait and see. Don't forget, the defence minister needs a ceasefire so he can build his concentration camp that's slated to hold several-hundred-thousand Gazans. So far, no ceasefire is in the offing. 

👉Who would have imagined in this bright, new century of ours that descendants of survivors of the Holocaust would be complicit in creating the same type of system under which so many of their relatives and co-religionists were murdered by the Nazis during WWII? It's not exactly the Circle of Life, is it? (Circle of Death is more like it.)

 

    GHF aid station June 15, 2025. Chaos, Inc.

EACH DAY IN GAZA, dozens of people are killed by Israeli bombs and gunfire--often the figure is over 100 dead, mostly women and children. And since the end of May, around 780 Palestinians have been killed near the four Gazan Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) feeding stations and five-thousand-five-hundred have been wounded attempting to receive food aid.  What kind of humanitarian aid system is this, where people risk their lives for a box of food?! ANSWER: It's not humanitarian aid. It's cheese in a mousetrap, and there are so, so many hungry mice everywhere. As I mentioned in a previous post,  the GHF stations are purposely designed to induce stress and strife among Palestinians entering them, thus creating an inherently unstable environment where IDF troops are given license to fire on the crowds. But, I'm sure the "humanitarian city" Israel Gatz hopes to set up will be better organized and all the nutritional, medical, social, and psychological  needs of Palestinians living inside the wire will be met in a robust and forthright manner. 😝 Yeah, right. Fuck Israel.

 

Cheers, Jake. ____________________________________ 

 

* One Haaretz newspaper wag suggests calling it “Camp Israel” after the innovative and forward-thinking Israeli defence minister.

+ The main Israeli port of Haifa and a proposed Gazan port.  $$$$$$$$$$$$

 

    "Maus" by Art Spiegleman

 

 

 

 

 

NoW UPDATE: UKRAINE

 

    The Four Amigos Plus One

THERE’VE BEEN QUITE A FEW HAPPENINGS these last few weeks. One that’s occurring at the time of this writing—Thursday morning, EDT (Eastern Daylight time)—is that the Russians are meeting with their Ukrainian counterparts in Istanbul in a back-to-the-future negotiation to start peace talks and finally end the terrible three-year conflict in Ukraine. This came after the "four amigos" (PMs Starmer and Tusk, of England and Poland respectively, President Macron of France, and Germany’s Chancellor Merz) road the rails to Kiev to meet with their BFF, President Zelensky. After giving him a presidential tongue-bath, they left for home assured their visit had stiffened the spine of Ukraine’s president to keep the fight going to the last Ukrainian, and to demand a 30-day ceasefire be in place before any negotiations would start with the Russians. They sure are a bunch of tough-talking hombres!🤠 

OF COURSE, such a ceasefire would be unacceptable to the Russians, as it would only allow Ukraine time to regroup and rearm with weapons and intelligence provided by Western countries.* Additionally, the United States has yet to stop the flow of armaments to Ukraine, hardly a sign of a genuine appeal for peace. Besides, why would the winning side (i.e., the Russians) give Ukraine a break when they are entering the final phase of their special military operation to ensure safety and stability along Russian borders?

👉Last weekend, in response to Ukraine's ceasefire overtures, Russia’s President Putin offered a counter proposal. Russia, he said, would send a delegation to Istanbul to negotiate without pre-conditions.  At first, Zelensky said there would be no negotiations unless a ceasefire was in place. [That would be a “precondition” to the talks wouldn’t?] Then Trump warned Zelensky that he had better attend the negotiations in Istanbul (or else!):

  

“‘President Putin of Russia doesn’t want to have a Cease Fire Agreement with Ukraine, but rather wants to meet on Thursday, in Turkey, to negotiate a possible end to the BLOODBATH. Ukraine should agree to this, IMMEDIATELY,’ Trump said on Truth Social.” (Al Jazeera)

 

After that, Zelensky said he’d go to Istanbul only if Putin would attend, which would be inappropriate because there is much to be negotiated first before the chief executives of each country would meet. That's done normally when it’s (hopefully!) time to sign the peace treaty. Moscow’s team is headed up by presidential aide, Vladimir Medinsky, who oversaw the original Russian delegation during the Istanbul negotiations of March 2022 (the ones that Boris Johnson summarily scuppered). 

Zelensky changed his tune about the negotiations after Trump's rather blunt missive and instead sent a delegation led by his defense minister. We’ll see if anything comes of it, but I doubt it. I find it hard to believe the Ukrainians will make  a serious effort to negotiate in good faith. It seems like another of Zelensky's  pro forma performances meant to appease Trump and his addlebrained European supporters by appearing to negotiate in earnest, then walking away, blaming the Russians. NEVERTHELESS, face-to-face discussions are finally being held between the two sides. And that’s a positive, if small, step. At least for the next few hours we can hope.¹ That said:

 

“Zelensky’s current strategy is transparent: appease Trump just enough to avoid backlash, but stop short of agreeing to anything that might commit Ukraine to a negotiated settlement. Even in a weakened state, Kiev shows no willingness to make meaningful concessions – or even to engage directly with Moscow.

On the Russian side, there is little incentive to indulge a Western-managed process designed to give President Trump a diplomatic win. Russia is holding firm on the front line and continues to expand its gains methodically. There is no reason to offer a ceasefire now, just when progress is being made.” (RT)

 

 👉EUROPEAN LEADERS need to realize the jig is up and that Ukraine, and the U.S., and NATO have all lost. And losers can't be choosers. They will have to live with what the Russians will allow them in any final peace deal. But, the "four amigos" seem oblivious to that reality as they do a slow-walk movie strut on the way to the big gunfight at the O-K Corral. What a bunch of posers!

Note: I photoshopped their heads around because these Bozos are interchangeable, all saying the same crap with each having a comeuppance and political ‘beheading’ coming down the pipe in their near-future. Chop-chop!😆

 

[UPDATE: President Zelensky has landed in in Ankara today and is holding talks with Turkish president Erdogan while his negotiating team prepares for Friday's talks in Istanbul with the Russian delegation. There's no telling what Zelensky spoke to Erdogan  about but, dollars to doughnuts, the clown prince will throw a spanner into the works ASAP. 🤡 Stay Tuned.]

 

Cheers, Jake. ____________________________________

 

*But not France. Macron said his military was tapped out and had no more armaments to give. Boo-hoo!

 

1. Negotiations could take weeks or months. Recall that the 1975 Paris peace treaty between Viet Nam and the U.S. was years in the making.