It is difficult to maintain any faith in humanity these days, as it so continuously, consistently and reliably chooses the path of inhumanity. 

It's exhausting to even think about, let alone write down, the litany of evils plaguing our world, and somehow even worse to contemplate the cowardice and complacency that enables it. 

The West has largely turned its back on Ukraine; sure, Australia's providing tanks, but this is an exception. US aid continues to trickle through, but with so many restrictions and conditions attached, as to be pretty much useless. "Don't actually use these" and "don't hurt any Russians" are what it amounts to. Even that will cease under Donald Trump and his handlers, who are openly siding with Russia, and will do all they can to abet and enable its plans. 

Orban's Hungary continues to block large aid packages from the EU. Olaf Scoltz continues to dither. 

Russia's allies suffer no such indecision. Iranian drones and North Korean munitions continue to flow freely, no strings attached. North Korea have even sent personnel. No paralyzing terrors of escalation there. 

Back home, the Prime Minister has announced evidence of blatant Russian interference, (paying off Jordan Peterson amongst others) and the anti-Trudeau hordes, so completely tunnel-visioned by their pet issue, can't think beyond seething, drooling rage at the messenger. They'll probably embrace Russia in response. If Justin Trudeau said water was wet, his opponents would scream that it wasn't. 

Further south, while Joe Biden has to fight tooth and nail to send Ukraine sock-full of grape shot, there's no problem at all getting billions in aid to Israel. And unlike Ukraine, which receives weapon under the condition they never actually use, there are no restrictions whatever on what Israel does with its gifts. No-strings attached, carte-blanche, do as thou wilt. Israel can hit anyone it likes, and anyone it doesn't.  It even struck Russia's Khmeimim airbase in Syria, and the world did not descend into WWIII. 

Every day brings bad news, and worse news. Even no news is bad news; silence makes one fear the worst. 

So what is one to do? "Keep Calm and Carry On" I suppose. There's not much alternative. 

  

Paul Di'Anno 1958-2024

 If I may step away from politics Just. For. A. Minute. I'm quite saddened to hear of the passing of Paul Di'Anno. 

A good singer, a good frontman, an important architect in the formation of Metal As-We-Know-It. 

His albums with Maiden are probably my favourite of the ouvre - sharp and edgy in a way they just wouldn't continue to be under Bruce Dickinson (awesome as he was and is). I think I was given a vinyl copy of "Maiden Japan" as a Christmas gift one year, and to this day the opening drum beats of "Running Free" will be every bit as seasonal as anything by Burl Ives or Bing Crosby; my own personal jingling bells. 

I got my picture taken with him after a gig in Toronto sometime in the early 2000s. I hope it still exists: a lot of my pics were lost in a flood some ten years back. 

(Funny story, his backing band at the time were a local band I would later audition to join. Alas, I didn't cut it. Wonder who they eventually did choose. . .) 
There exists somewhere a picture of me 

Russians at War

 Big kerfufle at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) of late over the screening of Muscovite Pity Party Russians at War. 

Under pressure from the local Ukrainain community, the Festival has suspended screenings, not out of any acknowledgement of the community's concerns, but over "security concerns" - concerns which, for the record, the Toronto Police did not share, and made no recommendations about one way or the other. 

Cue the tiresome hand-wringing from the local artsy-fartsies abut the power of the film's pacifist message. Propaganda? Oh no ma'am. Just humanizing the rape of pillage of a country. 

I would have a lot more sympathy for the argument from artistic expression if the director, Anastasia Trofimova, had not been a Russian national previously employed by Russia Today (RT). Or, if this had not been during a time of war in which real lives were at stake. 

So what's the difference between Russians at War and Twenty Days in Mariupol, which gave the Ukrainian side (and won a pile of Oscars in the process)? This: Mariupol is about people defending their country from brutal invaders.   Russians at War is about the invaders. This is not different sides of the same issue: they are not equally entitled to my sympathy. 

Make no mistake: those allegedly poor Russians are there to kill Ukrainians.  Unless they mutiny and defect, they will probably obey their orders and kill more. 

A message of pacifism will make no headway in Moscow. It could make quite a bit in democratic countries. Loosey-goosey both-siderism could easily take hold in the more squeamish elements of democratic society and push ballot-box pressure to end military aid, or force Ukraine into futile "negotiations" - the appeaser's favourite euphemism for "surrender". 

The Kremlin is quite happy to push this kind of psychological opiate, especially when they're this close to getting their operatives back into the White House - Trump and Vance have both stated their plan for Ukraine is give Russia everything it wants, and I do mean everything. Russia at War is just what the Russophile Trumpists need. 

Anti-war my ass. 

At least Modi didn't get his Majority. He'll have to form a coalition government, and won't be able to rewrite the constitution. That is an EXTREMELY good thing.

A democratic India is a very good thing to have in the world. Whereas and autocratic one, aligned with Russia and China, would be a very scary thing indeed.
Take what releif may come.

Pay the Price

When Mike Johnson finally allowed a vote on military aid to Ukraine, (to universal celebration of all decent minded folks in the free world), I was tempted to, in the words of Churchill, “sleep the sleep of the saved and thankful”. 

Speaker Mike Johnson

It is of course a great relief – Ukraine isn’t down for the count yet. But how much is too little too late? Six months of wasted opportunity, lost territory, and lost lives. Adivka is lost. As we speak, the Russians are advancing on Lyptsi and Vovchansk. Who knows when the aid will actually arrive? 

It would not surprise me if The Russians put up a statue of Johnson in Adivka. That he finally did the right thing after 6-months of dithering does not redeem him. He very nearly cost an entire nation its existence. Its liberation will be that much more difficult and bloody because of his Trump inspired dilly-dallying. Putin’s other puppets in Congress were clearly distraught – a delicious sight, all those tankie tears.

$60 Billion. That’s about what it will amount to. That sounds like a lot. How much is democracy worth?

Some well-meaning people have complained that $60 billion is a lot to spend on other people’s wars; that it could buy a lot of hospitals and schools at home. To such folk I would like to say that it would also buy a lot of Russian language lessons and Cyrillic signs to put up over those hospitals and schools. 

That’s what I’d like to say. I’m more likely to say that it will save countless Ukrainian lives. It seriously will.

To begin with, almost none of this is in the form of cold-hard cash. Skids of dollar bills are not being sent to Kyiv to finance Zelensky’s imaginary summer home – this is a Rascist fantasy. Most of it is in the form of military hardware, already constructed and currently gathering dust. So why not send it to an embattled people who could desperately use it? Unless you want them to be slaves. . .

Patriot Missiles

Some of that hardware will include Patriot missile defence systems which will shoot down Russian missiles before they land on Ukrainian cities. Will anyone who’s not a Kremlin Kretin tell me this is not money well-spent? Better than letting the Patriots rot in landfill somewhere? That is what the pacifist position amounts to: withholding technology that could save lives, and letting the Russian missiles fall where they will.

Pacifists are people who refuse to prevent massacres, even when they can.

If the aid prolongs the war, it will be by allowing Ukraine to survive, which I refuse to see as a bad thing. If Russia continues to attack, then that is Russia’s crime. Russia can achieve peace any time it likes; it need only turn around and go home. It is Russian greed and Russian bloodlust and Russian delusions of grandeur that keep the killing going, not Ukrainian insistence on survival, nor its friends’ attempt to help.

Democracies either stand together, or fall one-by-one. There is enough strength in the democratic world to keep a large piece of it democratic, but no one state – no, not even that one – can do it on its own. So we are faced with a choice: a world dominated by democratic ideals (however imperfect), or dominated by strong-men like Putin, who will grab and take what they want.

Dictators are basically bullies, school-yard bullies who’ve gotten control of countries. They don’t want to make deals with you. They don’t want to reason with you. They won’t honour agreements with you. They will grab and take as much as they think they can get away with. That’s why appeasement never works. They’ll just keep taking more. So, you can either stand up to them now, or later, or not at all and find yourself with nothing.

That’s why I support the $60 billion aid package, and all other such packages from all over the civilized world. Make it $70 billion, 100, 200, whatever it takes. How much did it cost to bring Hitler down?  You can be sure Putin will not be skimping on his war!

It will mean diverting more resources into manufacture of engines of death. Sorry, but sometimes that’s what survival requires. Auschwitz was not liberated by good vibes. Nicer things will be neglected so that worse things don’t appear. I don’t like it either, but it’s not like I had a say in any of it. Putin and his followers chose the way of war, and we need to respect their decision. 

Fortunately for us, the Ukrainians alone are currently shouldering the burden of blood. We don’t have to disrupt our soft comfortable lives – yet. We owe it to them to render any assistance we can, whether it’s convenient or not.

Slava Ukrayini!
Слава Україні

 On June 25 of this year, I was lured out of bed with news  that Russian helicopters were shooting at Russian armed columns on their way to Moscow. When I got out of bed it was even better: twenty-five thousand armed Wagner mercenaries had seized control of Rostov-on-the-Don and were on their way to Moscow. 

Then it was all over by lunch. Prigozhin changed his mind, and called the whole thing off. 

Yevgeny Prigozhin, former hotdog salesman, now commander of Wagner private army

Blink - or sleep in - and you would have missed it. Never in my life has such a huge news story amounted to so little. 

For the briefest of moments - less than an afternoon in fact - it looked like the world world was entering into a new phase. One of the world's biggest and most problematic countries was about to implode in on itself. Who knows what it would look like afterwards, but at the very least, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was through. Putin couldn't possibly fight a civil war and a foreign war at the same time, especially if the rebels controlled the border areas. Russian forces would have to come home, or else wind up unsupplied and encircled. It was over.  

Until it wasn't. 

You ever been awoken from a deep sleep, in the middle of an amazing dream, because your fucking air conditioner chose that moment to "CLANG"?  That's what it felt like. For a couple hours, it really felt like Victory was around the corner. If you think we're disappointed, imagine how the Ukrainians must feel! 

Still, it's difficult to see how this could fail to benefit Ukraine somehow or other. At the very least it'll further demoralize Vatniks on the front line: bickering leadership is rarely condusive to morale. And a couple expensive Russian helicopters were shot down. . .

If I made too much of it, in my defense I wasn't the only one: I daresay most of the internet, experts and amateurs alike, assumed full-scale civil war was on. When twenty-five thousand armed mercenaries start marching to the capital, it's not an unreasonable assumption to make. Death and destruction seemed far more likely than *poof* - nothing. I'm in the middle of Antony Beevor's Russia: Revolution and Civil War, and this was more or less how the last Russian civil war started, so it was not exactly a ridiculous thing to think. 

What the hell was Prigozhin playing at? Who the hell knows. Commentators are all a tizzy because there really is no logical explanation (not that logic ever had a place in Russia) or rational justification for it. Was he bluffing? Did he realize he bit off more than he could chew? Did he think his support was not strong enough? Or some other end game we can't even imagine and won't know for years to come. That'd be my guess. 

The whole thing is weird. The only thing I'm certain of is you'd have to be a Grey Zone imbecile to think either Putin or Prigozhin has come out of this stronger. 

 

 The Nova Kakhovka Dam has been blown, flooding large parts of southern Ukraine. Thousands will need to evacuate. Thousands lack clean drinking water. Untold numbers will drown. Thousands are without power. Agriculture in the region has been ruined. Most of the animals in Nova Kakhovka Zoo have died. It is a humanitarian, ecological, and economic catastrophe.

Both sides are blaming the other. Since lying is Russia's national sport, (I wouldn't trust Dmitri Peskov to spell his own name), I am inclined to believe Ukraine. These are lands Ukraine considers its own, and hopes to liberate soon. It will be inheriting a massive mess, one they're hardly likely to be imposed upon themselves. Not to mention how much it complicates their plans for counter-offensive in the area. Sabotoging one's own counter-offensive seems one double bluff too far. True, Russia also claims the territory. And the Russian side of the river has gotten the worst of it. But Russia has historically never given a shit about its own people, and never shied away from causing ecological catastrophes (Kara-Bogaz anyone?), so I have no problem believing they'd do this to their own side. Scorched earth is their way, or in this case, soaked earth.