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I wonder if more escalation of military conflict is what we need….
Combined U.S. military forces are being rushed to the Middle East, but events have overtaken the rationale for these moves – viz, to deter an Iranian response in the wake of Israel’s enhanced air campaign against Hezbollah and the start of a ground operation in southern Lebanon to remove terrorist outposts that threaten Israeli communities, U.S. and Israeli officials said Monday. The infusion of fighting assets, which includes air-defense units, will add to the tens of thousands of American personnel already on high alert there, said Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman.
Oh…right, OK. Well, so obviously, escalation is very clearly what we need. Which is just dandy, because this morning [Wednesday 2nd October 2024] we’re getting lots of it: Iran says its action is concluded “unless the Israeli regime decides to invite further retaliation”, and Benjamin Netanyahu says Iran made a big mistake last night and will pay for it. Clear meeting of minds there, folks….and entirely predictable.
After all, yesterday’s events were clear enough: Israel’s military issued a news wire saying rockets were being fired from Iran at Israel. The IDF said it had engaged its Arrow-2 and Arrow-3 anti-air defense missiles. CNN confirmed that Iranian missiles have made impact on Tel Aviv. Jordan and Iraq shut their airspaces.
But fear not, for peacemaker President Biden ordered US military assets in the region to shoot down inbound Iranian missiles, according to the White House press machine, and the White House said it had convened an emergency meeting with VP Harris and national security teams.
High-handed proxy wars have consequences. Now those consequences have materialised, does the current US administration have a clue what to do next, aside from “Full ahead Both to World War III? The Iranian missiles got to Israel before the deterrent did. The Biden administration – Biden, Harris and Blinken – warned Iran to butt out. The Iranians ignored them. So much for diplomacy: the missiles have left the silos
What was that “decapitation” theory again, Pentagon guys? Doesn’t seem to have worked here, does it? Well, whatever – I’m sure Russia will be much slower to release their missiles. Right?
Is the answer to our fiscally bankrupt and depressed economic output to print more US Dollars ad infinitum?
Former U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer, has argued that the United States should vigorously deploy tariffs and other trade restrictions both to protect U.S. industry and to force not only China, but a variety of European and Asian countries, to cease unfair trade practices.
A number of experts have raised concerns about the economic impacts of these policies as well as the risks they would pose to U.S. geopolitical relationships.
However, as both Harris and Trump have declared for restrictive import policies that will adversely effect everyone else, they can’t both be wrong….can they? And the weather’s been jolly nice here today also:
See? No bombs raining on us, mate. We’re alright, Jack. Nothing to worry about.
In the light of these openers, I offer a brief focus on two people: Jerome Powell and Antony Blinken. For they are both classic members of the club I have decided to call The Strangelings. They look perfectly normal to the point of being dull bordering on tedious. But something about them just isn’t right.
Powell sort of sounds like he knows what he’s doing when it comes to the Dollar. Just like Blinken did when he went along with the Bidenarris idea to hand a pile of stay-neutral bribe money over to Iran. But Powell is surreal when it comes to the Wall Street liquidity problems, and Blinken made his game of nuke-Moscow seem a harmless idea – even if he was hatching the scheme with the help of British moron David Lammy. Lammy called Trump a Nazi…and still calls climate change a bigger threat than fundamentalist terrorism . When younger he openly declared hatred for “a Britain run by white supremacists”. He’s a Strangeling too, as is the man who made him Foreign Secretary, Keir Starmer.
The Strangelings’ most obvious feature in political policy terms is their willingness to see every cognitive dissonance as a perfectly consonant development. But as a human typology, there’s far more to the archetype than glorifying both open borders and the closure of Schengen in the same speech. It’s more to do with the fanatical words that emerge unexpectedly from the facial orifice of an innocent face. Think infant Shirley Temple launching into an anti-semitic Julius Streicher rant when you were expecting a few verses of The Good ship Lollipop.
Harriet Harman would enthuse about the virtues of paedophilia while looking for all the world like a Geography teacher about to explain rift valleys. Starmer uses the phrase “hard right racist thugs out to take over our country” and not one iota of Keir’s face diverges from his now familiar impression of a constipated apparatchik. Jeremy Hunt – using the reverse form of the affliction – adopts a lower-fourth juvenile voice pleading “But I have done nothing wrong” behind a visage obviously compiling a list of suitable targets for vengence. Blair, Cameron, Reagan, Harris, Macron, May and Merkel were all textbook Strangelings. When Mutti Merkel left her husband, she took only the fridge with her. A hard-line East German Communist Youth organiser one week – and a Christian Democrat the next – she was a Strangeling: both an oddity and a stranger…possibly even to herself.
There have always been Strangelings in public life, but not on the ubiquitous scale (and with the monied power) that they have today. Jamie Dimon, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Emmanuel Macron and Kamala Harris all have not so much hidden depths as invisible sewers. They specialise in unpredictable behaviours and hidden desires, moving through life like so much ether….totally free from any and all moral considerations. Every member of the New World Order may not know every other member. But they know how to spot each other, and they revel in each others company.
We have lived through the dawning of the Age of the Strangelings. And none of us know for certain what they will do next. The sole thing we can be sure about is that they won’t know what they’re doing either.
They won’t have considered the consequences of their actions – or how such could very easily from here on blight the lives of 8.2 billion people. And probably wipe them out in the end.
But on that happy note, do try and enjoy your Wednesday.
The Slog 