Update December 29: a useful follow up to this post is given by a John Helmer piece on Naked Capitalism. See no innocent ships. * One thing about the Middle East is that its shipping lanes have many choke points: narrow … Read More »
I’ve tried in idle moments to draw up a list of female gamekeepers turned poacher. Contrary to the useful idiocies of identity politics, Facebook’s Frances Haugen does not qualify. One who emphatically does is GCHQ’s Katharine Gun (not be confused … Read More »
Thinking it less a gamble than what salesfolk call a kick-in, first Angela Merkel then Olaf Scholz rolled the dice and lost. Calculating that Russia would swiftly be defeated, followed by regime change in Moscow, Germany obediently committed to the … Read More »
Israel is killing children at a historic rate, is killing an unprecedented number of journalists, and is starving half a million civilians while raining military explosives on a giant concentration camp. No part of this is complicated. No part of this is two-sided. Caitlin … Read More »
This (abridged) from The Economist, August 10 2023: The numbers of war dead are a secret in Ukraine but we get a sense of the scale from the rapidly expanding military cemeteries in every town. At Lychakiv cemetery, space quickly … Read More »
In yesterday’s post – After the war, can Russia win the peace? – I wrote … Western ruling elites have shown repeatedly that Russia cannot trust them: America’s through a thousand deeds and utterances to the effect they recognise no friendship, … Read More »
After all that has gone down, even if the Kremlin is inclined through enlightened self interest to magnanimity, I can’t see the man on the Moscow omnibus buying it. A month ago I wrote that: Ukraine stands exhausted and mortally … Read More »
The Armed Forces of Ukraine walked into this section. It is small – about 1,200 metres long and some 300 metres wide. I do not even understand why they are doing this – they are simply pushing their people into … Read More »
In the early hours of today on his substack leading voice of the political realist school, John Mearsheimer poured out the impotent outrage so many of us are experiencing: Death and Destruction in Gaza I do not believe that anything … Read More »
I can envisage no scenario in which things do not get much worse, in the west at least, before they get better. Broken: the implicit contract between ruler and ruled Washington and its criminally complicit allies didn’t have to lose their … Read More »