The Books of Bokonon

Johnathan Last of The Bulwark goes into just how self-destructive the current White House regime truly is - in the process declaring the American Age is over . When we keep in mind that Trump's big idea for decades has been to reimpose the sorts of tariffs only a Gilded Age president would love (McKinley, anyone?). We now are dealing with a tariff regime that makes no sense. Ask the penguins in isolated Antarctic islands that got caught up in this mess - well actually don't because penguins cannot talk or trade goods and services.  The tariff regime has led the current Canadian Prime Minister (and likely future Prime Minister following elections in the near future) to declare the era of American leadership to be effectively over. As a great power, the US is finished. We just don't quite know the scope of what has been done just yet. The way the tariffs were rolled out had no real coherence. The end result in addition to possible (or probably) plunging all involved into a gl...

I'll lead by posting a link to a blog post I think might be worth your while. The blogger I've known primarily as The Analyst on Telegram has been moving over to Bluesky and has hosted longer posts on his own blog.  The Analyst's title is certainly intended to provoke a reaction. The reality is that all governments fall eventually. It's never a matter of if but when. Towards the end, The Analyst makes clear that predicting the exact moment that this iteration of Russia led by Putin is impossible. But if one reads through the post carefully, one will appreciate the various economic and geopolitical headwinds the Putin regime faces.  The economic picture is grim. The ruble has been losing value for much of this year, and plunged recently to its lowest level since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Although the ruble recovered a bit, it is still north of 100 rubles to one US dollar, and there is little hope that aside from maybe another dead cat bou...

 We live in interesting times, to say the least. Let's start with Syria. When I started crafting my post, this was a map showing the position of a faction of Syrian rebels in relation to the remaining territory under Assad's control. That map has become very outdated since then. When I was reading that intelligence had predicted that Assad's regime would collapse in 5 to 10 days , I knew it looked grim for that particular barbaric dictatorship. If reports that a faction of rebels has now not only succeeded in taking several major cities but also now is in control of the Damascus International Airport, the regime is officially over. This is a dictatorship that the Russian Federation and Iran have propped up in earnest since the initial heady days of the Arab Spring. We know how opposition to Assad's regime got decimated, and how Russia bombed the city of Aleppo into the Stone Age. Syria has been in a civil war since 2011. Granted the territory held by various rebel facti...