A most frequent occurrence, there’s a lot of telling material for your reading pleasure at Salt Spring News, the latest instalment dealing in considerable depth with recent moves involving a developing alliance between Russia and Turkey, doing something of an end-around to counter NATO moves in the Ukraine and Syria. Mr. Scott has run this most excellent aggregator site for more than a decade, providing not only the material for rumination, but a short rumination of his own from time to time. He has often featured pieces from Pepe Escobar, a pundit who is the diametric opposite of what we see in our closer-to-home press, that is to say, a fine researcher and a scribe who looks under all the rocks before informing his readers of all aspects of the subject of his enquiries. His latest piece can be accessed at SSN (link above) or here, so now we can get to the point of the mainstream of tonight’s symposium (h/t Tom Lehrer, An Evening Wasted With, c. 1959).)

Pictured above are some of the prima ballerinas in the current dance macabre working through Eastern Europe and the Middle East, with Erdo and Vlad finessing some slick stuff on Merkie and Obie of late. For those of us who don’t like the meddling of NATO in the affairs of the Ukraine or supporting sworn enemies to unseat Assad in Syria, there is this tendency to gloat at the undoing of the narrative that the West is promoting in this region, as well as others around the globe. There is also a tendency to forget what sort of people Vlad and Erdo have shown themselves to be through the repressive actions against minorities in their own countries as well as the sequestration of wealth and suppression of human and general social rights at home and abroad. The sad part is that, for the ordinary citizen who believes that we should all have a say in the affairs of our land, there may be no viable choice from those extant, and there is a readjustment in thinking, one that takes us from an alignment with existing organizations to a sense of belonging to a broader human group of fluid and changing nature in which we provide our own leadership and delegate freely as long as those to whom we delegate work toward agreed objectives. When objectives are not met, or the effort goes astray, we withdraw our support and realign. Anyone who felt the upsurge of interest and energy attendant upon the “hope and change” campaign of 2008, who sensed the stark contrast between the mumblings of the Bush and the soaring oratory of Obama, it continues to be something of a bleeding sore to see that Obama has, for all intents and purposes, become Bush, other than the words. We saw this play out on a lesser scale a couple of weeks back when we saw the loyal opposition in Victoria sign on to a tax bill that even some of their members qualified as a sell-out. It was a no-brainer: the measure would pass with or without their vote, and instead of taking a stand against the bald giveaway of what should be common resources, the opposition became the same corruption by voting with the government. Weaver stood alone is asking the rhetorical WTF? and the sitting was over.

The difficulty lies in building community activity to counter this massed stupidity and betrayal, a process that seems to require a good deal of patience, but there remains the question of how much time do we have to be patient, given the pressing nature of the challenges we face.