World War? Third time's the charm

One of recent time's crazier headlines read: 'Rishi Sunak says Russia to blame for Poland strike - regardless of who fired missile'.

There you have it. Russia is to blame, always and forever. Even if they didn't actually do what they are accused of, and that the ramifications of it might be, oh you know, World War III. Whether or not the Ukrainians stood something to gain from such an act is, it seems, irrelevant.

Not that I have any idea who shot which missile where. The news is impossible to read, so squelching with propaganda as it is. Take, for example, two articles from The Telegraph from the same day a week-or-so ago. One was entitled 'Russia losing significantly more aircraft than it can replace', another 'Russian air power could overwhelm Ukraine'. As to which was true I must admit even more ignorance than usual. At least I now understand what reading the news in the Soviet Union might have been like.

Still, in an attempt to backtrack somewhat, other media outlets are now calling the Poland-bound missile 'Russian-made' instead of 'Russian'. I once stubbed my toe on a futon from Ikea and still harbour resentment towards the Swedes, so I appreciate the distinction.

The war drags on, and nobody seems too sure why. Certainly not much of our national interest lies in that patch of Eastern Europe. The Yanks want to throw another $37.7 billion at the Ukranians, adding to the billions already injected into various Ukrainian bank accounts and blown up on the Eastern European steppe. It's all for a good cause as we fight for the freedom of Ukraine until we run out of Ukrainians, or until the money given to the Ukrainians is lost in dodgy crypto-exchanges linked to the Democrat Party.

Not that everything gets the press as war-aroused as a missile strike on some poor unsuspecting Poles. Nord Stream II – one of Europe's most significant pieces of infrastructure – is blown up amid, err, how should we say, strange circumstances, and it passes through the media cycle as fast as any piece of low IQ celebrity gossip. Bridges, too, are blown up, before being speedily memory-holed.

When an awkward question arises it is ignored. After all, the war is now reductio ad Putler – the man in the Kremlin is very bad and we are very good. That knowledge is enough to analyse each and every new event as it unfolds.

Whether the West told the USSR that it would not expand NATO eastwards when the Soviets pulled troops out of East Germany, whether our moves to co-opt Ukraine into Western military frameworks might constitute a threat from the Muscovite point of view, or whether the big brains in Washington might have upped the ante by fostering the 2014 revolution in Ukraine is neither here or there. It might be a few more decades yet till the West spots its post-1991 strategic idiocy.

It's hardly surprising: we can scarcely remember who our own Prime Minister was last month, let alone thinking back a whole eight years to Euromaidan. Our longue durée is now approximately the time it takes to refresh our Twitter feed.

Meanwhile, never fear, Rashid Sanook is at the G20 shindig in Bali. One might think that our overlords would tire of each others' company having just been to COP27, but apparently not. Hot off committing us to 'climate reparations' due to our terrible sin of starting the Industrial Revolution (no good deed goes unpunished), he is meeting all his chums again, Herr von Schwab among them. Heaven knows what he'll sign us up to next.

As an aside - given that the G20 is described as a 'intergovernmental forum', one wonders which government Schwab is there to represent. I will let the 'conspiracy theorists' among you figure that one out.

Of course, as the leaders of the world gather their populations are rapidly immiserated. Sanook's Chancellor of the Exchequer – Hunt 先生 to his friends – continues to crush the middle classes of his own country under onerous tax burdens and profligate spending on wars, hotels full of Albanians and public sector largesse.

It's quite a pretty picture they are painting. It's quite hard to keep track of all the madness on display; perhaps that's the point. No doubt the multi-millionaire boy from Goldman Sachs and his friends at the G20 will sort everything out for us. Just keep the panem et circenses going a bit longer, please: it's going to be a mighty crash when it all comes crumbling down.

Another nugget of news is Trump's announcing to run in 2024. Very serious people think he would be a bad choice. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps his time has passed and de Santis is the man. Then again, maybe it does not matter. Would either of them stand a chance in America's definitely above-board and completely squeaky clean electoral system anyway? After all, Americans seem bizarrely intent on voting into office the senile (Biden), the brain-damaged (Fetterman) and the brain-dead (Harris).

It's hard to keep up with sheer onslaught of insanity. Perhaps that's the point: the barrage is so relentless that is impossible to resist. In that sense, it's a bit like a barrage of Katyusha rockets.