My speculations about the likely explanation of the Syrian gas explosions were hardly published than I saw an article entitled “Trump Should Rethink Syria Escalation” signed by 29 former officials of various US security and intelligence agencies operating as Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS, https://consortiumnews.com/vips-memos/), arguing that Trump was wrong to hastily conclude that Assad was guilty, and urged him “to rethink his claims blaming the Syrian government for the chemical deaths in Idlib and to pull back from his dangerous escalation of tensions with Russia.”

In Trump’s post-missile raves, he rued the deaths of “pretty little babies,” and wept crocodile tears, while daughter Ivanka, who is alleged to have been moved by the image, urged retaliation and praised the results. But they stopped short of weeping for the children whom she and her father had just killed with missiles.Even grief can be uneven in war.
Larry Summers, the American demagogue, said, 25 year ago, that one American was equal to 11 Africans. A Jewish friend told me a while ago that one Jew is the same as 100 Palestinians and 500 goyim. So the slaughter of Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians in the last 50 years is nothing to them.
Now suddenly, the unnecessary deaths all across Syria become merged with the unfortunate event in Idlib, and instantly blamed on Assad, without pausing for evidence. This George Bush style has energised the White House, Congress and Pentagon, and warms the hearts of the arms-makers as they print billions with each run of the assembly lines.
The Neo-con call for war plays on every news network. I have yet hear any sage or objective analysis of the situation on American networks. We are dominated by rhetoric at the White House, as Trump finished 100 days, feeding off sycophants to whom humanity is a big blur, bringing its destruction closer than ever before.
North Korea’s Kim il Jung threatens to blow-up an American carrier, and the US seems to salivate at the thought. You would think the sane and sage words in the VIPS’ memos would reach Trump, and having done that, make him pause from his make-believe world and ask a few real scientists and analysts for information and advice.
The USA has long been a rogue state, having seized world trade, enslaved Governments with money gifts, and changing regimes willy-nilly to suit its agenda. It has broken international laws and its actions are no different from the crazies its second amendment has nurtured in schools, vigilante groups, Police forces etc. that kill with impunity. It gets away with all this because no one has the temerity to spank it, as it has done intemperately and illegally with Syria and North Korea, with a shrew at the UN and hawks in Washington, all guided by Israel and the might of the Bilderberg dollar.
Trump is unfortunately too selfish, and his family advisers no improvement, to understand the complex issues around “live and let live.” Their learning seems to have by-passed all the advances made in thought, human relations, politics, government and the sciences generally, save profit-making, an easy thing to do, if you have no conscience or sense of fairness and what is right and wrong, and when your wealth puts you above the law.
The VIPS group said it well: “We issued our first Memorandum for the President on the afternoon of Feb. 5, 2003, after Colin Powell’s ill-begotten speech at the United Nations. Addressing President Bush, we closed with these words: No one has a corner on the truth; nor do we harbor illusions that our analysis is 'irrefutable' or 'undeniable' [adjectives Powell applied to his charges against Saddam Hussein]. But after watching Secretary Powell today, we are convinced that you would be well served if you widened the discussion … beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.” The advice remains sound today.
The protests now occurring in Russia smell of Mossad/CIA, continuing destabilisation in Venezuela and Brazil as weapons of war.
As Trump glories after 100-days in office, we recall that 2017 is the 100th anniversary of America’s Asia Exclusion Act, 100 years since Indian indenture globally was declared ended on March 12, 1917, and Canadian soldiers struck a big blow for peace by taking Vimy Ridge on April 9th in WWI, when others had failed.

In each village there is always an old lady who is of such an irascible temperament she puts the deadliest fear in the heart of the stoutest boy. To stand in the long, dark shadow of so fearsome a being is to listen to the knees knocking together tock-tock, tock-tock of a young man with so much promise as a leader, who only moments before was boasting he could face an awakened wasp’s nest with both hands tied behind his back. Or even put those same knocking knees to good use in outrunning a bad-dog with its canines bared, foaming at the mouth, and lean and powerful as an accelerating cheetah chasing down its fleeing prey.

Such were our run-ins with the solitary and reclusive soul, Auntie Moon. We all knew and feared her more than the fiery-red wasps we called Jack Spaniards, or the bad-dogs that knotted together into an ad hoc, pick-up-side bundle to chase us a dozen at a time as a tumble of razor-sharp teeth. Or even those molecular red ants that delivered a savage, pepper-hot sting, which we used to get even with enemies recently made during sessions of pitching marbles, trapping them by the hundreds in a matchbox, and then delivering these secretly during class down the back of the pants to the horrified, wide-eyed consternation of our recently made schoolyard rivals.
Of course, we spoke respectfully to Auntie Moon, as we said back then, “In front of her face.” This is what we were taught to do by our parents whenever we met an adult on the street. We sang out in a chorus of engaging and publicly truthful boyish voices, “Good morning, Auntie Moon!”, wishing her the best of the day as we trundled on with our weighted school bags that were already putting a curve in our developing backbones, heading as we were into the rugged disciplinarian world that was the square-pegs-in-round-holes education system in those bygone hegemonic, colonial days.
Auntie Moon never deigned to give us a reply. She looked down at us from the lofty perch of advanced adulthood with eyes probing suspiciously through our boyish bonhomie, searching from face to face for not only an ulterior intent in our fair-weather greeting, but more for signs of guilt.
For Auntie Moon had good reason to look down her long nose, flaring each nostril with menace, at our cheerful bursts of sunlit disposition. She was as suspicious as those bared canines that always chased us, and for good reason, since as boys we were angels in public places, but badly behaved enough to maliciously throw a rock into a sleeping pack of dogs for the love of mayhem, and then onwards for an escalating thrill of the chase.
If Auntie Moon had similar long, predatory teeth she would have bared them at us too. Also, she would have chased after us with accelerating bursts of speed if she had stamina and muscular legs. For no doubt about it, she had little faith in the humanity and goodness of boys, who knew enough of this world to sing like a choir hooded with haloes in a church, “Good morning, Auntie Moon!” within earshot of proud parents so they could hold their heads up high.
However, Auntie Moon knew even more of the machinations of this mixed-up world, how it always presents a minimum of two faces on any day. She knew us well, and despite our mother’s milk still fresh on our faces, that a mere breath later, moments after we had sung together with angelic, lifting voices our friendly anthem of greeting, we would be scaling her backyard fence like wraiths, especially whenever the branches of her trees were labouring with the weight of fruit.
This was when the smells of ripened fruit from her backyard wafted throughout the neighbourhood, the scents of yellow mangoes irresistible, each jeweled with the raindrops of diamonds, ruby-red cherries clustered within reach on trees barely a boy-and-a-half tall. The scents lingered like an open invitation, with palms outstretched and beckoning to each two-faced, amoral boy to take the easy, wide road leading to temptation and doom.
It was in this space of fruition where the tension resided between us boys and the irascible Auntie Moon. At first she tried the passive approach to keep us out, populating the garden with the foreboding residents of two scarecrows, each with gaunt looks beneath dismal straw hats, the hands withering as its bamboo fingers dried into knots like bones under the harsh, hot sun.
It took her active intervention to have us change our thieving ways. Hiding among her trees, Auntie Moon employed the element of surprise. In her hand was a long blade, its edge silver and sharp. Snatching the slowest runner by the collar, she arced the blade at his legs, turning it aside just before impact to slap his calf. He screamed in horror.
In her rage, Auntie Moon turned on a clump of young banana trees, chopping its suckers down at the knees like badly-behaved boys.
After that we avoided her very eyes.

Guyana Focus >