Remember this quote from jD Vance

I actually don't remember it at the time, but here's great quote from US Vice-President JD Vance during a 2024 presidential campaign:

"Our interest, I think very much, is in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to out country."

In a later podcast interview, Vance even opined that a war between Israel and Iran would be "the most like and most dangerous scenario" for provoking World War III.

Yikes! If you been thinking that you hadn't heard much from Mr. Vance throughout this whole US-Iran war thing, well, that might be part of the reason.

War or no war. Mispoke or no mispoke

There ae those in the MAGA camp who seem unsure whether the US is actually in a war. 

For example, Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin, a prominent Trump ally, led his Fox News interview with "We are not at war with Iran". Period. Then he wobbled. "This is war, and we're taking out the threat." Ah, right. When pressed, he clarified: "We haven't declared war. They declared war on us, but we haven't." But, another reporter pointed out, "Just now you said, 'This is war'. You called it war." "OK, well, that was a misspoke', Mullin concluded. Clear as mud, then.

Mr. Mullin is not alone. Republican Rperesentative Anna  Paulina Luna and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham both seemed to think that American was not at war with Iran.

Trump invaded Iran based on a "feeling"?

After a great long post the other day about the US war against Iran, here's a much shorter, but no less damning, one.

When the USA invaded Iraq back in in 1991, George HW Bush got United Nations backing and a vote in Congress before he went in to Iraq, which had just invaded little Kuwait.

When the USA invaded Iraq again in 2003, his son George W. also obtained Congressional approval and, although he didn't actually get UN Security Council clearance, he did have the support of a good 40 members of the UN. The issue, you might remember, was his conviction that Iraq had accumulated a stock of "weapons of mass destruction" (a phrase you don't often hear these days, but basically we are talking about nuclear bombs). That claim turned out to be demonstrably false, but Bush and a majority in Congress, a whole host of other countries, and even apparently most Iraqis, did believe it to be true.

Fast forward to February 2026, and Donald Trump set in motion a full-scale war on Iran without telling a soul - not Congress, not the UN, not the Security Council, just the leaders of Israel (who can only loosely be described as having a soul). Trump made his decision because, as he always himself, he had a "feeling" that Iran was imminently about to attack the US (or possibly Israel, or possibly some other country): "It was my opinion that they were going to attack first. If we didn't do it, they were going to attack first. I felt strongly about that."

Wow. So, there you have it in a nutshell: Trump declared a war in which hundreds have already died based on a hunch, a feeling, an opinion. Watch the video. It will creep you out forever.

Prophet Song is eerily prophetic

Reading Paul Lynch's Prophet Song is eye-opening and thought-provoking. Written in 2023, the book is a fictional but plausible dystopic account of Ireland sinking into the depths of fascism and totalitarianism. It seems today, just three years later, remarkably prescient, not so much of present-day Ireland, which still enjoys a robust and resolute democracy as far as I know, but of the situation in the USA.

Granted, the fascist state that Lynch describes is much more extreme, in the same way that Margaret Atwood's Gilead portrayed an eerily familiar, but more severe, USA-gone-wrong. But the parallels are arresting, and Lynch's account of the way in which such an unthinkable situation can materialize by stealth, with a heedless population sleepwalking into the unimaginable, is chilling indeed.

The book, which won the 2023 Booker Prize, is written in a distinctive and idiosyncratic style, with very few paragraph breaks, minimal punctuation in general, some interesting vocabulary choices and word orderings, and some unexpected figures of speech. The text lurches giddily from earthy Irish vernacular to blank verse poetry; the juxtapositions are striking.

Here are just a few snippets:

The winter rain falls lush and cold, the passing days held numb within the rain so that it seems to mask time's passing, each day giving to faceless day until the winter is at full bloom.

The head on you, Larry says, I could pass you on the street and hardly know you. Anybody else but Dad want coffee? Mark says.

She turns watching the faces that surround her, faces pained with the vertigo of staring into the sudden abyss, all of these people the very same, every one of them clothed yet naked, sullied and pure, proud and shameful, disloyal and faithful, all of them brought here by love.

She lies in the dark walking blind alleys of thought, she thinks she sleeps then wakes into a dark room watched by whispering faces finding herself judged.

She drives to the supermarket and coins free a trolley, slides her son into the facing seat and walks past two soldiers standing guard by the doors while holding her breath, the dark majesty of automatic weapons in the arms of youths no older than her son, chins that have no need of a blade, their faces aggressively expressionless.

Wow. It takes a little to get into the cadence and the style of Lynch's writing, but once you do, this is a very rewarding book.

US invasion of Iran is not a just war, and not just a war

This is a long post - there's a lot going on - but bear with me, I'll get to the point eventually.

Just as negotiations between the USA and Iran seemed to be making some real substantive progress - wide-ranging and long-lasting talks on nuclear limits and monitoring, sanctions relief, access to energy sectors, economic cooperation - the rug was pulled, bridges were burned, and a full-scale regional war suddenly seems not just possible but likely.

In the midst of these intense and apparently quite promising mediated discussions on Iran's nuclear program, the USA and Israel have jointly launched a massive and apparently ongoing operation to overthrow Iran's government. It's called "Operation Epic Fury", for Gof's sake. (Who comes up with these names? I'm guessing Trump). End of negotiations. 

Who knows what Trump's rationale was/is (rationale? Trump?), but his negotiating team seems to have been completely blindsided. It's hard to fathom why he would launch a probably-unwinnable war, that will almost certainly send global oil prices through the roof, just before mid-term elections in which his party seems to be struggling. It has all the hallmarks of a whim (believe it or not!), probably a whim deftly engineered by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has been itching for years to attack his bête noir Iran. 

Of course, the Trump administration is trying to frame the US first strikes as a response to previous Iranian attacks on the USA and its allies, and argues, rather unconvincingly, that its goal is just self-defence, "to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime", but few people are buying that. Pete Hegseth likes to say that "the United States did not start this conflict, but we will finish it" . Ooh, pants on fire!

Often, that "imminent threat" is portrayed by Trump & Co as an imminent nuclear attack, on the USA or on some other country, and Trump's timely intervention is therefore saving the whole world: "If we didn't do what we're doing right now, you would have had a nuclear war, and they would have taken out many countries". Unfortunately, Iran doesn't have any nuclear weapons, and even the American intelligence agencies assess that Iran is not actively building any nuclear weapons, and is at least several years away from having any such weapons. How imminent is that?

Where this will go is anyone's guess, but Iran is far from defenceless, and has already responded in kind by attacking US bases in other Middle Eastern countries (Iraq, Bahrain, UAE, Kuwait and Qatar, for starters). Multiple states could be drawn into this conflict, and concerted attacks on Israel can only be hours away (yup, that happened). Iran does not have that many friends in the region, but there is an "Axis of Resistance" comprising Hezbollah (Lebanon), Houthis (Yemen), Hamas (Palestine), and various Shiite militias in Iraq - oh, and strategic partnerships with Russia, North Korea and, to a lesser extent, China - so this could still get very messy. For someone who purports to want to avoid distant "forever wars" and to be working towards world peace, Trump sure has a strange way of showing it.

So, what is this, then? Another Venezuela? Another Iraq? Libya, maybe? Just another step in Trump's quest for world domination? Iran's case is very different from any of those previous regime change operations. Iran is structurally different, "an ideologically entrenched state with layered institutions, doctrinal legitimacy, and a deeply embedded security apparatus", not just a maverick state presided over by a dynastic dictatorship. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei was apparently "taken out" on Day 1, but there is a whole theocratic apparatus around him which will click seamlessly into place. And now they have a convenient martyr to rally around. 

Trump portrays the attacks as doing the people of Iran a favour, calling on them to "seize control of your destiny" and to rise up against the oppressive Islamic theocracy that has ruled the country since the 1979 Islamic revolution. But how exactly are they supposed to do that? There is no plan in place. All Trump has done is to destabilize the country without any thought for its future, leaving it ripe for chaos and penury to ensure.

Trump's exhortation for the Iranian people to "take over your government" is naive at best. Even if the Iranian people (not just the ex-patriate Iranians dancing and singing in the safe capital cities of western nations, but the actual residents of Iran) want regime change - and some polls suggest that they overwhelmingly do - they are absolutely not in a position to make that happen. 

And, make no mistake, the Iranian Islamic regime and its powerful well-prepared regressive machinery is still very much in power, even if many of their leaders have been assassinated by Trump's strikes. Don't believe what Mr. Trump himself might tell us. Plus, global history is very much against the possibility of any quick and easy transfer of power: aerial bombing campaigns have a terrible historial record of successfully fomenting regime change.

Reactions by most western leaders to the US intervention have been predictably muted, given that everyone is scared stiff of crossing Trump. Most chose to condemn Iran's "indiscriminate" strikes on US military bases, while conveniently not even mentioning America's indiscriminate attack on Iran. Implacable Iran adversary Saudi Arabia and the 22-nation Arab League also chose to condemn the "blatant violation of the sovereignty" of those Arabic countries that Iran attacked, blithely papering over the US attacks that precipitated them. Benjamin Netanyahu said ... well, you know the kind of thing Netanyahu said.

Australia and - perhaps surprisingly - Canada were, if anything, less guarded in their language in their support of the US attacks. Albanese strongly supported the US's efforts to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons (wait, wasn't that what the Oman-mediated talks in Geneva were about?) Canadian Prime Minister Carney issued a remarkably pro-US statement in favour of the American military action, calling Iran "the principal source of instability and terror throughout the Middle East". Well, that may have been the case once, but now that role has apparently been assumed by Israel and the USA. Carney did however make it very clear that Canada would not be participating in any such military attacks.

In a knee-jerk reaction, US antagonists China and Russia predictably did condemn the US attacks, but then what else were they supposed to do? Brave little Oman, which had been mediating the US-Iran nuclear talks, also called out the USA, calling the attacks a "violation of the rules of international law and the principle of settling disputes through peaceful means rather than though hostility and the shedding of blood". The UN itself has been surprisingly silent thus far.

The US Congress is, as always, hopelessly divided. It was just days away from a formal debate on potential military action in Iran, a debate that the surprise attack has handily pre-empted. Democrats and at least a handful of Republicans are warning that Trump's actions are (yet again) illegal and unconstitutional. They were launched without Congressional approval or debate, and in response to no credible imminent threat. (A Congressional vote is about to put that to the test.) Even if a censoring motion passes, though, Trump knows that he can override it, and a two-thirds majority to override THAT would be a stretch indeed. It would therefore amount to little more than a stern rebuke, a proverbial slap on the wrist. 

Polls suggest that 6 in 10 Americans disspprove of Trump's war, and a similat majority do not think that he has a clear plan, and that he should get congressional approval for any further military action.

So, how should we see this apparently gratuitous military escalation, this unprompted attack on an independent sovereign state, ethically speaking?

The US and its supporters (which apparently includes Canada) argue that the action was a necessary evil, needed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons which would pose an existential threat to the region and to global stability in general. Furthermore, it was needed to stop Iran's human rights abuses and its violent suppression of domestic protests, arguing that removing the current regime would benefit both the Iranian people and regional security.

And yes, you can see some elements of sense there, even if Iran is actually nowhere near developing nuclear weapons, and promising talks were under way anyway to address that very threat, now abandoned. No-one really likes Iran and its methods (apart from its own hard-line Islamist radicals) - "the world's leading state sponsor of terror", as the well-worn phrase goes - but that is not the only issue here. Few people really like the political systems in Russia, or Hungary, or North Korea, or Afghanistan, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but you don't see the USA invading them to force regime change. It is very selective in its choice of invasion, even if not necessarily logical.

The bottom line, is that invading Iran without UN and Security Council  approval is quite clearly a contravention of international law, and serves to further erode confidence in the international rule of law. In the same way, invading Iran without Congressional approval is against US domestic law and the US Constitution. There is little to distinguish it from the US's earlier invasion of Venezuela, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, etc, etc. Pre-emptive or "preventive" wars are rarely moral, usually prompted by other self-serving or mercenary factors, making it a "war of choice" - never a good idea. (Some would argue that Iran itself has been flouting international law for years and so should not expect to hide behind international law now, but that is a very slippery slope to navigate)

When you think about it, it's pretty patronizing to say that Iran cannot ever have nuclear weapons, but the US (and France, and Pakistan, and Israel, and others) can, and that the US knows better what is good for Iran than its own government. Just because we don't like the way a country runs its affairs is not a sufficient reason to wade in there and change it. There is a little thing called sovereignty. Remember the outcry when Trump talked about the US annexing Greenland, and making Canada the 51st state?

There are potential humanitarian concerns too. Although Iran itself was in breach of humanitarian norms in its brutal put-down of domestic dissent, initiating a war in which civilians are certain to suffer and regional instability is increased is not a valid response. There are already reports that a school has been struck in Iran, with unconfirmed reports of 153 children killed - it always seems to happen that hospitals and schools end up suffering, despite claims of "precision targeting" - and this thing is just getting started. The invasion could even serve to strengthen the Islamic regime's resolve, and weaken internal grassroots resistance. Either way, it is unlikely to benefit the Iranian people, and the establishment of a puppet regime serving US and Israeli interests - which is probably the endgame here - will not help them. 

As you can probably tell, my instincts fall in the latter camp. The United States' invasion of Iran is not a just war, even if such a thing exists.

So, how are those tariffs going?

A detailed look in the G;lobe and Mail at how American and world trade has gone in 2025 concludes that: "The global economy has been transformed by shape-shifting US trade policies. Just not in the ways Mr. Trump envisioned."

As a global average, US tariffs are about 11.6%, but there are huge variation between countries, with China facing down average tariffs of 27% (although that is much less than the triple digit tariffs in place last spring), and Canada and Mexico facing tariffs of just 4.5-5% (due to the protections of the USMCA trade agreement - for now, at least). The global effective tariff rate has remained pretty much unchanged from pre-Trump days at around 2%.

Most countries are just trying, as far as possible, to avoid US trade and boost trade with other non-US countries, particularly China, India, Vietnam, etc. Canada's exports to the US fell by 5.8% in 2025; it's exports to the rest of the world jumped by 17.2%, although a lot of that was specifically due to the burgeoning price of gold, which was always a large Canadian export globally. Most countries are not retaliating in kind, generally speaking, but seeking to further open up non-US trade. 

The US has indeed narrowed its trading gap with many countries, especially China, a stated aim of Trump. But its trade deficits with other countries, such as Mexico, Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand and Ireland, have actually worsened.

Of the three countries facing so-called "fentanyl tariffs" - China, Mexico and Canada - China has been by far the hardest hit, but Mexico (arguably the main offender as regards fentanyl) has hardly suffered at all. Canada is somewhere in between.

Canada has lost a lot of manufacturing jobs as a result of the US tariffs, but the USA has lost almost as many, percentagewise, and many more in absolute terms. The US employment slide actually predated Trump and his tariffs, although tariffs have certainly not helped (and have definitely not had the effect that Trump boasted about, of vastly improving US manufacturing employment).

Part of Trump's goal, certainly when negotiating international trade deals, was to increase overseas investment in the USA. Canada never actually signed any agreements with the US, and so has made no commitments to increase US investment like several other countries have. In fact, Canadian net investment in the US has cratered, falling to a 12-year low.

Another victory Trump claims for his tariffs is the sterling performance of the stock exchanges. What he fails to mention is that the performance of the exchanges in the rest of the world has far outpaced that of the US stock exchange, a stark reversal of the trends over the previous decade.

And finally, and no means least, Americans' opinions of US economic policy (inflation and employment) is also tanking. Americans have rarely ever felt so pessimistic in the last five decades. It remains to be seen how that pessimism plays it in the upcoming.mid-term elections.

Ellison family ownership of CNNnwoudl be disastrous for media bias

The on-again-off-again bid by Netflix to acquire ownership of Warner Bros Discovery seems to be off again, this time probably permanently. And while you might not be particularly interested which global conglomerate owns which bit of Hollywood or who is in control of the Cartoon Network, there are other considerations that might be much more impactful for the United States and even the world.

Now that Netflix has pulled out of the deal, Warner Bros Discovery will almost certainly become owned by Paramount Skydance, which has aggressively pursued the hostile takeover. Paramount Skydance is part of the tech/media empire of Larry and David Ellison, and therein lies the danger. Warner Bros Discovery owns, among many other things, CNN, one of the few media voices still critical of Donald Trump and his push towards fascism, and the new ownership structure puts CNN at risk of influence by Trump.

Larry Ellison in particular has a close relationship with Trump, and was a major donor towards Trump's re-election. When the Ellisons bought Paramount, CBS News (part of the Paramount group) saw a significant editorial shift and a concerted effort to appeal more to conservative viewers. There is every likelihood that Trump nemesis CNN, almost certainly under strong pressure from Trump himself behind the scenes, will suffer the same fate. CNN CEO Mark Thompson felt compelled to issue a rather panicky memo to staff members, urging that they "don't jump to conclusions about the future until we know more", but CNN staff at all levels are clearly worried.

With the Warner Bros Discovery acquisition, the Trump-aligned Ellison family will have assembled media holdings to rival that of the (equally conservative) Murdoch empire, and critical, progressive-leaning news outlets will be an endangered species in the US. Other than CNN - and there were rumours of CNN already starting to shift rightwards back in 2022, even before recent developments - left-leaning (or even centre-leaning) media in the USA is limited to MSNBC, NPR and PBS, and, in print, the New York Times and (maybe) the Washington Post. The right-wing stranglehold on US media will be almost complete.

And, in case you are maybe not convinced that media bias can actually affect people's political views in this day and age, let me assure you it can. Like social media, the mainstream press can materially influence elections, whether they tell the truth or not. Studies have clearly shown that when people change their news source their politics change too; it's that simple. And nobody knows this better than Donald J Trump and the MAGA movement.

"I apologized for my comments - no, really, I did!"

It's worth watching the bizarre press conference in which Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim made the same reply almost twenty times to journalists asking for Sim to explain his actions. Whatever the press corps asked, Sim's answer was "I called Councillor Orr and apologized for my comments", almost word for word, and with a straight face

The whole thing started a few days earlier when another councillor from Sim's party accused Councillor Sean Orr (not from that party) of distributing illegal drugs to people on the street. No-one really knows why he made the allegations, but he later publicly apologized to Orr for his accusations, which were based, he said, on unspecified incorrect sources. Later, though, Mayor Sim made exactly the same accusations about Councillor Orr (based, presumably, on the same incorrect information), and now he too is apologizing - twenty times over! 

It's very strange, but fascinating viewing. I assume he has been advised by his legal counsel to just keep repeating the safe line, and not to get drawn into any discussion that might compromise him legally.