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.

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

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. End of negotiations. 

Who knows what Trump's rationale was (rationale? Trump?), but his negotiating team seems to have been completely blindsided. 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, is hard to fathom. 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 "to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime", but few people are buying that. Pete Hegseth says, "The United States did not start this conflict, but we will finish it" . Ooh, pants on fire!

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. 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 for world peace, Trump sure has a strange approach to it.

So, what is this, then? Another Venezuela? Another Iraq? Libya, maybe? Just another step on Trump's question for world domination? Iran's case is 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 available polls suggest that they overwhelmingly do - they are absolutely not in a position to make that happen. 

And, make no mistake, the 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, and whatever Mr. Trump himself might tell us. Plus, global history is very much against it: 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 and 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 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 attack, 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 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. 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.

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. No-one really likes Iran and its methods (apart from its own hard-line Islamist radicals), 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 other side of the coin, though, 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. 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. 

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.

Different attitudes of US hockey players to Trump's politicization

It's well-known that Donald Trump has no shame, no scruples, and these days neither does anyone else in his administration nor his social media team. They seem to think that anything goes, no limits, because that's the way Trump thinks. It's hard to know if Trump says "make me something like this", or if the functionaries come up with the daft ideas themselves (my guess is the former: Trump instigating but avoiding direct culpability).

So, since the unfortunate win by the US men's and women's hockey teams over Canada in the Winter Olympics - against the run of play, against the skill levels, let it be known - Trump has made a point of weaponizing the national hockey teams against Canada, partly because he's only seven years old (so there!) and partly because, well, because he can. Some of the team members seem into it, but some are distinctly uncomfortable at being used in this way.

For example, Brady Tkachuk - US star player and Ottawa Senators captain - is distinctly angry at being used in an AI-doctored anti-Canada video. "I would never say that. That's not who I am", he says, defensively. Now, I have little love or respect for either of the Tkachuk brothers - they are skillful but sneaky and nasty players - but to have your words twisted in that way is tough. And he has to work in Canada, with a demanding and censorious home crowd. 

He also tried to distance himself from Trump's tasteless locker room call after the gold medal match, and insisted that the unidentified recorded call of "close the northern border" was definitely not him.

Another US star, Auston Matthews, captain of the very Canadian Toronto Maple Leafs, apparently didn't think twice about accepting the invitation to Trump's White House swagger-fest - that part is pretty traditional, after all, for better or worse - although he did draw the line at appearing at the much more political State of the Nation address, unlike some of the other Americans.

A bunch of the American men's team, though, did think twice about attending Trump's politically-charged schmooze-a-palooza. In all, five members of the gold medal-winning US team skipped the traditional White House invitation. Coincidentally (or probably not), a majority of these men had Minnesota connections.

The US women's team, on the other hand, declined the White House en masse, unwilling to be used by Trump for his own nefarious political purposes. They also reacted publicly to Trump's objectionable joke about his "having to" invite the women's team (suggesting that they are much inferior, despite their just-as-valuable gold medal), calling it a 'distasteful joke".

Team USA Women 1 : Team USA Men 0.

But, more to the point, why does Trump have to be so divisive and offensive and so totally tone-deaf. He didn't have to make (or rather, have made, because I'm pretty sure he's not capable of doing it himself) an anti-Canada video with fabricated audio using one of America's top sportsmen without his permission. He didn't have to make tasteless macho jokes at the expense of one of the world's most dominant sports teams. But he does it anyway, because ... what? Because he childish and shallow? Is that all that's going on? Because he thinks it will play well with his far-right voting base? Who knows?

Canada agonizes over Winter Olympics performance - again

It's pretty widely agreed that Canada didn't have the Winter Olympics it wanted in Milano-Cortina 2026.

Canada ended up with 21 medals in total, substantially less than the 26 it earned in Beijing 2022 and, at eighth place, the first time the country has finished outside the top five since 1994. Listed according to gold medals won, we are even further down the table. The 29 medals of 2018 and the 14 golds in 2014 seem like a distant memory.

Predictably, the outcry comes that Canadian sports is underfunded. The boss of the Canadian Olympic Committee was of course one of the loudest whiney voices: "Canadians deserve a sports system that is properly funded. National sports organizations are stretched unbearably thin." It happens every time. (Actually, it happens even if the country does well!)

But it's hard to blame it on funding. Nathan MacKinnon didn't miss an open goal because of underfunding. Funding issues didn't cause Cassie Sharpe to crash and injure herself in the freeski halfpipe, or Mark McMorris to miss the whole Olympics due to injury. And you can't blame underfunding for all the times Canada came fourth not third. These things happen. And even if they seem to happen disproportionately, you still can't blame it on funding.

Adam van Koeverden, an Olympic multi-medalist himself and now the Liberals' minister for sports, denies that Canadian sports are underfunded, pointing to a 45% increase in the athletes' assistance program since 2018, and a more than doubling of the government's sports budget over the last 20 years. Like everything else, sports are competing for scarce government funds.

It's hard to quantify the effect of, and the need for, funding for Olympic performance. For that matter, it's hard to know how important a good showing at the Olympics actually is, in the scheme of things. Maybe that money is better spent elsewhere? But those who really care are convinced that it's critical. 

Here's an eye-opener, though: fifteen out of the twenty-one medals Canada won at the latest Winter Olympics were won by people who are funded through an organization called Great To Gold, a project established by two Toronto business leaders which canvasses funds from private and corporate backers for Canadian athletes who have been handpicked as having Olympic medal potential. But there's the rub: if they had medal potential anyway, maybe they didn't need the extra funding, maybe it made no difference? Like I say, this stuff is really hard to quantify.

Likewise, unlike Canada, many countries offer substantial incentives for medal wins. That's nice for successful athletes, but it's hard to believe that it has an appreciable effect on performance. Surely, all athletes at the Olympics Games are going for gold. Italy had by far the biggest incentive payout, and they did do very well. But they were also the host country, which must factor much more highly in performance.

Sure, Canada is no Norway, a winter sports powerhouse despite its tiny population. This is not so much due to funding, but perhaps more to the way winter sports are an integral part of Norwegian culture, although funding too has escalated in the country and Norway's results have spiked accordingly. Furthermore, although Norway has a tiny population, it has one of the world's highest standards of living, with good healthcare and education. All of this helps.

Neither is Canada the USA, the richest country in the world with one of the world's largest populations. But, in the scheme of things, we really don't do that badly. Yes, we should have won the men's hockey gold, after outplaying the Americans for almost 60 minutes. But we didn't, and maybe that's OK.

Trump's "great hospital boat" is a joke ... right?

I thought this was precious. Just when you thought he had finally understood the situation in Greenland, Donald Trump has despatched "a great hospital boat" to Greenland to service the many Greenlanders he says are "not being taken care of". This is presumably his idea of a PR coup of some sort.

In fact, Greenlanders have pretty good healthcare, provided free by Denmark. There are five regional hospitals across the island to care for the scattered population of 56,000. Any more complex cases that cannot by dealt with by the main hospital in Nuuk are sent for treatment in Denmark, also free of charge. Denmark has one of the best healthcare systems in the world, better than countries like the UK, France and Spain.

But this is best of all: coincidentally, just this weekend, Denmark's Arctic Command revealed that it had evacuated a crew member of a US submarine off the coast of Greenland who required urgent medical attention for treatment in Nuuk.

It all sounds like a comedy sketch to me.