Sacre Bleu! – Er, Make That Red White And Bleu!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

There has been a lot of activity in France lately concerning the United States government spying on three French Presidents.

The current President of France even called an emergency meeting of the Conseil de la Défense, the country’s highest national security forum to discuss the emergence of documents that appear to implicate the US National Security Agency (NSA) – now who’da guessed that? –  spying on Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, who ruled France from 1995 to 2012.

The documents further indicate that the NSA may have also targeted the personal communications of Francois Hollande, France’s current head of state.

The files were published by WikiLeaks, which described them as “top secret intelligence reports and technical documents”, detailing NSA spying operations against the French presidency, as well as espionage directed at several French government ministers and at France’s ambassador to the US.

The documents include intelligence briefs, which detail the thoughts and diplomatic maneuvers by French presidents and other senior officials, on subjects such as the Greek economic crisis, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and the United Nations.

This is further evidence of more disgraceful and arrogant behavior by US spy agencies.

The thing is, however, no one is surprised any more.

Since Edward Snowden’s revelations the world has come to expect illegal and bad behavior from Americans. It is as simple as that. And for the reputations of Americans it is as bad as that. Which is a great pity because these activities do not represent in any way the vast majority of the American people.

So, if they aren’t a surprise to anyone, will the latest revelations cause trouble between America and France? I think the undoubted answer is “Oui”, but only a “petit oui”.

As befits normal protocol in these kinds of things, the American ambassador to France was summoned for what was called ‘an official protest’, but little or nothing more happened apart from President Obama getting on the phone with the French President, groveling and apologizing and assuring him in no uncertain terms “that the US is no longer spying on France”.

No, I don’t believe him either, but there it is.

There was no need for America’s snooping. As with Germany, French and American intelligence agencies cooperate with each other regularly. They jointly monitor international issues of mutual concern, such as what is happening in Syria, Iraq, the Ukraine, Libya, and even the financial catastrophe that is Greece.

For now that will continue, but the road ahead looks bumpy.

Wikileaks has already made good on its promise that its “French readers can expect more timely and important revelations in the near future”.

The latest release from the whistleblower website contains more documents that indicate that the National Security Agency (NSA), under orders from Washington, were tasked with collecting secret information not only about the economic policies of the French government and the country’s financial sector, but on export contracts by French companies.

In fact every French-registered company involved in negotiations for international projects or other sales contracts valued at over $200 million, like car makers Peugeot and Renault and financial institutions like BNP Paribas and the agricultural credit union, were also subjected to US government secret snooping.

Washington’s pathetic statements that none of this information is ever used to benefit American companies competing for international contracts rings mighty hollow with the French, and the rest of the world come to that.

This latest information is a lot more damning and may necessitate a much stronger response from the French – even if it is just to save face.

Like their attitude over the invasion of Iraq, I think any further reaction would include little or no cooperation in any future American interventions in the Middle East and maybe the use of a veto or two in the United Nations.

We might be at the start of a new meaning to the term “non” cooperation?

.

=======================================

.

 

Time For Some Crude Talk.

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.  

It’s not so long ago that I was getting bombarded with emails about how great an investment oil would be.

At that time the predictions by those in the ‘know’, who really know nothing, was that oil would hit $200 per barrel – maybe much, much more!

Well, they almost got the number correct, except that oil actually hit $20 per barrel, not $200. As these things go it was a pretty good guess!!!

So why has the oil price declined and, although it has recovered a bit, why are the predictions for today’s low prices to hold long term?

The simple layman’s answer of course is that the oil price has declined because supply is greater than demand. When there is a surplus of a commodity the price falls and when it is scarce the price rises.

The supply of oil has increased relative to demand for a number of reasons.

The most obvious one is the vast reserves of oil found and now being recovered in the massive shale-oil fields in the United States of America and the tar-sands in Canada that have added more than 5 million barrels per day to domestic oil production since 2008. Able to produce more at home, North America has been able to reduce its demand for imported oil.

The effect of this, of course, is that the OPEC countries have seen their annual revenues fall sharply during the same period. To try to rectify this fall in income, which they need to provide for their own citizens, they have been trying to replace lost revenue from North America by increasing production of their own oil supplies.

In other words, they have created even more over supply in the market, which helps to keep the oil price down.

Then there was the ISIS or ISIL terrorists in Iraq who had taken control of most of the oil fields and were dumping oil on the black market as fast as they could to help finance their war. Recently they’ve lost control of a lot of those oil fields so that part of the equation may no longer be in play to the same extent.

However, if there is a deal ever done with the Iranians and they are able to trade without restriction again, no doubt they will be adding their oil to the market glut which will also help to keep the market over-supplied and the price suppressed.

Then there is the increasing use of compressed natural gas or CNG. This is the natural gas that used to be burned off at the oil wells, but that is now collected, compressed into tanks and used to power vehicles and in drilling equipment, meaning less diesel is purchased.

Despite all these over-supply pressures, the thing that is keeping the oil price from collapsing completely is the continued demand from China. This is a good thing because a long-term collapse in the oil price, whilst it may make life a bit easier financially for many with decreased heating and fuel bills, also has detrimental secondary effects on some parts of the country where the oil industry provides a living for a great many people.

I haven’t had an email about investing in oil for a long time and I don’t expect them to start again soon. Now you know why.

.

================================

.

Whatever Happened To Right And Wrong?

 “Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

A bit of politics today.

The Iran deal – if there in fact is one, nobody seems certain – is causing a lot of angst within the Republican Party. Maybe they know the reason for their concern, but somehow I doubt it.

Don’t worry I’m not going to go into a big analysis of the deal, not yet anyway. As I said, no one is sure that anything has really been agreed.

But the details of the deal aside, what this and many other happenings over the past few years has clearly highlighted is that political parties – and not only in America – have become obsessed with the “if he’s fer it, I’m agin it” mentality.

The facts don’t count.

The reasons don’t matter.

The benefits are never logically weighed up.

Nor are the faults.

It is always just a knee-jerk reaction with no analysis whatsoever. You could write the headlines even before the event it is all so depressingly predictable.

And these pompous parties and politicians have the gall to call it ‘democracy’ and to try to foist it on other parts of the world that don’t want it and haven’t asked for it.

Somehow we have deteriorated to the point where a country full of politicians who don’t know what’s best for their own people, now think they know what is best for everyone else. Self-delusion, arrogance, call it what you like, there are many words that could be applied to describe it, none of them very complimentary.

An example is Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who has clearly learned nothing from what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, because he now boasts that a U.S. military campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities would only take “several days” of bombing.

Apparently in his head there would be no consequences. The Iranians will just sit back and take their medicine then wise up and never do it again.

On the other hand, of course, if Obama was against a deal with Iran I bet you Sen Cotton would be all for it.

That’s the real depth of his analysis, and there are (too) many others like him.

Whatever happened to right and wrong?

.

==========================================

Doing The Right Thing.

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

The Sunday Sermon

Barrack Obama during his first Presidential election campaign

Seven years ago a young fellow called Barrack Obama was running for President. One of the cornerstones of his campaign was a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, which he called “a dumb war”.

In that much he was right. It was a dumb war, instigated by the dumb American and British politicians who preceded him and who had the deceit and arrogance to lie to their electorates in order to manufacture an excuse to invade that country.

It was always destined to be a disaster. Once Saddam had been eliminated there was no strong leader to hold Iraq together. He may have been a monster, no one is arguing he wasn’t, but without him, or someone like him, things have far from improved. That is just the harsh reality, like it or not.

Seven years ago Obama had no moral objection to the fact that a withdrawal of the occupying forces in Iraq might leave the way open to civil war and genocide. In fact to quote him from that period he said, “[If] that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done.”

He could have said the same about many other countries in the world where civil strife raged.

So today the speeches laden with moral indignation, telling the world that he has ordered military action in Iraq “to prevent a potential act of genocide,” ring mightily hollow.

It would be much better if Obama came clean.

I know it’s a bit of a reach for a politician to start telling the truth, but it would help.

Obama needs to tell the world that he will clean up the mess he and his predecessors made. He needs to admit that the “sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq” that he said he had left behind, when U.S. troops pulled out, was a dream that has deteriorated into a nightmare. And he needs to remove the advisors who prompted him to compare ISIS to a junior varsity basketball team when he was interviewed on the subject in January this year. That was just another thing they got completely and tragically wrong.

Yes, I’m asking for a bit of honesty and humility, that’s all.

What I’m hearing instead, however, is more claptrap and confusion.

Vice President Joe Biden is telling everyone that the U.S. “will follow ISIS to the gates of hell”, while other senior Obama Administration officials are assuring us that America is, “not launching a sustained US campaign against ISIS…”

Journalist James Foley minutes before he was beheaded by ISIS terrorists

Conflicting statements like those, in the face of the continuing barbaric beheadings of men, women and even children, and other heinous crimes committed by these despicable and godless terrorists, will hardly strike fear into them. Perhaps the strategy is to have them so helpless with laughter that they cannot continue fighting?

Winston Churchill once said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.”

After all this time and after all these failed initiatives we must be getting closer to doing the right thing  –  surely???

.

===================================

.

Dirty Harry? It Must Be Fact Day!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

No dirty facts here. That’s someone else’s job.

Just good clean fun with another selection from the fabulous fasab fact file.

Enjoy.

..Oh, and spare a thought for poor Betty Stobbs who for one split second thought she had made it.

.

.

Dirty Harry’s badge number is 2211.

.

.

Frisian, a language native to the Netherlands,

is considered the easiest foreign language

for English speakers to learn

.

.

The amount the U.S. military spends annually

on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion.

.

.

The Milky Way has four spiral arms, not two.

.

.

The main ingredient for chocolate are technically cacao beans,

but they are known throughout the cocoa industry as cocoa beans

because of a misspelling.

.

.

Cacao has been around for millions of years and

is probably one of the oldest of nature’s foods.

.

.

It has been calculated that in the last 3,000 years

there have only been 240 years of peace in the world

.

.

During the An Lushan rebellion in China in the mid 700s

nearly 40 million people died.

This was 1/6 of the world’s population.

.

.

Your brain is the fattest organ in your body at around 60%

.

.

Curfew comes from a combination of two French words

– “couvrir” and “feu”. Literally this means to “cover fire”.

.

.

In 1999, Betty Stobbs, 67, of Durham, England,

took a bale of hay to feed her flock of sheep

on the back of her motorcycle.

Her hungry sheep, however, charged her bike and

knocked her into a deep ravine.

She survived the fall but was killed

when her bike landed on top of her.

.

.

Andrew Jackson was involved in as many as 100 duels,

most of which were fought to defend the honor of his wife.

Not surprisingly he was shot multiple times during his life.

.

.

Alexander the Great is famous for a spying technique still used today.

He had all his soldiers write home to their families

and then intercepted the letters.

Whoever didn’t have something nice to say was executed.

.

.

If you are referred to as a “treasured guest”

in Disney don’t get carried away.

That means you’re an asshole and

workers are being warned about you

.

.

The voices of Yoda and Miss Piggy

were done by the same person.

His name is Frank Oz.

.

.

=============================================

.

Shock Headline – The President Agrees With Me!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

The Sunday Sermon

.

I’ve been saying it for a long time – and now the President of the United States agrees with me – he doesn’t know WTF he’s doing!

I can’t say as I take much satisfaction from his admission though.

The US President is the most powerful man in the world and he has at his disposal the most powerful military organization in the world.

Yet he doesn’t know what to do with it, when to do it, or even who to aim it at!

A bit of it, belatedly and half-heartedly, is now pointing at ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria. Yes, you’re right, they are the very same Islamic terrorists he was funding for a while in Syria! He says he wasn’t, but in practice he was.

Confused?

You should be.

Because the Obama Administration certainly is!

Indeed Obama’s team of idiots have confused themselves to the degree that they don’t know what to do and are afraid to do it even if they did!

The situation is not being helped by the noise coming from the equally ill-informed politicians in the Republican camp either. Some cynics would say they are doing a lot of it with the November elections in mind!

As I’ve said before on this blog, America has never been good at foreign policy. There are so many examples over the years to prove this beyond any and all doubt (Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, now Syria). But this latest debacle could turn out to be foreign policy failure on a grand scale.

This is simply down to the fact that, even yet, the Obama administration clearly does not understand the severity of the problem. They haven’t managed to process the long term threat that a well armed, well supported and well funded group like ISIS can become.

Everyone – except the President and his people apparently – knows that these terrorists will not be content even if they are allowed to establish a fundamentalist Islamic state in the Middle East. Their hatred of anything and everything in the West is total.

In fact, as we have seen in Iraq and Syria, their hatred even extends to fellow Muslims who they do not consider to be ‘militant enough’ and they have attacked and murdered them in just the same ways as they have attacked and murdered Christians.

In Syria, which is none of our business, the Obama team thought they wanted the Assad regime removed, and to get that done they thought they could support ISIS (or the anti-Assad fighters of whom ISIS were always destined to be a big part).

Now the US may well find itself on the same side as Assad in a fight against the terrorists. And that may be the crux of the US Administration’s problem. They made the wrong move, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, for all the wrong reasons and correcting the mistake will require a major volte face and sizeable portion of humble pie.

Are they big enough to swallow it?

We’ll see.   

.

==================================================

.

What A Flipping President – What A Flipping Mess!!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

The Sunday Sermon

.

President Obama said in June that he would be prepared to “take targeted and precise military action” in Iraq, whatever that meant.

But it’s taken him two months to make the decision. Two months during which Islamist militants have swept through northern and western Iraq and are now threatening Christians in that country with religious conversion or death.

So far its not only too little too late, but half-hearted to boot, with Obama saying that the step was being taken to defend US personnel in the city of Irbil and protect religious minorities facing what he called a “potential act of genocide” from the Islamic State, the extremist group most recently known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

There doesn’t seem much “potential” about from the reports I am reading.

It’s as if the President’s Administration and his advisors didn’t see it coming!

This belated decision is yet another turning point in the Obama administration’s dreadfully badly thought out foreign policy, which has seen his ratings plummet, both at home and in the eyes of the world.

Even now his administration’s goals remain unclear. For example, is this latest move a tactical decision, or a simple reaction to the consequences of failing to act sooner, or is there a strategy behind it?

I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else knows, but I fear it is just the former. Sadly, a belated attempt to halt ISIS’s advance toward Irbil won’t be enough – and if I know that, why don’t Obama’s advisors?

Of course, on the other side of the political fence, rather predictably, some of the gung-ho Republicans, always spoiling for a fight (somewhere other than in the US), have quickly jumped on the bandwagon and tried to use this latest debacle to score political points against the President.

They have criticized Obama’s inaction in Syria and the failure to bolster moderate rebel forces there as contributing to ISIS’s growth. But hang on a moment GOPers, think it through before you speak (this will be new territory to most of them!). If the President had intervened (or rather, been allowed to intervene) in Syria he would have been intervening on the same side as ISIS, not against them.

Then we would have had an even more bewildering situation where US troops would have been fighting with ISIS (effectively) in Syria against Assad and at the same time fighting against ISIS in Iraq trying to stop their genocidal purge of the Christian community there.

It is this kind of utter confusion that has over the past few years greatly diminished America’s global influence and standing.

The mess that was left in Iraq after Bush’s invasion on the false premise (the lie) of WMDs, and Obama’s withdrawal of troops on the equally disingenuous premise (another lie) that they had brought peace to the country, is a disgrace.

And unfortunately it sends a message to the world that America is confused, indecisive, deceitful, short-sighted, blundering – in short all the things that you don’t want the world to think about you if you want to be taken seriously.

What a flipping mess!

.

==========================================================

.

Iowa? IOWA? Oh, no, NOT IOWA!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

The Sunday Sermon

.

I read a strange thing on the internet the other day.

Not much unusual there, you could do that every day.

This was a study that found that Americans’ attitudes about whether the US should intervene in Ukraine is correlated with their ability to find the country on the map.

And even more strangely  –  perhaps  –  it was the Americans who COULDN’T find the Ukraine on a map who were more in favor of intervention!

Apparently  –  and I kid you not  –  some of the respondents thought that the Ukraine was in Iowa.

Europe with Ukraine highlighted USA with Iowa highlighted

Unfortunately the guys that think out American foreign policy are these sorts of people. The kind who just don’t know what they are talking about. The kind of bureaucrats who rub Preparation H on their elbows  –  if you see what I mean!

Recent history proves this beyond all reasonable doubt.

To add insult to injury so to speak, these know nothings who advise the President on foreign matters try to spin every situation by telling everyone that, even though it has massive debt already and is effectively bankrupt, the US must still be the world’s policeman and uphold democracy.

Why?

What business is it of ours?

And if we are so hell bent on ensuring democracy exists throughout the world why aren’t we intervening in one of the biggest dictatorships of them all, Saudi Arabia which was also the home of most of the 9/11 terrorists and of course Bin Laden’s mother country? But no, lets attack Iraq and Afghanistan instead!

For more than half a century American foreign policy has been dictated by a mindless mantra that “if the Russians are for it, then we’re against it”.

The rights and wrongs of any particular situation are not analyzed or discussed. The facts are never examined. The truth is not even looked for.

That is why US foreign policy has been such a shambles throughout the world and will continue to be so until basically the people directing it wise up.

As for the Ukraine?

First of all it is NOT in Iowa.

Second, the US has spent (wasted) $5 billion and more during the past twenty years on “democratization” programs in Ukraine, including efforts from the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute and the National Endowment for Democracy.

Third, yes there were elements within the Ukraine who did not like being subservient to Russia, but what happened in the Ukraine was that a democratically elected president, Yanukovych, was overthrown in February in what amounted to a coup d’etat.

Students of history will remember what a funk America was in when the Russians started to “assist” Cuba way back in the early 1960s, yet they can’t understand why Russian leader Putin doesn’t want a fully nuclear armed Ukraine as anything other than an ally on his doorstep.

Why can they not see that the strategy of absorbing Ukraine into NATO and stationing missile defense systems there, is bound to piss the Russians off in exactly the same way as events in Cuba did for the Americans?

The fact is, of course, that they probably do see that. And they don’t care. The name of the game here is not upholding democracy at all. Such a laudable goal is only a smokescreen. The name of the game is to try to curtail Russia by having Ukrainian missiles pointed towards Moscow instead of Washington, or Washington’s allies.

It’s a game plan that Putin sees quite clearly. To think that he will sit back and not respond is just a fantasy. Let’s hope that the idiots in Washington don’t land us with yet another catastrophe.

With their past record I wouldn’t count on it though!

.

=====================================================

.

Lies, Deceit And Incompetence

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

I was sounding off a bit in last week’s Sunday Sermon about the state of things in Iraq, a mess created by blundering American and British intervention in a situation they did not, and still do not understand.

Last week I concentrated on the fact that ISIS, the al Qaeda splinter group – big name, ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’ – has now seized large parts of northern Iraq, with consequent freeing of prisoners, fleeing of frightened former residents of that area and even unconfirmed reports of ‘mass beheadings’. Other reports of mass executions of official Iraqi army personnel seem to have been confirmed.

Presumably there will be worse to come.

All in the name of an Islamic State?

Well, hold on, maybe not just that.

It turns out that as Iraq descends into what will probably be a bloody civil war, the ISIS-al Qaeda forces have taken time to raid Mosul’s central bank and relieve it of some 500 billion Iraqi dinars, worth approximately $425 million.

Mosul is not only the largest city in northern Iraq, it is an oil hub at the vital intersection of Syria, Iraq and Turkey, thus providing rich pickings for the terrorists.

They also reportedly stole additional $ millions from a number of other banks across Mosul and what has only been quantified as a “large quantity of gold bullion.”

Others towns and cities, like Saddam Hussein’s old home town Tikrit, have suffered a similar fate.

As a result of all this George Bush / Tony Bliar created disaster, the ISIS/al Qaeda chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a previously relatively unknown figure, is now the leader of perhaps the ‘world’s richest terror force’.

(Quick side note to President Obama – I’m sure he reads this blog 🙂

– Hi Barrack, you can stop using American taxpayers’ money

to fund these ISIS terrorists in Syria, they have enough money now.)

.

In fact, to put the latest cash haul in perspective, at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the US, Al-Qaeda had been working with an operating budget of around $30 million (source ‘Council on Foreign Relations’), so even allowing for inflation they are substantially richer today, and by definition have it in their power to do much more damage not just in the Middle East region, but worldwide.

As regional analyst Brown Moses succinctly put it on Twitter, this recent haul of ill gotten gains will “buy a whole lot of Jihad……For example, with $425 million, ISIS could pay 60,000 fighters around $600 a month for a year.”

It might even do a lot more. ISIS has already attracted 12,000 militants from abroad, 3,000 of whom are from the West. With bought mercenaries on board things can only get worse.

When Bush and Blair used Words of Mass Deception about Saddam Hussein having Weapons of Mass destruction as a bogus excuse to attack Iraq there were no terrorists and no terrorist threat from that country. Thanks to their lies, deceit and incompetence, there are now.

If this is an ‘improvement’ I can’t see it  –  can you?

=========================================================

.

Obama Says Iraq’s Government Needs Help!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

Now there’s a headline. Let’s repeat it…

Obama says Iraq’s government needs help!

Long live hypocrisy!

.

Time for a Sunday Sermon I think!

.

.

I say hypocrisy for one simple reason, Obama  –  remember him, the man who was getting all the troops OUT of Iraq  –  wants to send them back in again because of the almighty mess that America, Britain and other western nations made blundering about in a country they didn’t understand.

It’s worse than that, of course, because Obama wants to send the troops back into Iraq to help stave off attacks by radical Islamists who have been making inroads in various parts of Iraq and are now threatening to close in on Baghdad itself.

This what he said, “I don’t rule out anything, because we do have a stake in making sure that these jihadists are not getting a permanent foothold in either Iraq or Syria.”

But hang on a minute.

There’s that stench of hypocrisy again.

Are these not the very same terrorists who Obama is supporting financially and with arms shipments in Syria?

They may have different names in different countries but these terrorists collectively want to establish an Islamic state in the region that surpasses national boundaries and governments. And from there, who knows?

It really is that simple. But it seems American foreign policy is in its usual state – completely confused, completely devoid of logic and good sense.

The mess that has been left behind in Iraq is catastrophic.

The country has more or less disintegrated politically and militarily, with Islamic militants capturing the country’s second-largest city this week after soldiers scattered, leaving their uniforms and weapons behind. So much for the $15 billion Washington (i.e., the American taxpayer) has already provided in training, weapons and equipment to the Iraqi government!

The result of this capitulation is that at least half a million ordinary citizens are understandably fleeing as the terrorists gain ground.

America’s ‘re-intervention’ will start with air strikes, possible using drones. But the chances of that doing anything more than temporarily halting the terrorists are slight. Next will come increased supplies of arms and equipment for the ‘official’ Iraqi forces. And then ‘advisors’ will be sent in  –  they’re probably already there, their presence will just be officially acknowledged.

There was a strong indication of what will come after that, when White House spokesman Jay Carney said. “We are not contemplating ground troops, I want to be clear about that.”

I have seldom seen a clearer admission that the White House is actively considering sending ground troops back into Iraq!

SoS Kerry has been wheeled out again to tell the world that the situation presently is not just a threat to Iraq, but to the United States and the rest of the world. We all know that John. What we also know  –  and what you don’t  –  is that more blundering about in a situation you do not understand, more young American live sacrificed for nothing, and more brave souls maimed for life to satisfy political whims won’t make things any better.

Will common sense ever prevail? Sadly I very much doubt it. The lack of understanding exhibited by the politicians seems to span all parties.

The lunatics are in charge of the asylum.

So there’s more stupidity on the way!

.

Ethno-religious map of Iraq, courtesy of the Washington Post

.

=================================================

.