It’s the dawn of a new year. Aren’t you excited about the prospects, dear diary?
There are at least three wars being waged in the Middle East right now, which is about par for the course over there. Canada is engaged in one of them.
It’s a brutal kind of warfare with ISIS as a participant. They have some structure, lots of money and a few war material and equipment suppliers who don’t really care who they sell to, as long as shareholders get their dividends.
ISIS is the central casting studio for the psychopaths of the world who will gather to kill, maim, rape, plunder, loot and decapitate those who happen to cross their paths. There isn’t any Geneva Convention rule of warfare for these crazies. Common sense, logic and political expediency are not in their wheelhouse. They have no plan other than to conquer and then … well, who knows what they want to do. Clarity is not their end game and that’s why they will be tough to beat in 2015.
When your enemy doesn’t know what the objective is, where do things go?
Their motto appears to be something to the effect that “we’ll blow things up or remove the heads of those we decide are infidels, and then do it again until we die ourselves.” Life is not that important to them.
On the West African front, Ebola continues to spread, but less alarmingly now, or else the international news agencies just got bored with covering that story. They seemed to lose track of the death toll somewhere around 8,000.
A Malaysian Airlines plane went missing. That was big news for about two weeks. Then those same news gatherers got tired of covering that one too. Still no word on where those 329 people went?
Events may not be as harsh in Canada, but no less crazy. We’re not beheading anyone, thank God, but we still have our erratic moments.
Next door we have an opposition party leader completely giving up to join her rivals, taking some henchmen with her and nearly destroying the party she left. They just don’t seem to like active opposition parties in Alberta. I don’t know why, it’s just the way it is. They prefer the democratic dictatorship of one, as long as it remains benevolent. Look for a woman named Smith to be named to an Alberta cabinet post soon.
On our federal front, our stalwarts of democracy are fighting tooth and nail and spending billions to claim (or in their words, reaffirm) our Arctic sovereignty. We want that piece of minus 50 land that juts up and out of the north that may have some oil hidden underneath it that could be worth $6 billion. We’re willing to spend $12 billion to protect it.
Meanwhile, officials from the Turks and Caicos Islands, representing warm weather climes, sandy beaches and sparkling waters, arrive in Ottawa to beg our big shots to take them under their wing. Our big shots keep saying no. We don’t need any stinking protectorate warm weather islands in our portfolio. We only do cold and ice.
Our paid employees keep saying no to our potential version of the Hawaiian Islands in favour of bargaining with Russia and Denmark as to who owns frozen tundra in a place where no sane person goes, or even the unbalanced bunch at ISIS!
So that’s what is shaping up for us in 2015, dear diary. I told you, I earned my cynicism the hard way. Can’t help it. Happy New Year!
