The end of the world as we know it

And I feel fine, mostly. There's a lot of good news out there.

It’s been nearly two weeks since my last newsletter, posted in the middle of a summer hiatus. I hadn’t intended an absence this long but what the hell, I’m now back in the saddle at the National Post (We’re not Los Angeles yet, but. . .) and right away I want to thank my subscribers here for their patience. I’m slowly getting back into Real Story’s usual groove.

This newsletter was going to be about the collapse of Canada’s capacity to manage immigration and refugee flows and the directly-related impact of unprecedented and mostly unregulated population growth on housing affordability, employment, infrastructure, Canada’s social fabric and our foreign policy. I barely scratched the surface in my column and I’ll be returning to it. There’s just so much that’s gone unreported about it all that it’s hard to know where to start.

My point was a familiar one: We Canadians are in no position to look down our noses at the Yanks.

I can scarcely believe, for instance, that Gregor “Happy Planet” Robertson is now Canada’s housing minister. For some useful background, here are a couple of longform pieces I wrote for Macleans, back when Macleans was a useful magazine: This piece, about how Robertson presided over Vancouver’s transformation into an epicentre of fraud, foreign-money swindles and real estate rackets, and this one, about just how much damage was done and the price you’ll pay for pointing out what happened and why.

I also find it beyond belief that the B.C. Ferries Corporation expects to get away with entering into a contract with China’s Merchants Industry Weihai Shipyards for four new ferries, at an undisclosed cost. I have no trouble believing that Weihai’s bid was the cheapest option, though. It’s amazing how cost-efficient production can be in a slave state.

So, a lot going on. The Americans are having parades and shootouts and Pyongyang-style extravaganzas. The G7-plus hasn’t quite kicked off in Kananaskis yet and I’m no more opimistic than I was back in February. I remain of the view that a G6 summit would have been best, that U.S. President Donald Trump should have been invited to stay away.

We’ll see.

We should savour the good news where we find it. So let’s do that.

Following on Israel’s evisceration of the allegedly undefeatable Khomeinist proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon last fall and the revolutionary overthrow of Bashar Assad’s Russian-Khomeinist satrapy in Damascus last December, the big good-news event this summer was Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb.

Eighteen months in the planning, more than 100 Ukrainian drones struck deep inside Russia, destroying nuclear-capable long-range bombers and raining hell on military fortifications from Murmansk, above the Arctic circle, to Irkutsk, 4,000 kilometres east of Ukraine.

Fun fact: Ukraine’s killer drone swarms emerged from sheds carried on the backs of flatbed trucks that had been dispatched to within striking distance of the Russian airbases. The truckdrivers were wholly unaware of what they were transporting. All of a sudden, the roofs of the sheds just opened, and out flew the drones, remotely operated in real time from Ukraine.

Operation Spiderweb was the best news of the year until late last week when Israel launched a breathtaking multi-target attack on Iran’s nuclear, defence and command centres. It should come as no surprise that Ahmed al Sharaa’s transitional Syrian government, which is seeking normalized relations with Israel, has signalled that it is quite content with Israel using Syrian airspace to hit Iranian targets.

A masterwork of espionage and reconnaissance going back years, Israel has gone straight for the head of the snake, attacking from the sky and from inside Iran. The ongoing Operation Rising Lion is a complex interplay of sophisticated commando operations and airpower that already surpasses the destruction of Hezbollah in its audacity.

One way of looking at these events: they represent the full and final undoing of Barack Obama’s catastrophic foreign policy. You’ll see why I feel a bit vindicated if you read this from a couple of years ago: Obama’s blunders created the Iranian threat terrorizing Israel.