Last year, I supported the Conservatives in the federal election because the Liberal government of the previous 10 years had produced large net capital outflows, presided over Canada’s decline in the rankings of the most prosperous countries per capita, conducted a suicidal war on the petroleum industry, self-defamed the country for attempted genocide of First Nations, was a useless member of the western alliance and did not deserve a fourth consecutive term in office. I had seen Mark Carney as a central banker in Canada, where he was a scene-stealer when the prime minister, Stephen Harper, and the finance minister, Jim Flaherty, guided us through the 2008 financial crisis. I also saw him in the United Kingdom, where, as governor of the Bank of England, he had plunged the bank into absurd controversies about global warming and parroted the Cameron government’s nonsense about Europe. His successor has renounced his dire predictions of the consequences of Britain withdrawing from the European Union. Read More

The Iran war is now in an artificial stasis, in which practically all of the vast international coalition of people who are repelled and horrified by U.S. President Donald Trump, in the United States and elsewhere, have reflexively bought into the Iranian claim that since that ghastly regime has ostensibly survived, Iran is winning the war. Read More

Regular readers will note that most of what was predicted about the Iran War in the last three weeks in this column is coming to pass. The Iranians entered into the Islamabad discussions exuding confidence that the Americans were suing for peace and that Iran had found and struck the Achilles' heel of the West by closing the Strait of Hormuz. This revealed the infirmity of the Western Alliance and exploited the consumptive flabbiness of the American public itself with the terrifying spectre of somewhat higher gasoline prices. Read More