Are you still Charlie?

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Hey, fellow indifferent hypocrites sensitive, peace-loving folks. Can't deny, I was eagerly looking forward to seeing the newest Charlie Hebdo front-page, and their stinging new cartoon that was certainly going to mercilessly lambast and "show it" to the terror perpetrators in Paris.

So now that it's come out, I couldn't help feeling disappointed... and cynical.

Here it is:

France returns to normalcy, it says in a nutshell. And that's it. WAIT, THAT'S IT!? What?

Where's the biting, bitter, spot-on sarcasm? Why the muted coyness? It wasn't so long ago that we saw the open-minded satirists depicting a Russian plane being fucked in the ass by a missile. Skulls were raining on a beach from the sky, etc, etc. And what's this, now?

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One more player in Africa

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

If you have the chance to fly from an exotic place like Casablanca to a strange place like Mogadishu in war-torn Somalia for example, you would probably be on board the Turkish Airlines (they serve amazing food, by the way). The reason is that the company has 45 African destinations in its portfolio, which makes it the largest carrier on this continent. But what is Turkey doing in Africa, you may ask? Simple: it's making money. It is accumulating influence in a place that others consider too risky, or too early to go to.

Turkey's trade with Africa rose up to 23.4 billion dollars last year. More than half of that is Turkish exports. This means that nearly one dollar in 10 out of the 157 billion Turkish total exports had come from Africa. Such are the benefits that a single country could draw out of trade with the world's 18th largest economy that is Africa. Indeed, Africa has vast untapped potential, and it often remains underrated and overlooked. But Turkey has recognised the perspectives, and is now scrambling to assert more solid positions here. Just like another emerging economy has done lately: China.

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Obvious point to ask as far as the Syrian War and Refugee Crisis are concerned:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I may have missed prior posts that brought it up but it's a discussion worth repeating now that France is back and actively involved in a war once the Syrians attacked a 'real' state worth retaliating for, as opposed to Turkey where Assad shelling villages wasn't a sufficient cause for a war or intervention. /snerk

http://www.ibtimes.com/syria-healthcare-crisis-amid-russia-airstrikes-only-one-third-aleppo-hospitals-still-2190012

^That Russian policy to detonate as many hospitals as their planes can reach, combined with the atrocities of Assad and Daesh is only going to have one result: not to shrink a refugee crisis but to boost it. The Russians, in other words, are literally working to the same end as both of the major players in the civil war. They do not have the least bit of concern about the humanitarian catastrophe for the refugees, they have neither tears nor whining about expanding the chaos and the danger facing civilians in any sense whatsoever.

So long as the West, and NATO, persists in ignoring that Russia has its own goals, and they're completely unrelated to solving the refugee crisis or even really defeating Daesh until Assad is firmly consolidated in power with only Daesh left, there will be severe problems for planning a balanced strategy. It's bad enough to move airplanes existing purely to target the Russian Air Force and that France is now pursuing its own campaign in the midst of a Bonapartist emergency state plus likely to be not half as democratic as what exists now probable constitutional changes (which this being France will also conveniently not lead to any trouble with Paris and Brussels as human rights go).

A war cannot be won when one side wants to go right and the other side is going counterclockwise in reverse and the other side things counterclockwise in reverse is going in the same direction they're going, or alternately persisting in ignoring a pattern of danger that's as real as the USA's own idiotic attempts to push red lines now, against Russia, that were not enforced when they might have had an impact on a weaker opponent earlier.