Tuesday 1st of July 2025

we had high hopes.....

Methinks that Allan Patience is naive and over-optimistic… He gives the game away when he writes:

He is an Australian version of America’s Pete Buttigieg”. Oh boy! Pete Buttigieg was as efficient a Transport Supremo as a dead toad can be used for a road-block. We had high hopes about Pete, but we soon discovered he could not run an outback dunny tipping plate, as customers went for the bushes.

Having been a student of history, not as being told by Professors and historians, but as an observer of street gangs and spaces between the lines, Gus can assure Allan that had the unfortunate Cancun meteorite incident not happened, there is 75 per cent chance the dinosaurs would have evolved into smart beasts and humans would still be rats living in fear of being trodded on (we are but this is beside the point as we breed like rabbits).

Our present crops of leaders are unfortunately not the last of the human dinosaurs. And please do not include Xi and Putin in the mix… I know, I'm biased... But Allan, this shows you’re the victim of Western propaganda which has been designed by other devious successful dinosaurs, such as Rupert Murdoch, to make you swallow dead blowflies and historical inaccuracies. 

Say what you will, Putin is not what you describe if you follow what he truly does… Here you come to us with the old furphy that Putin wants to restore the Russian Empire, kill this or that “angelic” MI6 agent, as if it was a sin to defend Russians from being obliterated by the Western loonies. 

As a honorary fellow of political sciences (bugger! Politics has NEVER been a “science” but an art form of deception and control) you would have looked under the carpet of history to see the skeletons of good will… and there are plenty more to come. 

The Teals in Australia is not a worldwide phenomenon. It’s mainly an Aussie — possibly also happening in Ireland? — knee-jerk reaction to the old pissy Liberals (Dinosaurus Conservativus) who have fallen into the cesspit of their awful policies, while the Greens have tried to replace the labouring Labor gangs, which during these weird AUKUS days of the American Empire wriggling on death row, are doing better because the Labor outfit has smarter young dinosaurs in reserve.

A bunch of teals burnishing the seats of Parliament may look like a flower arrangement, but eventually they fade and may not agree on which way to go to hell while having to fight a hostile media... As an aside the "social media" will be fully controlled by the main-stream legacy media and Disney by the end of the year.

The 2024 presidential elections in the USA have been a continuation of the sophisticated theatre of the absurd, which we have studied in details since Brutus. On one hand, Joe Biden was a devious crook on his way to complete senility, thus replaced undemocratically by a laughing jackass… while on the other side we had the ultimate unpolitical wind-vane-style rotten deal-maker with live grenades in his trousers. An impossible Sophie's Choice if you ask me. Meanwhile most of the political systems are rigged in favour of the psychopaths. Some of the psychopaths are geniuses and have by luck or crookery managed to improve the lot of their fare, which I think is what most dumb people want... amazing.

Welcome to the human rat species.

Gus Leonisky

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

By the way, Allan Patience's piece is here: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/07/the-contemporary-world-is-run-by-political-dinosaurs-facing-extinction/

geopoliticus.....

 

Ten defense ministers walk into a room in China…
The SCO can do what NATO cannot: defuse hostilities by providing 'indivisible security' to its Eurasian member states and across the multipolar world.

 

BY Pepe Escobar

 

The defense ministers of all 10 members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) met last week in Qingdao, in China's Shandong Province. 

That, in itself, is the stuff drama is made of. Not only because it was a warm-up for the main SCO annual summit later this year in Tianjin with heads of state. But mostly because on the same table we had top BRICS members Russia, China, India and Iran, plus Pakistan; an Indian defense minister visiting China for the first time in five years and facing his Pakistani counterpart after their latest serious exchange of fire; and the Iranian minister closely consulting with Beijing immediately after the Israel–Iran ceasefire kabuki orchestrated by POTUS.  

If that was not intriguing enough, the SCO meeting in Qingdao took place almost simultaneously with the NATO summit in The Hague.

Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif cut to the chase, remarking how, unlike NATO, the SCO can “further peace in this region.” China's Defense Minister Dong Jun stressed that the SCO plays the role of a “stabilizing anchor.”

The now-fragmented (thanks to US President Donald Trump) collective west has no idea what the SCO is all about. The SCO is a 25-year-old multilateral organization, founded a few months before 9/11, and consists of 10 full member states, two observer nations, and 14 dialogue partners: nearly half of the world’s population, from Eastern Europe (Hungary) all the way to the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Rim. 

The SCO is not an Asian NATO – as in an offensive military alliance, and it doesn’t want to be; rather, in a quintessentially Chinese formulation, it prefers to affirm itself as a “giant ship of security.” 

Initially conceptualized to fight against what the Chinese define as “three evils” – terrorism, separatism, and extremism – the SCO has seriously evolved into a mechanism of economic cooperation. Its latest round table at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum less than two weeks ago, for instance, was hosted by SCO Secretary-General Nurlan Yermekbayev, moderated by the ultra-experienced Sergey Katyrin, president of Russia’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and focused on the challenges of creating a common SCO logistics, financial and energy infrastructure.   

This panel moderated by Alexey Gromyko, director of the Institute of Europe of the Russian Academy of Sciences and with the secretary of the Union State (Russia–Belarus) Sergey Glazyev as the main speaker, intertwined the SCO with the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), debating what is the role to be played by the post-Soviet space in the emerging multipolar economy.   

So the SCO today promotes not only joint counterterrorism drills and intelligence sharing, but also economic cooperation fine-tuned to the cultural expectations of different civilizations. It’s a multipolar organism by definition.     

Strategic partners Russia–China get on board 

The heart of the matter in Qingdao had to evolve around what can be called the Primakov triangle – a nod to former Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov who envisioned a post-Soviet, autonomous Russian powerhouse in a new multipolar order. Today, we see that prescience in a “RIC” composed of Russia, Iran, and China, and not India: These three independent civilizational states are, at the moment, the top three actors advancing the complex Eurasia integration process.   

Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov met privately with Chinese Defense Minister Dong Jun, as well as with Iranian Defense Minister Aziz Nazirzadeh. At the SCO table, Belousov did not mince his words. 

He said that US and Israeli attacks on Iran breach the UN Charter and international law; he confirmed that Moscow had proposed to broker a de-escalation; and he re-emphasized that “the role of international institutions designed to ensure global stability has fallen to an unacceptable level.” 

Belousov also stressed all 10 Ministers’ top headache: that “terrorist ideologies” and “transit of militants” continue to spread from West Asia to Afghanistan.

On Ukraine, Belousov was quite predictable; Russia is steadily advancing, and Kiev resorts to “terror tactics” as it contemplates doom. None of the players at the SCO table would dream of contradicting him. 

So, where was India amidst all this action? Well, refining its shopping list. Defense Minister Rajnath Singh personally asked Belousov for urgent upgrades to the Su-30MKI and much faster delivery of the remaining S-400 Triumf. These are part of a hefty $5.43 billion deal; three units have been delivered, and the next two will arrive by early 2026.  

These S-400s were instrumental during Operation Sindoor – India's mini-war against Pakistan. 

Immediately after Trump's Israel–Iran “ceasefire” kabuki, Tehran approached Beijing to examine buying options for a substantial batch (at least 40) of Chinese J-10CE fighters (the export version of the J-10C). These negotiations, by the way, have been going on for at least 10 years. 

From an Iranian point of view, in terms of low cost and availability, the J-10C might be a better option than the Russian MiG-35s and Su-35Es (the export version of the Su-35S). But it’s important to remember that the Su-35 and the J-10C represent two different classes of jet fighters. Nothing prevents Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)from buying both – a case of interacting strategic partnerships.      

Diplomatic sources confirm that Iran already has Su-35s. It is unclear how many, but certainly more than two. Russia is more than ready to sell up to two squadrons. Each squadron would have 12, so a total of 24 jets.

The consensus in Moscow is that Iran will step up simultaneous purchases of top-of-the-line Russian and Chinese fighter jets. And certainly air defense, as in Russian S-400s. The drama that unfolded in the past two weeks goes way beyond the artificial and superficial debate on whether Tehran lacked help from its close, strategic Russian–Chinese allies. 

While the IRGC wants those fighter jets after the painful lessons of Israel's 12-day war, it needs most of all to fine-tune its internal counter-intelligence and insurgency apparatus. A substantial amount of punishment suffered by Iran came from domestic saboteurs who launched drones, planted bombs, and surveyed high-value targets to be murdered.

We want war against Russia and China 

Now compare all these Eurasian interactions in Qingdao with what happened in The Hague. Essentially, after being blackmailed by the appalling NATO Secretary-General Mark “Hello Daddy” Rutte, the European Union (EU) decided to allocate a whopping €650 billion (approximately $695.5 billion) of funds it doesn't have to buy US weapons to declare war on Russia – and later China. 

That brings us to the five percent kabuki. For every NATO member to spend five percent on offense, with their combined debt already exceeding 80 percent of GDP, they would need to nearly triple the €325 billion (approximately $381.2 billion) they spent on weapons in 2024, thus reaching nearly one trillion euros.

EU citizens with a brain can easily do the math: There will be a non-stop orgy of “cost-cutting,” tax hikes, and disappearing social benefits to finance the weaponizing. And stealing €300 billion (approximately $351.75) of Russian assets won’t help, because that won't cover even a one-year increase.

All ministers at the SCO table in Qingdao knew that NATO was at war with Russia, and then China does not even qualify as a lousy Monty Python sketch. Russia already has 13,000 missiles and counting, and will soon be able to produce up to 300 hypersonic Oreshniks a year – more than enough to paralyze every single port and airport in Europe. 

It was quite intriguing to observe Russian President Vladimir Putin’s immediate follow-up to what was discussed at the SCO in Qingdao. Cue to the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) forum in Minsk, at which Putin said, “thankfully, the situation in the Middle East is stabilizing. The longstanding conflict between Israel and Iran is, thanks to God's grace, now behind us."

Or, maybe not, if statements of Israeli officials are anything to go by. Still, for the Russian president, what always matters most is geoeconomics. At the forum, Putin highlighted the EAEU's preferential agreements with Vietnam, Singapore, and Serbia, plus an imminent agreement with the UAE, saying: “Mutually beneficial relationships with countries across Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America are actively advancing.” Not to mention further cooperation with the BRICS, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), ASEAN, the African Union, and, of course, the SCO.

And just as the ministers were leaving Qingdao, it was officially confirmed: Iran ditched the American GPS system for China’s Beidou. Talk about a sharp, bold move in the tech war chessboard. Next step: to snatch all those Su-35s and JC-10CEs. 

https://thecradle.co/articles/ten-defense-ministers-walk-into-a-room-in-china

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.