Today's Commentary about Carney, about Ukraine, about Trump, about Venezuela, plus our "Mostly Harmless" B-Ark

I found some good commentaries to share tonight, plus a bit about the B-Ark.

Commentary about Carney's progress: 

Wayne Horton has started a fascinating series called The Carney Letters - an unauthorized series by Wayne Horton. Here is how he explains it:

...These letters imagine what Mark Carney might say if he could speak freely to Canadians — not as a Prime Minister bound by diplomacy, but as the thoughtful economist, public servant, and citizen he’s always been. They’re written from the desk he’s never actually had: the one where he can set aside decorum and speak to the country without filters, handlers, or the fear of headlines.
In an age when political communication has been stripped of candour, these “unauthorized” letters restore the voice behind the restraint. Each entry draws from Carney’s real words, gestures, and silences — the things implied in his tone and timing but left unsaid in public. Together, they form an imagined correspondence with a nation he’s trying to rebuild: pragmatic, principled, and just a little weary of the noise.

And here is an excerpt from his letter from yesterday:

Dear Team Canada — Day 218 — Who Cares? We Do.
...when I said “Who cares?”, what I meant was:
Who cares about the theatre when the real work is happening elsewhere?
I shouldn’t have said it that way. But the sentiment — the prioritization — was not wrong.
As one senior official in my Johannesburg briefing dryly remarked:
“The U.S. is a partner. It is not the plan.”
And increasingly, that is true.
Meanwhile, the Economy Delivered Something Remarkable
Last week’s national accounts confirm what many analysts doubted was even possible:
-Canada’s GDP grew at roughly 2.6–2.7% annualized in Q3.
-Inflation remains near the 2% target.
-Unemployment is stabilizing rather than spiking.
These are not small accomplishments.
They happened during:
-a heated tariff war,
-a deliberate attempt by the Trump Administration to damage our manufacturing base,
-a global energy price shock, and
-accelerating geopolitical instability.
You do not get GDP growth and anchored inflation in those conditions unless something deeper than luck is at play.
As one economist put it to me this week:
“Prime Minister, this feels like watching a plane climb during a stall warning.”
In aviation terms, that’s not supposed to happen.
In policy terms, it means the strategy is working — and the stall warning may have been premature.
Still conservative commentators in Canada and the United States insist the economy is “running on fumes,” yet every week I meet with more world leaders eager to invest in Canada, and more Canadian business owners preparing to expand. The irony, of course, is that conservative media does not actually want conservative economic strategy to succeed — because the results would benefit all Canadians, not just an elite few.
We are not clear of turbulence. But the wings are holding — and the lift is real.
...Canada has formally concluded negotiations to join the European Union’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) initiative — the central procurement and financing pillar of Europe’s Readiness 2030 plan. ... SAFE mobilizes up to $244 billion in loans for EU member states to rearm — part of a broader $1.3 trillion European defence modernization effort. As Europe urgently acquires ammunition, drones, artillery systems, missiles, and next-generation infantry technologies, Canada will be the only non-European country with preferential access to that massive demand...
For Canadian workers, engineers, and manufacturers, this is the largest defence-sector opening in generations...

Commentary about Ukraine

Phillips P. OBrien / Phillips’s Newsletter

Weekend Update #161: Not A Bad Week For Ukraine
Truth, Democracy and Corruption, Possible High Command Changes, Are European Gloves Coming Off?
...During the last few months we have heard the most about Trump pivoting to help Ukraine, threatening to send Tomahawk missiles, etc, and even announcing the really tough (or so we were told) oil sanctions on Russia. Now I think we can say clearly that these steps were public disinformation, to make it look like Trump could help Ukraine when really the administration was heavily involved reaching a deal with Russia.
Witkoff and Ulyanov talked on October 14. Trump announces oil sanctions on October 22. Which do you think was the real position of the administration?
And as greater confirmation, I can share with you that I have heard that Trump’s public statements that he thought Ukraine was winning, were also bluff. He remains convinced that Russia is winning the war, wants Russia to win, and is acting with that in mind. US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who has replaced General Kellogg as the Trump representative talking with Ukrainians, has told the Ukrainians that they are losing and if they do not accept this terrible deal, things will only get worse.
This is what Trump believes. The actions in between the Anchorage Summit and today during which he seemed to state the obvious, were to maintain leverage over Ukraine and Europe.
The USA is now the enemy of freedom and democracy in Europe, and that needs to be understood....

Andrew Tanner / Rogue Systems Recon

Ukraine's Bitter Choice: War Without End - Or Push To Victory
Peace talks do not end existential conflicts unless one side can already no longer continue the fight. Moscow's true goal in negotiations is always the same: gain what cannot be taken by other means.
....The truth is that peace isn’t an option and never was. Not in the way Western minds are trained to think about it.
Again, it isn’t that there’s nothing to be gained by a break in active hostilities, only that this has to be weighed against dangers no less potent than those presented by continuing the fight. Deep down, this whole peace dance is for show: one way or another, Ukraine and the Muscovites are locked in a struggle to win the capabilities race. Each is driven to find and possess the right combination of violence that will eliminate the other’s ability to inflict harm. Any pause in the fighting will only ever be tactical, the resumption marked by even more intense destruction than before, because inventories will be replenished.
If you want to the the war quickly, the only sure way to do it is boost Ukraine’s armed forces with every weapon they can absorb now. This has always been true, and failure to get it done is the real reason why Ukraine’s counteroffensive efforts in 2025 had to remain so carefully limited.
Another reason that a peace deal or even truce remains very unlikely in the near future is that Putin’s economy and society are not going to be able to withstand a shift away from total war mode without serious pain. This makes it absolutely possible, even more likely than not, that any end to active hostilities in Ukraine will be followed by an attack on one or more Baltic states within six months to a year. The longer Moscow waits, the greater the danger posed by cumulative European investments in defense. This is a numbers game now, and will be until the Third World War is finally over....

Commentary about Trump
I said in a comment three weeks ago that people who think we can get rid of Trump by releasing the Epstein Files are just wrong - just like we were all wrong in 2018 that the Mueller Report would be the end of him. In truth, nothing will ever make Trump resign, and the Republicans will never have the guts to impeach him. The only thing that America can do is to hunker down and survive him, somehow, and then re-create their systems so democracy will survive too.
Tonight I found this excellent article along the same lines:

Christopher Armitage / The Existentialist Republic

BOMBSHELL: Trump Is FINISHED (This Time We Really Mean It)
This time it's for real, right?
I keep seeing the same phrase. “The beginning of the end.” The Daily Beast used it last week. Then Newsweek. Then NPR. Then a Substack I follow. All of them about Trump. All of them confident that this time, finally, the coalition is cracking.
So I started researching. And what I found was a decade of failed predictions, exposed pundits, and supposed turning points that never turned.
CNN alone used the phrase “the walls are closing in” in headlines at least 45 times between 2017 and 2019. I stopped counting “beginning of the end” after I hit triple digits. ....
...Pollster Brent Buchanan of Cygnal told Newsweek his monthly surveys show “zero movement” in core Republican views of Trump, adding “I don’t think there’s anything that could get between how the base feels about Trump.”
When Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene broke from Trump over the Epstein files, she resigned rather than face a primary. That tells you something about Trump’s hold on Republican voters.
What would actual collapse look like? Republican approval below 70%. Primary challengers gaining traction. Elected Republicans voting against Trump priorities rather than expressing “concern.” Fox News and talk radio turning against him.
None of these indicators are present.
The documented record reveals a consistent pattern spanning ten years and two election cycles. Every category of prediction followed the same trajectory. Analysts who predicted specific outcomes with high confidence were repeatedly proven wrong. The media predictions share a common feature: treating each controversy as categorically different from previous ones that had failed to damage Trump, then being surprised when the pattern repeated.
The people telling you Trump is finished have been telling you that since 2015. They have never been right....
The walls never closed in.
So I’ll put the question to you directly: Is this incompetence? Is it complicity? Is it an industry profiting off hopium while we wait for someone else to save us?
Whatever your answer, here’s what I know for certain. If you’ve spent the last decade consuming media predictions about Trump’s imminent demise, you haven’t been receiving information. You’ve been receiving a product. The product makes you feel like accountability is coming. The product gives you permission to feel ok, even as things get worse. The product lets you believe that someone, somewhere, is handling this.
No one is handling this. No one is coming to save us. The people who told you the walls were closing in are still making the same predictions, in the same confident tones. They will collect their paychecks whether they’re right or wrong. They face no consequences for failure because failure is not a bug in their business model.
We’re the only ones who face consequences. And we’re the only ones who can change anything....

But in spite of all that, Trump is glaringly incompetent and mentally ill: 

Garrett Graff / Doomsday Scenario 

It’s time to talk about Donald Trump’s health (again) 

The most consequential topic in the world is the simple question: Is the President mentally fit to serve? ... the evidence has only grown that something serious is afflicting Trump. ...On Truth Social, day after day, out of sight of most Americans and news coverage, he’s ranting about conspiracies that are just fundamentally untrue. Remember when he posted an AI-slop video of himself dropping poop on the American people? As one USA Today Opinion piece in September summarized: “An unhinged rant about Tylenol. Baffling conspiracies about an escalator. Deluded self-praise. Two-decade-old gripes over losing a construction project bid, droned about on the world stage as if nothing could be more important. That all came from President Donald Trump in one week, a week that should alarm us and spotlight one simple fact: He is desperate and declining.”...
...I’m a longtime student of presidential succession and “continuity of government” protocols and one of the big questions I think about is that in the personality cult of MAGA would any set of Cabinet officers ever be willing to move to invoke the 25th Amendment in the event of a major health episode of the president? Think Marco Rubio and JD Vance would be the profiles in courage to declare the president incapacitated, even if he was? Would Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi take away the nuclear keys if they had to?
I have my doubts.
In an administration and political movement that was always prized loyalty, you can imagine not declaring the president incapacitated being seen as the ultimate loyalty test. And yet we all can recognize the signs of aging in Donald Trump — this is a grandparent where his family would be starting to have the conversation about whether he was safe to drive anymore, let alone control the nation’s nuclear weapons.
It’s long past time for this to be a sustained front-page story in the US. One of my consistent refrains this year has been that the US media knows how to provide wall-to-wall coverage and how to elevate a “news story” to a “news event.” (Think Hunter Biden or Hillary’s emails.) It’s clear that the media hasn’t yet decided that the president’s health and fitness is worthy of a “news event.” But it should be.
There is no bigger, more consequential topic in the world than this: Is the President of the United States mentally fit to serve?
We need to start this conversation with this simple set of facts: Donald Trump is the oldest person ever elected to the presidency, and yet we know less reliable information about his health than we have known about any modern presidency...

Maybe if he eased up on rage posting in the middle of the night he might stay awake during cabinet meetings.

— Just Jack (@just-jack-1.bsky.social) December 2, 2025 at 11:55 PM

About the upcoming Venezuela War

Michael Ian Black

Why Are We Going to War With Venezuela
Seriously - why the fuck are we going to war with Venezuela?
...If I had to guess – and I don’t but I’m going to, anyway – Trump was looking for an “easy” war to win during his second term. I’m not being facetious. My best guess as to how we got here is that Trump looked at a print-out of Mt. Rushmore and asked himself how to get his stupid, fat head up there. None of those guys won Nobel Peace Prizes, but every single one of them either fought in a war or led the nation during wartime, or both. In other words, I think the invasion of Venezuela might be, literally, a vanity project.
Are we really going to blow up a bunch of people, places, and things to soothe the egos of men like Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and Stephen Miller Are we really going to de-limb and orphan a bunch of kids so Kristi Noem can throw on some camo and rattle her (all-natural) sabers. It sure looks like it. A bunch of tough-acting swaggerbots are about to get their war boners on. They’re doing it for funsies and to get their taste of that sweet, sweet petroleum. Crucially, though, they’ve neglected to at least fashion a fig leaf with which to disguise their naked greed...
... Each one of them trying to look tougher than the last in front of their commander-in-chief, himself trying to look tougher than everybody in the room. If the Soviet Union was a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, then the current United States is a parade of squirrels, hopped up on meth, inside a circle jerk. Lord have mercy.

Mark Wauck / Meaning In History

Thinking About The Venezuela Situation
...The overall consensus regarding the US military buildup in the Caribbean is that this level of deployment signals an intent to launch some sort of actual kinetic military action. The argument for this is that the deployment is far too expensive to allow for a backdown. Additionally, in his most recent statements Trump appears to be threatening at least air strikes, hinting at this as a first step that could be followed by further escalation. Notably, however, this threat was still framed as an anti-drug measure—the targets were discussed as storage sites in Venezuela for Columbian sourced drugs.
The other possibility is that this is all intended as intimidation—to induce a regime change in Venezuela—and won’t go beyond that. While there are good military and strategic reasons that militate against military action, there are also strong arguments against the US stepping back from war. In fact, the closing of Venezuelan air space is already an act of war, and backing down at this point would constitute a renunciation of US hegemony over the Americas—unthinkable to many MAGA Trump supporters, on the one hand, and certainly to all Deep State Anglo-Zionists.
With that in mind, let’s look at some recent commentary on the situation—what’s really behind it? Again, there’s a general consensus that this is about Venezuela’s oil—the largest reserves in the world. There is also the issue of muscling Russia and, especially, China out of the Western hemisphere. Let’s see how this all fits together, if we can....

By the way, I think last week's Democratic video about the US military obligation to refuse illegal orders was a shot across Trump's bow, and a message to his whole incompetent administration, that they will be challenged if they start pointless and unjustified wars.
Malcolm Nance reports tonight that US military are likely already on the ground in Venezuela because SOMEBODY is identifying the boats that Hegseth is targeting.

Our "Mostly Harmless" B-Ark
Finally, does anyone still remember that The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy said Earth was originally colonized by a B-Ark? We were described in the Guide as "mostly harmless" -- but not completely, of course.

If Douglas Adams were watching the current US political circus, he’d probably sigh, scribble a note, and update his hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy: “In the unlikely event that your society’s B Ark gains influence, prepare for turbulence, contradictory memos, and someone declaring emergency powers over the national supply of vowels.” Remember how the B-Ark was packed with phone sanitizers, marketing executives, middle managers, and self-anointed visionaries who mistook confidence for competence. America’s modern B-Ark equivalents seem to hold press conferences, usually while explaining with great authority things they clearly just learned from a meme. They announce policies that read like they were brainstormed on a whiteboard covered in fast-food grease. They radiate the breezy confidence of people who’ve never assembled IKEA furniture yet feel qualified to redesign democracy on a livestream. And every time they open their mouths, you can almost hear the distant hum of an interstellar ship crewed entirely by the unqualified, drifting ever farther from the planet they insist they’re saving.

- Glen Lancaster 🇨🇦

Read on Substack

A truism for our times is this Douglas Adams observation: “The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.”