It was the best of times, it was the worst of times - from Habs Rule to America Chaos

For some reason I am seeing a lot of just two kinds of posts. 

Positive ones about the Habs victory on Sunday, and negative ones about Trump's America causing chaos in the world. 

So they seem to fall into a sort of oddball "two cities" theme, really. Here they are

Habs Rule!
The playoff standings as of Monday night are here
Canadiens-Sabres Game 3 recap

Some good posts about this game:
Classic sports photo here

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Dobeš wears #29 on his helmet for Dryden and a White Ribbon on his mask for ending men’s violence against women. Montreal loves him, as do we all.

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Astronaut Jeremy Hanson shows his Habs love

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And PK

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Next, Trump chaos makes the world turn away from America
In his Concis Canada piece last week, Shankar Narayan describes how the world is changing:

...When the Trump administration launched its war against Iran, the democratic alliance did not behave like a cleanup crew for Trump’s war policy. They held the line. Not for a day. Not for weeks. Since day one of the Trump-Netanyahu war against Iran, allies have refused to absorb the fallout or launder the escalation.
And the break keeps accelerating.
Saudi Arabia just refused to let its bases become launch pads for Trump’s Hormuz gamble. Qatar had already broken from the old cartel structure. The UAE followed with its own exit.
Global energy markets are in chaos. That is no longer a dramatic sentence. It is the operating condition. And in that chaos, Germany is now looking at something that would have sounded ridiculous in the old world: buying Canadian LNG from the Pacific coast, then moving it all the way to Europe through the Panama Canal....
That is the market speaking. Not politely. Loudly.
Europe is saying that Canadian supply is valuable enough to consider even when the map is ugly. It is saying that a stable democracy with serious reserves, serious institutions, and serious legal predictability is worth more than a shorter route through a broken geopolitical system....

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The USA has not only ceased being leader of the free world, it has ceased being a member of the free world. It betrays democratic allies and supports expansionist dictatorships. The only question Americans need to ask themselves is do they want this to continue?

- Phillips P. OBrien

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You know what makes me sad the most? We weren’t Rome. We weren’t the Mongols. We weren’t some blood-soaked empire held together by terror and the divine right of some inbred lunatic with a crown. We were something else. We had it all. Economic power. Military dominance. Cultural gravity. Scientific leadership. The reserve currency. The aircraft carriers. The universities. The movies. The fucking moonshot. The entire world — allies and enemies alike — hung on our every move. Every speech. Every election. Every carrier group. Every… fucking… word. We ran the world without quite admitting that we did. That was the strange magic of it. The Americans never fully thought of themselves as emperors. Romans knew they were Romans. The British knew they were an empire. We still talked like a republic of shopkeepers and mechanics while half the planet calibrated itself around our existence. And say whatever you want about the United States — and God knows there’s plenty to say — but the broad truth is this: When America functioned, the world functioned better. Not perfectly. Better. Trade expanded. Poverty collapsed. Technology spread. Democracies multiplied. Global violence dropped. People lived longer. Markets stabilized. Even our enemies benefited from the order we imposed simply by existing. That’s the part the morons never understood. The real American empire was not conquest. It was a giant, humming system of incentives, guarantees, markets, security arrangements, norms, and absurdly optimistic assumptions about humanity itself. We believed — naively, arrogantly, sometimes stupidly — that people ultimately wanted freedom, prosperity, and peace. And for a long stretch of history, we were right. Oh, we fucked things up plenty. The moment America consciously tried to engineer history with tweezers and PowerPoints, we usually stepped on our own dick. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Pick your catastrophe. But when we were simply ourselves — productive, confident, future-oriented, open, inventive, ambitious — things mostly worked. People’s lives improved. The world got richer. Humanity moved forward. And now? Gone. Squandered. Traded away for ragebait, tribalism, conspiracy theories, and the political judgment of people who think Facebook memes are research and the price of eggs is a civilizational crisis. Esau selling his birthright for stew, except somehow dumber. Nothing like America had ever existed before. Not Rome. Not Britain. Not China. Nobody. Because nobody else ever combined that bizarre cocktail of power, optimism, industriousness, idealism, missionary zeal, and almost childlike belief that tomorrow could genuinely be better than today. That combination is probably gone now. And now that it’s gone, I doubt humanity ever gets another version of it.

- Bryan C. Del Monte

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And just for a laugh at the end, here is Rod Stewart to King Charles

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