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Welcome to The Village Oak Tree.
I am your host, Terrance Ó Domhnaill. Thank you for spending a little time with me once again. We’ve had another insane week in world news.
Just within a week, we have chaos from all over the world that has surprised everyone. Few people saw all of this coming, at least those of us who are not privy to such things. Sit down with me today in a warm spot and let me tell you about what I found from news media around the world, that is not being censored by the U.S. government.
To wrap things up, I have another chapter from The Priest to read to you. More of Michael Campi's dystopian future story about what the collapse of the United States would look like from a first person perspective.
The biggest news of the week is obviously what just happened in Syria and that Bashar Al Assad has left the country for Moscow.
I have been watching independent analysts for the last few days and the one thing that is starting to become clear. It's mostly all about the petrodollar. In this case, LNG pipelines running through Syria from the gulf states to Europe. Whoever controls the flow of oil, controls the middle east.
Assad was an idiot and everyone sort of knew it. He dismissed the threats, ignored the warnings and now he is gone.
The U.S. has been stealing oil from the northeastern oil patches, via Conoco and the U.S. Army, who is providing security for them, for several years now.
Russia needs those Mediterranean assets in the west (the military bases). Israel has always wanted Syrian territory for their expansionism to make a Greater Israel. Iran was using Syria as a military supply conduit for Hezbollah. The Turks want the northern territory for themselves as part of the old Ottoman Empire.
Then there are the various other smaller tribal factions in Syria that will now break out and start making their own territorial claims.
There are no winners here as the world will soon see. Israel will win a little bit for now by expanding the Golan Heights. Türkiye will continue to try and take out the Kurds (SDF) in the north. Russia is going to do all it can to make a deal with the new government coalition to keep their bases. And the west will continue doing all it can to try and control the flow of oil and gas to Europe.
Syria will probably break up into little fiefdoms with a Caliphate in the middle, based on the old ISIS models throughout the winter months. Ahmed al-Sharaa, the leader of Hayat Tahrir-al Sham, says he will have a new government in place by next March. This is what the west (the U.S., western Europe, Türkiye and Israel) have wrought.
None of this will be of any benefit for anyone living in the west, other than the oligarchs and their paid for politicians. There will be so many territorial disputes going on from now on, that any future for cheap oil and gas from Syria will be a long time coming, if at all.
Biden went on national TV Sunday night to lie through his teeth about crediting the downfall to a weakening Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. I guess he feels like he has to try and steal something out of this as they lost control of the situation on the ground there. His way of theft is trying to control the narrative once again in the U.S.'s favor, plus run a heavy bombing campaign against the ISIS rebels in northeast Syria. He is defending the Kurds SDF forces, so he says. So he uses B-52's and F-15's to carpet bomb some desert camps to make himself look good. He also says he wants to work with the new government to ensure everything goes okay.
In other words, he will be sending over some political salesmen to try and convince the new government to cozy up to the U.S. rather than the Russians, Iranians and Hezbollah. I wonder what Biden will try to offer them for this relationship? Think about that for a minute. What does the United States have to offer this new hardline Islamist regime?
Crappy weapons deals? Trade deals? Some financial aid with strings attached? Can the U.S. offer the new Syrian government something no one else can give them? I don't have all the answers but I am curious to see how this is going to work out over the next six weeks. That is all Joe Biden has left before he gets put out to pasture. Can he pull a rabbit out of his hat before Trump comes in and takes a wrecking ball to it all?
I'd be willing to bet that Trump tries to pull the military out of Syria next year soon after the inauguration. That will leave the Kurds with no protection from the Turks or ISIS. ISIS will likely make some small moves, then bigger ones and so forth once they realize there is no one to stand in their way. Other groups may pop up and try to make some moves. Without the U.S. to stand in their way, will the Russians pick up the ball? Will the Iranians step in to help? What will Israel do? They are already bombing places in Syria to shut down the supply lanes from Syria to Lebanon and staking out Syrian territory for themselves. Israel didn't waste any time.
The biggest takeaway from all of this is that these groups, HTS being the front runner, will eventually get a little more organized and pretty soon, will establish an extreme Islamist state, much like the one that called themselves Daesh or ISIS or ISIL or whatever. All of these Syrians who are celebrating the end of the Assad rule will soon be crying and lamenting the atrocities now being committed by the Islamists. Civil war is probably coming to Syria by next spring, if not sooner, as all of these various factions fight over who is going to be in charge and how the territory is going to be run. Mind you, I say territory because the borders of Syria are already starting to change.
There is still fallout from South Korea over their presidents attempt to set up, what may have been a coup attempt using martial law. That was and still is, a big deal. Especially in the U.S. I listened to several analysists the day after and some said that it caught the U.S. by surprise. I listened to other ex-military analysists who said that that was false. The pentagon and the commanding general over the U.S. military assets in South Korea probably knew it was coming and just stood by. Someone was giving orders about this from on high. Did Biden know about this beforehand?
We may never know the truth as a lot of things about that have been secreted away for 'National Security' reasons. As I keep saying, censorship is alive and well in the U.S.
If the U.S. did stand on the sidelines, knowing this was coming, then they had a vested interest in this. Maybe better control over the government to make sure that South Korea keeps doing as it is being told? There is a lot of unrest over there right now over corrupt political leaders and the over watch of the U.S. There are a lot of South Koreans who want the U.S to take more of a backseat role, instead of behaving like a colonial master.
Mostly, like a lot of little countries these days, they want the United States to quit telling them what to do. They want more control over their sovereignty. I have read some stories recently about how South Korea doesn't like the idea of the U.S. using them as a staging ground for a war with China. It's making them very nervous. I can't imagine why!
In other places around the world, Ireland held their national elections recently and Fianna Fáil won the majority, with Fine Gael coming in second place, and Sein Finn coming in a close third. Which is a good showing for Sinn Fein.
The bad thing about that, is that it likely means Fianna Fail will probably set up a coalition with Fine Gael once again and it will be business as usual. Which is not good for the people. It means that, despite a budget surplus, health care will continue to be underfunded and housing will remain in severe shortage for everyone.
I found an example of what that looks like from a Facebook group I follow called Peg's Cottage. Here is an advertisement for an Irish cottage for sale. This place is small, hence the descriptive cottage. I have seen the listing pictures and, it is small compared to American houses. If I were single, I would love it. My wife wouldn't like it though.
Brookside cottage in Co Roscommon, 2 acres of pasture land, terraced gardens, mature trees, a brook with pond. For sale at €205,000, which comes to $216,816.51.
This is an older style Irish cottage with two central fireplaces instead of central heat. If you want to stay warm in the winter months, you will have to lay in a goodly amount of peat. This is an example of the housing prices in Ireland these days. Something like this is considered a premium property there and they wonder why the young professional people want to immigrate to somewhere better, like Canada and Australia for instance. Western Canada's Irish population is booming I hear.
From the United States, president-elect Donald Trump is doing his usual bullying rhetoric on social media and in main stream news. His threat last week to impose 100% tariffs on any country that tries to dedollarize made the news. Countries like Russia and China are chuckling a little bit over the lack of economic sense coming from him.
For anyone with any common sense, if the U.S. were to impose such extreme tariffs on any country, they would stop trading with U.S. and it would bankrupt a lot of companies. I don't imagine the American voters would go for something like that. But, when has Trump ever listened to anyone? Especially the voters unless it benefits him.
There has been a lot of talk from eastern Europe over the war in Ukraine. No surprise as there is always something in the news every week about them. This week, we have hints that Zelensky may be thinking about a ceasefire and a negotiation with Russia finally. Then, there are other stories saying that he has said no.
Of course, we have heard this before and the west, notably the U.S., has told him to say no. But this time, it sounds like he may be getting serious about it. Trump may have something to do with that as he keeps saying he will end the war quickly. He is telling people now that he plans to cut off the funding. Imagine the pushback from the military industrial complex?
I listened to a well-known analyst on Monday tell the host that the top Russian general called the U.S. top general and the day after that phone call took place, Ukraine was stopped from firing any more ATACM's, Storm Shadows and other medium to long range missiles into Russia. It has been three weeks now and I bet this may also have had an impact on Ukraine's decision to possibly start negotiations. That doesn't mean that the U.S. has given up though. In this mornings news, Ukraine fired a couple of ATACM’s into Russian territory within the last twenty four hours so I wonder if the Russians will respond with another Oreshnik?
Some of Biden's people are pushing back before Trump takes over by telling the news media that Ukraine should lower their draft age down to eighteen years, like the Americans. Keep fighting with all you have they keep saying. Draft women to fight they are saying. All the while sitting a half world away thinking smugly that no one will touch them in North America. What if they had to send their kids to the frontline of a battlefield somewhere? Would they be so public about sending teenagers to get killed?
On top of all of that, here is something I talked about a few weeks ago and it has been brought up again. A new story from Russian news about the American military equipment and how badly it performs. This time, it is about their much vaunted M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks that the U.S. has always said where so good. Everyone should buy a bunch.
The U.S. sold 31 tanks to Ukraine after the war started and Ukraine lost 20 of them to the Russians. Ukraine mothballed the rest before they were lost as well. They were taken out by drones, missiles and anti-tank weapons. This is the kind of stuff that the pentagon doesn't want the American public to know about.
I have said before and I say it again. The United States no longer has any technological advantages on the world's battlefields. They don't have enough trained people to man their equipment, especially with their Navy ships. They no longer have any 'quality' military offensive equipment such as tanks, artillery and missiles. The missile launchers keep breaking down. The tanks are a very expensive maintenance nightmare, and their famous F-35's are nothing but flying junk, according to sources. This applies to nearly all of their hardware. The U.S. military is very much a paper tiger these days, which is probably why they push other countries to fight their wars for them so much since the twenty year wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Ukraine is tired and the people in Europe and the U.S. want all of this to stop. The U.S. politicians and their corporate owners want all of those natural resources so for them, its fight, fight, fight. Something I outlined a couple of weeks ago in my last podcast. The morbidly wealthy billionaires don't care how many people die or become impoverished as long as they continue to amass insane amounts of wealth.
Europe is fading fast economically and its largest countries are having major political problems. Germanies governing coalition has collapsed and chancellor Sholz looks to be on his way out soon. France's prime minister, Barnier just resigned after only being in office for three months. Macron is defying everyone saying he will remain as president until 2027. The voters may have a say in that very soon. Is Macron going to declare himself a modern version of Napoleon?
There are a lot of right leaning political parties taking shape all over Europe that don't like the way their pro-western governments have been spending their tax money on weapons for Ukraine and not spending money on domestic issues. Economies are failing because the governments cut off cheap Russian oil and gas over the war, at the insistence of the United States.
As I said, and it was brought up again in the news this weekend, that the U.S. and Britain are the most likely saboteurs of the Nordstream pipeline explosion back in 2022. Was this a ploy to make Europe mad at the Russians so the Americans could sell their LNG at a higher price? I listened to another podcast this week telling me that Europe now imports 70 percent of its LNG from the U.S. at about a 40 percent price increase over what they used to get from Russia. This is one of the main contributors to the EU's financial collapse. That and giving and selling on credit, weapons to Ukraine. Credit that Ukraine is likely to default on after the war is over.
As one European economist said on a Canadian podcast last weekend, Europe is cutting its throat to spite the Russians at the behest of the United States. The U.S. doesn't stand to lose much in all of this but the EU nations most certainly are feeling the loss. It is destroying economies. If Trump brings back the notion about the U.S. leaving NATO, the EU will have to make some hard choices in order to keep their standard of living. Even then it may be too late for Europe. The EU bloc may be on its last legs financially now and it could spell big trouble for their national governments.
Germany and France are two big examples and more will come unless they divest themselves of the Americans a lot more. Russia and China don't have to be the bad guys. They don't want to be the bad guys. All Russia is asking for, is for NATO to get out of their backyard with their military and leave them alone. If western Europe doesn't want to trade, that's fine. China wants to trade with everyone, including the U.S. They are strong enough now, that if someone doesn't want to trade with them, they'll find markets elsewhere. Which they are doing in Africa and central/South America.
That is one of the primary reasons they started the BRICS alliance a few years ago. Something a lot of other countries have noticed and want to join. They are all tired of being bullied by the west, especially the U.S. and are looking for alternatives for trade where they won't be sanctioned later on.
Speaking of U.S. bullying, China is standing up the latest bullying tactic of the U.S. with the blocking of chip technology again. For a long time, the U.S. has said that China wants to use the advanced chip technology to augment their military in order to take on the mighty U.S. They have sanctioned a Dutch chip company to prevent them from doing any business with China and blocked U.S. companies from doing chip business with China. All in the name of national security of course.
China is fighting back with enticing Chinese and other chip engineers to go to China and work for Chinese companies. They have invested heavily on their own advanced chip making technology in order to move away from needing anything from the U.S.
Given China's ability to surpass the Americans in research and development, I see a real possibility that it won't be too long before they won't need anything from the U.S. chip making industry. This will only further isolate the United States in the global trade wars and create even more economic problems very soon. As if the U.S. doesn’t already have economic issues as it is. If China pulls farther away from the U.S. in trading because of all of this aggressive posturing, the U.S. economy will take an even bigger nosedive and that will be that. The crashing of the U.S. economy will bring the end to the empire.
Will the United States incur their own version of a government uprising? Will the angry people rise up to demand change? I would say that voting in Donald Trump this time was a cry for change. Will he bring the changes needed?
No one knows for sure what he is going to do. He says a lot of things and does stupid stuff like trying to out muscle Emmanuel Macron at the Notre Dame reopening ceremony with a stupid handshake that went on for way too long. But will he do something to save the American economy? It certainly doesn't look like it with all of this talk about mass deportations, doing away with the birther rights and getting rid of the DACA program. Deporting whole families in order to keep them together, even if some of them are native born citizens.
Meanwhile, health systems in the United States are failing badly. In an article by Jessica Wildfire, she writes about how the U.S. government has pretty much eliminated any safety precautions for Covid and all of its variants. No mask mandates, no subsidies for personal protective equipment or anything. It’s as if the government wants to completely wipe out any mention of Covid, bird flu or anything else about viruses infecting people in order to keep everyone working. Forget about the death count. Forget about how long Covid is disabling a large portion of the labor force. Nothing else matters except people going to work so they can be taxed, so the government can spend that tax money on wars like Ukraine and Palestine.
The state of health care in general is so bad that the U.S. has lowered the average death age. It has the highest rate of maternity deaths, infant mortality rates, cancer rates and so on. It has the most expensive health care system of any first tier country on the planet with the worst health care rating, even amongst countries with severe medical staffing shortages, such as Canada, Ireland and the U.K.
In other health industry related news, the U.S. news media made quite the splash about a major health insurer's CEO getting shot on a public street, killing him. What made this so special is this company was one of the most notorious regarding not paying claims and rewarding massive bonuses to this CEO and the other executives. Apparently a lot of people have died because this company denied a lot coverage.
A lot of people applauded the murder and hailed the shooter as a sort of dark hero. The bigger picture and one I try to point out to people, is that this is just another symptom of how sick American society is. Not so much the murder in of itself but the motive behind it. This young man has now been caught so let the media frenzy begin.
I speculated that once Trump reveals next year that he won't be keeping his campaign promises, a lot of people are going to get very angry and demand change. Maybe even violently out of frustration. Will we see more corporate executives get assassinated or have attempts made? Will there be protests in the streets and violent crackdowns by militarized police? Will Trump declare martial law and invoke the insurrection clause in the constitution?
With so many Americans having guns in the U.S., if there were to be another Kent State incident, the public backlash could start something even bigger and chaos would ensue. An armed uprising?
I think the United States is headed for a major change in government in some fashion soon. We are seeing this happen everywhere else around the world and the U.S. is ripe for it. It would only take the right spark and they could see something unfold like what we watched in Syria and South Korea last week.
The trouble with that is usually when there is a violent uprising, the new governments usually turn out to be worse than the old ones. We have Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine, to use as examples of how bad things could become in the United States if a popular uprising were to take place and they replace the current government model with something more extreme. Such as an authoritarian theocracy based on a Protestant Christian model? Can anyone say project 2025?
In the video. I pause for a break at this point. When I return, I read another chapter of The Priest for everyone. Michael Campi's tale of a future dystopian United States after a total economic collapse.
Thank you for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed it and that you will return again for more political discourse.
Please like, subscribe, reply and share the videos or audio podcasts, however you watch or listen. The goal here is to resist the authoritarians who want to take our freedoms away from us. I appreciate everyone around the world, no matter who or where you are. Together, using independent media, we can resist the authoritarian governments in the west.
As I say good bye this week, I wish to leave you with this Irish blessing as you go about your day. "May the sun warm you a bit, the air be fresh as after a spring rain, and the birds be singing to you on your way up the lane" Slán go fóill.
References:
The Racket by Matt Kennard
A book about the U.S. racket of mafia like behavior across the world.
Kremlin responds to Trump’s BRICS threat
Spokesman Dmitry Peskov has warned that the US president-elect’s warning will only accelerate desire to abandon the dollar
RT.com/Russia
Biden pushing Ukraine to force teenagers to war – AP
The outgoing White House team reportedly wants Vladimir Zelensky to remove his objections to conscripting the country’s youth
RT.com/news
‘Enough work for women’ in Ukrainian army – retired US general
Able refugees should also be brought back from abroad to fight for Kiev, Ben Hodges has said
RT.com/news
US admits much-hyped tanks failed in Ukraine
Kiev already retired its dwindling stock of M1 Abrams earlier this year
RT.com/news
US announces air strikes on ISIL targets in Syria after al-Assad’s fall
US Central Command says it struck more than 75 targets to ensure armed group does not exploit end of Syrian leader’s rule.
Aljazeera.com/news
Beijing vows to protect itself from US economic ‘bullying’
Washington has restricted the export of a broad range of chipmaking tools and software to China
RT.com/business
Killing of insurance CEO reveals simmering anger at US health system
Mike Wendling in Chicago & Madeline Halpert in New York
BBC News
The Priest
formerly known as Bob (part 19)
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