Sometimes You Bomb Iran

Matariki joy, Middle East madness, and voices of reason.

Sometimes you get out your B-2s and go bomb Iran
Sometimes you get out your B-2s, it’s all part of god’s plan
Well, if you want that peace, you can’t be quiet
When there’s a picture of you hanging out on an island
So you best be getting your B-2s and go bomb Iran

Song: Jesse Welles

---

Morena, folks, I hope you had a lovely Matariki weekend. A bit on that to start, and then I’m afraid it’s time to break Basil Fawlty’s rule and talk about the war.

What a contrast our lovely little country was this weekend to so much horror and unhappiness around the world. For us, it was about spending time with whānau, and we thoroughly enjoyed the Marlon Williams concert on Saturday night. Here we are waiting for it to start:

Fi and I.

It was a moving evening from the opening Kapa Haka group to the sublimely talented Mr Williams, who delighted in playing his first arena show, at Matariki, at home. A very special Kiwi with well-written songs, an outstanding voice, and a lovely line in dialogue between numbers. He’s the real deal.

Despite the global situation, I reflected last night on the positive and posted:

“Here are a couple of photos that made me smile this Matariki weekend. A great crowd at Marlon Williams last night, including plenty of older Pakeha celebrating this special time in Aotearoa. Maybe I'm in a bubble, but it doesn't feel like the racists are winning. Noisy they may be, but they're trying to hold back the ocean.”

Photos by Rachel Boyack and Julie Anne Genter.

As you know, returning to my starting analogy, Basil is unable to contain himself and not mention the war, instead he takes to impersonating Hitler and jack-booting it around the place as things spiral out of control and that’s not a million miles from the behaviour we’ve seen from Donald J Trump, warmonger in chief of the largest military the world has ever seen.

---

There will be a paywall shortly. If you’d like to continue reading this newsletter and have access to all my writing, you can subscribe at my original price of $80 per year or $8 per month, or the Gold Card discount of $70 per year or $7 per month. The cost of your subscription will remain unchanged as long as you are subscribed.

Drop your bombs between the minarets…

Although we knew it was probably coming, it felt like a shock when word came through early yesterday afternoon that the US had bombed three separate sites in Iran. What happened to taking up to a couple of weeks to decide?

Of course, nobody expected an announcement stating that they would start bombing at this date and time, but even so, it felt shockingly insane.

We’re just supposed to accept the same old line about the baddies having WMDs that we’ve seen time and time again, and it’s even more insulting this time.

With both US and UN intelligence indicating no proof that Iran was about to develop a nuclear weapon, we’ve moved beyond “we have the evidence, trust us” to “we don’t even believe our own evidence, so we’re just going to take the word of Benjamin Netanyahu on this.”