Blimey!

This weather is totally crazy.

When I woke up ( at ....errrr ..... 11:33 this morning, and my excuse was that I was having a really good dream about a new house that I had bought) the weather was beautiful. So I had a leisurely breakfast and messed about a bit on the computer before deciding to go to the brocante at Pionsat.

But a flaming phone call interrupted me and I was there discussing the Palestine question with someone and it was gone 14:00 when I left. Bright sunshine when I left, and in the 5kms it takes to drive to Pionsat the heavens opened with a deluge. In the village square all the stallholders had gone due to the rain and that was that.

By the time I checked the stats at 31:45 we had had 22mm of rain and it's still bucketing down. Thunder and lightning and all sorts. It had better clear up if we are going to have another go on that roof tomorrow.

In other news, I noticed a little giveaway phrase in a press report about the situation in Afghanistan. Hidden in all of the rhetoric is the little phrase that NATO "hopes to reverse the Taliban's momentum". Translated into English that means that the Taliban is advancing in Afghanistan and NATO hopes to push its forces back. Now if the Taliban is advancing, it means that NATO is retreating, so what a giveaway this phrase actually is.

But then again I've been saying for a couple of years that the Taliban has had NATO on the run and that Khazi's writ doesn't run any wider than the gates of his palace in Kabulseye (and only then with American permission).

To make matters worse, the Dutch pulled out of Afghanistan today. Not that the Dutch forces amount to much - who will ever forget the craven way that the Dutch Army, who had been sent to defend the town of Srebenica and its population, surrendered it to the Serbs and then stood by idly as the Serbs massacred the population - but it's a sign that the Coalition of the Willing is becoming less and less Willing as the war marches on. What with the Germans also likely to pull out before the end of the year and the Poles and Canadians to be the next to run away, the Septics and the Brits are going to be left with the oeufs all over the visage. And with more and more countries pulling out, the likelihood of persuading more and more countries to take over so that the Septics can secure all of the mineral rights in Afghanistan will be less and less. It will mean that more and more Brits will be dying so that more and more Americans can become richer and richer.

July 2010 was the second-most-deadly month for NATO forces in Afghanistan. And when was the most deadly month for them? Why, June 2010 of course. But of course nothing of this is surprising. For every innocent child that NATO kills you have half a dozen people shouting for revenge. And Afghans and other tribesmen ("tribespersons please" - ed) are much more likely to pick up a gun and go to war that your average North American or British Couch Potato.

And how long has this war been going on? 8 and a half years? And instead of things getting better and better they are getting worse and worse. The Brits and Septics have been dragged into the very bloodbath that they promised that they would avoid. But then again, the way of dealing with a group of freedom fighters, most of whom were Saudi Arabians, led by a Saudi and financed by a Saudi company, leading to an invasion of ... errrr .... Afghanistan was something that mystified almost everyone on the planet.

The funniest thing about all of this is that when the Russians invaded Afghanistan the Afghans fought the Russians off - armed by weapons supplied by the west. The Russians had the right to feel aggrieved by that. And 20 years or so later here are the Afghans fighting off the might of the west with no help from anybody at all. No wonder the Russians are p155ing themselves laughing.