FUCKING AROUND PROTOCOL: THE WORLD TIPPY-TOES ON A THREE-LEGGED CHAIR WHILE TRUMP PLAYS THE BACK NINE

From an Iowa cornfield to a Manila Uber to a Lagos kitchen, everyone's paying for the taxpayer-funded bubble where the back-nine emperor tees off.

Picture it. The world has a fucking noose around its neck. The noose is tied to a tree limb riddle with termites. Underneath the world’s feet is a chair with 3 legs, because the 4th one snapped off somewhere between the second Iranian ceasefire and the third one. The chair is wobbling like a drunk on a trampoline. The world is up on its tippy toes trying desperately not to sway. And the bloke who’s supposed to be holding the chair steady, the so-called leader of the so-called free world, is at Mar-a-Lardo, in a polo shirt that’s screaming at the seams, lining up a putt and asking his caddy whether he should play the 5 iron or the 6.

This is what we’re calling Fucking Around Protocol.

Fucking Around Protocol is the operational doctrine where you push, and you push, and you fucking push, and then when the other bloke pushes back you act surprised. You act betrayed. You scream into the cameras about how unfair it all is, you sook like a child whose ice cream just hit the footpath, and then you go back to your golf cart and demand someone find you a fucking sandwich.

Let me catch you up on what’s happened while the back-nine emperor was teeing off and the rest of the planet was wondering what fresh hell is coming next.

The United States Navy, on the orders of the cunt currently triple-bogeying the par 4 at his own resort, fired on 2 Iran-flagged oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. The tankers were empty. Empty. Not loaded with weapons, not loaded with crude, not loaded with so much as a Filet-O-Fish. Empty hulls. The justification was that they were breaking the US blockade.

Read that again. America is enforcing a blockade. America. The country that invented gunboat diplomacy and freedom of friggin navigation and the goddamn Statue of Liberty. America is now firing on commercial tankers in international waters, in the same neighbourhood where it spent 50 years lecturing every other bastard on the planet about the sanctity of free trade routes. The hypocrisy is so thick you could spread it on toast.

Iran’s response was calm, measured, and exactly what you’d fucking expect from a country that has watched the United States bomb it twice in the past 12 months while it was sitting at the negotiating table with a pen in its hand.

Any attack on Iranian tankers and commercial vessels will result in a heavy assault on one of the American centers in the region and enemy ships.

That is not a metaphor. That is a weather report. Forecast ahead: a torrential rain of fucking missiles. There are roughly 30,000 American military personnel scattered across bases in Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Every single one of those bases is now a target. Every single one of those service members got out of bed yesterday morning with a bigger bullseye on their kit than they had the day before. And the bloke who put it there is on the 11th green at Mar-a-Lardo, wondering whether he can claim the cart fees as a business expense and whether the dining room is doing the meatloaf again tonight.

▶ FRANCE 24 - Iran warns of retaliation as US tensions threaten fragile peace talks

But wait, you say. Surely there’s some fucking diplomacy happening. Surely the grown-ups are in the room?

The grown-ups are in the room. Marco Rubio is in the room. Marco Rubio, the human autocomplete, is in Qatar, where he met with the Qatari Prime Minister, because Qatar is the one playing chair-holder while America’s golfer-in-chief works on his short fucking game. The White House has put together a 14-point memo. Fourteen. Fucking. Points. You can fit the entire framework of the original JCPOA on a beer coaster, but Trump’s people needed 14 points, because nothing says “I am serious about peace” like a listicle that reads like a Buzzfeed article on how to please your Capricorn.

The 14 points include suspending Iranian nuclear enrichment, lifting US sanctions, and restoring free transit through the Strait of Hormuz. You know. The Strait that’s currently full of empty tankers being shot at by the same fucking country demanding free transit. They want Iran to give them everything, while America is over here blowing holes in Iranian shipping. It’s like a bloke punching you in the face and then asking why you’re not hugging him back.

Iran has not responded to the 14 points. The cable TV anchors are puzzled. Why won’t the Iranians respond? Why won’t they just say yes to peace? What’s wrong with these people?

Tohid Asadi from Al Jazeera, broadcasting live from Tehran, spelled it out for any fuckwit who’s been in a coma:

Iranians were engaged in negotiations over the past one year not once but twice while their country was targeted all of a sudden unexpectedly by the Americans and Israelis.

Iran sat down to negotiate. Got bombed. Sat down to negotiate again. Got fucking bombed again. Now you want them to sit down a third time, and they’re saying give us a goddamn minute to think about it, and the American press is acting like Iran is being unreasonable. The same press that got us into Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Vietnam is now confused why a country that’s been bombed twice mid-handshake is hesitant to shake hands a third frikken time. Spare me.

This is the trust deficit you build when your foreign policy is run by a senile prick who can’t remember which country he threatened on Tuesday.

▶ AL JAZEERA - Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei briefs military chief on ‘new guiding measures’

Meanwhile, the new bloke at the top in Tehran, Mojtaba Khamenei, has done his first major public-facing meeting since taking the supreme leader gig. The man has been a ghost. No public appearances. No statements you can actually film. Written notes only, like a bastard who’s allergic to cameras. So who does he meet with first, this new ghost in the machine? The foreign minister? The lead negotiator? The bloke whose job is to sort out the flogging 14-point memo?

No. He meets with the commander of the Khatam al-Anbiya joint armed forces headquarters. The military chief. The bloke whose job is to push the fucking button.

That is not the diary of a man preparing to sign a peace deal. That is the diary of a man preparing for the moment after the deal collapses. And the official line out of Tehran is that the strategic patience period is fucking over, fingers are on triggers, and any attack will be met with surprises by new weapons, new methods of warfare, and new arenas of war.

That last bit, new arenas of war, is the line that should have every American base commander in the Gulf shitting himself sideways into a bucket. Because new arenas of war doesn’t mean another Strait of Hormuz dust-up between two destroyers. It means cyber. It means proxies. It means a Houthi drone in your morning muesli. It means somewhere you didn’t fucking think was on the board.

And while Tehran is staffing up the war room and Washington is shooting at empties in the Gulf of Oman, satellite imagery shows an apparent oil spill off Kharg Island, which just happens to be Iran’s main crude export terminal. Cause: unknown. Source: unknown. Convenient: extremely fucking.

You don’t get an apparent oil spill at the exact terminal that handles 90% of Iran’s exports because the fucking seagulls knocked over a barrel. Something happened at Kharg Island. Either Iran did it, in which case they’re telling the world they can shut their own taps off whenever they want and the rest of us can get rooted. Or somebody else did it, in which case the chair just lost another leg and nobody’s owning up to who kicked it.

We are now at 2 legs on the chair. The world is hopping like a drunk in a sack race.

THE TAXPAYER-FUNDED BUBBLE WE DIDN’T NEED TO INFLATE

Now let’s talk about who’s actually paying for the cunt making these decisions.

The back-nine emperor’s golf habit costs you, the American taxpayer, more than the GDP of several actual nations. Every time he flies down to Mar-a-Lardo, the entire fucking circus flies with him. Air Force One. The backup plane. The Marine helicopters. The motorcades. The Secret Service detail. The hotel block-outs in Palm Beach because every protection officer needs his own room and minibar. The local cops on overtime. The military comms units. The Coast Guard cordoning off the waterfront like he’s the Queen of fucking Sheba. The C-17s flying the cars in. The advance teams going down a week early to stand around looking grumpy and shouting into earpieces.

Hundreds of millions of dollars. Of your fucking money. So a decaying doddering delusional dimwit whose neurons are shorting out at an incalculable rate can shoot 92 with mulligans on a Thursday and call it a working trip. A working trip. The man hasn’t done a working anything since the Reagan administration.

This is the bubble. He doesn’t see what you see. He doesn’t pay for what you fucking pay for. He doesn’t queue at the pump or check the receipt at the supermarket or stare at the power bill wondering when this whole shitshow got so cooked. He sees a green fairway, a polished cart, a club steward holding a Diet Coke, and a member from Naples called Chad who tells him the rally was the biggest one ever recorded in human history.

Now zoom out from the 18th green and look at who’s paying the actual fucking bill.

THE CASCADE

A corn farmer in Iowa is sitting in a Ford F-150 looking at a field he’s not going to plant. The math doesn’t fucking work. Diesel for the tractor is up. Fertiliser is up because half of it came from countries that just got tariffed by the same idiot demanding lower prices at the supermarket. The export market for the corn he was going to grow has evaporated because China stopped buying. The crop insurance won’t cover the loss if he plants and the price collapses again. So he walks away from the field. A 4th-generation family farm and the patriarch is staring at unplanted dirt thinking about how the fuck he’s going to tell his old man, who’s 84 and still sharp as a tack, that the family is out of the corn business after a hundred and twenty years.

A fisherman in Songkhla on the Thai coast is tying up his boat for the 3rd week running. Diesel is too expensive to chase the bloody catch. The fish prices haven’t moved enough to cover the fuel. His son was supposed to take over the boat. The son is in Bangkok now, driving a delivery scooter for a Korean app, sleeping in a 6 square metre room he shares with two other lads from the village, eating rice and chilli paste because that’s all that fits the budget.

A Filipino Uber driver in Manila is on his 14th hour of the day. He needs another 3 hours just to break the fuck even. The fuel keeps creeping. The fares don’t. His wife is a nurse on a contract in Riyadh she can’t get out of. His kids are with his mother. He sleeps in the car between shifts and pisses in a Coke bottle because there’s no time to find a toilet.

A grandmother in Lagos is choosing between cooking gas and her grandson’s school fees. The gas keeps going up because Nigeria, despite sitting on a sea of crude, imports nearly all its refined fuel because successive governments stripped the refineries for parts and put the cash in a Swiss account. When Hormuz wobbles, Lagos shakes. When Lagos shakes, that grandmother decides between a hot meal and her grandson getting an education. That’s the fucking trade-off.

A pensioner in Birmingham is wearing 2 jumpers indoors because the energy bill is now the difference between dignity and the hospital. A Pakistani truck driver is sleeping in the cab because the diesel he just bought ate the motel money. A Bangladeshi seamstress is doing 12 hours for a wage that bought groceries last year and barely covers rent this year. A Mexican factory worker is staring at a layoff notice because the export contract got cancelled the moment the tariff hit. A Sri Lankan tea picker is being asked to do 2 plots for the price of 1. An Egyptian baker is watching the queue for subsidised bread get longer every fucking morning. An Indonesian dive operator is closing the shop because the tourists stopped coming when the airline fuel surcharge doubled. An Argentinian rancher is selling breeding stock he swore he’d never sell because the feed cost has gone fully sideways.

Right on down the line. Every link in the global chain. Every single one of them paying, in real coin and in lost sleep and in busted plans and in dreams put on the shelf, for the bubble that the back-nine emperor lives inside.

Meanwhile, the bubble itself.

The bubble has 24-hour climate control. The bubble has staff who tell him the rally was the biggest. The bubble has Fox News on a loop. The bubble has chicken nuggets at midnight and a Diet Coke button on the friggin desk. The bubble has Stephen Miller on the phone going yes sir, brilliant sir, you’re a genius sir, while the world dangles. The bubble has zero exposure to the actual cost of any of the decisions made inside it. The bubble is the most expensive bubble in human history, paid for by the taxpayer, insulated from reality, sealed against consequence, and floating above a planet that is choking on the consequences of every shitty decision that gets made inside it.

Back on the patio, Stephen Miller is trying to explain that the entire Persian Gulf is one bad morning away from going up like a Roman candle. The response from the most powerful office on the planet, transcribed from the imaginary press conference happening inside that decaying skull, goes something like this: they’ll work it out, they love me, they want a deal, nobody’s done more for the Middle East than me, by the way what the fuck is the score on the Yankees and where’s my goddamn meatloaf.

This is Fucking Around Protocol in action. You shoot at empty tankers. You threaten the world’s most contested shipping lane. You stiff-arm the only diplomatic process that has any chance of working. You demand 14 points of concession from a country you’ve already bombed fucking twice this year. You bill the taxpayer for your weekend golf. Then you tee up the 18th and wait for the find-out portion to start.

The find-out portion is going to be expensive as fuck.

Australia has 22 days of fuel reserves. Twenty-two. Fucking. Days. The Strait of Hormuz handles roughly 20% of the world’s oil. If the chair tips over, you will be paying $3.50 a litre at the pump within a fortnight, and the whole country will discover what energy sovereignty actually means, which is to say, we don’t fucking have any. None. Zero. We’ve been hocking the back paddock for 40 years and now the bill is sitting on the kitchen table with red writing on it.

Kharg Island leaks. Empty tankers burn. American bases hold their breath. Mojtaba Khamenei whispers new measures to a general nobody outside Iran has ever heard of. A corn farmer in Iowa walks away from a field. A fisherman in Thailand ties up his boat. An Uber driver in Manila falls asleep at a red light. A grandmother in Lagos puts the gas bottle back on the shelf. A pensioner in Birmingham puts the third jumper on. And the cunt who started it all is asking his caddy if the wind is going to push his ball into the bunker.

3 legs became 2 legs. 2 legs is a stool. A stool wobbles harder than a chair. And the noose doesn’t give a flying fuck about your handicap.

Stay tuned. Operation Epic Fury isn’t fucking done. Not by a long shot.

And screw the tinfoil hat. The oil market doesn't move on news anymore. It moves on whatever Trump and his goons did at breakfast. Every spike, every dip, every 'apparent' tanker incident is timed perfectly to whoever opened the position the night before. They're not trading oil. They're trading the policy calendar from Mar-a-Lardo's back office.

And that’s for another day.

IFLA ~ Gman

AUSSIE-TO-YANK GLOSSARY

Flogging - covered all four senses (thrash, sell dodgy gear, overuse, useless person, to sell Trump ties, Trump watches, Trump steaks, Trump University)

Frikken - the softened-fucking explainer with the Meta-algorithm note baked in

Friggin - spelling variant cross-reference

Bloke - Guy, dude, fella. The basic unit of Australian masculinity. Used roughly 400 times a day with no loss of meaning.

Mar-a-Lardo - Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s Florida resort, renamed in honour of his expanding silhouette and his willingness to swap state secrets for a rare steak.

Tippy-toes - On the very ends of one’s toes. As in, the position you adopt when there’s a noose around your neck and you’d quite like to keep breathing.

Find-out portion - The second half of “fuck around and find out.” The bit where the universe collects the bill, with interest.

Shitting himself sideways - In a state of extreme alarm. The sideways modifier indicates the alarm is so significant it has bypassed the normal direction of travel and is now heading for the carpet.

Going up like a Roman candle - Igniting. Catching fire. Becoming a fireworks display you didn’t fucking plan for.

A fortnight - Two weeks. 14 nights. Yes, we still measure time this way. No, we don’t know why you stopped.

Stiff-arm - To hold off, fend off, push away. Originally an American football term we adopted because it sounds more athletic than “ignored.”

Sook - To whinge, sulk, carry on like a stepped-on cat. A grown man going on Truth Social at 3am because the news anchor said something mean is sooking.

Get rooted - To go away in the most unkind possible terms. Polite version of go fuck yourself. We use it on truckies, telemarketers and prime ministers.

Cooked - Completely fucked. As in “the economy is cooked,” “his career is cooked,” “this whole shitshow is cooked.”

Hocking the back paddock - Selling off the family farm bit by bit to pay the grog (booze) bill. National metaphor for what successive Australian governments have been doing with our resources, sovereignty and energy security since the eighties.