Happy [Belated] Canada Day!!!

 

I've done a couple of posts in the past wherein I've written about my lack of enthusiasm for Canada Day.  You can look for them if you want to.  Obviously, my disaffection was even greater this year.  I'm going to share a quote from a CounterPunch article put up on the site today, July 4th:

The Israeli military forced us into displacement. We ended up in Gaza City on the streets. I have a family. I have children who are all under the age of 15. My wife is pregnant. My financial situation is not easy. A few weeks ago I had to sell some of my belongings. I had a stroller that I used to push the gallons of water on. I had a bicycle too and other things I had to sell to buy flour. We have no food, no water. We don’t have anything. I went to the US aid distribution sites and to the aid trucks. I went there seven or eight times to get food. About 20,000 people gather at the distribution sites along the Netzarim corridor early in the morning, but only 2,000 manage to get any food parcels. Why? Because of the overcrowding. Because of the number of people creating chaos. The food parcels they put in front of us are not enough compared to the number of aid seekers. The American site is a dead end. They told me that there is American aid in Netzarim. I went there. I walked 15 kilometers to look for some flour, rice or lentils. I couldn’t get anything. I went to the Netzarim aid site three or four times. All in vain. We go there only to find death in front of us. There was no food or water. There was only death. People were lying dead in the sand in front of us. I don’t know what to say. This situation is very hard. They told us there is aid in the trucks. Then, we went to the trucks. The trucks move very fast, running over people. The trucks were running on top of people! Today, I am unable to do anything. I used to weigh 90 kilos. Now I weigh only 58 kilos. Things are hard, really hard in Gaza. We are subjected to the worst torture in the world.

THIS is what Mark Carney, Justin Trudeau, Crystia Freeland, Anthony Housefather, etc., plus Pierre Poilievre and his team of troglodytes, all ENTHUSIASTICALLY support.

This is what the management of CBC News deliberately continues to enable and what Canada's mainstream journalists cowardly concede to allow their paymasters to enable.  It's what the fascist, rancid "newspaper" The National Post champions and celebrates.

Meanwhile, some "progressives" are mollified with token sanctions against a couple of particulary egregious nazis in Naziyahoo's cabinet (But heaven forbid sanctions against Naziyahoo himself!)  Whereas the more "radical" and "activist" among us dislocate their shoulders from patting themselves on the back for wandering around in large groups in public chanting like shit-heads.

I've joined those crowds.  I've written letters.  I joined Independent Jewish Voices (as a supporter) and suggested things.  But I had been in a serious financial/personal crisis in 2023 all the way til about this time last year.  But the full-time activists.  The academics and scholars.  The union movement activists.  They've watched this holocaust being live-streamed for almost two years.  For some of them, going to work for eight hours a day, five days a week, pretty much entails that they're supposed to be thinking about how to respond to this.  And, so far, what they've come up with is NOTHING.

So, with this complete moral failure, PLUS Carney's using Trump's threats as an excuse to [again] trample the rights of the First Nations, to "stand up" ["Elbows Up!!!"] to Trump by promising to buy billions of more in US-American weapons and trap refugees at the border and all the other stupid bullshit that Canada's servile politicians do, ... and the significant proportion of this country's population which supports all of this vile garbage, and all the other stuff that makes me depressed and misanthropic, ... fuck it.

How To Get Canada To End Its Support For Israel's Genocide of the Palestinians

 

We already know the answer.  It's the same answer for any and all revolutions.  Meet up in large (or small!) numbers somewhere, and chant moronically for a couple of hours.  Make sure not to damage any property or anything.  Then go home and await the fruits of your victory.  And if doing that once didn't have any impact, then keep doing it.  And doing it.  And doing it.  As people die and die and die and die.

Never stop to reflect that your "activism" hasn't stopped Canada from continuing to ship weapons to the Israeli nazi regime.  Or to stop Canada from continuing to disgrace us all by providing diplomatic cover for Israel's nazi war criminals.  The only thing keeping Palestinians alive is the material limitations of Israel's ability to slaughter them.

Don't open your eyes to the reality that your strategy and tactics are garbage.  Because that might cause you to have to actually THINK about possible alternatives.  And, since we're all brain-dead, that's a non-starter.

At least you can pat yourself on the back that you "did something."

Canada's Disgusting Culture

 

Look at it this way.  The Israelis are insane.  And they're very thin-skinned.  Even though they've been openly conducting a live-streamed genocide for over a year, they refuse to accept criticism for their nazi-level barbarism.  I'd say that anywhere between 80 to 98 percent of them are sincere when they label criticism of their racist sadism as "antisemitism."  These self-pitying, coddled idiots can't see that it's the genocide that has turned the world against them.  It's "antigenocidism" not "antisemitism."

The whole time though, the "rules-based international order" has aided and abetted them.  The USA has funded them and gone into overdrive to re-supply them with weapons.  The vermin occupying power in the UK, France, Germany, Greece, etc., attack pro-Palestine protesters and keep the trade and weapons and funding going for Israel's murder machine.  Canada assisted in punishing the Ansar Allah in Yemen for their defense of the Palestinians' humanity by assisting in the USA's "Operation Rough Rider."  Canada has also been instrumental in "training" the kapos in the "Palestinian Authority" in the West Bank to beat-down protests against the racist brutality of the Israeli occupiers.

That's what we do.  That's who we Canadians are.  Perhaps half of Canadians gleefully support the slaughter of Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, because of decades of brainwashing by a propaganda system that masquerades as "journamalism."  Most of us don't care one way or another.  It's happening to people out of their immediate zone of interest and so it might as well not be happening at all.  But the decent, sane minority are becoming increasingly disgusted and and then angry.

And so that's when our idiot leaders decided to pretend to visit an "aid site" (where starving Palestinians are shot by US and Israeli nazis for showing up to get food) and the Israeli Child-Killing Force ICKF supposedly fired "warning shots" over their heads.  And it was this shooting at privileged foreigners (rather than the mass slaughter of innocent Palestinian civilians) that empowered the cynical stooges in the West to issue strong words criticizing the Israelis and to implement token sanctions against Israeli inviduals.

And this weak sauce was apparently enough for a significant number of Canadian progressives who desperately want to believe that their culture isn't entirely irredeemable.

 Addendum to my last post: Biden would say he was "working tirelessly" to get the hostages returned.  He was lying because 1) He didn't give a fuck about the hostages because Netanyahu didn't (and doesn't) give a fuck about the hostages.  and, also 2) Because he was VERY tired and he gave in to his weariness by taking multiple naps and sleeping 10 or 11 hours a night and all the other things that a dying, senile man does.

But when he was AWAKE he did (to the degree that he was able) try to do all of the racist, imperialist, scum-bag/shit-for-brains stuff that he'd dedicated his life to.  Like destroying Social Security, exploding the prison population (especially with Blacks and Latinos), and approving wars and illegal sanctions thereby killing millions around the planet.

I guess I finally understand where Hitler's fans come from.  The same sort of filth who would feel a twinge upon hearing of Biden's cancer diagnoses.  "Except for the mass murders of entire peoples of innocent men, women and children, he was a good guy!"

Not the Brilliant Argument They Think It Is

 

I'm in a weird mood this morning so I looked at Driftglass and then Lawyers, Guns & Money.  

"Evil and Stupid" Driftglass refers to those "centrists" and "moderates" who advocate for a third political party between the extremists of the left and the right as "grifters."  As opposed to his preferred Democratic Party USA, comprised of  vermin who sell-out the lives of their countrymen to oligarchic parasites (most notably private health insurance, Wall Street and the military-industrial-coplex) and who traumatize and slaughter millions around the world, and earn a pretty penny for it.  (Clinton's net worth:  $120 million.  Obama's net worth: $70 million.)

But don't call THEM "grifters"!

But the L, G & M post is about people (like the stupid Jake Tapper) talking about Joe Biden's infirmity.

I've noticed a few Democratic Party cult sites working this meme recently; "Why are people talking about Joe Biden when the fascist threat of Donald Trump is standing right before us?????"

It's astonishing how fucking stupid these assholes are.  Let me try to explain it to them.

You see, a couple of books have come out about the last presidential election.  (One of them by Jake Tapper.)  The one that Donald Trump actually won.  They've come out NOW because now is most likely the best time for such books to come out.  Timely.  Recent history.  So, whatever one thinks of Jake Tapper, it's understandable that he would want to talk about the book he's trying to sell.

And, if you'll remember, the Democrats, seeing the FASCIST threat of Donald Trump, in their infinite wisdom decided to put Joe Biden up against him as the incumbent rival.  They did that even though they'd had been deliberately hiding Joe Biden from everyone due to his advancing senile dementia.  They'd been doing that for pretty much his entire presidency.

So, they had FOUR FUCKING YEARS to anticipate the fascist threat of Donald Trump and they decided that Biden was going to be their (and everyone else opposed to Trump) man.

Well, okay, ... Biden probably wouldn't have been their first choice.  But if the Democratic Party of the United States of America's power-brokers had really pushed for someone else, the increasingly addled octogenarian Biden would've gotten VERY UPSET.  And, for four years I guess, the power-brokers inside the Democratic Party of the United States of America felt that if there was ANYTHING worse than fascist Donald Trump, it would be the ire of a befuddled, 80-something-year old narcissist being turned on them.

Here's some further levity:

BTW one thing that isn’t appreciated nearly enough is that the Democrats handled an absolutely horrible situation last July basically flawlessly under the terrible circumstances.

So, in other words, when their disastrous decision to go with the senile incumbent inevitably blew-up in their faces, they anointed the senile incumbent's unpopular, untalented, insincere, air-head VP to carry their banner.  And when she lost against the monstrosity of Trump due primarily to her own lack of appeal, including her disgusting adherence to the Biden policy of GENOCIDE, zombie-like Democratic Party hacks like the LG&M blog say that the whole thing was handled flawlessly.

[Much of that post is quoting someone else who decries the ignorance of US-Americans about Trump's perfidy.  And the LG&M writers blames "journalists" like Tapper, and right-wing propaganda outlets like "FOX News" for that.  Conveniently forgetting their own discrediting of themselves with the "Russiagate" conspiracy theory.  And their continued discrediting of themselves by continuing with the absurd denialism and covering-up of Biden's infirmities that they started in 2019 and are still at it as of today.]

2025 Readings II

 Some formatting issues occurred in the original 2025 Readings post and I don't know html so I can't fix it.  So I'm gonna make this post the place where I try and start again.  Stuff will follow ...

I read most of This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress.

The first few essays all pretty much said the same thing: there is no Theory of Everything. After reading the first essay, the following essays fell flat-- the point had already been made.  ...  And the redundancy of essay topics truly blunted the edginess of any attempt at a novel argument.  ...  I will spare you my frustration about the jargon-filled and ego-laden, pseudo-arguments made in most of the essays – at least for now. On a positive note, a few of the essays did teach us something new, and made us think deeper, drawing us to lines of thought far-removed from our typical work and interests. Like Infinity by Max Tegmark! Who knew there is more than one type of infinity?! The essay on Entropy by Bruce Parker was similarly notable. It tackled a complex problem and was able to put in words the typical confusion many have when grappling with the concept of entropy, which measures the amount of disorder in a system. The idea also actually seems radical, and it is one of which I have never before heard.  ... Notice that you don't need to own the book to read the essays, they are all freely available on edge.org. 

The book had some good stuff.  Apparently there's nothing to the idea that the language you speak molds your brain differently from people who speak a different language.  I'm going to have to dig deeper into the ideas presented in Ross Anderson's "Some Questions Are Too Hard For Young Scientists To Tackle."  But this is the sort of book you read when you have a lot of time to sit and think and read further.  At least some of the essays, the interesting ones.

 2025/07/01

I got 500 pages into The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson.  Somebody else requested it from the library so I had to return it.

Wilson really knows how to convey a mass of information clearly and eloquently.  Great book.

From the Defenestration of Prague in 1618 until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, brutal warfare swept across Europe. In his monumental study of the causes and the consequences of the Thirty Years War, Wilson, a professor of history at the University of Hull in England, challenges traditional interpretations of the war as primarily religious. He explores instead the political, social, economic as well as religious forces behind the conflict—for example, an Ottoman incursion left the Hapsburg Empire considerably weakened and overshadowed by the Spanish empire. ... Wilson's scholarship and attention to both the details and the larger picture make his the definitive history of the Thirty Years War. 

Next I hope to insert a quote from a Reddit review that I saw a couple of days ago:

One of the tricky things that bedevil the social sciences in pop culture is that a little knowledge about a topic can often be worse than no knowledge at all. Humans and the societies they build are mind-bogglingly complex; surface-level understandings are inherently reductive. OK, that’s by necessity. But then you throw in human tendencies to pattern-match, or frame things through their own ideological lens, or replace a foreign context with their own, and things get warped even further.

This isn’t just a problem with laymen: Wilson himself notes that much of the history of the 30 Years War was written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an age of nationalism and centralized nation-states, in which a multi-ethnic/linguistic/confessional entity that looked to have been vomited onto a map of Central Europe seemed hopelessly obsolete to historians. German historians in particular blamed the Holy Roman Empire for all the then-current ills of Germany at the time of writing.

The great success of this book is the way it unravels the overarching narratives and simplifications of popular memory of the 30 Years War. Principally this is done through very liberal doses of context; the book takes up more than a quarter of its massive length in addressing both its causes (while stressing its non-inevitability), as well as investing time in the periphery (if you would like to know more about the metallurgy and export of Dutch cannons, this is the book for you). Thanks to engaging writing it rarely drags though, and the drama is compelling.

There you go.

Um, well, ... you see ...

 

First I read this: "Dear Generation Z, Where Are You?" by Michael Albert of "Z" fame.  In this essay he asks why they aren't out protesting:

Great. But Gen Z, you are 70 million strong. 70 million. Where are you? First one, then another.

I tell myself you are preparing yourselves. You are meeting to get your arguments in order.  You will soon burst amorously onto the activist scene. Trump to savages education. Trump exiles students. Did Trump’s troops grab you? Grab a classmate? Grab someone across town? Trump commands whole universities to bend a thousand knees and some rush to do so. Are you at one of those? Are you applying to attend? Are you at work wondering who gets fired next? You must be minutes away from boiling over, mustn’t you?