Conservatives on Crack

You know, I've said elsewhere that given the fact that US-American right-wingers have embraced draft-dodging, adopted daughter banging, brood of abandoned children spawning, intellectual and moral degenerate Ted Nugent as one of their own, simply for his gun-loving, vegetarian-loving, chickenhawk ways, ... it seems entirely plausible that Canadian "conservatives" would stand by their boy Rob Ford even if the alleged crack smoking video was released and played for them on a giant IMAX screen.

But just for the record (not like it matters given their hypocrisy and stubborn loyalty to their own) but I think it's officially time for these drooling half-wits to retire their whole "corrupt Liberals" meme.

Patrick Brazeau, Mike Duffy, Rob Ford, Bruce [Paul?] Carson [the old dude with the 20-something wife who tried to extort the First Nations]; and on and on: Tony Clement, ... ah, the whole gang of shit. They're now "The Corrupt Conservatives."

More Books

 Reading Susan George's book Another World Is Possible If ... , Susan George has been writing great, readable stuff since the 1970s. I've read A Fate Worse Than Debt and How the Other Half Dies. If you want a good introduction to the political-economic history of the postwar period and how we've found ourselves in this sorry state, I'd recommend giving her books a try.

What makes this work a little depressing is that it's from 2004, and in it, George makes the entirely reasonable argument that if there's to be any hope for social justice in the world, then the population of Europe must stand up to the USA's neoliberal onslaught and expand their welfare states and their environmental regulations and all the other things that we embattled leftists in North America recognize as the source of Europeans' generally better living standards (all things considered).

Alas, the neoliberals are in the driver's seat in Europe now as well, and are succeeding in their divide-and-conquer strategy to destroy the European welfare state and bring on the inequalities of wealth and the resultant financialization of the European economy that has so benefitted North American elites.

I also picked up the paperback version of the fourth volume of Robert Caro's awesome biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson; The Passage of Power. I'm afraid that I haven't actually read the first two. I've only read Master of the Senate, but it was fan-fucking-tastic. I've only just started The Passage of Power but the writing is top-notch. I'd curl up with it for a few days and read it cover-to-cover but I'm so behind in everything else in my life that it'd have terrible consequences.

Also, a while ago I mentioned that I was reading The World That Never Was by Alex Butterworth. I can't say enough about it. It's a sweeping survey of what has become a fairly neglected portion of political history: The story of anarchism, terrorism, and the state's response to it. Butterworth writes as a principled liberal. He's critical of the anarchists but he's more critical of the hypocrisies and corruptions of the system they rebelled against. He paints the anarchists he describes as flawed human beings, but nonetheless, human beings inspired by noble, humanist ideals. Furthermore, he shows how the police apparatus of provocateurs, double-agents, international law-breaking, was, in the final analysis, more dangerous than the anarchist bomb-throwers it was designed to combat. That is the focus of the book. It's not intended to be a history of anarchist thought or philosophy.

I Can't Blame KirbyCairo

Sick at heart of all the stupidity and evil being rewarded, Kirby Cairo has thrown in the towel when it comes to blogging. Joining Boris at the Galloping Beaver and Rural at Democracy Under Fire. Alison at Creekside took a hiatus from hopelessness not too long ago; perhaps with Christy Clark's surprise majority she'll take another pause. And I've been blogging lightly for a while myself. (At least it feels lighter. Like I don't care or something.)

Blogging is speaking out to the world, hoping that like minds will agree and that perhaps (if only in a small way) we can add to a collective cultural reality and somehow influence the broader culture.

Once in a while though, the bloggers that I like grow dispirited and depressed. They feel like they're swimming against the tide and their efforts are futile. Of course, you'll occasionally hear such emotions from bloggers you disagree with (mainly on the right) as well. As if nobody's happy.

Consider the plight of these fuck-ups: Their great white hope, stephen harper, refuses to immediately outlaw abortions. Homosexuals can get married and it's against the law for federal public servants to discriminate against them. Even worse: innocent children are told they can't bully homosexual schoolmates into suicide! It's politically correct insanity run amok!

Oh yeah, back to stephen harper ... the great betrayer ... ; he campaigned on small government, low taxes and balanced budgets, while racking-up the largest budget deficits in Canadian history!!!! What we obviously need is ruinous crushing austerity and plenty of it!

Meanwhile, "the corpse" [CBC] continues to thrive [in their fervid imaginations anyway] while Sun Media struggles for its life in the face of public apathy or antipathy. When, oh when, will Canadians be free to tune into Global, CTV and Sun News, free of encountering the Maoist collectivism of the state broadcaster?????

I suppose these shit-heads are also incensed that Arabs and/or Muslims can roam about our land freely, as if they're citizens or something, and document all our vital resources and our weak-points.

And don't get them started on the First Nations. (Please, for the love of Allah, don't get them started on their racist, childish, idiotic conspiracy theories.)

Yeah, occasionally these insane, inbred, ugly-minded simpletons feel like the mainstream is out of touch with them.

The important difference is that these pieces of shit are acting as a drag on our collective intelligence, with their self-evidently stupid yammerings being subsidized by greed-head manipulators who know that the longer idiots can fixate about teenage single mothers, the less time they'll have to connect two-and-two together and realize that single mothers on welfare aren't a politically powerful demographic and that they therefore can't have too much of an impact on the average Canadian's material well-being.

Canadians have to be reminded that the neo-liberal theories of the elites haven't done a good job once you factor-in all the younger Canadians forced to live with their parents decade after decade. Or once you consider the enormous rise in household debt levels and imagine what would have happened to economic growth over the past ten years without it. Or once you think about the rising tuition rates and delisted health care services. Add in the billions in G20 security, public safety funds lost, gas plant contracts torn up, crumbling infrastructure, ORNGE waste, outside consultants paid for in secret,$20 billion wasted in Afghanistan, etc., etc., ... All that money could have gone to real services for real social needs. And then there's the $100 billion to prop-up the economy as a result of the financial bubble implosion.

Piss on all those elitist scum-bag incompetents and thieves and their shit-for-brains chump supporters.

This Country is Fucked

This whole fucking world actually. This whole fucking human race is doomed. The greed-heads aren't going to be torn to pieces by the ravenous hordes. The ravenous hordes will tear each other to pieces. The biggest greed-heads will survive in their isolated fortresses, and congratulate themselves on their inherited wealth and their prescience at having survived the calamities they brought upon us all.

What happened with the corrupt, duplicitous BC Liberals? They won a majority? Why? 50% of the electorate too "smart" to bother voting? Green-NDP vote-splitting? Whatever. Here comes the pipeline, protected by all the resources the federal government, the Alberta government, and the British Columbia government can muster. (Which will obviously include the murderous RCMP and the nefarious agents of CSIS.)

So, ... dig, I go to an event last night. Rick Salutin and Steven Shrybman (the lawyer representing the Council of Canadians' challenge to six election results over election fraud) about "taking back our democracy." Shrybman gave a nice presentation about the case that filled in some blanks for me. But, obviously, taking away six seats from an 11 seat majority isn't going to change anything. Even if it succeeds, a majority is a majority is a majority.

It was up to Rick Salutin to tell us how exactly Canadians can "take back their democracy." So the old hippy gets up there and starts babbling about how elections are ridiculous, proportional representation is a dead-end, political parties are anti-democratic and democracy is just people in a circle having a conversation.

Far-out man.

So, if we had an entirely different world, it would be better than this one? Is that it?

Barack Obama continues to defend Wall Street CRIMINALS, he continues to MURDER people around the world, ... and any opposition appears to be coming mostly from insane, hypocritical deluded "libertarians" and whatever the fuck they are Repugnicans.

The Canadian opposition parties continue to treat the harpercons as just another rival party, no different, no more contemptuous of Canadian democracy than any of the others.

Rob Ford will be re-elected in Toronto and stephen harper will win another majority.

The left will respond by having a protest somewhere, some afternoon, at the indulgence of the police. Leftist men will respond to their powerlessness by raping a few female comrades.

And of course, the planet will start to burn in the next couple of years.

I'm feeling another bout of Miley Fever coming on!

Whatever's going on between Miley and Liam, I hope they both find happiness!!!!

harpercon defeated; an okay day for Canada

It's tough getting around to visit all the small communities in a place like Labrador. That's why getting free plane rides would give a huge advantage to any candidate who could score 'em. And, the smaller airline companies who serve Labrador might not have the liquid cash sitting around to donate to the harpercon candidate who could get them some sweetheart government contracts later, would have the wherewithal to provide those free rides.

That's called corruption 101.

Penashue tried to blame it on his inexperienced enthusiastic staffer, but that was bullshit.

In the end, blatant, glaring corruption brought down a harpercon cabinet minister. Amazingly, stephen harper believed that Penashue's idiotic excuses would be enough to placate the people of Labrador. Perhaps he was thinking that Penashue's bragging about how he'd hold up projects elsewhere until Labrador got some swag would convince the voters to pick the government stooge again in return for more goodies.

But the downfall of Penashue was a good thing. It meant that at least nominally, in some cases or circumstances, the rule of law is still a factor in Canadian politics. Evidence of this has been in short supply for a long, long time. And, Penashue's subsequent rejection by the voters of Labrador is even better. It shows that some Canadian voters are willing and able to put integrity before possible material gain.

I am saddened somewhat, by the final outcome. The riding had been narrowly won by Penashue from a Liberal. It had been a Liberal stronghold. Since it had basically been won by fraud, the party that lost by fraud should have had a clear field to go against Penashue in the byelection. I believe the NDP should have taken the high road and stepped aside to, really, let what had been the intention of the voters of Labrador last time, to prevail. Instead, the NDP is thinking about partisan self-interest. And doing so stupidly and ham-handedly. Despite the NDP's having polled a distant third last time, Mulcair and his brain-trust must have believed that to look like a contender for power, they should campaign to win in Labrador. And, they lost. Which was to have been expected. A perfect storm of circumstances combined to make the Liberals implode in 2011 and to make the NDP the head of a coalition government with the Liberals, ... er, um, ... I mean to make the NDP the Official Opposition in the face of the harpercons' stolen majority government. The NDP's response to this windfall has been to work mightily to become the intellectually and politcally bankrupt Liberal Party and thereby steal all the votes that the Liberals lost. (It doesn't make any sense to me either.)

The riding went to the Liberals as it should have. But that doesn't make me happy either. Because human beings are stupid creatures. And I'm human too. But one bit of stupidity I don't possess is infatuation with the very handsome Justin Trudeau. Lots of other people do. Even though Justin Trudeau is fine with shredding our civil rights in the name of anti-terrorism, and destroying the atmosphere in the name of the Tar Sands and the political power of big oil and Alberta's voters. He's Canada's Barack Obama. Just think of how Canada will look on the world stage with a dreamboat like Justin Trudeau as our representative!

Who cares if he's business as usual or worse? Look at all the nice US Democrats shrieking about how sweety-pie Obama has a right to kill you in the name of Wall Street. It's sickening.

In the end though, harper's in-your-face scuzzery and contempt for democracy is the real threat. The NDP should have taken the high road, given the Liberals their victory, and advertised it as a blow against the demonstrated enemy of Canadian democracy, stephen harper.  They should focus their attacks on harper, harper, harper, and then embrace those aspects of the NDP that made them viable and the absence of which made the Liberals wither, and just advertise themselves as the antidote to the humiliations and abuses of late-capitalism that Canadian voters are asking for.

(I'll leave off by saying that in my search for the links for this place I saw an editorial about "What the Harper Government should learn from Labrador byelection defeat" [or words to that effect] by repulsive newspaper troll John Ibbitson. As if I'd bother to read what that yammering hack has to say about such an important subject! I'd prefer "What John Ibbitson should learn about how he's a contemptible, disgusting practical joke of a human being.")

For Your Consideration

Crazy-assed meth cook Walter White:

Canadian Spaceship Media Whore Chris Hadfield:

Safe return Commander!

thwapstradomus

US and European elites will intensify their efforts to destroy their fellow citizens' living conditions in the hopes of becoming even more insanely wealthy and powerful. They will succeed because the deluded, brainwashed voters in these countries will waste their time on contests between pea-brained right-wing nutbar parties and mewling, milquetoast "liberals" or "social democratic" stoops.

The elites don't worry about the debts of their governments because they own that debt and that debt is used to justify the austerity needed to wring it out of the chump majority's pockets.

But Japan will devalue the Yen and engage in hogwild stimulus spending, making North American and European products just as expensive as they always were.

China's elites will refrain from stimulating the domestic economy because their whole system is built on exploitation. Rising wages and employment levels and more secure housing would only make Chinese labour less passive and, essentially, give them ideas above their station. So China will stagnate because Europe and North America can't import as much.

Behind it all, world temperatures will rise with increasing speed, and the world's ability to sustain life (let alone civilization) will become increasingly in doubt. It's anyone's guess whether the vindication of the environmentalists will mean that environmentalists will be listened too, or whether they will be gunned down in the streets by the last gasps of the Archie Bunker brigades.