Friday, January 13, 2023

F-35's, Outside Consultants, and Capitalism

 


So all of the outrage about the expensive white elephan F-35 fighter jets that the Liberals engaged in when it was the harpercons lying and hiding turns out to have been just for show.  (Not surprised.  Just pointing it out.)

Also, recently, I saw the pea-brained parasite Pierre Poilievre yammering about the Liberals having hired the scumbags from McKinsey to do nothing for tons of public dollars.  Poilievre conveniently forgets how his harpercon crew were unprecedented in hiring outside consultants (generally friends of the party) for government work.

It's the same phoney outrage all the time.  It's the nature of capitalist pseudo-democracy.  The oligarchy always gets its demands.  The two parties play-act outrage when they're in opposition and wounded innocence when they're in power.  

And when the NDP becomes the contender at the provincial level (British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba) they become almost indistinguishable from other provinces' Liberal parties (with a few differences here and there).

Nothing will change so long as our society is ruled by a philosophy that puts profits over people and democracy.

Saturday, January 7, 2023

Brief Thoughts on the Recent Chaos Over Speaker of the House of Representatives

 


I don't know much about the guy who finally won the vote to be the Speaker in the now Republican controlled House of Representatives.  Lemme look up his name again.  (I think it's "McKnight.")

...

I was wrong.  It's Kevin McCarthy.  As I understand it, despite his enthusiastic support for Trump's contention that he only lost his re-election for President bid due to Democratic corruption of the electoral process [a claim that is obviously untrue and extremely hypocritical], McCarthy is [I think] seen by a small group of extreme-right-wing populists as a representative of the "soft-on-the-'globalists'" establishment.

Anyhow, the Republicans have a very small majority in the House.  Just as the Democrats did in 2020.  As Nancy Pelosi, in 2020, needed the vote of every Democratic Congressperson, McCarthy needed every single vote he could get in order to be elected.  For that reason, a small group of renegades had the ability to block his election either to utterly confound him or in order to extract policy concessions.

Sunday, January 1, 2023

Thwap's Post Wherein He Shall List the Books He's Reading in 2023

 

Apparently there was a series called "The Librarian."

In October 2021 I started a post: "Latest Reads."  About a month later I decided to make it my one-stop shopping post for all the future books that I'd read.  The post's title was amended to "Latest Reads: [NOW THWAP'S GIANT BOOK DEPOSITORY!!!!] I continued it into 2022.  But that eventually became too unwieldy to edit.  By Autumn 2022 I decided to start another post for the year's book readings in 2023 and here it is.