US mass-murdering, degenerate, racist, rapist filth, sanctioning ICC Justice

 

Today the CBC had a pretty good article about how the nauseating pieces of shit in the Trump regime are (like all their stinking predecessors) putting sanctions on the International Criminal Court and its justices, for daring to consider whether the zio-nazi scum in Israel, or the USA's own marauding war criminals, should be subject to prosecution for torturing, raping, and killing innocent men, women and children.

 

Kimberly Prost began to feel the effects of the U.S. sanctions immediately.

"These economic sanctions are not symbolic in any way," said Prost, a Canadian judge at the International Criminal Court (ICC), who was sanctioned by the Trump administration last year.

Prost's credit cards were cancelled and her access to banking services hindered, she said, because of the U.S.'s wide-reaching impact on the global banking system.

"Every time literally I go to make a bank transfer, I hold my breath because I don't know if it's going to work," Prost said in an interview with CBC News.

"To order an Uber, book a hotel, buy a theatre ticket — everything requires some form of credit card, and so you're sort of struggling to adjust."

...

The sanctions on Prost are part of a larger U.S. campaign to discredit and dismantle the ICC, which began in earnest after a February 2025 executive order imposed sanctions for investigating American personnel and issuing arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant.

...

Prost was singled out for her role in judicially authorizing a March 2020 preliminary investigation into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan since 2003, including by U.S. service members.

Since 2021, however, the investigation has deprioritized the role of the U.S., focusing instead on the Afghan government and Taliban forces.

"To my knowledge, there's no active investigation of the Americans in that case, but I'm sanctioned."

 

Just a few quotes from the degenerates displaying their sickening hypocrisy:

 U.S. President Donald Trump has since sustained his attack on the international court, calling on member states to immediately "resign from this rogue institution" in a September UN General Assembly speech. Just last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened to dismantle the ICC "brick by brick" if allies do not "rein in" the court.

...

The United States has never been a member of the ICC, and has long expressed concerns that its citizens could be prosecuted.

"As the United States works to bring peace around the world, our diplomats or our soldiers could be drawn into this court," President George W. Bush said the day after the court was inaugurated in 2002. "It's very troubling to me."

...

Twenty-four years later, Rubio echoed the same rhetoric about the "dangers" of the global court, warning that American border patrol agents, marines and prosecutors would "be at the mercy of foreign judges," risking imprisonment for defending their own country. 

 

As Ian Welsh says: Banking should be a human right.  We should not acquiesce to giving governments the power to cripple us financially, EVER.  Especially instantaneously through a financial system that now operates electronically the vast majority of the time.

 

In Britain and Germany multiple people have had their bank accounts frozen for supporting Palestine. When government isn’t directly involved banks often do the dirty work themselves, for example German banks debanking AfD politicians. The same happened to Farage in the UK. In Canada we had the government freezing accounts of the protestors against vaccines who parked their trucks in Ottawa. (I didn’t support the truckers, but at the time I said the accounts shouldn’t be frozen.)

As the economy moves more and more to electronic payments, being without a bank becomes more and more a sentence to homelessness. And even the small cash window is often closed In Germany, when the government de-banks you they also make it illegal to give the de-banked person any money so they can eat or pay rent.

This method of control makes organizing against the government almost impossible. It’s done to individuals and organizations. It needs to end.

They do this in Europe to journalists who say things that the European Union's imbecilic leadership doesn't like.

 

The European Union is trying to eliminate sources of information that do not confirm with its official interpretation of real world events.

One of the latest persons hit with official EU restrictions is the former Swiss intelligence official and author Jacques Baud:

Jacques Baud is a former colonel of the General Staff, ex-member of the Swiss strategic intelligence, specialist on Eastern countries. He was trained in the American and British intelligence services. He has served as Policy Chief for United Nations Peace Operations. As a UN expert on rule of law and security institutions, he designed and led the first multidimensional UN intelligence unit in the Sudan. He has worked for the African Union and was for 5 years responsible for the fight, at NATO, against the proliferation of small arms. He was involved in discussions with the highest Russian military and intelligence officials just after the fall of the USSR. Within NATO, he followed the 2014 Ukrainian crisis and later participated in programs to assist the Ukraine.

...

A former colonel in the Swiss Army, Jacques Baud, is also listed for acting “as a mouthpiece for pro-Russian propaganda and making conspiracy theories, for example accusing Ukraine of orchestrating its own invasion in order to join NATO.” Former French military officer Xavier Moreau is listed for similar actions.

...

The European sanctions aimed at the “heads of the destabilizing activities”, in which they propagandize for the benefit of Russia, have been introduced in October 2024. They provide for the freezing of assets of persons sanctioned, a prohibition of entry on the territory of the EU and the prohibition of making funds available to them.

...

The sanctions against Jacques Baud were published today and are now official. In Annex 57 the ‘Statement of Reasons’ claims:

“Jacques Baud, a former Swiss army colonel and strategic analyst, is a regular guest on pro-Russian television and radio programmes. He acts as a mouthpiece for pro-Russian propaganda and makes conspiracy theories, for example accusing Ukraine of orchestrating its own invasion in order to join NATO.

Therefore, Jacques Baud is responsible for, implementing or supporting actions or policies attributable to the Government of the Russian Federation which undermine or threaten stability or security in a third country (Ukraine) by engaging in the use of information manipulation and interference.” 

  

If they felt even the slightest confidence in their own agendas, or in their own moral rectitude, vermin like Trump or the EU-oligarch leadership wouldn't be so desperate and brazen.  They only speed the process whereby other actors will design financial systems outside of the reach of these psychopaths.

It Requires More Than Narrative

 

Some people say that all we have to do is realize that ordinary people vastly outnumber the elites and their institutions of control.  "We are many. They are few."  Some people say that to do this all we have to do is change the narrative(s) that govern our conscious thinking: "We in the West live under democracies.  Capitalism is the best, most efficient system for the allocation of scarce resources among society.  Work hard and play by the rules and you will be rewarded to the extent that your talents deserve it." becomes "We live as the subjects of rapacious, self-interested, short-sighted, oligarchs.  Capitalism is theft.  Which means that we are being robbed.  Democratic socialism is the best form of economics."

A Message To Albertans That Would Benefit the Alberta NDP

 

"Foreign oil company executives don't like you."

That's it.  That's the message.  Alberta's oil industry is majority foreign-owned.  US-American if we aren't concerned with charges of "racism."  They want to keep as much of the money that is earned by Alberta crude oil for themselves as possible.  So, in that light, they pay their workers the minimum they can get away with.  And they pay their whores (I've said earlier in this blog that the Left either takes control of the word "whore" or we come up with a different word that comes up with the sense of selling out everything you believe in for money, to sex-workers, the vast majority of whom were/have been doing what they had to do to survive, ... and stick to that new word.)

But at this moment in time, Alberta premier Danielle Smith is an oil-industry whore.  In that for a mess of pottage, she will sell out the people of her province, the country and all that the monarchical shit-fuck stupid drivel it is supposed to represent in her non-existing brain, ... this paid lobbyist scum, gave all the support she could with "plausible deniability" and now she's pretending that she's not a treasonous paid shill for her degenerate master Donald (child-rapist) Trump.

So, once we've consigned Danielle Smith to the political hell she so richly deserves, we should inform Alberta voters how a great deal of their political choices are determined by propaganda whores like Ezra Levant.  One of the most loathsome of whores.  A serial grifter.  A zio-nazi pussball.  A complete degenerate.  "The Western Standard."  Ha-ha-ha!  You fucking loser Levant! Eat shit!  The same way that all your business ventures have eaten shit. 

These US-American oil companies have been sucking Alberta dry for decades and they've used their pocket-change from the profits to finance a political infrastructure of grifters to bamboozle Albertans about what's really happening.  They see the wages and the royalties they actually have to pay as bothersome.  They're going to block, avoid and ignore any and all changes to their current domination and they're certainly not going to respect Alberta's environment.  Especially when all the oil is gone. 

CBC Avoids Talking About Afghanistan While Talking About Afghanistan

 

Apparently the Canadian government is uncomfortable talking about Canada's war in Afghanistan and some people are upset about it. 

It's not much of a stretch to say the federal government has trouble saying the word Afghanistan.

A couple of weeks ago, late on a Friday, Defence Minister David McGuinty and Veterans Affairs Minister Jill McKnight issued a statement to quietly defuse what some in the veterans community might view as a Remembrance Day bomb. 

They announced that a Senate bill (S-246) currently before the House of Commons — designating service in both the first Gulf War and Afghanistan as wartime service — would be the subject of public consultation in the coming months.

While it is most definitely about Afghanistan, the word Afghanistan does not appear anywhere in the 335-word joint statement.

In the eyes of Canadian law, at the the moment, the service of 40,000 troops over 13 years, the deaths of 158 of them, the wounding of an estimated 2,000 soldiers is reduced to the banal catch-all designation of "special duty area."

The fact the federal government doesn't recognize the Afghan war as a war — and needs to ask the public what it thinks — is jaw-dropping for many people, especially veterans. 

Spoiler alert: Canada finds it difficult to talk about Afghanistan because Afghanistan was a horrible waste of blood and treasure.  The USA toppled a government that had managed to restore a measure of order to a country that had been destroyed to wound the Soviet Union.  The Taliban were grim, medieval-minded religious fanatics with a horribly misogynist philosophy, but most people in Afghanistan appeared to prefer them over the raping and thieving gangsters who had been tearing the country apart after the Soviets left and their allied government eventually fell. 

One thing the Taliban did was to harbour Osama bin Laden who had helped in the war against the Soviets.  When 9-11/2001 happened, the deranged bush II regime demanded that Afghanistan hand bin Laden over, no questions asked.  The Taliban asked for proof of his connection to the attack and the USA invaded and toppled them.  They then installed a government comprised of the warlord gangsters who had misruled Afghanistan before they were defeated by the Taliban.  A warlord, gangster government of drug-dealers, rapists, thieves, pedophiles and scum.  A mafia government, who could only see Afghanistan as a site for plunder.

In the face of such an intolerable situation, the population of Afghanistan, led by the former Taliban rulers, launched a resistance movement.  Canada agreed to assist the USA in crushing this resistance and imposing the American puppet government.  Canadian troops stayed in Afghanistan from 2001-2014.  The whole time, Canadian politicians, military officials, and media, all insisted we were "winning" in the battle against the insurgents.  We were defeating the Taliban on the battlefield and bringing women's rights, education and economic development to the people of Afghanistan.  It was all bullshit.  Most Canadians acknowledged this.  For so doing, shit-assed imbeciles like stephen harper and Peter Mansbridge dismissed us as cretins with short attention spans.  But when Canada left in 2014 the resistance was continuing and it would continue until the USA finally abandoned the country in 2021, and the Afghan National Army evaporated and the US-puppets fled with as much stolen loot as they could carry.

In its 2026 Remembrance Day coverage, the CBC discusses how we have difficulty discussing this topic.  Apparently it's even problematic to refer to it as a "war."  I don't know the significance of that fact and the CBC story never explains it.  Perhaps as a "war" service in Afghanistan means something for Canadian military personnel getting a bigger pension or something.  All the article says is that the government doesn't call it a war and CF people who were there angrily insist that it was.  Anniversaries of events during the war, such as Operation Medusa, aren't officially commemorated by the Canadian government.

Of course, being a crude propaganda outlet, the CBC can't avoid mentioning how horrible and evil the Taliban resistance was:

One of the hallmarks of the war that sticks with veterans is the cruelty the Taliban inflicted on ordinary Afghans.

Former Canadian commander — retired major-general Denis Thompson — recalled how in 2008 insurgents used a 10-year-old boy as a suicide bomber.

"There was a lot of very cynical and vicious attacks," Thompson said, noting how the boy did not control his suicide vest and was remotely denotated by an old, nearby Taliban fighter as the child got close to a Canadian patrol. 

"There are no limits, if you will, to one's imagination when they're coming up with ways to terrorize the population or to get at the security forces."

That our allies raped little boys in front of our soldiers' eyes isn't mentioned.  That its police kidnapped people and killed them if ransoms weren't paid.  That they robbed the people in the areas where they ruled under our protection, ... none of this is mentioned.  And, by failing to mention these facts, the CBC does the job of making the world seem inexplicable, chaotic, mad.  How could such a bestial enemy prevail against the forces of democracy and freedom?  Maybe some people just don't want to be helped! 

 

It is fair to say, however, for many veterans Afghanistan risks becoming the war Canada has already forgotten as a collective institutional amnesia settles over most of Ottawa.

This year saw a remarkable convergence of anniversaries. 

It has been 25 years since Canadian troops first set foot in Afghanistan following 9/11, 20 years since the beginning of major combat operations, 20 years since the first female soldier was killed in combat, 20 years since Operations Medusa, 15 years since combat ended and five years since the South Asian country fell back into Taliban hands.

And yet as those important milestones passed this year, there was mostly silence from Ottawa. 

This is because, even with their heads lodged firmly in their assholes, Canada's politicians, military leadership and media realize that bringing these things up will remind people that it was all for nothing.  It will either cause them cognitive dissonance or it will for force them to acknowledge their delusion and their stupidity. 

The article goes on to mention the stupid and false claims from the degenerate Donald Trump about how neither Canada, nor the rest of the NATO allies, contributed in any meaningful way to the USA's doomed mission to impose a puppet-government of rapist gangsters on Afghanistan.  And how his disgusting, ingrate behaviour got Canadians justifiably angry.  However ...

 Trump's remarks provoked a backlash across Canada. But beneath the anger lay an uncomfortable contradiction.

While Canadians were quick to defend the war's sacrifice online, they have been far less willing, it seems, to talk about the war itself.

Only a handful of federal statements have been issued — five in all. The federal government did mark the anniversary of the end of major combat and the beginning of construction of the long-delayed national memorial.

The prime minister's Veterans' Week statement, released on Nov. 5, specifically mentions the Gulf War and the four soldiers killed last month in Wainwright, Alta., but not Afghanistan.

Historian Sean Maloney, at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ont., said we struggle as a nation to talk about war in general and find it particularly tough to sort out our feelings about Afghanistan.

"Why are we afraid to talk about it?" Maloney asked. 

He spent a decade battling the Defence Department for permission to publish his history of the war. 

"What are we embarrassed about? Who's embarrassed? Is it the bureaucracy? Is it elected officials? Is it both? Is it cultural mavens that this doesn't fit in with?"

Retired general Wayne Eyre, the former chief of the defence staff who led a team to train Afghan soldiers during the war, said Maloney's questions are not easy to answer.

"Part of it is because of how it ended up," Eyre said, in reference to the Taliban victory in 2021.

"Canada has gone through various waves of understanding and commemoration based on the national mood and who's to say that's not going to change in the future with respect to Afghanistan? My hope is that we learn from it, we continue to venerate those that we lost over there."

I suppose it is noteworthy how Canada's political and military officials have the sense to avoid this topic, but they can't bring themselves to admit the reasons WHY they avoid it.  That we're a lapdog to imperialists.  That we're a racist, colonial state.  That, as a capitalist country, we're ruled by greedy psychopaths who put profits before people.

The article instead tries to invent some "danger" out of our failure to remember our "mission" in Afghanistan:

 

Former diplomat Pam Isfeld said she has noticed the same thing and wonders how well equipped Canadians are to face a world that's increasingly more dangerous when they are reluctant to acknowledge their past.

"It's an important part of our history, and the idea that nobody really wants to talk about it, I don't understand," said Isfeld, who served as a civilian adviser to Canada's combat commander in 2006.

  

It concludes with more tripe about how we were seriously trying to build something in Afghanistan, rather than the whole project being launched by idiots with no understanding then (or now) about what was really going on.

 

Canada accepted over 54,700 Afghan refugees who fled the 2021 Taliban takeover, many of them deeply invested in the Western political and social value promises of a better future.

Abdul Razaq Khan, a former translator for Canadian media outlets, said he was grateful for finding a safe haven and often thinks about what his home country could have become.

"Canadians were helping to build our country, and we had to step up for that," Khan said.

Asked if he was angry about the way life has turned out, he replied: "No one leaves their country happily."

The Afghanistan pro-NATO puppet-government was corrupt and vicious from top-to-bottom.  They were so bad that the majority of Afghans preferred the Taliban-led resistance to our rapists and thieves.  The schools we paid to be built fell apart and the teachers were just names some warlord gave us so that he could collect their salaries.  Perhaps if we acknowledge THAT, we can more adequately commemorate how and why thousands of Canadian Armed Forces were traumatized, maimed or killed there. 

 

 

Half-Measures?

 

Some on the Left say that politicians like Bernie Sanders, AOC, and "progressives" among the new crop of Democrats elected in the anti-Trump/anti-inflation "Blue Wave" are just sheepdogs for the Democrats.  Keeping left-leaning voters from straying from the flock.  Voting for such people means guaranteed betrayals, as both the political party and the wider capitalist system either bring such people to heel or they were always mercenaries to begin with.

Some of those on the Left saying such things are delusional crackpots with decades of failure and non-accomplishment to show for their activism.  (Obviously, I'm a different sort of delusional, failed crackpot.)  Even so, they might still have a point.

Is it possible that voting for anyone electorally viable is not only a waste of time, but, worse, losing time and energy that could have gone into more genuinely revolutionary endeavours?  Voting for people who will betray us siphons energy and creates despair when those betrayals are made manifest.

Or is it possible to vote for such people and mitigate the damage done to ordinary people by the capitalist system, thereby creating breathing space and time to develop and advance a farther reaching agenda?

I suppose it's helpful to figure out if these moderate progressives actually mean what they say.  I'd say that most of them do.  They don't see revolution as realistic, and they feel that what they're offering is the best that can be expected, given the circumstances (which includes an electorate that is far from possessing a revolutionary consciousness).  Fraudulent, self-serving "progressives" should be relatively easy to figure out.

Arguments against voting for genuine moderates will have to be more thorough to really make their case. 

CBC News: An Avalanche of Slop

 

I'm trying to focus my thinking about current events.  I only read a few (mostly US-American) websites and I try not to pay attention to the news outside of whatever those sites are talking about.  I've decided to try writing more here to get me to look at the news more comprehensively.  In that spirit, I decided to look at the CBC News website.  I want to know what the CBC is talking about given all the real information about AI, West Asia, Ukraine, etc., that I get from the sites I regularly read.

So, today, November 9th, 2026, CBC News has a bunch of stories about IVF and other reproductive issues, such as egg-freezing.  I suppose that's interesting on some levels, but it isn't exactly crucial information for understanding today's world.  Russell Brand got sentenced to 10 years in prison.  People are using illegal drugs in public.  Somebody in Toronto is removing trees "suspiciously."  They're shooting bears at dumps in Inuvik.  A 19-year old won the PGA.  Some hockey player isn't going to play for Winnipeg's next game.  And 39 people died in a boat accident in Senegal.  There were a few other stories.

Mostly trivial stuff.  Mostly stuff that can't really be connected to the main events and trends going on in the world today.  The rise of oligarchic feudalism and the continued hollowing out of the economy and the majority's living standards.  Nothing about major wars and genocides.  All just unimportant slop.  Stuff to distract us from understanding the world that the CBC (a propaganda outlet) serves. 

Where Is The Left-Wing Opposition To Carney?

 

Mark Carney has taken advantage of Donald Trump's imbecilic attacks on Canada to push a radical, far-right agenda, all while paying lip-service to the idea of "resisting" Trump and pursuing "Canadian sovereignty."  The racist grifter Pierre Poilievre cannot play that role because he spent too many years telling Canadians about his masturbatory fantasies of himself and Trump playing with each other's bodily fluids.  The fact that Carney remains Trump's lickspittle ally doesn't register because Canadians are, essentially, complacent, ignorant people with short attention spans and a corporate media system that works to keep them that way.

Carney is attacking the right to collective bargaining.  He's unilaterally attacking First Nations rights to consultation about Canadian assaults on their lands.  He's going gung-ho on NATO's delusional imperialist agenda.  He's publicly supporting Trump's illegal, murderous assaults on Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and Palestine.  He's subsidizing the fossil fuels industry and its commitment to global heating for short-term profits.  He's all-in on the shit-for-brains/anti-human "Artificial Intelligence" boondoggle.

Carney wouldn't be able to do all of this if the Canadian Left hadn't shown itself to be an irrelevancy decade after decade.  Our electoral system is partly to blame for this.  First-Past-The-Post means that (as is even more the case in the USA) legislative authority is traded between two pro-business parties.  (That was the real reason that the idiot Justin Trudeau reneged on his promise to change our electoral system.  The massive majority the Liberals received when stephen harper made the Conservative brand toxic was the elixer, but it was the way that FPTP limited Canadians' democratic options that was at the base of it.

But elections are one thing.  A Left that has neither strategy nor tactics cannot be expected to be an effective extra-parliamentary resistance.  I have said for years and years at this blog, and I continue to say, that peaceful, one-day marches will not sway politicians who are controlled by corporate capitalists, domestic and foreign.  All the money and power is on the other side.  The people of Canada are fodder for them.  The political class's material self-interest comes out of servitude to the profit-above-all capitalist agenda.  They aren't going to deviate from that course just because we took an afternoon to register our displeasure.

For pointing out this obvious reality I was derided as a negative nelly and I eventually gave up on arguing my case, both online and face-to-face with other leftists.  I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that my exiting myself from the fight is what has doomed the Left to failure.  I'm irrelevant.  The Left has failed all by itself.  With its merely performative protests, its unwillingness to inflict/suffer consequences, its stupid, sanctimonious adherence to non-violence, ... the Left has made itself irrelevant as well. 

War on Sunday?

 

I'm no expert in such things at all.  But if the weirdo who blogs at "Moon of Alabama" is right, then the new moon of November 8-9 is going to be the time when Trump will try one last bombing campaign against Iran. 

Working against this is Trump's realization that both the USA and Israel are running out of long-range offensive weapons (meaning that their fighter-jets will eventually have to fly into Iranian airspace to hit their targets, with all the risks that entails) and defensive interceptors.

Trump also knows that the Gulf states are highly vulnerable to Iranian retaliation.  All of the assets there, from the central fossil fuels and infrastructure, to the undersea internet cables, to desalinization plants, could be obliterated, throwing the region's and the world's economies into a black hole.

Furthermore, Israel is a small country.  A densely packed country.   And Iranian patience with the zionist entity is approaching a breaking point.

One of the video channels that I watch (can't remember if it was Danny Haiphon, or Jackson Hinkel, or The Grayzone) said that Trump is insisting that if there is an attack on Iran, then Netanyahu's airforce is going to be taking a leading role in it.  For much of this conflict it has been the USA doing the work of attempting to re-open the Strait of Hormuz and attacking Iranian targets.  I don't know how a US President, who is being blackmailed by an Israeli politician, who forces him to start a war that everyone knew had a good chance of turning out badly, negotiates in such a situation.

Leaking the videos of Trump raping adolescent girls would be a huge thing.  It would undermine the influence of the USA grievously.  It would be massively destablilizing.  There would be rage and there would be calls for all the rest of Epstein's fellow degenerate murderers to be exposed.  Because the Epstein case shows the total moral depravity of the West's ruling classes.  As well, Israel revealing this evidence of Trump's monstrous behaviour would rebound against them.  That they knew about this.  They had this evidence and they chose to conceal it until Trump stopped obeying them.  It wouldn't exactly make the Israelis look less disgusting than they already do.

 

It's also not clear that Israel's military leaders are prepared to sacrifice their country to protect Naziyahoo from going to prison. So there's that.

But what is the alternative to a reckless, likely doomed-from-the-start assault on Iran?  The continued throttling of the world economy as oil is prevented from exiting the Strait of Hormuz.  Tankers are being destroyed.  Strategic reserves are dwindling.  Prices will continue to inexorably rise.

Iran is demanding the removal of US military bases in the region.  (This has already happened.  But Iran will not allow the USA to return and rebuild those bases.)  It is demanding the removal of the Israel Child-Killing Force from Lebanon.  It has the USA's puppet monarchies on the ropes.

Trump could hold off on attacking Iran only to eventually be forced to concede to the end of the US-American Empire sometime in 2027.  Meanwhile, Iran is building its relationships with Russia and China.  Ukraine is crumbling.  The delusional European leadership trying to build the capacity to challenge Russia militarily but the people of Europe don't seem to have any interest in such insanity.  If Russia manages to end the war on its western flank it will have more resources to share with Iran.  China is also increasing its aid to Iran.  China has zero interest in preserving the USA's ability to bully and threaten and subvert.

Personally, having written all this, I think that Trump will take the second option.  He will avoid instantaneous destruction from attacking Iran and will opt to drag things out until the inevitable becomes unavoidable.  

Early-morning reflections ...

 

I was reading something just now that had been written on January 30th, 2026, about how the protests in Iran had been co-opted by Mossad/CIA agents.

It just occurred to me how disgusting that was.  I've long been an opponent of dogmatic non-violence advocates.  But sometimes, mass-rallies do represent the views of what might possibly be an important demographic.

Whatever the case, some people think that publicly demonstrating your opinion to your government via a mass-rally is a valid way to influence your government.

And, so, at a time when the besieged Iranian government was suffering from an attack on its currency or whatever it was using to import needed necessities, and it privileged some of the more protected demographics, perhaps for venal reasons, perhaps for rational reasons of national survival, this would inevitably have meant that some people who were already suffering under the USA-imposed/Illegal/47Years of illegal sanctions, would find themselves in very dire straits indeed.

And, for the sake of argument, let's imagine that the government of Iran is NOT run by hopeless, delusional, fanatically-narcissistic psychopaths, and that they are, instead, sane, empathetic men, who (whatever their delusions and the justifications for those delusions) responded to the currency attack with desperate measures, which they knew would harm people outside of protected circles.  AND they would only grant whatever concessions they could when they were forced to by public opinion.

And, in authoritarian states, as Iran is, ... it takes considerable guts to organize a public demonstration. (Which, I suppose, is a big reason why, say, Canadians, of the "activist" persuasion, are so addicted to them!  They haven't figured out that governments at the centre of imperialist systems know that they aren't threatened by the stern looks of disapproval of the tiny minority who have enough resources to have the time and the energy to be concerned about issues outside their immediate self-interest.)

 

....

Anyway, the point that I don't want to lose is that public demonstrations can sometimes be dangerous to organize and/or participate in. In some countries anyway.  And Iran is such a country.  [And saying that doesn't make me have to concede that the "Mad Mullahs" need to be wiped out with a nuclear bomb and the 4-million innocent civilians who die with them are necessary "collateral damage."]  

But these public demonstrations were no more than what Canada's are: an expression of disagreement.  or an expression of discontent.

These were people under forty-seven years of crippling sanctions, being subjected to further deprivations because of a recent attack on their country's currency, to which their government was responding as best as their preconceived ideas could muster, ... being FORCED to speak out, to say to their own besieged government: "WE have our limits! WE are AT our limits!" because desperate times call for desperate measures.

And to have those demonstrations within the crisis to be infiltrated and expropriated by agents of the people who caused the crisis, ... which is to say CIA and Mossad ... the cynicism of that.

 

Too angry for words ... 

Fascist Propaganda

 

I like Owen Bean as an actor.  He's quite good.  And for a guy with such "presence" he's been a pretty good sport about being relegated to being the villain who dies, or the hero's right-had man who dies.

All that having been said, it took obviously more than just that to make YOOtOOBE put the British TV series "Sharpe" into my feed.

And, as a result of that meta-subsiduary I tried to watch "Sharpe."

It reminded me more and more of "Master and Commander."

Go to Ian Welsh's blog for a more eloquent critique.  But the 18th-19th Century British aristocracy were a pretty capable bunch of scumbags.  Like, some accident of history made the British temporarily better at incorporating new ways to kill people and they ran with it.

But watching the first episode of "Sharpe," ... first of all, there's an Irish soldier who risks his life to defend the treasure of the army that was going to execute him.

Then there's the conversation between Sharpe and the Spanish count who sides with the French.  In my view, Napoleon could have saved himself a lot of grief (and deprived us of Goya's masterpieces about the war that actually got fought) by just forcing his will through the existing monarchy.

Apparently the opera "Carmen" was related to a lot of bleeding-heart, "woke", pinko-commie-faggots, leaving post-Napoleonic Spain for France.

The brother of the contested title of "Count" says that he's backing Spain against the old-order of Catholic superstition and royal dictatorship.

Sharpe says something stupid about not caring about anything outside of his mission and then the battle was going to resume but I couldn't bring myself to watch anymore of that dreck.

This oligarchic nightmare we are living under is the direct result of the success of the ancient British aristocracy to maintain their hold on power over the world and to also delude working class people into thinking that they're free.

Napolean did fuck up though.  And Goya's prints ARE worthwhile for showing us what we should avoid. 

Former European Imperialist Powers Wanting to Colonize Russia and former Soviet Republics?

 

Why do the European vassals in NATO want to continue to drag out Ukraine's agony?  They are desperately trying to militarize themselves (after severely damaging their industrial base by cutting themselves off from Russian energy) and they are launching a brazen campaign of propaganda trying to instill fear in their populations that Russia is attacking them.  It doesn't appear to be working because what neo-liberal shit-heads don't (and can't) understand, is that when you constantly fuck people over they see no reason to die for you.

Global Warming, Genocide, AI, Zombi Neo-liberalism

 

GLOBAL WARMING 

You know, developed countries like Canada could have led the way.   We have the ability to provide decent housing and nutrition to everyone in the country.  We have a fairly educated population.  And we had the productive capability and the financial wealth to design a society, a steady-state society, that requires far fewer resources and labour, to maintain our infrastructure and a more leisurely lifestyle for everyone.

The problem of course is capitalism and Leftists' pathological adherence to compromised electoral politics and performative-only protest.

We needed to shut-down the oil industry.  This could have been done in a gradual fashion while the national government financed investment in 21st-Century industries (pharmaceuticals? green energy?) to replace the jobs displaced in the petro-provinces.

 

GENOCIDE 

The fact that, for three goddamned years, Israel has been free to conduct a live-streamed genocide in Gaza (and to a lesser extent in the West Bank) and that Canada's government continues to aid and abet it, ought to be cause for reflection on the part of the Left on the worthlessness of our strategy and tactics.

Other groups and individuals obviously have the time and the resources to devote to this issue.  And for three years there's been nothing but disorganized, desultory, campaigns against various individuals and meaningless street marches.  These groups should have, and could have, come together to come up with more sustained, meaningful actions.  Campaigns against specific, particularly egregious nazi scumbags, like the crew at the wingnut-welfare National Pest, or the nauseating Atrocity Hausfuhrer, or some death-industry manufacturer exporting the tools of mass-murder.

 

AI 

Aside from war, so-called "Artificial Intelligence" might be the single greatest misallocation of human resources in the history of the human race.  It's certainly demonstrates that we do not have, but that we DO need, democracy.

Below is a video from a guy calling himself "Adam Somebody" wherein he refers to "smooth-brained dictators" [building ridiculous megaprojects].

 

This whole "AI" fiasco is the product of a society that allows individuals (so far all male) become multi-billionaires.  Such undeserved levels of extreme wealth also mean undeserved levels of extreme power.  Power over people and resources.  For people who really aren't all that amazing to begin with.  It allows Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg to blow over $80 BILLION on his moronic "Metaverse" project.

"Artificial Intelligence" makes the "Metaverse" look tiny by comparison.  Our capitalist system, oligarchs, financial institutions, "investors," corporate clients, etc., ... our "elites" had the wherewithal to put TRILLIONS into something which (if it works) will deliberately displace 20% of the OECD labour force, while simultaneously draining gigantic levels of resources, convincing people to kill themselves or others, and weaken human being's thinking abilities.  (Trying to find a link for the current amount of financial wealth put into AI so far didn't get me a total figure.  But I did see two headlines, one saying that $1.5 trillion for 2025 and $2.5 trillion in 2026.  So THREE TRILLION DOLLARS in the last two years.)

And it doesn't "work."  Which is to say, it isn't profitable.  The whole thing is a Ponzi-scheme.  The only sector actually profiting is the chip manufacturers.  And they're getting money from selling to people who have been losing money year after year.  And the whole thing requires hideous "data centres" that drive up local utility bills (sometimes by 25%) while providing few jobs.

If we lived in a democracy, "AI" wouldn't even be a possibility.  LLM's that hallucinate, designed to destroy the livelihoods of a quarter of the workforce, being used now to displace 5-10% of the workforce, only for asshole employers to discover that they don't work and they are increasingly unaffordable.

I daresay a democratic society would have made better use of $8 billion dollars over ten years. 

Method To Their Madness

 

I still think that Trump did not want to attack Iran directly with the US military and that he was blackmailed into doing so by Netanyahu and Mossad who have compromising evidence of his multiple rapes of adolescent girls.  (This is a case of the tail being able to wag the dog if the dog in question is a serial pedophile-rapist and the tail has evidence of this in its possession.)

But this article from Richard Medhurst describes the cold, calculating, ruthlessness of the overarching foreign policy of a declining empire:

 But in the background, Washington have been quietly carrying out an armed robbery of the world’s oil and gas supply. All of it.

In just 90 days, the US have executed an energy blitzkrieg decades in the making:

• Hundreds of strikes on Russian tankers and refineries

• Disrupting a third of China’s oil and LNG supply

• Capturing the largest oil reserves on the planet

• Establishing a global naval blockade from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean

And in the process, kidnapped and assassinated two heads of state. We are witnessing the transition of the United States from an empire into a lawless Pirate State, and the birth of what I call the Petrogas-dollar or LNG-Dollar.

Just as Washington used the cover of the Ukraine war, sanctions, and Nordstream bombings to force Russia out of Europe — similarly, they used the cover of the Iran war to finish off Qatar’s position as a global LNG player.

By forcing Doha to declare force majeure on March 4 within the first week of the war, then triggering the retaliatory strikes on Ras Laffan on March 18, Washington took the world’s largest gas field out of the picture — crippling Iran, and sidelining Qatar in one fell swoop.

The claim that Israel carried out this specific strike without informing Washington, is both politically and logistically impossible — made only more suspicious by Netanyahu and Trump’s attempts to profusely distance the White House from it.

Regardless, there can be little doubt that the US and Israel provoked this. At that point, they had spent 3 weeks working their way up the escalation ladder; bombing Iran around the clock, and gauging their responses. Moreover, Tehran had made it abundantly clear (as early as March 12), that any strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure would be met with “an eye for an eye”.

By crippling Qatar’s LNG capacity — even just partially — Washington hit three birds with one stone:

 

 

Read the rest.

HOW all of this was to be achieved was always up for debate.  From the debacle in Europe and the destruction in Ukraine, to the exposure of US weakness in West Asia, to China's quiet confidence in the presence of the senile grifters in the US-American leadership, ... it seems that under Biden and Trump, these globalists have miscalculated.  

Communicating with Trump Fans

 

How anyone can look at that travesty and see a hero is beyond me.  But recently I've been interacting with a couple of Trump fans.  They're still "all-in" on their orange god.  I guess if you were already so brain-damaged as to have been captivated by him in the first place, the fact that he has betrayed them on the Epstein files (he was going to expose the Democratic child-molesting/eating cabal remember); that he betrayed them on stopping the "Forever Wars,"; that he has shown callous indifference to the sufferings of non-rich people from the price inflation that his own bungling stupidity has caused; and he spends the rest of his time making an ass of himself with the various monuments and institutions in Washington DC (from the reflecting pool to the Kennedy Centre), ... well, none of that is going to alter these shit-heads' belief system.

Even as Canadians, in a country being economically attacked by the imbecile (who stupidly claims that we've been "ripping off" the USA through unfair trade deals and practices) they're incapable of pulling their heads from their shit-filled asses.

Conservatives of this stripe have an astonishing ability to attach all manner of nefarious traits to their designated enemies and to transform them into something like Emmanuel Goldstein of 1984's "two-minute hate" infamy.  In this case, the torch has been passed by the pretty-boy-faggot-traitor Justin Trudeau, to the faggot-traitor Mark Carney.  And all sorts of cataclysmic horrors will happen if their political opponents win an election.  (Starting with the other side's victory being based on fraud by definition.)  Because "liberals" and "socialists" (they're the same thing really) are deranged, perverted, totally incompetent, hateful monsters.*

 Let's start with the latest thing I heard.  I mentioned needing a raise to deal with the rising cost of living.  The Trump fan blamed the current inflation on Mark Carney and "all his spending."  Off-balance, and seeking to enter into an actual debate with the fuckhead, I said "Well, whatever.  I'm not getting any of his spending" and extracted myself from the situation.

The thing about these lunatics is that their hatred of Carney is so disconnected from reality, and so totally based on willfully fraudulent premises, that even I, who despises Carney, finds myself defending him (sort of).

The whole world is dealing with inflation.  The Pandemic (and the price-gouging that corrupt oligarchic firms used it as an excuse for) way back in 2020, were followed by the removal of Russian fuel from world markets and the loss of fertilizers and grains caused by the NATO-Ukraine proxy war against Russia.  As well, the trillions and trillions of dollars pumped into the economy since 2008 ("Quantitative Easing" and other bail-outs) has helped the oligarchy to buy-up assets of all sorts, including housing.

Canada's inflation is worse than other G-7 countries.  But none of those lying assholes in the right-wing media would dare point their fingers at our oligopolistic sectors like groceries and telecoms.  If Carney is to be blamed for anything it's for continuing to coddle and enable those parasites.

Next, I was treated to a video of some boorish asshole fishing in a river saying that Canadians need to remember that Trump isn't their president.  They live in Canada.  And they should expunge the notion that the deranged leader of the super-power to our south has been slapping us with tariffs and threats of more tariffs, oh, and threats of annexation.  Yes (says the arrogant fuck), all Trump has done is expose Canada's vulnerability.  The evil, stupid Liberals got us into this mess by having put all Canada's eggs in the US-American basket.  Perhaps the dunce is too young to know that it was the conservative Brian Mulroney who got the first Free Trade deal done.  The whole thing has been a bipartisan, Liberal-Conservative affair, backed by all the business groups and the corporate media.  It's only CONSISTENTLY been resisted by leftists.  But now, it seems, a few delusional, ignorant conservatives are claiming the prescience to see that diversifying our trading partners and developing some economic autonomy are good things.

Also, apparently the whole trade-war thing is entirely Carney's fault.  He's manufactured it out of whole-cloth to hoodwink the Canadian sheeple into supporting him.  Carney (the Machiavellian) is making the innocent lamb Trump the scapegoat to brainwash us into trusting him.  [That is some metaphor mixing I just did there!  Making a lamb a goat!]

I was shown a video of the piece-of-shit whoever that Trump had negotiating with Canada, saying (without evidence) that the Canadians, at the last minute, out-of-the-blue, came out with all sorts of brazen new demands.  In the comments section, a gathering of the usual human garbage were spewing nonsense about forcing Carney to show the proof of his own claims of US-American last-minute additions.  They typed this drivel, obviously sitting in their own shit in front of their computers, blissfully oblivious to the fact that the God-Emperor Trump's negotiator wasn't showing any evidence for his claims.

The fact that Carney had made numerous concessions to Trump (including cancelling plans to tax internet media companies like Meta and "X" and Google) and agreeing to his insane demands for spending 5% of GDP on weapons, ... all down the memory-hole.

Carney is a socialist.  Carney who is privatizing our airports and other public infrastructure, lowing corporate taxes to 6%, pretty much removing all environmental restrictions on the fossil-fuels sector, and gutting First Nations' right to approval over projects on their lands.

"Intelligence" and "stupidity" are amorphous concepts.  Some people can possess great quantities of both.  Most people have more of the former and less of the latter.  But some people are, overall, stupid.  You can tell just by listening to them.  And humans exist on a spectrum from essentially stupid to sort of genius.  And we will never be rid of the sorts of mistakes of nature that in this day and age look at a fat, deranged, pedophile-rapist, psychopathic, ego-maniacal degenerate like Trump and see GOD.  At one time these pieces of human garbage were politically marginal.  Now, as society decays, they are more abundant.  

 

*Here in Toronto, Olivia Chow stands for all that is bad and deceitful, and stupid, and gay, and incompetent, and etc.,  Olivia Chow is the worst mayor in the history of mayors anywhere.  She has DESTROYED this city.  In my opinion, Chow is a VERY dim light bulb who has something of a kindly nature and has decent advisors.  She's done some quite good things for Toronto and some quite bad things.  And I take the opinions about her from stupid assholes who still revere the memory of international laughingstock, lazy, stupid, drunken, lying, shit-fuck Rob Ford, with all the respect that they are due. 

Two Disagreements

 

Yesterday I happened to read two articles that I disagreed with.  The first one, was a little difficult for me.  It was written by a Palestinian and it was how they said we shouldn't use the word "terrorist" against the Netanyahu government or the "settlers" illegally pushing West Bank Palestinians off their land.

Settler colonial violence is, of course, real and terrifying, but “terrorism” is the wrong framework for understanding and confronting it, because it was designed to serve imperial designs and make settler violence look like an aberration. In this way, the label of “Israeli terrorism” often misleadingly characterizes settler violence as confined to the Israeli far right, even though it’s the product of a broad Israeli consensus and a systemic feature of Israel’s colonial regime.

...

The terrorism framework did not emerge from positive or emancipatory values, but has been exclusively weaponized against oppressed and marginalized peoples in the service of imperial agendas. While in the 1960s, the terrorism framing was used by western imperial interests against anti-colonial struggles (Algeria, South Africa, Vietnam, to name a few), the post 9/11 global “terrorism” narrative shifted to focus on a new “global enemy” — Islamic fundamentalism — and used to justify military occupations and atrocities across the world under the banner of the “War on Terror.” More dangerously, it was used to build a legal arsenal encroaching on people’s rights and freedoms, undermining the rule of law and peoples’ sovereignty under the cover of legality. 

...

There is a reason why terrorism has no agreed-upon definition under international law. It is a political tool whose meaning has been shaped by those with the power to wield it. A framework built and weaponized by imperial powers against colonized peoples cannot become the tool through which we dismantle colonial violence.

Another danger of embracing the “terrorism” label for settlers is that it exceptionalizes their violence, turning masked settlers who kill Palestinians, burn their homes, and attack their villages into a violent fringe — “bad apples” supposedly detached from an otherwise legitimate Israeli state and Zionist establishment.

...

The inconvenient reality is that decades of international impunity are the central reason why the colonial settlers’ movement has reached such levels of unleashed violence today. Calling settlers “terrorists” offers another escape from that accountability: it isolates individual perpetrators while leaving intact the system that arms, protects, and enables them.

I believe the “terrorism” label should not be used for any group, globally. West Bank settler violence is state-backed settler colonial violence. It is part and parcel of a century-long Zionist settler colonial project. Confronting this violence means confronting the institutions, policies, and structures that produce it — not simply the individuals who carry it out. Call it what it is.

 

Some valid points.  But I disagree.  Yes, "terrorism" is an amorphous, politically subjective term.  But it's also a powerful one.  It has penetrated the psyche of Western consciousness.  And if it can be thrown back in the faces of those who cynically employed it in the first place, then we should do so.  Especially since, while there might not be a genuine, legal definition of "terrorism" there are serviceable definitions of the word:

Concepts of political discourse are hardly models of clarity, but there is general agreement as to what constitutes terrorism. As a point of departure we may take the official United States Code:

 

“act of terrorism” means an activity that — (A) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life that is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State; and (B) appears to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping.³

The concept is not precisely delimited. First, the boundary between international terrorism and aggression is not always clear. On this matter, let us give the benefit of the doubt to the United States and its clients: if they reject the charge of aggression in the case of some act of international violence, we will take it to fall under the lesser crime of terrorism. There is also disagreement over the distinction between terrorism and retaliation or legitimate resistance, to which we return.

US sources also provide more succinct definitions of “terrorism.” A US Army manual on countering terrorism defines it as “the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious or ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear.”

And, it requires no stretch of the imagination to see how Israeli behaviour aligns with this definition.  I said that the writer had some good, valid points.  But there's something to be said for the opposite position and I think there are better uses of anti-genocide people's time than debating the terminology to describe zio-nazi behaviour.

 

The other article employs Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to attempt to debunk the idea that rising yields in the bond market signify the weakness of the Trump regime's erratic political-economic policies and that these higher yields will put some sort of break on Trump's mismanagement of the world system.

Commentators point to large federal deficits, growing public debt, and the volume of Treasury securities coming onto the market. From this perspective, higher yields are the market’s response to excessive government borrowing, and the Trump administration’s policy amounts to fiscal recklessness. This interpretation rests on an old and misleading conception of financial markets. It treats government and private borrowers as competing for a limited pool of savings, so that larger deficits necessarily drive interest rates upward. But interest rates in a modern monetary economy are not determined in this way. The Federal Reserve (Fed) directly sets the short-term policy rate and strongly influences the entire yield curve through changes in the composition and size of its balance sheet and through expectations about future rates.

The current rise in long-term rates is better understood from this monetary perspective. Inflation remains above the Fed’s 2 percent target, and the energy shock associated with the Iran war has reinforced fears that inflation will persist. These fears are exaggerated. Inflation above 2 percent is not, by itself, evidence of an inflationary crisis, particularly when there is no distributive conflict capable of generating a self-sustaining wage-price spiral. The deeper problem is the Fed’s commitment to an excessively low inflation target.

This goes against the argument of Jack Rasmus (same thing here or here) which is that the bond markets are genuinely worried about the over-extension of the US dollar and that the nation's ability to raise funds without simply printing it is going to limit Trump's ability to continue his wars and for the USA as a whole to maintain its standard of living as a devalued dollar makes imports more expensive.

 

The US has continued to run massive budget deficits averaging more than $2 trillion a year since 2020. In past decades before 2000, the US used to cover its deficits with economic growth and tax revenues. But growth has slowed sharply since 2020, on average barely 2% per year, and tax cuts for corporations and investors have accelerated. So Sales of US Treasuries have been key to financing the annual $2 trillion plus US budget deficit.

Should foreign buyers of Treasuries continue to buy fewer Treasuries, like China has been doing, or worse, start selling off their Treasuries—how will the US finance its annual $2 trillion and rising budget deficit?

The US will have to either cut spending, raise taxes, or sell more Treasuries to domestic US buyers. But to sell more domestically, it will have to entice US domestic buyers to do so. How? By increasing the interest rate on the Treasuries it will pay them if they buy more.

Which brings us back to the recent events regarding Japan, its Yen, and its increasingly competitive Japan government bond rates that offer interest rates to buyers nearly equivalent to US Treasury bond rates.

Japan is about to sharply reduce its purchases of US Treasuries. That means less global demand for US Treasuries. At the same time, Japan has started selling off some of its $1.1 trillion hoard of Treasuries. That increases the supply of Treasuries globally. Lower demand higher supply both mean falling prices for US Treasuries and, in turn, rising long term US bond interest rates.

...

To assist Japan—and discourage it from selling even more US Treasuries—US Treasury Secretary Bessent last month intervened in global currency markets and started buying Yen to assist Japan trying to prop up the value (price) of its Yen.  But that’s just the appearance. The real Bessent objective is to assist Japan to prevent it from selling off even more US Treasuries.

In an interesting twist, Bessent didn’t enter the global currency market to buy Yen with dollars. He used the US Treasury’s stock of Euros currency to buy Yen. That may have temporarily helped Japan, but it undermined the value of the Euro and European economies. That did not make the Europeans too happy.

On August 30, 2026 Bessent bragged the US action had stabilized the Yen. But evidence suggests otherwise. The Yen is likely to continue to fall below the benchmark Yen-Dollar exchange of 160 to the $1.  When it does, Japan will likely dump (sell) more of its US Treasury holdings in order to buy more of its currency to prop it up. That means Japan, like China, will reduce its holdings of US securities well below the $90 billion it already expended since July. If it’s selling Treasuries it’s certainly not going to buy more. So both Japan’s demand and supply of Treasuries will push up US long term Treasury bond interest rates.  US long bond rates are already at 5.3%! They’ll likely go higher now.

That will pull up US mortgage rates. So US consumers can forget about US housing affordability before the US November elections. It’ll get worse, not better. It’s already happening.

 

Rasmus says more about various countries pulling out of US Treasuries, as well as the enormous financial appetite of the AI debacle.  Obviously, the financial markets aren't thinking of MMT, and neither do any Western governments.  Whether they did or not is irrelevant.  They don't have the well-being of ordinary people at heart.  It's "heads they win, tails we lose" as usual. 

Canada-USA trade at the end of European Imperialism

 

I don't know why anybody was bothering trying to seal a deal with Trump since his solemn word isn't worth air it's spoken on.  But Trump apparently demanded some last minute surrenders of essential national sovereignty and even the lickspittle Carney was forced to stand up to him.

I'm not a big fan of Canada, but it's a tad better than the USA, so I'm opposed to assimilation.  I suspect the vast majority of Canadians are too.  Whether US-Americans have the stomach for the conquest and extended occupation of Canada is also an open question.

Whether members of the US military would want to attack Canada, ... in their eyes a loyal, but sovereign ally, is also questionable.

Canada is only a tenth the size of the USA economically.  So Trump's 50% tariffs are going to hurt.  But they're also going to hurt US-American consumers.  Canada is the USA's third-biggest trading partner and they don't buy our resources out of the goodness of their hearts.  On top of the rising cost of oil and everything dependent upon oil (including diesel for food delivery) there's all the other brainless sanctions Trump is applying on other countries around the world.  US-American citizens/consumers/households are going to be pissed.

Trump's idiocy occurs as he refuses to admit defeat against Iran in West Asia.  As the rest of the US ruling class refuses to admit defeat everywhere.  As their selfish schemes and corruption destroy the foundations of the very society their wealth is based upon.  As their delusional economic political-economic theories become less and less capable of disguising their failure.  As Russia pushes the Ukraine (and NATO) to the breaking point.  As China passes the USA in economic, military and "soft" diplomatic power.  As they expose their total moral bankruptcy in supporting Israel's nazi-genocidal policies.

Obviously what Carney needs to do is employ some Modern Monetary Theory and spend money employing Canadians whilst (in congruence with MMT) taxing the wealthy to limit inflation.  I doubt Carney will do this.  He will try (and fail) to sell militarism and austerity.

The bond markets are giving their verdict and someone other than Trump would be toast.  But Trump is one of the most unhinged megalomaniacs to ever occupy the Oval Office.  Plus, he's building an entire infrastructure to carry out a detailed, ruthless plan of election-stealing.

Late-capitalism is showing itself for what it really is. 

How Do Stupid People React When They're Abused By the System?

U.S. Senate kills bail-out of autos, 2009 rather than 2011, $9 billion, $9 billion a day in Iraq no prob, trillions for financial sector w/out really blinking, ... Dems don't force them to filibuster. 60 now mandatory to pass anything in Senate? bullshit. One of biggest causes of US auto ind.crisis is health insu. obligations, not union wages.

ldrs fucking them over to kill the union.

Just like the ruling class in Fr. Rev. kept pushing till their own system collapsed, U.S., world corp.elite det'd to destroy themslvs

Keep piling it on fuckheads.

But, rev. not guaranteed (even Rev don't turn out way s'posed to) because, people don't seem to know what to do.

Stupefying pol. culture, mass ignorance, delusion, + stupidity and cowardice.

The majority when faced with powerful adversaries tend to turn on weaker/weakest minority scapegoats. Taking on the system takes brains and courage, bashing immigrants, unemployed, prostitutes much easier.

What happens when economy collapses? Many turn to crime, and victims (rightously) turn to law n' order and vigilantiism and sometimes fascism (pseudo-populist demagogues), instead of organization and demand for respect for all human beings, short-term calculations and living for self, family, friends, world can fuck itself.

That appears to be where canada will go.

Trump, Epstein, Israel

 

Just have time for a quick thought: I will continue to maintain that Trump was blackmailed into attacking Iran by Israel, which has compromising evidence of Trump abusing adolescent girls at Jeffrey Epstein's properties.

All this talk about continuities of US policy towards Iran, and the maintenance of the petro-dollar, and etc., do not take away from the fact that Trump's belligerence is unprecedented.  Other US presidents (for all the continuities of policy) did not go to war against Iran.

Furthermore, there is evidence that Trump was reluctant to go to war against Iran.  NOT because he was the "America First" hero who truly wanted to end the neo-cons' "Forever Wars."  (Trump recognized in 2015 --at least-- that those stupid wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were stupid.  And he saw that opposition to them polled well with his voting demographic.  That's it.  That's all.  He's not a man of principle.  He genuinely believed that the neo-cons' wars were stupid, but if he needed to play along to get along, he would.)

No. Trump was opposed to war with Iran because he knew Iran would be a difficult job for the US military.  It would lead to unforeseen consequences.  As it was, as it has.

"Head-Waiter to the Provinces"

 

That's how Pierre Trudeau derisively described the role of the federal government in Ottawa according to the desires of provincial premiers. (Actually, I don't know what vision P.E.T. was denigrating, but you get the point.)

For a long time I haven't known how to think about this debate.  But now, it seems to me, that a weaker national government gives capitalists more opportunities to exploit weaknesses.  

I think debates between national and sub-national governments should continue and that they should be decided by what is best for the vast majority of people. 

It's Tough Being a Deluded Servant of Oligarchy

 

So, global warming denier Donald Trump is blaming Canada for somehow not "managing" its 3.69 million square kilometres of forest and thereby allowing giant wildfires to spread which causes smoke to fill the skies of various states along the Canada-USA border.  As if we're supposed to have armies of people wandering around the Canadian Shield putting dried twigs into garbage bags.  It's a moronic accusation that doesn't warrant a response.

But notice how Carney's options for rebuttal are limited because he can't point to the obvious role of global warming due to the burning of fossil fuels as the real culprit behind these fires.  (These fires have, obviously, become the "new normal" for most humans who now have to deal with them.  I'll bet at least 75% of the people in Toronto, where I live, have forgotten all about them.  It's sickening what we're prepared to put up with in order to avoid the struggle of having to adjust to reality.)

Carney can't blame global warming because he's a craven servant of the oil sector and he's committed to extracting and having burn even more petroleum than ever.

Every day the man comes up with more reason to be contemptuous of him.