Mark Carney and the "Rules-Based International Order"

 

One example of the flexibility and falsehood of international law that Carney admitted to at Davos would be his own theft of $2 billion in Venezuelan gold reserves held in the vaults of the Bank of England.  He was the bank's governor at the time and the UK was (and remains) united in destroying the Bolivarian Revolution that wanted to use Venezuela's oil wealth for the general population rather than local and foreign elites.  Carney's "argument" was that the US puppet/douchebag Juan Guano was Venezuela's legitimate ruler and not Maduro who had only been elected in an election.

Thoughts

 

With the lawless, murderous, racist, sexist, fascist ramapaging of the Trump regime in Minnesota, and the way that the regime's supporters not only defend it, but celebrate it, ... the sickening reality of how debased the world has become is evident for all to see.

Trump represents the evil I said would follow harper's assaults on Parliament

 

If you go back through the pages of this blog to the years when stephen harper was desecrating all of the customs and conventions and the very letter of the law of our parliamentary system, you will see that I was constantly "harping" about how dangerous and disgusting his behaviour was.  I also expressed my dismay at the lack of push-back against harper; both from the super-radicals who believe that the real world is a waste of time and that if only everything magically changed, their little Marxist grouplet or "anarchist" collective would sweep away all before them and so to hell with worrying about something as ridiculous as Parliament and the semi-quasi-democracy it represents  - AND - from the "respectable" left and center who thought shouting "SHAME!!" [leftists] or "Tsk-tsk!" [centrists] was the extent of their responsibilities.

I'm not saying that Canadians' incapacity at resisting harper produced the rise of Donald Trump in the United States.  I'm saying that progressives and leftists failures to counteract the fascist turn of decaying capitalism has produced [in the USA] a fascist movement, united under a grifter, who has, in the real world, with real resources, created an army of lawless goons, inspired by racist ideology, targeting scapegoats and anyone who wants to resist them.

As economic conditions deteriorate, more people become insular, reactionary, "conservative."  We had certain rights under our system of government.  We could have built upon them.  We should be outraged when ... ahh, I've too much to say and no time really to say it.

Remember when harper stymied investigations into human rights abuses in Afghanistan? Remember when he stole an election?  Remember when he refused to provide Parliament with cost estimates of his policies?  Remember when the falsified expert advice to justify cutting funding for KAIROS?  Remember when he used his stolen majority to ram through gigantic omnibus bills?  Remember when Elections Canada refused to seriously investigate his election fraud and selectively granted legal immunity to different sets of witnesses?

As a people, we should be passionate about defending the rights we have.  Instead, the far-left smirks and shrugs their shoulders and says something eloquent about "bourgeois liberties" while the progressives mouth whatever platitudes their own hypocritical leadership in Liberal, NDP, Green, Democratic, whatever parties tell them to say.  (And then hope they forget those platitudes and what they were supposed to represent whenever one of those centrist parties gain power.)  And, of course, the vast majority of people, incapable of lifting their eyes from their own immediate concerns, simply ignore it all as a farce.

We see the results of this massive human-societal failure in the murderous, illegal, unconstitutional behaviour of Trump's ICE.

Iran

 

As I understand it, there are some legitimate economic grievances that many Iranians have against their government.  This was also the case in the early days in the protests against Assad in Syria.  But as with Syria, so too with Iran.  USA and Israeli spies soon attached themselves to these protests and used them as a pretext to violently attack the government.  And if you don't think the US government would start killing dozens of protesters if US-Americans started murdering police officers, just look at that country today, when police there go ape-shit when US-Americans peacefully protest police violence.

Canadians Dying in Hospital Hallways

 

At the time, when I was first reading about Prashant Sreekumar dying in an Alberta hospital's hallway after having waited eight hours to see a doctor, somewhere in a comments section (I forget where) idiots were blaming Justin Trudeau.

Thwap's Reading Achievements for 2026

 Here's links to 2025 Books I & II.  2024's readings.  2023.  September 2021 to December 2022.

Anyway, a few days ago I finished Fresh Green Life by Sebastian Castillo.  

I knew that it was about a guy in his thirties who has been living in self-imposed isolation for a year who goes to a News Year's Eve party with friends and colleagues from his university days.  You can read the linked review if you want.  But I will just say that I enjoyed the book.  If held a few surprises for me as it went along.  I found the language of the narrator a little pompous at first.  I wasn't sure if that was intentional on the part of the writer to mock the narrator, or whether it was the writer's own voice.  Whatever it was, it faded and the rest of the time was smooth sailing.  In the end it was (for me) a hilarious send-up of the lives of academics.  [Here's a link to the narrator's favourite film.]

2026-01-18

Today I finished Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine:

Pappe argues that Israel's creation involved deliberate ethnic-cleansing:

In his latest work, renowned Israeli author and academic Pappe (A History of Modern Palestine ) does not mince words, doing Jimmy Carter one better (or worse, depending on one's point of view) by accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, beginning in the 1948 war for independence and continuing through the present. Focusing primarily on Plan D (Dalet , in Hebrew), conceived on March 10, 1948, Pappe demonstrates how ethnic cleansing was not a circumstance of war, but rather a deliberate goal of combat for early Israeli military units organized by David Ben-Gurion, whom Pappe labels the “architect of ethnic cleansing. The forced expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians between 1948 and 1949, Pappe argues, was part of a long-standing Zionist plan to manufacture an ethnically pure Jewish state. 

It's depressing reading Pappe's conclusion, written in 2006, about the slim possibilities for peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, knowing how far from that outcome the reality in 2026 is.  

I didn't know much about the "war" between Israel and the Palestinians and other Arab states.  I had been raised to believe that the Arab states told the Palestinians to temporarily leave so as to be out of the way while they crushed the Israeli state as it was being born.  I never thought that their leaving justified not letting them return, but I learned a long time ago from Christopher Hitchens that there had never been such an order.

The reality is that the Palestinians were hardly armed.  They weren't happy with the UN partition plan but those within the borders of what was to be Israel had resigned themselves to living in "Israel" when the time came.  They weren't prepared for what the Israelis had planned for them.

Iraq, Syria and Jordan sent troops that never left the lands that had been allotted to Palestine by the UN.

Egypt sent a mostly untrained militia into Gaza with little preparation and bombed Tel Aviv and some other towns for a few days.

Jordan's King planned to take the West Bank for himself in return for allowing Israel to take the rest of all that it wanted.

And all of this ethnic cleansing had been planned long before WWII and The Holocaust.