thwap's schoolyard

Rob Ford's low-hanging fruit

2012-01-31T09:38:00.001-08:00

It's easy to write a blog post when your target is so grotesquely stupid.

When he was first elected, Rob (coward) Ford announced that he was going to kill the long-delayed public transportation expansion "Transit City." In return for keeping his suffering suburbanite constituents waiting in the cold and the rain for late, crowded buses, Ford was prepared to pay anywhere from $50 to $150 million in cancellation fines.

Since Canadian politics isn't really designed to accomodate nazi-style government,* there's always a delay in the response to nitwitted bulldozing such as is engaged in by the likes of Rob Ford. Dalton (lying prick) McGuinty acquiesced and gave Ford a chance to grandstand over what is turning out to be a shitty deal for Toronto. Ford would get provincial money to bury the Eglinton Avenue light-rail service and he could find all the private sector money he wanted to expand the Shepard Subway line. Then, TTC Chair (and sometime Ford ally) Karen Stintz, realizing that Ford's plan was garbage tried to suggest a compromise. No deal. Then, Councillor Mihevic hired municipal lawyer Freya Kristjanson to comment on the legality of Ford's unilateral decision to kill transit city. According to Kristjanson, Rob Ford is not the King of Council and did not have the power to kill transit city.

So what's Ford's response?

“'I didn’t overstep my boundaries; I did what the taxpayers want,' he said."

Oh, really? Why is that Mayor Ford?

“I did what the taxpayers want. They want subways. That’s it.”

How do you respond to a complete shit-head like this? His legal argument for his power to unilaterally overturn past Council resolutions is: "The taxpayers want it"???

Then the moron starts yammering about subways. As if he thinks a light-rail system becomes a subway just because you spend $2 billion to bury it!!! As if his failure to find private-sector investors for the Shepard Subway is somehow delivering on the "taxpayers'" demands for subways!

Everything that comes out of this guy's mouth is a mistake. And there's no real debating with this human garbage. (Him and his fans.) You just scorn them. Insult them. Ignore them. Abuse them. Shame borderline people from voting for this drivel. Get the country back on track.

* Oh, but the left-wing on Toronto City Council are two steps to the left of Joseph Stalin, right?

If it was an "honour killing" ...

2012-01-30T10:39:00.000-08:00

Shouldn't whoever did it acknowledge their deed fearlessly and suffer the consequences with pride?

Ezra Levant: An Enemy of Canada

2012-01-29T09:09:00.000-08:00

Wingnut welfare recipient Ezra Levant has a new book coming out. It's called The Enemy Within. It's not an autobiography however. The slime-ball has decided to return once again to his masturbation fantasies about torturing young Muslim males. That's right. Levant's moved on from Maher Arar to Omar Khadr.

In case you're not familiar with the story (and given his book sales and his television ratings, you probably aren't) Ezra Levant will tell anyone who will listen that Maher Arar lied about having been tortured in Syria. Arar wasn't tortured in Syria! That would be ridiculous! He was just groundlessly identified as a terrorism suspect by some donut-munching desk-jockey at CSIS, and these groundless speculations were shared with the psychotic, paranoid and incompetent US intelligence agencies, and Arar was arrested at a US airport and, even though he was traveling with a Canadian passport, the US sent him to his home country of Syria, because, .... because .... well, it's a bit dodgy I guess.

You see, Canadian intelligence agents said that the USA wanted to let the Syrians "have their way with [Arar]" which would mean TORTURE HIM. But that can't be right, because Ezra says he wasn't tortured. In the war on Islamic terrorism, the USA sent Arar to Syria because it's closer than Canada. Wait. No it isn't. The USA sent Arar to Syria because they trust the Syrians more than they do the Canadians. No. That's not right either. The USA sent Arar to Syria because the Syrians have far better standards for evidence gathering and treatment of prisoners than does Canada. No. That's not right either.

Oh well. Anyway. Arar was lying about being tortured. The Syrian government is a torturing, mass-murdering dictatorship, but they didn't torture this Canadian citizen wrongly accused of being a terrorism suspect. Oh wait! Did I say "wrongly accused"? Ezra says that Arar wasn't "wrongly accused." Ezra says that Arar was most likely involved up to his eyeballs in terrorism!

Of course he didn't: he doesn't want to answer questions.
Arar the hustler -- and his lawyers-of-fortune -- will have to find a new target to shake down. Of course, they won't go after the Syrian government -- the Syrians know too much about him, and what really happened. He's already squeezed what he can out of Canada.

And, anyway, Omar Khadr said so! So, like, CSIS told the US-Americans about this terrorist see, and the US-Americans sent him to Syria for reasons unknown, and the Syrians didn't torture this terrorist, but they let him go instead, and then he lied about being tortured and then CSIS and Stockwell Day said that neither they nor the US-Americans had any evidence on him, and the Canadian government gave him $10 million because we're a bunch of chumps, because GET THIS: Confessed war criminal Omar Khadr says he saw Arar at a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan in 2001!!!!!! Oh, wait:

Defence lawyer Walter Ruiz showed the commission a report written by Fuller right after his interrogation session with Khadr in Afghanistan, in which the agent wrote it took Khadr several minutes to identify the man in a photograph shown to him as Arar, the CBC's Bill Gillespie reported from Guantanamo Bay.

Ruiz also said Fuller's report is much more qualified than his testimony on Monday and only says that Khadr thought he saw Arar in an Arab safe house in Kabul.

Ruiz also pointed out that Fuller's report states Khadr said he thought he saw Arar in Afghanistan in September and October 2001, the CBC's Gillespie reported.

Ruiz suggested to the court that in September, Arar was in the United States, not Afghanistan, while the following month, he was under RCMP surveillance in Canada.

Oh well.

Gee. It's turning out that Ezra Levant is a babbling fool. An apologist for torture. A liar.

So, anyway, this lying piece of shit's new book is about Omar Khadr, and it's called The Enemy Within: Terror, Lies, and the Whitewashing of Omar Khadr. Given that Ezra the Rat's take on Maher Arar is insanely deluded, what could the ugly motherfucker possibly have to say about Omar Khadr?

This controversial new book will be published to coincide with Omar Khadr's return to Canada in late 2011. It will include shocking information about the Khadr family, Khadr's psychological assessment, and his trial that has often been ignored in the mainstream media. Challenging the conventional wisdom about the Khadr case, The Enemy Within is a provocative look at the definition of "child soldier," life at Guantanamo Bay, the media coverage of the case, a tainted plea bargain, and the Canadian government's plan for Omar Khadr's rehabilitation upon his return to Canada.

So, wonder-boy Ezra is going to blow the lid off of how crazy Khadr Senior was? It's already been done shit-head. Everyone knows all about it. "Khadr's psychological assessment"? For real Ezra? Who profiled him? The torturing thugs of the US military and their Mengele-like experts? You don't even know what a laughable, twisted fuck you are! How could you? His "trial"? With evidence based on torture? With a "confession" that is meaningless? You're talking about a kangaroo-court operated under a president who has said that they'll only try people when they're convinced they can get a guilty verdict. Everyone else will just rot in indefinite detention. And, if they bring someone into the kangaroo-court and fail to get a conviction, Obama says he'll lock them up forever regardless. So, by all means, you shit-head, write about Khadr's "trial." It will be the same sort of useless swill as your writing about Maher Arar.

It goes without saying that it's too much to expect a complete moron like Ezra Levant to answer any of the very simple questions I ask about Khadr. You know, ... why is throwing a hand-grenade in a fire-fight a "war crime"? Why have successive Canadian governments allowed this citizen's rights to be so grievously trampled? Why is a boy of 15 supposed to be punished for the sins of his father? How was a boy of 15, immersed in his father's world of terrorism, surrounded by his father's accomplices, supposed to have realized that his father was "evil" (and that the imperialists and murderers of the USA are simultaneously "good") and rebelled against his father and all of his beliefs? Finally, what is all this nonsense about there being strict criteria for "child soldiers"?

Let's deal with this one in isolation people: For a doughy, ugly, pimple-brained fuckwad like Ezra Levant, only some 15 year-olds qualify to be considered child soldiers. Presumably, the "bad" 15 year-olds (and younger) have no rights at all and can be tortured to the perverted sexual delight of monsters like Ezra Levant.

Levant is referring to Khadr as "the enemy within." But given Levant's penchant for torturing children, his shilling for foreign special interests with deep pockets, his desire to poison the country with the toxic sludge of the Tar Sands and resulting pipelines carrying the filth, his attacks on public health care (and therefore on the health and financial well-being of the majority of his fellow citizens) and, lastly, his support for the Conservative Party of Canada as led by stephen harper, we can clearly see that it is Ezra Levant who is an enemy of Canada.

You read that right. Am I just as bad as stephen harper by saying that? Isn't it the case that harper overreacts and says that people who disagree with him are enemies of Canada?

No.

harper believes that people concerned about global warming (the greatest man-made crisis that humanity has ever faced) and about the pollution of West Coast forests and ocean shorelines are enemies of Canada. Supposedly the few hundred Canadian jobs and the massive profits to mainly foreign-owned oil companies are far more important to Canada than the potentially massive environmental devastation that this project could cause.

Which is ludicrous.

Now, re-read why I think Ezra Levant is an enemy of Canada:

But given Levant's penchant for torturing children, his shilling for foreign special interests with deep pockets, his desire to poison the country with the toxic sludge of the Tar Sands and resulting pipelines carrying the filth, his attacks on public health care (and therefore on the health and financial well-being of the majority of his fellow citizens) and, lastly, his support for the Conservative Party of Canada as led by stephen harper, we can clearly see that it is Ezra Levant who is an enemy of Canada.

See the difference? Among other things, Ezra spits upon our Charter Rights and Freedoms, and our ability, as citizens, to access necessary health care. He shits upon our values, all of them, on a daily basis.

Ezra Levant is an enemy of Canada. Treat him as such.

harper's Standing in the Polls

2012-01-28T06:59:00.000-08:00

Via "Northern Reflections" we get Susan Riley's "harper wins when voters snooze." She says some interesting things. She mentions harper's numerous fuck-ups, lies and demonstrations of hypocrisy, notes how none of these penetrate the thick skulls of his supporters and then:

What about everyone else? Many have given up - in cynicism or despair. They turn their back on politics, don't bother to vote, even imagine it is fashionable to remain aloof.
They claim all politicians are the same, but they aren't. They claim it doesn't matter which party holds power, but it does.
If Occupiers had simply voted en masse in May, we wouldn't have a majority Conservative government today.
The media aren't to blame. We hector from the sidelines (guilty!), or, more usefully, uncover hypocrisies and small scandals. Opposition MPs - notably Bob Rae, Charlie Angus, Elizabeth May; but others, too - advance persuasive arguments, based on evidence, de-bunking Conservative crime policy, and other initiatives.
Nothing seems to penetrate public indifference - to Harper's benefit.

The media is to blame to the extent that newspapers like Riley's own Ottawa Citizen and "Canada's National Newspaper" the Globe and Mail actually endorsed harper as if he hadn't initiated several constitutional crises and had dragged the tone of politics down into the gutter. As if every time the droning teleprompter reader Peter Mansbridge trumpets another "exclusive interview" with the lying sack of shit it doesn't make him look like a respectable politician.

harper successfully conned or pandered to 26% of the electorate where it counted. I agree with Riley that people who think they're too smart to vote have brought this on all of us. As did a lackluster opposition campaign.

We've failed as a country. All of us.

Long Day

2012-01-27T20:42:00.000-08:00

I was going to type something offensive about Patrick Ross for shits n' giggles (as Austin Powers once put it) but I thought better of it. Then one thing led to another and I'm typing a post for the day at 11:44 pm.

I think I'll watch a documentary about telescopes instead.

Austerity and Waste

2012-01-26T07:04:00.001-08:00

It is dogmatism. Cut taxes on corporations and the wealthiest for over a decade. Pretend not to notice the lack of a corresponding increase in investment in the economy. Cut public services and pretend not to notice the increase in homelessness and misery. Globalize and automate jobs away and pretend not to notice the rise in household debt. (When a frighteningly persistent recession appears, suddenly decide that debt-to-income overstates' the precariousness of Canadians' household finances.) The world over, elites are using austerity policies to break the back of democracy. But this is insane because capitalism requires consumption. Power is more important to the elites than is prosperity. But their power is based on prosperity. They are digging their own graves and they can't see it. In Canada alone, harper's "jobs policy" equals a relatively small number of jobs in the greatest carbon emitting project on the planet - destroying the future for oil industry profits today. While he refuses to build schools or adequate housing for the First Nations, he squanders billions on anti-democracy summits and tens of billions on new prisons and white elephant fighter jets. In Toronto, the "respect for taxpayers" mayor decides that streetcars constitute a "war on the car" and decides to blow an extra $2 billion burying a light-rail line, making it the stupidest light-rail line in the history of human civilization. At the same time that he's wasting a couple of billion dollars, he's slashing needed public services to avoid having to raise taxes on a city with relatively low tax rates. And his fans cheer mindlessly, because they are mindless.

Remember this at last: They are wrong about everything. They were wrong about WMDs. They were wrong about gravy trains at Toronto City Hall. They were wrong about tax-cuts. They're wrong about global warming. They're wrong about the Enbridge Pipeline debate. They're wrong about spending on First Nations reserves. They're wrong about sexuality. They're wrong about religion. They're wrong about torture. They're wrong about libraries. They're wrong about unions. They're wrong about poverty. They're wrong about protesters. They're wrong about Iran. They're wrong about deregulation. They're wrong about Greece. They're wrong about Hugo Chavez. They're wrong about Wall Street. They're wrong about human rights. They're wrong about contempt of Parliament.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Do not listen to them. Do not be polite to them. If they start up, tell them you don't have time for their stupid bullshit.

Wednesday Random Musings

2012-01-25T08:10:00.000-08:00

So, stephen harper convened a summit with leaders from Canada's First Nations communities in order to be able to insult them and ignore them.

Here's SOME of the insulting stuff:

Phillip said the prime minister basically told chiefs that he couldn’t just focus on their issues because he had to run the country.

“He did make a point of saying basically that, as the prime minister of Canada, he had many, many other issues. He talked about the great responsibility and many interests on this ‘great ship of state’ as he described the country,” said Phillip. “Quite astonishingly…at the very end he was recommending we go home and talk to our MPs.”

Here's the results of the ignoring stuff:

And Michelle Audette, president of Quebec Native Women, issued a stark warning about the violence in many aboriginal communities, a topic she said that was once taboo and off limits.

“Look how we are dying in our community. And it’s going to get really worse if it doesn’t change here, really worse,” she said.

“The family violence is epidemic, the sexual abuse is epidemic, it’s everywhere. The suicide rate, the drugs. It is everywhere. How come we have to live that way?”

Last month, the United Nations committee to eliminate discrimination against women contacted the federal government to say it is interested in investigating the disappearance or murders of nearly 600 aboriginal women and girls across Canada.

harper is scum. He is a loathsome villain. He is the most detestable racist. This is a tragedy. A HUMAN TRAGEDY. And of course, former ignorer of the First Nations, Paul Martin Jr., is moved to all sorts of empty rhetoric about harper's scuzziness which I will do no more than refer to since the sad joke of Martin's soaring rhetoric and sniveling action has pretty much played itself out.

About the harpercon spin job that opposition to the Enbridge Toxic Sludge Pipeline are all US puppets, the reply should be: "Shut the fuck up." Pack Ezra Levant on a plane to Iraq and make him look for the WMDs. Then send him to Syria as a one-man prison inspection team. This is a bullshit smear and it's laughable given harper's own craven subservience to US oil and health insurance fraudsters and arms dealers. There is nothing to debate because harper and his team are stupid, lying pieces of shit.

Apparently, safe in the booth at 640 am Moron Radio, Rob Ford was feeling a might testy. It's probably because the higher quantities of fruit he's eating in an attempt to lose weight caused him to unload a big soft ice-cream smoothie of his own toxic sludge into his big baby diapers just before the show began. As it all started to get cold and tacky and cause a painful rash, Ford began to spew about how everyone to the left of him on Toronto City Council are quasi-Stalinists. Very well then. Rob (pathetic coward) Ford reminds me of Julius Streicher.

NGO's and Canadian Mining Companies

2012-01-24T17:49:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of the month, at a loss for anything productive to say, I posted a link to the "Bad-Ass Honey-Badger" video on YouTube. Well, today, commenter "sailsmart" replied that I should write about how the harpercons are giving money to NGO's like PLAN, the World University Service Canada, and others, in return for their teaming up with Canadian mining companies overseas.

The spin is that obviously there are strains when a huge mining project comes to some remote community, but Canadian mining firms are concerned to best practices develop with responsibility blah, blah, blah, blah.

Knowing how the pieces of shit who pull harper's strings work, it'll go like this: Canadian mining companies are among the worst corporate criminals in the world. harper is shameless about using public monies to reward his friends and crush his enemies out of existence. These NGOs will be the first of many forced to trim their sails and use their credibility to provide public relations cover to these scum in order to preserve their very existence. Canada's mining firms will continue to poison and displace people but there'll be heart-warming photo-ops of lame-ass "development projects" going on ten miles away.

And then, at the end of the day, everybody will go home and puke their guts out.

Gingrich Upsets Romney in North Carolina Primary

2012-01-23T17:26:00.000-08:00

And I couldn't give a flying fuck about it. Matt Taibbi has confessed to enjoying the low comedy of the North Carolina primary, but I'm still in the same mood he was in on January 3rd at the beginning of the Iowa primary. This is a stupid, meaningless waste of time. This is a pointless contest between corporatist scum, validated by the participation of morons and hypocrites. The Repugs will choose one of their shithead Wall Street shills and that shithead will go shithead-to-shithead against the nauseating Barack Obama to see who can (by hook or crook) wrest a majority of the the votes of the people who still bother to vote in that useless, sick joke of a "democracy."

Let's remember a couple of things people: Despite what the braying jackasses of the right-wing believe, this recession is still in business and it was brought to us by the same neoliberals who today vow to starve us to health. Also, global warming is caused by human behavior and it will destroy civilization as we know it.

Oh yeah, last thing: Rob -lying coward -Ford is trying to lose some of his 330 lbs. "Cut the Waist." Ha-ha-ha. I don't fucking care about that either. I want that useless tub of shit to resign and leave public life forever. I don't care if he becomes a male anorexic or balloons to 1,000 lbs and becomes bed-ridden. I just want that fat lying sonofabitch to get the fuck out of my life.

Farm Labour Abuses

2012-01-22T12:07:00.000-08:00

Canada's marketing boards are squeezing Canadian consumers dry (or so the argument goes) because it's possible to pay less for farm produce in the USA. The fact that lower prices for food often times stems from abusive conditions, corporate farms pumping the earth full of poison, and exploitative big food processing corporations ripping-off farmers, and etc., is of no consequence to these shit-head simpleton arguments.

Farm gate prices are really pretty low and that, in part, explains some of the terrible working conditions that foreign workers endure on Canadian farms:

Overseen by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, the program is supposed to safeguard workers from exploitation, but critics say there’s little federal accountability. Complicating the matter is the fact the program is administered by a private, non-profit organization in Ontario, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island called FARMS – Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Services. (Its Francophone equivalent in Quebec and New Brunswick is known as FERME.)

The CSAWP “really suffers from a lack of government oversight by the Canadian government in terms of monitoring working conditions and living conditions, regulating them and sanctioning abusers,” said Kerry Preibisch, associate professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Guelph.

Migrant workers are housed in a variety of different accommodations. Most live on the farmers’ properties in bunk houses, barns or trailers. Some live away from the farms in motels or apartment buildings. Generally, accommodations are paid for by the employer.

Preibisch has documented a litany of substandard living conditions, from mould in bedrooms, a lack of indoor toilets and standing water to a gas leak that one employer refused to fix.

I attended the Toronto rally for the Justice for Farm Workers movement. Another small group of weak people speechifying to uncaring buildings and moving traffic. As with most other things, if your average Canuck isn't directly affected by some injustice, even if it registers with them, they do little more than shrug. I worked on a farm once. Outside of Delhi Ontario. Those Jamaican guys worked like sunzobitches. Three-times as fast as us Ontario-raised white boys.

This Country Has Turned To Shit

2012-01-21T05:36:00.000-08:00

Latest example: The anti-Canadian, oil-puppet, anti-democracy asshole stephen harper has refused to compensate Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin for their having been tortured by the monstrous Syrian government at Canada's behest.

As a result, these three CANADIAN CITIZENS are forced to sue the Canadian government to have to obtain justice.

harper has been fighting them every step of the way. (What with being a contemptible piece of garbage after all.) And now, Canada's cowardly Supreme Court has decided that ~~the job security of the various politicians and desk-jockey super spies~~ "national security" concerns trump the rights of Canadians who were tortured for months (almost TWO YEARS in Almalki's case) as a result of the actions of government agents. These men and their lawyers can't obtain the government information about the Canuckistan Eichmanns who condemned them to a living hell in Syria.

This is all fine and jim-dandy for Canada. There's been more news about an Italian cruise ship accident than there's been any reflection on the shitty uselessness of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms in preserving our human dignity as Canadian citizens. (This is par for the course. When these men first presented the Prime Minister's Office with a petition calling for an inquiry into their torture, the top story as chosen by our "independent" news media that day was about a "Tim Horton's" employee fired for giving a timbit to a customer's child.) As well, the same sort of right-wing ignoramuses who swallow the blatant lies of the harpercons hook, line and sinker, will also rationalize torture by saying that being Muslim, these guys were natural suspects (which is idiotic) and they will still harbour suspicions about these guys even though the Syrians weren't able to beat anything out of them.

We have a government of thieves and liars and inhuman scum, elected by the most repulsively ignorant, inhuman, stupid, racist and greedy voters. I will say it again: I do not recognize the authority of the harpercon government. They are criminals and they do not respect the institutions that they base their own authority on.

Respect

2012-01-19T03:48:00.000-08:00

This article by Tyler McCreary; "An Essay on Respect" focuses on how the chairperson of the Joint Review Panel for the community hearings into the Enbrigde Pipeline simultaneously disrespects the Haisla, Tsimshian, and Wet’suwet’en First Nations while asking them to respect everybody else, including the Enbridge Corporation that threatens their land:

On the morning of the 16th, the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs had opened the meeting by singing a song composed for the hearing. The song expressed the depth of their connection to their territory, the chorus “noh' y'in tah way atsaan tsun” translated to “our territory is our livelihood”. But the song also clearly expressed their opposition to the pipeline, closing with the line, “Enbridge noh' y'in tah wagga way sow' ye'h” (Enbridge don't step onto our land).

Prior to the hearings in Burns Lake on the 17th, representatives of the National Energy Board organizing the review panel indicated that they did not want the Wet’suwet’en chiefs to open with an anti-Enbridge song again. While the review panel presumably considered this prerequisite respect for Enbridge, dictating the terms of traditional opening ceremonies to Wet’suwet’en chiefs on Wet’suwet’en land disrespected those chiefs and their authority.

There was a buzz amongst the hereditary chiefs about the gall of the government folk who sought to dictate proceedings on Wet’suwet’en land. The chiefs, however, did not cede control of the opening. The panel was convened to hear their testimony, and would begin in accordance with their process. The chiefs paraded into the room in full regalia, assembled before the crowd, and again performed their oppositional anthem.

While the details of this performance were conveniently quieted in the official record, which only recorded this demonstration as the “Opening Ceremony”, numerous cameras and cell phones captured events and the words and images of Wet’suwet’en protest circulated through social media.

Here's the thing though: This bullshit government, all its hirelings, and its likely criminal paymasters, none of them deserve any respect. The harper government is a criminal government that hides behind institutions for which it has no respect itself. The proper attitude towards any harpercon slime-ball who seeks to lecture anyone about respect for others and the rule of law is to laugh in their face and tell them that they have renounced all claim to our respect and that they will listen to what you have to say and that you are granting them an unearned privilege by listening to whatever lies they are being paid to spout.

Staying on the Lie

2012-01-17T03:26:00.000-08:00

That's what we should call it when the harpercon scum start doing what is ordinarily called "staying on the message." Because with harpercon scum, "the message" is generally some laughably stupid concoction that most sane people would refer to as "a lie."

Case-in-point: The oil-shilling harpercons trying to pretend that public outrage against the Northern Gateway Pipeline is some US-American directed plot. In the latest repetition of the lie, harper blathers that he's not going to keep Canada as this pristine, undeveloped piece of wilderness that Hollywood elites can keep as their own national park.

harper, being a servant of US oil companies and international oligarchy in general, wants to turn Canada into their slag heap.

We have to obey the laws this piece of shit creates, ... why exactly?

We have to respect the ignorant or undemocratic decision of the shitheads who voted for this abomination, ... why, exactly?

This undemocratic, war crimes splattered piece of garbage gets to enact his revolting policies .... why, exactly?

Because our idiotic electoral system gave him a majority of the seats in the House of Commons? But that didn't matter to him when the opposition dominated the majority of seats in the House of Commons? Is there anything important that's happened to that chamber (besides his herd of MPs' asses sitting in the majority of the seats there)?

Did something change about Parliament that we should respect it more today than he did before the last election?

Goodbye To All That ...

2012-01-16T13:52:00.000-08:00

I left rabble.ca/babble.

I'm glad I got the boot from breadandroses.ca

I'm pretty much done with emasse.ca

Busy Again. Here's Another Video ...

2012-01-15T16:48:00.000-08:00

Gotta post something. I guess. Whatever.

"Order Out of Chaos"

Record-low Mortgage Rates

2012-01-14T07:01:00.000-08:00

This CBC story isn't all that convincing. I'll quote commenter "Belgarion" to summarize it:

So the banks tossed out the laws of supply and demand and started setting mortgage rates to...bonds? So if people had lots of money saved up to buy houses the rates would still be low today? Pardon my skepticism.

But whatever's going on, Canadian households are already more indebted than US households. I think our consumer economy is sustained by the higher level of social welfare spending, public-sector jobs, and other factors that harper, McGuinty, Ford and other clueless fucks are now about to hack and slash at.

The consequences of this mindless austerity are going to be catastrophic.

harper the Homophobe

2012-01-13T03:31:00.000-08:00

harper's cold, clammy, homophobic hands are all over the asinine statement from the Justice Department lawyer that non-Canadian gays and lesbians who got married in Canada were never married to begin with.

If there's a residency requirement for divorce, then say so and STFU. You gotta know that the blurting out of something so legally atrocious and morally offensive as "they were never married to begin with" was the result of some high-level harpercon cabinet meeting (maybe when John Baird and Jason Kenny were sent out to pick-up some dinner) where these cretins discussed how to attack homosexuals as if there wasn't anything less ridiculous and nothing more important for a Canadian government to be talking about but stupid religious bigotry.

I'm not a nationalist. I'm no patriot. But there used to be more moments when I took some pride in being from Canada than I've been having lately.

The Lying Contractor

2012-01-11T08:12:00.000-08:00

So, we needed some bathroom renovations done. Unbeknownst to me the wife decided to go with a contractor who didn't have a clue what he was talking about. His "estimate" was ridiculously low because it wasn't based on reality. Maybe if he gets all his materials for free and finished in less than four hours he could afford to do it for that price. But since it's a week's worth of work (at least) I somehow doubt it.

Not only was the estimate a joke. But he's completely ignorant and incompetent. Pipes where knocked apart before the water was cut off. Yeah buddy, our bathroom has electric outlets in it! And they're live!

This clown has already done hundreds of dollars in damages and he's just getting started.

Here's the thing. I told him to get the fuck out of my house but he says that he's got the contract to do the job and he'll sue us if we try to renege. (He's not bound by his ridiculous estimate obviously, but we're bound by the contract my wife signed. Nice how that works 'eh?) I called the cops but when they showed up, the fact that my wife thinks we should give him a chance and his bullshit about his contract meant that they're not going to do anything unless I get a court order. I get my day in court two days hence.

In the meantime, he's been given a key, so I have to take the day off of work to try to physically restrain him from doing as much damage as he's capable.

What would you do?

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ADDENDUM

I don't own a house. I'm not married. This hasn't happened. It's all a metaphor for the administration of Mayor Rob Ford of Toronto. Elected on false pretexts. Ignorant. Destructive. Costly.

At least with the shitty plumber one could get an injunction or something or other to stop him.

Is it really the case that we have to wait for the end of his term to try to fix the damage that he gets to cause in the meantime? (And the same question goes for the majority of stephen harper.)

Is that really all we're allowed to do? And if anyone dies in the meantime, too fucking bad?

Is that it?

The Time For Lesser-Evilism Has Arrived: Last Chance For Canadian Democracy

2012-01-11T04:24:00.000-08:00

Let's be clear. We have a semi-democracy in Canada. But even the low-level of corporate-capitalist democracy was too much for stephen harper. Too many restrictions on his arbitrary policies.

Anyway, I was reading Orwell's Bastard and he was talking about how the Liberals should reconcile themselves to their third-place status and the NDP should be extending an olive branch to them so that they can come to some sort of arrangement to defeat the greater evil of harper's Rovian-style garbage here in Canada.

Canada is in the same place that the USA was in with the bush II vs Kerry campaign. At the time, I said that were I a US-American I would hold my nose and vote for Kerry, just to reassert that electoral politics wasn't completely hopeless. Stop the criminal bush II.

But bush II stole his second election, Kerry caved, and then, when the Democrats retook the legislature, they showed that elections are entirely meaningless in the USA.

Has the "conservative" wave stopped? We have one last chance to try to do things legally.

Another Victory For The Mushy Middle?

2012-01-10T07:44:00.000-08:00

Wow! A Quebec NDP MP plans on jumping ship to the Liberal Party of Canada! So that an MP for the party of Bob Rae is moving to Bob Rae's new party.

And we still have an electoral system that allows the scuzziest 25-30% of the electorate to lord their stupidity and greed over the rest of us.

What's the fucking point I ask you?

Check this out. Read it and weep.

The Syrian Crackdown

2012-01-09T11:02:00.000-08:00

Syria's government is a revolting abomination. I recall Abdullah Almalki, the Canadian citizen who CSIS had Syria torture for them mention how he could hear children being tortured in the other room behind the back wall of his cell. I despise it just as much as I despise the rapist theocratic bullshit government of Iran.

But at the same time, let's put something into perspective. The USA's detestable puppet-regimes making all that noise for the Syrian government to stop with the crackdown and the killing of innocent people, ... while Bahrain and Saudi Arabia murdered their innocent protesters! And while they did jack-shit about Israel's mass-murdering of innocent civilians in Operation "Cast Lead."

It's the same nauseating, hypocritical expropriation of the call for democracy in the Middle East by the revolting US government and its inhuman stooges. (Of whom, stephen harper is one of the most contemptible.)

None of those governments, Syria, Iran, Jordan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, The USA, Canada, are worth a damn. To hell with all of them.

The Human Element

2012-01-08T07:45:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to type this for quite a while. The picture I'll be talking about has been in my memory for over a year. It was a news article about stephen harper and the picture showed him sitting with his wife watching their son playing a basketball game with his highschool. At the time I thought Harper the Younger was a nice-looking boy and that harper looked remarkably un-robotic. There seemed to be glimmers of real emotions (and not his usual selfish ones that are the only other ones I've seen bubble to the surface) as he watched his son playing.

Of course, I've never doubted that harper is a human being. I don't believe in the reality of concepts like "good" and "evil." My words used against harper (and many others) such as "vermin" and "sub-human" are just that, .... words. I have no belief that harper, or anyone else, is actually lower-than-human and therefore entitled to whatever murderous abuses I could dream up.

So this picture didn't so much come as a shock to me as it made me feel bad for the boy and a trifle surprised about the man. Yes, we're all human. And even stephen harper is capable of caring about someone else.

But that only makes certain of his actions all the more revolting. A while ago, I wrote about how robotic stephen harper is. I still believe that he's a psychopath. But evidently (as that picture seemed to show) he's not 100% selfish and narcissistic.

When he heard that the Afghan military, on who's behalf the CF is fighting, killing and dying for, are raping young children, harper could have stopped and thought about how this revolting behaviour invalidates the entire mission (at least because it is harder to suppress an insurgency against a government whose operatives rape children). But instead, he sees the issue as a problem to be swept under the rug.

When he heard that First Nations peoples at Attawapiskat were cramped into filthy, unheated shacks in the far north, he could have thought about those poor suffering people, and resolved to change the government policies that had condemned them to dangerous squalor. Instead, he deliberately lies and blames the victims for their plight and increases his level of abuse.

And on and on it goes and WILL go. All the people unemployed. All the sick people losing access to help. All the people about to lose the roof over their head. All the people exploited and abused by the corporations and the state. These are all examples of suffering that harper is CAPABLE of preventing, but he chooses instead to exacerbate. Because he's sold himself to capitalist greed-pigs. He's their errand boy.

Young Master Harper: I am sorry that I have to call your father an asshole and a scum-bag. But that's what he is. stephen harper: I am sorry that your son is going to hear so much out-pouring of abuse against his father from so many people and that he is going to have to live with having an imprisoned war criminal for an old man. But you brought it all upon yourself. You had a choice. You could have chosen differently, but you chose to serve power instead of humanity.

The loss is all of ours.

One of harper's Senate Appointments

2012-01-07T09:02:00.000-08:00

So, harper the un-Canadian racist corporate stooge homophobic sexist war criminal appointed some people to the Senate.

One of them was Ottawa police chief Vernon White. You know, ... the guy who cleaned house within the Ottawa Police Service, expelling all the scum-bag pigs who got their jollies from torturing (mostly female) prisoners?

Oh, wait a second, White actually did sweet fuck all while his pigs ran wild.

And for that non-action, he gets rewarded with a plum patronage appointment.

Because our political elites are contemptible vermin.

Just like with lying Toronto police chief Bill Blair, covering for his lying boss, lying, crying, farting Mayor Rob Ford, saying that Ford didn't call 911 operators "fucking bitches" for not sending a response fast enough to his house. The CBC ombudsman says that their reporting of Ford's abusiveness was sound. To which Toronto Police Service spokesperson said ....

... well nothing important anyway. I don't see the need to repeat their stupid lies here.

Blair will say any stupid thing that comes into his head and Rob Ford's whole career is based on blatant lying.

What these walking, talking pieces-of-shit need to realize is that past misdeeds (abetting torture, contempt for parliament, lying, lying, lying) eventually have repercussions. These institutions and positions don't magically impart respect to their occupants. That has to be earned.

And they've lost it.

Everyone's a Big Doody-Head

2012-01-06T17:01:00.000-08:00

That is all.

Have a nice weekend.

"A Little Thump Therapy Never Hurt Anyone"

2012-01-05T03:48:00.000-08:00

"Right on! He's just saying what everybody else is thinking."

The "he" in question is Iowa state representative, Clel Baudler. Baudler is referring to any attempts by the Occupy movement to protest at the Iowa Repug caucus for the farcical presidential campaign that's supposed to take place either this year or in 2222. (Campaign season seems to be forever in their idiotic electoral system down there.)

Republicans across Iowa are bracing for trouble on Tuesday, concerned that caucus sites will be the next stop for the Occupy protesters who've staged demonstrations and disruptions at election events across the state.

Occupy leaders say they're not planning to interfere with the voting, though they expect actions leading up the vote at candidates' headquarters and afterward at victory parties. But even if 99 percent of the 99 percenters comply, the prospect of scattered protesters inciting confrontations with Republican voters has people from both camps on edge.

"Tempers can flare, and people can start to get out of control," said Jack Whitver, a state senator and precinct captain for one of the larger caucus sites, just outside of Des Moines. "With a crowd of over 700 people, you just want to keep everything under control and make sure that something ugly doesn't happen."
Whitver promised a polite response to those who might try to chant or stage other disruptions at his caucus site - but that's not a unanimous position.

Iowa state Rep. Clel Baudler predicted that potential protestors at his caucus site in Adair County should expect a response that "will be swift and it will be sure."

"Since I'm not a state trooper anymore, they probably won't be handcuffed - but I have friends," Baudler said. "If an officer asks for help, I will help, believe me."

"We're just not going to tolerate in rural Iowa what's going on in the big metropolitan areas," Baudler said. "A little thump therapy never hurt anybody."

Baudler is a former Iowa state trooper. Which means that how many people he's raped and murdered is anyone's guess. But he's clearly a total shit-head. Here's a representative of the Repugnican Party USA, the second of the two "Shit on the US Constitution" parties that run that country on behalf of complete Wall Street criminals, and this scum imagines he's fit to criticize the Occupy Movement? A movement of progressives (who have almost always been proven correct about anything that's important) and millions of ordinary US Americans who are tired of being ripped-off and taken for granted and lied to.

Baudler should recognize that he represents a minority, and a despised minority at that. Let me put it this way: If Rush Limbaugh and his whole ditto-head army had to face some "thump therapy" from the entire population of US America that despises them, they'd be pounded into sauce. And that puddle of slime would have constituted the shock troops of the "fearsome" Repugnican Party USA.

Baudler should realize that he's a pathetic old codger whose "best" brutalizing, raping and race-baiting days are behind him. If shit-heads like him don't shut their gobs fast enough they might just find out that "thump therapy" actually DOES hurt. (Hey! I'm just saying what everybody is thinking!)

Speaking of pieces of shit: Barack Obama doesn't have many friends. Awwwwww! Hey Barack! I hear that Bradley Manning doesn't have anyone to talk to! Oh! Wait! You're the guy torturing him and keeping him in solitary confinement! Oh well. Let's hear about the one widdle fwiend that wonewee widdle Bawack Obama has been able to make. Turns out it's a particularly sleazy banker, Robert Wolf. Isn't that sad? Barack Obama doesn't like to press the flesh with ordinary US Americans. He doesn't seem to like his fellow politicians. He has some old "friends" who were part of the machine that brought his public relations snow-job to power. Now he likes to hang out with a super-rich bankster who uses him to protect his ill-booten-gotty and for nothing else. Think this Robert Wolf character will have much time for torturin' Barack after his presidency is over?

Who cares? Who fucking cares one way or the other? In a better world they'd both be wondering if they'll be cell mates.

Still Busy

2012-01-04T08:48:00.000-08:00

This is more to complete my "post a day" policy than for anything else ...

Evolution Neanderthals Homo Sapiens Fossils Science Anthropology Biology>

What's With All The Videos Man?

2012-01-03T19:39:00.000-08:00

Simple. I'm busy. I started something this morning, but no time to finish before the deadline. Roll the presses! Er, um, ... I mean, "Action!":

Fuckin' "A"

2012-01-02T16:18:00.000-08:00

What can I say?

This Went Viral But I Missed It

2012-01-01T10:51:00.000-08:00

According to Salon.com this was one of the biggest viral videos of 2011. I missed it I guess. But I can see why it was popular.

I didn't know what else to post.

Where's Rob Ford? (The Marg Delahunty Question Revisited)

2011-12-31T09:25:00.000-08:00

So there's a section in this week's NOW where they say this about Rob Ford:

His office still refuses to make his itinerary public, unable or unwilling to account for his long absences from City Hall while claiming the mayor is out doing what he’s always done: helping constituents.

Ford says his obligation is to the public, not the media. Lately, he’s taken to suggesting that his disappearances are in preparation for another run in 2014. But how long can he continue his risky political behaviour?

As I read that, it means that nobody can call up Toronto City Hall and ask where the mayor is that day. That's what it seems to say. Otherwise, if the media wanted to find him, they could just call themselves since it isn't a secret. It doesn't appear that the issue is that the media wants his itinerary sent to them without their having to request it.

If that's the case, then we can understand why Mary Walsh and crew showed up at Ford's door-step to poke some gentle fun at him. They simply had no other way of doing their skit. That the CBC crew showed up at Ford's home was apparently beyond the pale for a lot of people. Ford's secrecy makes it all more explicable.

And it adds a further lie to Ford's list of lies from that day (paraphrases):

1. "It was dark out." (It was bright morning sunshine.)
2. "My daughter was crying." (His daughter wasn't there.)
3. "I didn't swear at the 9-11 operators." (Ford and his toady Chief Blair swear to this, but they're both shameless, serial liars, so to hell with them.)

We can now add:

4. "Why didn't they come to where I work? They know where to find me."

Which he said in a mewling, whining tone to assembled reporters who were probably specifically informed of Ford's whereabouts so that he could spew his self-serving, self-pitying bullshit.

It's true what they say about bullies. They're generally cowards with a lot of personal problems.

Great Moments in "Conservative" Stupidity: Ronald Reagan and the threat of invasion from Nicaragua

2011-12-30T07:59:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while, right-wing trolls show up here at the school-yard and try to bait me with empty insults from their anonymous selves. It makes me feel a little queasy to tell you the truth. You know how a fly will bash itself again and again against a window, unable to comprehend the whole concept of see-through glass? That's how I feel about these "conservatives" who just spew stupid nonsense again and again and again and imagine that it hurts me when they insult me. And it's horrifying to think that there are creatures, humans like us in every respect, whose mental capacities are strained mightily to keep them functioning slightly above insect level.

When these idiots show up here, I just think of the decade-upon-decade of utter stupidity that their demographic has fallen for over the years. The asinine fears and threats that they've always tried to shriek into our ears. I think about how they've been wrong, wrong, wrong, about pretty much everything, and then I tend to delete their empty, going nowhere, accomplishing nothing snickers and ravings.

Since I can't think of anything new to write about today, I thought I'd remind people (or bring to their attention if they missed it the first time) just one example of this sort of stupidity. I bring to you today, Ronald Reagan's attempt to portray tiny Nicaragua, which had just freed itself from the US-puppet Somoza's murderous kleptocracy, as a threat to the United States:

Reagan also reminded the Clements supporters that when he urged military support for the rebels seeking to overthrow Nicaragua's Marxist government, he warned that Nicaragua was only a two-day drive from Texas.
He said that "Communist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua has made a lot of mistakes, but even they know better than to get themselves in a tangle with a bunch of Texans.
"Even with all the tanks and guns from the Soviet Union, my guess is that the Sandinistas would make it about as far as the shopping center in Pecos before Roger Staubach came out of retirement, teamed up with some off-duty Texas Rangers and the front four of the Dallas Cowboys and pushed the Sandinistas down the river, out across the Gulf and right back to Havana where they belong."
Staubach, the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback, was master of ceremonies at the rally.

It was insulting garbage then and it's revolting garbage now. And notice how, as with everything else, these "conservatives" want to have their cake and eat it too. Reagan was shameless enough to try to instill fear and terror in the minds of US-Americans, while at the same time stupidly boasting how easily the could be beaten by a few US "he-men."

In case this whole Sandinistas thing was before your time, do check out this link about the extent of US state terrorism against Nicaragua. Be sure to check out the gruesome accounts of atrocities committed by Reagan's Contra rebels against innocent Nicaraguan civilians, and then remember that this senile piece-of-shit Reagan got a hero's send-off when he finally croaked.

It's too late for Reagan, but there's still time for harper. It's still possible to work to get stephen harper imprisoned for the rest of his life for war crimes. There's no statute of limitations on this stuff. harper, Obama, bush II, Paul Martin, Jean Chretien, Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Cheney, .... all this vermin should be treated as the torturing, blood-soaked monsters that they are. And their fanboys' protests to the contrary should be treated with scorn and derision.

Perhaps we should create a place modelled after the Hell that these religious morons and hypocrites profess to believe in and put them there for the rest of their lives.

Holiday Hiatus

2011-12-29T07:43:00.000-08:00

The politicians are home with their families and their constituents (and the occasional hookers), and us lefty bloggers have exposed the shit-headery of the right-wing for years, ... (to no effect as harper has won a majority and Ford became mayor of Toronto)*, and I've got a bit of a cold, so I don't really know what to say.

*Right-wing shit-heads usually take this as an opportunity to gloat. To whit: "Your team only won because they bribed the referee, poisoned our team, and because your coach is the league president's son." "Yeah, but we still won. Nyah! Nyah!"

If You Missed This, Read It Now ...

2011-12-28T12:16:00.000-08:00

Dave of the Galloping Beaver Blog tells ignoramuses that they're stupid ignoramuses.

It's beautiful.

Outrage as a Defence Mechanism

2011-12-25T06:32:00.000-08:00

NOTE: I don't have a fucking clue what "blogger" did to make the formatting so insane. Enjoy!

Here's a couple of online articles! The first is from Matt Taibbi: "A Christmas Message From America's Rich" and it is, as you can imagine, as infuriating and sickening as it sounds. (What America's rich are saying 'natch, not what Taibbi says about America's rich.) For example:

Then there’s Leon Cooperman, the former chief of Goldman Sachs’s money-management unit, who said he was urged to speak out by his fellow golfers. His message was a version of Wall Street’s increasingly popular If-you-people-want-a-job, then-you’ll-shut-the-fuck-up rhetorical line:
Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.
“You’ll get more out of me,” the billionaire said, “if you treat me with respect.”
Finally, there is this from Blackstone CEO Steven Schwartzman:
Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.
“You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”
There are obviously a great many things that one could say about this remarkable collection of quotes.

Which of course Taibbi does. You can read the whole thing yourselves. I just want to pause for a moment on the section about interest-rate swaps. He's talking about J. P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon (who the NYT once referred to as "Obama's favourite banker"):

Dimon, incidentally, is another one of those bankers who’s complaining now about the unfair criticism. “Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” he recently said, at an investor’s conference.
Hmm. Is Dimon right? Do people hate him just because he’s rich and successful? That really would be unfair. Maybe we should ask the people of Jefferson County, Alabama, what they think.
That particular locality is now in bankruptcy proceedings primarily because Dimon’s bank, Chase, used middlemen to bribe local officials – literally bribe, with cash and watches and new suits – to sign on to a series of onerous interest-rate swap deals that vastly expanded the county’s debt burden.
Essentially, Jamie Dimon handed Birmingham, Alabama a Chase credit card and then bribed its local officials to run up a gigantic balance, leaving future residents and those residents’ children with the bill. As a result, the citizens of Jefferson County will now be making payments to Chase until the end of time.
Do you think Jamie Dimon would have done that deal if he lived in Jefferson County? Put it this way: if he was trying to support two kids on $30,000 a year, and lived in a Birmingham neighborhood full of people in the same boat, would he sign off on a deal that jacked up everyone’s sewer bills 400% for the next thirty years?
Doubtful. But then again, people like Jamie Dimon aren’t really citizens of any country. They live in their own gated archipelago, and the rest of the world is a dumping ground.
Just look at how Chase behaved in Greece, for example.
Having seen how well interest-rate swaps worked for Jefferson County, Alabama, Chase “helped” Greece mask its debt problem for years by selling a similar series of swaps to the Greek government. The bank then turned around and worked with banks like Goldman, Sachs to create a thing called the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which allowed investors to bet against Greek debt.
In other words, Chase knowingly larded up the nation of Greece with a crippling future debt burden, then turned around and helped the world bet against Greek debt.
Does a citizen of Greece do that deal? Forget that: does a human being do that deal?

You know, I find it rich that morons who think the ordinary Greeks should suffer whatever austerity is imposed upon them, because they supposedly made hay while the sun was shining, imagine that the whole country was in on the interest-rate swap scam. Supposedly it was a secret from Germany's bankers but every Greek pensioner was laughing into their shirt-sleeve, in on the joke. And now, all the Greeks have to pay!!! That's right! The Greek millionaires and billionaires who have taken all their money out of the country will pay on higher taxes on, well, nothing probably, and everyone else will see tax increases, benefit cuts, higher education costs, unemployment, etc., etc., etc., ...

It's a goddamn scam and ANYONE who buys into the worldview of the richest 1% is a fucking moron who has renounced the right to be taken seriously.

And while we should be outraged at the infantile petulance of these billionaire parasites (YES! Even that "Home Depot" guy is leeching off the hard work of his thousands of employees. Those Wall Street assholes are completely useless.) what is even more disgusting is that we continue (as a society) to live in their world and respond to their worldview (fighting back against austerity for example) when the REAL challenges are forced to go onto the back-burner. I'm referring to our mindless devouring of the world's life-sustaining resources (BTW - if the quote is still the wrong font in snot-green, blame "Blogger"!) :

There isn't enough to go around anymore. We're stealing from our biosphere and we're stealing from each other and we're even stealing from generations not yet born. For example, we're emptying our oceans of essential food species, depleting them beyond their baseline reproduction stocks. And, as we fish one to the verge of extinction, we move on to the next most desirable species and find ways to market that. We're draining our groundwater reserves to drive the hopelessly unsustainable Green Revolution and, in the process, subjecting farmland to massive amounts of fertilizers and pesticides that speed its exhaustion and transform it into useless desert. With food scarcity already spreading through the world we're diverting vital farmland and increasingly scarce water to grow crops to make biofuels.

The long and the short of it is that the human race has to get serious about switching to an alternate political-economic system, but we're in thrall to shallow greed-heads and we waste all of our time trying to "resist" the US-led capitalist-imperialist plunder of the Middle-East's oil reserves to feed the carbon economy, which feeds the parasite Wall Street economy, which causes financial crises and fucks us all over.

It's "OUTRAGEOUS"!!!! But what does it mean to be "outraged"? What do we do when we're "outraged"? Protest for an afternoon? Camp out in a park until we're asked to leave? Write our MPs? Write a letter to our local paper?

Throw a rock through a corporation's window?

Hey! For that last option, did you:

A. Think "right-fucking-on dude! smash the state! the people united will never be defeated!"

B. Think "Horrors! A rock going through a corporations' window! Now the state has every reason to crush legitimate dissent and blah, blah, mewl, whine ..."

If you answered A or B, then you're part of the problem.

Merry Whatever.

Whatevah

2011-12-24T04:10:00.000-08:00

Abusive Mining Companies and stuff ...

2011-12-22T09:34:00.001-08:00

Go and read this little story: "Canada-El Salvador trade deal to further entrench power of rogue mining corporations"

Understand that the mining company has its own side of the story. But, as is usual with this sort of thing, their side is no doubt complete lies.

In other news, Barack Obama has taken time out from torturing Bradley Manning and bombing Afghanistan and Pakistan, to lecturing Hugo Chavez about human rights and peace.

Fuck It

2011-12-21T14:58:00.000-08:00

I couldn't sleep last night, so I ended up watching this:

Enjoy

Flaherty Trades Health For Prisons and Fighter Jets

2011-12-20T04:38:00.000-08:00

So, our useless idiot of a finance minister, Jim Flaherty, announced to the premiers that the harpercon monstrosity is going to be unilaterally abandoning the current federal funding regime for health care. Flaherty isn't discussing anything of substance here. He's just switching to an arbitrarily arrived at formula that translates into far less federal spending on the provinces' health care plans.

Flaherty probably believes in what he's doing. He's a hopeless dullard after all. And while I'm sure he's not alone in being so, we have to be careful. Other austerity preachers are cruel monsters and psychopaths who can attain heights of cleverness that Flaherty is incapable of even dreaming of.

What Flaherty hasn't done is make the connection between his imagined prudence in restraining health spending, and the titanic waste that harper plans to engage in with his prison building (and filling) plans and his F-35 fighter-jet purchases (among other things). Once again, Jim Flaherty helps to make his world an inferior place. His contribution to the world is a negative one. It's rare to see someone being so much worse than useless, but the extent of Jim Flaherty's stupidity is likewise rarely matched.

Seriously, ...

2011-12-18T21:12:00.001-08:00

I'm sick of dealing with the GARBAGE thinking!!!

The non-existent "gravy train" at Toronto City Hall.

The non-existent "WMDs" of Saddam Hussein.

The TRILLIONS of dollars spent to bail out criminal banksters while the idiots gibber about how global warming is a socialist plot. (http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/18-3 )

The closet-cases and religious nut-bars and racists trying to set social policies when they should be locked-up and medicated somewhere ... [kidding, just enlightened]

I'm sick of these morons controlling our public discussions. A system is sick when it oozes out stuff like Margaret Wente, Ezra Levant, Glen Beck and Sarah Palin to have a major say in what it will do in the near future.

Sick, sick, sick. That is all.

Their Values and Ours

2011-12-18T11:40:00.000-08:00

Have you noticed that progressives care about things like promoting peace, attacking racism, promoting democracy, achieving economic justice and preserving the planet, while "conservatives" seem to be concerned with idiotic things like combating "Islamofascist" terrorism (by killing lots and lots of Muslims), fomenting racism, attacking democracy, promoting economic inequality and destroying the planet (in order to preserve "jobs" that employers want to eliminate in any case)?

Have you noticed that we're sane and that "conservatives" are complete and utter shit-heads?

I have.

Speaking to a soldier

2011-12-17T06:47:00.001-08:00

One of "the troops" (tm)! I was out with some friends, and 4-1/2 pints later, in the line-up for the pisser I end up talking to a young man who, as part of the conversation, informs me that he's in the Canadian Forces. (It was a naturally occurring thing I remember. I just don't remember what we were talking about before he said it. Been drinking.)

"I'm a pinko but I got nothing against soldiers." I said. "Governments that send them on stupid missions and then dick them around when they get wounded, that's another story."

He answered: "I'm as left-wing as you can get. I've been to Afghanistan and I think it's fucked. We should never have gotten involved."

We both agreed that the harpercons' (Peter MacKay especially) are contemptible scum. Then it was time to piss and re-join our respective parties.

Support the troops!

An Appreciation of Edward Keenan's Dec 5-21/11 Column

2011-12-16T05:08:00.000-08:00

The article's headline is "Why raising taxes might (ahem) solve our problems" and it refers to the debates over the lying, blubbering cry-baby Rob Ford's budget:

During last week’s public hearings on next year’s municipal budget, scores of citizens told the city’s politicians they didn’t want services cut. Almost all of the speakers were asked by members of Rob Ford’s budget committee, “Do you have any solutions?” Many of them suggested raising taxes. The suggestion drew scorn from committee members. It’s fair to say Councillors Doug Ford, Mike Del Grande, Frances Nunziata and Giorgio Mammoliti did not consider it a suggestion at all.

Even though dozens of citizens had just suggested raising taxes as a way to maintain service levels, Del Grande told a television reporter from Global News, “No one is really answering the question of how to pay for [that].”
It’s a childish response—“Nyah, nyah, nyah, I can’t hear you!”—even if it is understandable.

It would be understandable, if it was at all fair. There's further snide, condescending responses to the left-wing pinkos from Ford's gang of idiots and liars in this week's NOW article about the budget disaster as well. (I want to focus on Keenan's column today though.) The thing is that Ford and his fellow fuck-ups don't have a leg to stand on. You see, taking them at their word, these morons said that there was around half-a-billion dollars of "GRAVY" that could be painlessly eliminated, allowing for tax cuts and freezes "GUARANTEED." So, if we want to pretend they weren't lying through their shit-stained teeth, Ford, DelGrande, Nunziata, Mammoliti were just completely, totally out to lunch about the state of the city's finances and they should step aside.

You see, it doesn't even matter that nobody wants to raise taxes, even if (as Keenan will go on to demonstrate) that Toronto's tax rates are among the lowest in the whole GTA. It doesn't matter if the Ford administration has found itself in a mess and they refuse to raise taxes because that would be political suicide. None of this matters because Ford said, again and again and again and then he GUARANTEED it, that there would be no mess. There was no mess other than an ocean of gravy that had been built up over the years. Ford was completely, totally, unforgivably wrong, and he should hang his head in shame. He's a goddamned useless liar and he and everyone associated with him should resign enmasse.

Obviously, the shamelessness (plus stupidity and boorishness) that allowed Ford to lie and babble so blatantly will help the fuck-head rationalize his continuing in office, but let's continue with Keenan's article:

But in Toronto, where the city delivers much better services for far lower taxes than anywhere else in the GTA, it’s time for a grown-up to conduct a reasonable conversation about finding ways to raise more revenue.

Did you read that? Read it again: "it’s time for a grown-up to conduct a reasonable conversation" That's the reason that I decided to type an appreciation of Keenan's article. The entire Ford administration is comprised of childish liars and morons. Children, being who they are, at their level of mental and emotional development, tend to shamelessly concoct more absurd and ridiculous lies than do adults. In fact, adults who are forced to invent preposterous stories tend to be people who are routinely referred to as "childish." They're generally selfish people who haven't developed empathy with others and who don't think about their actions before they do them. Mayor Rob Ford, with his whining, his quick temper, his carelessness (even indifference) about facts, is a pathetic 300 lb [14o kg] man-child.

And what Ford represents really, is the entire "conservative" political movement of the last few decades. It began with the simplistic lies of the actor-president Ronald Reagan, which descended into the shameless greed, crudeness and hypocrisy of the Newt Gingrich years, and it touched bottom with the out-and-out criminality and idiocy of the bush II years.

Yes, those were US-American politicians that I was referring to. Because this is the centre of late-capitalist politics. And it is infecting us here, north of the border in Canada. The elevation of Ezra Levant's locker pin-up Stockwell Day to leader of the movement, the simultaneous freak-show of the Mike Harris government in Ontario, and culminating in the quasi-fascist regime of morons, closet-cases, religious nutbars and other assorted scum of the present harper regime, all take their cues from the garbage that is the US right-wing.

And in doing so, they are obviously enabled by the cooperation of the liberal opposition. This descent into madness isn't an affliction of the "conservative" parties of the world, but the scrambling of greed-heads and stupid monsters, struggling to preserve their privileges in a dying system. The great battle of our time is how decent, intelligent people within the majority population can protect themselves against greed-heads and shit-heads.

Let's continue with the Keenan column:

In Toronto, we have the largest metropolitan police force in Canada, and our cops are the best paid in the country, too—as everyone agrees they should be. We have the most sophisticated transit system in Ontario, by far, and it survives with fewer government subsidies than any other major transit system in North America. We have the best and most-used library system on the continent, and, as Canada’s largest urban centre, we provide extensive services to non-English speakers, the poor and those otherwise in need of specialized assistance.

Despite these top-tier service levels, our property taxes are very low. In Hamilton and Oshawa, residential property tax rates are more than twice as high as they are in Toronto. In Ajax, residential taxes are about 72 per cent higher and in Mississauga they are 25 per cent higher. Toronto has the lowest property taxes in the GTA. (And lower than many other large cities: Montreal’s property tax rates are about 20 per cent higher, while Ottawa’s are about 70 per cent.)

This is more damning evidence that we owe nothing to Ford or his witless supporters. The upshot of those facts is that whenever some fucking imbecile goes on about "the mess" left behind by progressive mayor David Miller, we should just laugh in their face. When the union-loving David Miller (who was so willing to roll-over to all of their exorbitant demands that they went out on strike to reject his offers!) is blamed for anything, it's blame based on ignorance and delusions. Once again, these right-wingers are simply not fit for adult political discussions and it is LONG past time that we ignored their stupid protests and complaints.

If the city were to increase residential property tax rates to the level that people in Ajax pay, the city would raise an additional $2 billion per year—enough to eliminate our supposedly crippling civic debt before the end of Ford’s first term (and pay for the entire Sheppard subway construction by the end of a possible second term). If they raised taxes to the average rate charged in other GTA cities, we’d see more than $900 million a year in extra revenue.

In this context, let’s remember that the budget committee is seeking ways to avoid making $88 million in cuts. A tax increase of 6.5 per cent this year would render all of the proposed service cuts unnecessary; even then, Toronto would still have the lowest rates in the GTA.

Keenan goes on to argue that there CAN be an argument against tax increases but it has to be based on reality as processed by sane adults. Perhaps other policies make living in Toronto more expensive than other places and these things should be attended to first before property taxes are raised. Perhaps the province and the feds should give Toronto more control over tax revenue. But regardless, as it stands now, Toronto was a well-run, low-tax location and Rob Ford is a lying asshole. These things are facts. They're simple facts. They're facts that say that everything that comes out of the mouths of Rob Ford and his fans' mouths is bullshit. These are facts that say that right-wingers don't understand policy and they don't understand budgeting and they don't understand truth and they don't understand reality.

When we take the battle to them, there should be no respect for their arguments. They have nothing but stupid lies. There should be no respect for decorum. They abuse our restraint. There should be no respect for their feelings. These people are racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, stupid thugs. Canadian Cynic used to document the drooling idiocy of the right-wing in Canada on a regular basis. Nothing has changed since he stopped blogging. They're still morons. Contemptible morons. They should be treated as such and the people who might be tempted to embrace their beliefs should be shamed into leaning more towards our direction, thereby raising the intelligence level of our political culture.

Occupy Economics Departments

2011-12-15T16:35:00.000-08:00

Nicely devastated sir!

What about the failure of the economics profession to forecast the economic collapse? Mankiw concedes, “It is fair to say that this crisis caught most economists flat-footed.” But he insists; “Yet this is no reason for embarrassment….Some things are just hard to predict.”

Mankiw is certainly correct that most conventional economists were caught flat-footed. Indeed, many boasted that their “method not a doctrine” had led to policies that had achieved enduring prosperity and stability. The “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved,” declared Nobel Prize winner Robert Lucas in his 2003 Presidential Address to the AEA.

Before 2008, conventional economic theory championed the deregulation and expansion of the financial sector as a strategy to enhance economic efficiency and lower risk. It taught us that speculation is not a problem because all of the actors have all the information necessary to make the right decision.

It ignored the tsunami of increasing private debt while concentrating its attention and disapproval on a much slower growing public debt.

“The problem is that economists (and those who listen to them) became over-confident in their preferred models of the moment: markets are efficient, financial innovation transfers risks to those best able to bear it, self-regulation works best and government intervention is ineffective and harmful,” Dani Rodrik, Professor of Economics at Harvard comments.

Again Keen is more blunt. “Neoclassical economists were effectively trained to not see this crisis coming, by theoretical fallacies that led them to ignore crucial real-world phenomena like the ballooning levels of private debt, and rampant speculation and fraud in the private sector.”

Well done!

A Reading List

2011-12-14T03:51:00.000-08:00

An anonymous reader asked me to put up a reading list entry that others could contribute to. It ain't a bad idea.

In my reply I mentioned A Wicked Company:The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment.

I should also add that there's a reading list to be found at the EnMasse thread: "What are you currently reading?" that's fulla my reads and a buncha other people's.

But by all means, drop reading suggestions in the comments section.

What Does This Say About Canada? (It Can't Be Anything Good)

2011-12-13T04:44:00.000-08:00

So, Christie Belchforth writes for the National Post. Perhaps their worst columnist? Another reason that newspaper is failing? But Belchforth used to write for the Globe and Mail. Of course, Margaret ('s brain) Wente writes for that newspaper. And she's perhaps their worst columnist. (She's in the top 3 worst for sure.) And then there's the Liberal Toronto Star. And their worst columnist is by far Rosie DiMoron.

Christie Belchforth, Margaret's brain Wente, Rosie DiMoron.

What does it say about this country that these hideous idiots are such prominent writers?

What's going on that our male-dominated newspapers choose to have these abominations to represent women? Is it some sort of plot? Or do they like what they read and think: "Finally! A girl who GETS IT!" ?

No matter what, it doesn't say anything good about us.

Jokes

2011-12-12T15:42:00.000-08:00

"The War on Drugs" is a joke. "The War on Terror" is a joke. "Humanitarian Intervention" is a joke. "Capitalist Democracy" is a joke.

But I ain't laughing.

I'm Picturing Rick Perry Gettin' It On With Christie Blatchford

2011-12-11T07:21:00.000-08:00

Because I'm a sick fuck that's why!!!

I watched shit-head Texas governor Rick Perry's "Strong" commercial the other day. Jaw-dropping stupidity. Every time that I think the "conservative" movement has hit bottom, totally discredited itself, and that the moral regeneration of US and Canadian culture is about to begin, something more sickening comes out, the Rush Limbaugh fans embrace it, and we all fall deeper into the abyss.

So, in other news, I thought I'd check out what Sister Sage had to say about Christie Belchforth's latest abomination. Now, I'd heard that Belchforth had seen some guys hugging on the street in Toronto and figured that men (at least in Toronto) were too wimpy and sissy for her tastes. Evidently, she would go on to list some more "manly" activities that guys should be doing, instead of hugging, like farting on cue. (Belchforth apparently farts a lot or has a fixation with them. [Double-ugh! Belchforth's farting fetish has now insinuated itself into my unbidden thoughts of Perry-Belcforth coitus!!])

To my utter amazement, it wasn't some grown men hugging, but some adolescent boys that set her off!

There were a couple of boys, maybe 10 years old, maybe 12, walking ahead of me. Coming towards them was another small knot of boys about the same age.

The two groups met, and immediately began hugging each another, one at a time. The trustees and ding-dongs at the Toronto District School Board would have been ecstatic; I was mortified and appalled.

Jesus Christ! Get a grip! My generation of guys doesn't hug. (I only learned the correct side to lean into when hugging a woman a few months ago! Apparently a lot of other guys my age have the same problem.) I thought maybe the 20-somethings are doing it. Whatever. If that's what "the kids" are doing these days, it's fine with me. But Belchforth couldn't handle boys doing it! I suspect she'd have had an aneurysm if it had been a group of adult men.

The rest of her column read like a list of cliches, hypocrisies and bigotry. This sort of shit really doesn't do anything for the quality of Canada as a mature democracy.

That's my post for the day. Slow news day. Lots of work to do ...

Hey Peter MacKay! I'm Spartacus!

2011-12-09T17:41:00.001-08:00

I'm with The Sixth Estate (and no doubt, many other bloggers) on this one. In response to the buffoonery of Peter MacKay threatening legal action against the MPs who said he lied about the reason for his helicopter trip, I'm saying the following:

Defense Minister Peter MacKay lied when he said that he took the helicopter ride to observe a search and rescue operation. The real reason he took the helicopter was because he has a massive sense of entitlement, no sense of shame, and he wanted to act like a big-shot. He used valuable government resources for his own selfish, lazy purposes. He wanted a quick trip to the airport so that he could get to a stupid photo-op.

There Peter MacKay. Sue me.

I think you're an asshole. I still remember your idiotic behaviour when your department leaked the Colvin emails to friendly generals and journalistic hacks like Christie Belchforth and Rosie DiMoron that they wouldn't give to the parliamentary committee that was asking for them.

You're a contemptible piece of shit MacKay.

ETA: Here is the video of the offensive Peter MacKay that I was referring to. Look at that cowardly, entitled, ass-kissing, revolting failure of a human being. I must thank Alison of Creekside for having brought it to my attention.

The Canada Wheat Board Ruling

2011-12-08T12:49:00.000-08:00

All that I have time for today is to discuss the strange little ruling against the harpercons' bill to abolish the Canada Wheat Board.

The ruling says that the Agriculture Minister's introduction of the bill is illegal.

This was a little troubling given that "sean in ottawa" on page 8 of this thread at EnMasse convinced me that it's within Parliament's mandate to unilaterally change its own laws. (Just like Bob Rae was within his rights to unilaterally abrogate contracts with Ontario public sector workers [... which, please, doesn't mean that i agreed with that!!!].) And, that being the case, the beautiful thing about the Left ever winning power under such conditions would mean that (assuming this left-wing government had a spine) it could legislate radical legislation and overturn precedents with just as much carefree abandon.

But "unionist" (who generally rubs me the wrong way) explains it thusly:

I suggest you folks read the court's decision. It didn't invalidate any law. It explicitly doesn't prevent the new legislation from being adopted, nor from having full force and effect if adopted. The existing legislation said that the Minister couldn't table certain changes without consulting the board and the farmers. Parliament passed that condition. The court found that he had indeed tabled legislation without consulting the board and the farmers. It declared that he had violated that law. He did violate that law, while it was still in full force and effect. The court didn't order anyone to do anything further (except awarding costs). So Tobey's concern is understandable, but not in this case.

ETA: The decision is here.

By the way, if the new legislation had been introduced by another Minister, or by a private member's bill, there would have been no violation of the law as far as I can see. It still would have been tyrannical - but not unlawful. It just shows how arrogant the Cons are.

So, it's a queer little ruling, but not that problematic.

The First Nations Unwilling to Tolerate harper's Bullshit

2011-12-07T11:44:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I wrote:

harper is driving the First Nations peoples into a major confrontation and it would behoove all of us non-scum, non-harpercon Canadians to prepare ourselves to support them.

Today, the CBC reported:

A regional chief who represents Attawapiskat says that a number of his counterparts in other First Nations are prepared to engage in civil disobedience over Ottawa's handling of a housing crisis in the northern Ontario community.
"There's people who are ready to stand up and be counted... to stand up and do civil disobedience so that we are heard," Stan Louttit told Evan Solomon on CBC-TV's Power & Politics.

"If the minister does not want to work with us, you may see that sooner than later," said Louttit, who presides over the Mushkegowuk Council, which represents Attawapiskat and six other First Nations.

Here's the thing: harper is used to getting his way. Shitting all over our democracy by lying to Parliament, withholding information, proroguing at will. He's benefited from the apathy and ignorance of the majority of Canadians and especially from the pathetic cowardice, impotence and corruption of his parliamentary opposition. But the First Nations are NOT ignorant about how badly they're being abused by the settler society. And they are NOT apathetic in the face of blatant oppression.

This is where the irresistible force meets the immovable object. And the tragedy is that the First Nations, as a people, do not like conflict. They do not want to put their bodies on the line against the police. They do not want to be surrounded and starved and sent to prison. But occasionally the blatant cruelty and criminality of Canadian federal or provincial governments forces their hand. harper's attempt to completely destroy their sovereignty is one of the biggest assaults in a long time.

These are desperately poor people. One time, reading one of Owen Gray's posts, the heroism against all odds that the First Nations have displayed from time to time really hit home to me. harper has pushed their backs to the wall but he is going to encounter something he's not used to seeing: principled and determined opposition.

If harper doesn't back down soon, he will find he's started a firestorm and, hopefully the First Nations will find allies in the wider society. Those of us sick to death of the racist drivel, the self-pitying, hypocritical whining of assholes like the small dead brain-cells crowd. I'm sick to death of those morons having any sort of influence in government policy. I have no further patience to indulge them in their ignorant ravings. Let the Kanadian Konservative Klan be harper's allies, and let the Canadian activist left stand by the First Nations in their struggle for their rights and their dignity as a people.

ETA: The First Nations will be the most effective of harper's opponents not only because their backs are up against the wall, but also because they have no misplaced respect for Canadian institutions and rules. The system has been set up against them, to destroy them as a people. Whereas I am someone who would like to respect our institutions and have Canada live our supposed collective values, the First Nations are a separate people for whom "Canada" has obligations towards. stephen harper on the other hand, is a Canadian who hates Canada and Canadian values. He despises our institutions and our rules, but unlike the First Nations, he incoherently demands respect for his control over them. I think he's about to have his sorry ass handed to him.

thwap's News Round-up

2011-12-06T04:36:00.000-08:00

So, in Afghanistan, where we debased our values as a country (complicity in torture and spitting on democracy to cover it up), sacrificed over one-hundred of our soldiers' lives while wounding, maiming and traumatizing hundreds more, and spent billions of dollars, we have yet another mainstream journalist struggling to write something not condemnatory:

Canada will end its combat mission in Afghanistan in July and take up a training-only mission some time after that. Its effort in Afghanistan has not been futile — not at all — but there is much in the country that remains unchanged, and that is a worrying legacy.

All righty then! Anytime the Toronto Sun, or some other shit-rag of a newspaper blares a headline about a Liberal or NDP government wasting $45,000 somewhere, we shouldn't even have to try to prove that it was money well spent. We'll just say "It's not completely futile spending. And nobody got killed." That works for them when it comes to spending on war. Why should there be a different criteria for anything else?

Closer to home, the people at Attawapiskat are fighting back against stephen harper's arrogant, insulting and hypocritical attempt to use the bitter fruits of Liberal and harpercon neglect to attack their sovereignty:

They've kicked harper's third-party manager from their community. APTN has provided the nauseating responses of the harpercon scum, but APTN is staffed with bigger people than me because I can't stomach re-reading their drivel. harper is driving the First Nations peoples into a major confrontation and it would behoove all of us non-scum, non-harpercon Canadians to prepare ourselves to support them.

The NDP Needs to Get SERIOUS About Economics

2011-12-05T05:40:00.000-08:00

You read that title and you expect to see some sort of diatribe about "fiscal responsibility" or "harsh realities" or something right?

But when I read headlines like that I generally think that I'm in for a heaping helping of neo-liberal delusions and hypocrisy or some mewling nonsense from a "social democrat" who drank their kool-aid.

"Conservatives" tend to be the biggest deficit spenders. (Espousing tax cuts that only weaken the revenue base, increase inequality, and make us poorer as a society.) [In the USA there's an unbroken post-1945 tradition of Democrats (who are "left-wing" in what passes for the political spectrum in there) producing higher GDP growth than Repugs.] It's been neo-liberal free trade deals, deregulations, tax-cuts, and monetarist anti-inflation policies that have brought us to this sorry state.

Always remember: In Canadian economic history, when honestly compared against the Liberals and the Conservatives, the NDP has NOTHING to apologize for. NOTHING. We have followed mainstream neo-liberal dogma for decades now with nothing to show for it. Their policies have failed. It is long past time to dismiss idiotic assertions of the dangers of left-wing economic policies.

Simple honesty demands it.

So What's Going to Happen to Peter MacKay?

2011-12-04T08:07:00.000-08:00

So, last post, I was talking about how Tony Clement and his harpercon colleagues were making a mockery out of the "War on Terror" by using funds for border security to spruce up Perry Sound - Muskoka for the G20 conference (with Tony doling out the contracts like the Santa Claus at a company Christmas Party). The thing is, it's people like Tony Clement who want us to take their War on Terror seriously, so that we can trust our lives to people like Tony Clement who will "keep us safe." Then they go and spend the money on gazebos.

So, now it's Peter MacKay, Minister of War Movie Fantasies, who, in the middle of his campaign to tell the military to tighten its belt for the good of the country, has been found to have lied to Parliament about why he needed a military helicopter to take him from a fishing trip. He's abusing DND resources while belonging to a government that harasses veterans' rights activists trying to resist the harpercons' nickel and diming of wounded veterans. (The harpercon shit-heads are alarmed and apparently mystified that health care costs EXPLODED after Canadian troops had been committed to a war zone for over a decade.) MacKay is using military helicopters for personal use despite the fact that one of his own MPs was lecturing East-Coast fishing crews and oil-rig workers that they should think about rescuing themselves from the Atlantic Ocean instead of expecting their nanny-state government to come flying to help them.

Such titanic hypocrisy.

Where are the consequences?

So, What's Going to Happen to Tony Clement?

2011-12-03T06:48:00.000-08:00

"Two-Tier Tony." Because he wants rich people to have their own private health insurance so that they can see doctors in Canada as fast as possible while people with lower incomes either get bankrupted or die.

Because he's a "Conservative" (not "conservative"), which is to say, he's an asshole.

So now, he's infamous for having lied to Parliament about his involvement in slush-fund spending in his riding. Remember the Great War on Terror? You know? The deadly serious battle of our time? The Islamo-Fundamentalist hordes are at our gates and our political leaders have no greater mission than to "keep us safe." NOTHING can stand in their way of protecting us from this inscrutable Asian menace. Not even our civil or legal rights!

Of course, if an asshole, scum-bag "Conservative" politician who rolls his eyes back into his head masturbating himself to images of poor children dying of easily treatable illnesses decides that he wants to spend money allocated for BORDER SECURITY on sprucing up the downtown in his own riding, far from any border, and dole-out the money in the time-honoured pork-barrelling tradition, and LIE to the people's representatives about it, ... that's his or her right. I mean, what's the safety and integrity of our borders in the Great War on Terror when there's some personal political gain to be had?

So, Clement clearly lied. He's clearly corrupt. So what are we going to do about it?

What CAN we do about it?

...

Perhaps there is something WRONG with a system where we find ourselves confronted with vermin like this and there is NOTHING that we can do about it?

Racist Canada

2011-12-02T15:59:00.000-08:00

Racism founded on ignorance.

Fuck-heads who always want to blame the First Nations for everything are ignorant about how things get done on First Nations reserves under the Indian Act.

Here's an invaluable guide to the reality at Attawapiskat if you haven't already seen it.

But I've really got to hand it to the scum-bag harper. The lying sack of shit fucking knows that the community leadership there didn't have the authority to solve their own problems. He's just embracing his ignorant, racist mentor Tom Flanagan's teachings. But it's typical harper: Sees people suffering and does his best to ignore it. When that's impossible he blames the victims and tries to take advantage of them.

He's an asshole. End of story. A helmet-headed, dead-eyed psychotic dork.

Mass Murder and Morons

2011-12-01T08:09:00.000-08:00

Been reading about modern art lately. The part about Dada, Surrealism, ... and then even some of the post-1945 movements, ... where they're a part of the reactions to the world wars, got me thinking.

World War I genuinely traumatized Western Civilization. That all this "progress" and bourgeois rationalism, and Christian civilization, and etc., etc., had produced a cataclysm that sent millions of men into a meat-grinder, for year after year, killing 10 million people, ... it produced a crisis of faith that resonates with us today. 10 million people!

Then, over the course of two decades, Europe again trundled into mass-slaughter (with Japan doing its bit) killing over 60 million people! And ending with atomic weapons that would continue to be developed and built so that humanity could now deliberately commit suicide!

People recoiled at the insanity. A lot of artists took the view (misguided I think) that rationalism itself was at fault. (Hence, Dada, Surrealism, etc.,) The whole cultural distrust of authority, reason, sacred ideals, etc., etc., a lot of it comes as a response to the mass slaughters of the world wars (and by the mass killings of Hitler, Stalin, and later Mao, Suharto, Pol Pot). Oh hell, while I'm at it, I shouldn't leave out the genocide against Native Americans and the mass famines imposed on India and elsewhere by the British and other imperialists. [But the ability to know, write, and acknowledge those latter mass deaths is a result of the questioning of authority resulting from the moral and intellectual failures of the world wars I think.]

The point that I was trying to get at is similar to the one I was trying to make here, where instead of being outraged and appalled at the torture or death of one individual, as a society we shrug our shoulders at Canadian government direct complicity in the torture and deaths of THOUSANDS. Here, it seems to me that whereas the world wars used to traumatize us as a people and made us doubt our sanity as a species, nowadays they're used to justify current wars. "Canada's casualties for the whole Afghanistan 'mission' are less than one day of battle in World War II! So shut-up about it! Nobody cares!"

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the US had led a wave of violence and cruelty that has resulted in the deaths of over one-million people and devastated the lives of many millions more. And Canada is a participant. And I blog, write letters to the editor and occasionally stand in the street with millions of other sane people, but we haven't been able to stop it. And Jon Stewart joked about it (ruefully at times) and other people fought each other over discounted merchandise at "Black Friday" completely oblivious to reality and some people actively cheered the slaughter.

That's all.

Bail us out or there'll be trouble!

2011-11-30T03:24:00.000-08:00

How come it works for the banksters? Supposedly if they fail it will be bad for the economy. (In reality, the financial sector has been based on the power of closing one's eyes and thinking happy thoughts for years and years and years. If those big banks failed, all that would be needed would be for everyone to keep their eyes closed, keep thinking the happy thoughts, and the state would be able to reconstruct the whole magic castle all over again.)

The fact that households are crippled with debt and suffering insecure employment and that this is slowing down consumption and GDP growth doesn't seem to resonate.

It's obvious that our leaders think that WE should bail out the nice corporate lobbyists who take the politicians out for lunch and dinner, but that WE nobodies should get any consideration is akin to throwing pearls before swine.

That's how the blogging tories see themselves. They love it.

Capitalism's Crisis of Legitimacy

2011-11-29T04:03:00.000-08:00

It's not easy being a devotee of capitalism these days. What with the tendency of capitalist elites to cry for public bail-outs for their self-inflicted wounds while at the same time they continue to fleece the very same individuals whose tax dollars are needed to bail them out. What capitalism needs is an intervention. But right now, instead of wanting to set capitalism down on a chair with some friends and getting it to deal seriously with its addictions and its moral failures, most of us are thinking something else entirely.

Right now, capitalism is like a junkie that has broken into our home and is waving a gun around, demanding our money and making all sorts of other offensive and ludicrous demands besides.

How does an ordinary middle-class devotee of Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman rationalize their delusions to their bewildered fellow citizens? For the most part they're reduced either to rote recantations of the past (dubious) successes of capitalism, or they're blathering the capitalist version of the "no true Scotsman" excuse that democratic socialists were accused of when they tried to argue that environmental regulations, public health care and a subsistence wage for the unemployed weren't a diluted form of Stalinism. (The difference of course, is that democratic socialists relied on something called "democracy" to prevent the same power of the state that allowed it enforce vehicle emissions to metastasize into the power to enslave people in concentration camps, whereas in a "free market" the vast wealth of the "winners" is invariably used to bribe both courts and legislatures to distort the market to accommodate their wishes and entrench an oligarchy.)

More and more, fans of "free market" capitalism tend to keep their embarrassing philosophical predilections to themselves. The same is true for their political choices. Who among us would now offer, without trepidation, that they voted for lying, blustering failures like Toronto's mayor Rob Ford? Who were the die-hards supporting the lying incompetent Tim Hudak? Who now proudly stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the torturing, pedophile-enabling, serial incompetent, anti-democratic stephen harper? Very few people. Only the worst of the bunch. The most incorrigible of shit-heads.

Yes indeed. These are tough times for the sad, deluded types who worship the money of other people, who hang on the words of lying propagandists while their own lives turn to shit because of the policies they embrace. 1991, the end of the Cold War, in which Soviet command economics collapsed of its own accord, was a long time ago. Capitalism was devolving itself at the time, in response to its own unworkability and failure. But the correlation of the death of a rival economic system gave the imaginations of these simpletons a new lease on life. Two decades of continued failure (more frequent and intense financial crises, increasing household debt, more pervasive poverty, less political legitimacy and an increasing resort to authoritarian measures to suppress dissent) are starting to penetrate all but the dullest of consciousnesses.

It's about bloody time. These fools have held us back for too long.

How do you stop them?

2011-11-28T07:46:00.000-08:00

Break windows and get the cops to attack peaceful protesters in response? Hmm. Interesting idea. I can feel international capitalism buckling under the resulting strain just thinking about it.

Get a permit and have a rally and a march attended by hundreds or even thousands? And then go home? I bet the thought of it has the politicians and their puppet-masters quaking in their boots.

Vote for a candidate who is opposed to imperialist war and who is for social justice? This would be nice except that in some ridings, some form of mental deficiency makes the largest minority of voters pick the pro-war, anti-justice party. As well, sometimes there exists a party that LIES when it says it is anti-war and pro-justice. Finally, genuine pro-peace, pro-justice parties tend to cave at the slightest pressure from the real masters of our society (which includes the US government).

Occupy a park and cause traffic snarls with impromptu marches until the state tells you to leave? Who would have thought the state would resist an extended protest movement against it?

My point (and I've been making it for a long time) is that we leftists spend hardly any time on developing realistic tactics and far, far too much time bitching and whining and living in fantasies.

Too Much

2011-11-27T16:41:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to post something along these lines for a while. In his Salon entry entitled "The Fruits of Liberation" Glenn Greenwald writes about the murder of seven Afghans, including six children, by a NATO airstrike in Southern Afghanistan and how he almost didn't mention it because the killing of Afghan civilians isn't anything new:

I read about the death of these children yesterday and had decided not to write about it because I don’t have anything particularly new to say about it, but then all day, that decision irritated me because it just seems wrong to allow this to go unobserved (and in Southern Afghanistan, “NATO” in the vast majority of cases means: “American”). Whichever version is correct, the U.S. devastated these families forever and ended these children’s lives in a region where even U.S. officials say that there is a grand total of two Al Qaeda leaders and the group is “operationally ineffective.”
What’s particularly notable, I realized, is how we’re trained simply to accept these incidents as though they carry no meaning: we’re just supposed to chalk them up to regrettable accidents (oops), agree that they don’t compel a cessation to the war, and then get back to the glorious fighting. Every time that happens, this just becomes more normalized, less worthy of notice. It’s just like background noise: two families of children wiped out by an American missile (yawn: at least we don’t target them on purpose like those evil Terrorists: we just keep killing them year after year after year without meaning to). It’s acceptable to make arguments that American wars should end because they’re costing too much money or American lives or otherwise harming American strategic interests, but piles of corpses of innocent children are something only the shrill, shallow and unSerious — pacifists! — point to as though they have any meaning in terms of what should be done.

I've been meaning to put a post together about how we should be up in arms when our governments carelessly or deliberately kill or torture just one individual. But here we are blithely accepting that we kill or torture thousands of individuals and we allow it to continue.

I thought about telling a story about how a family member of mine was killed by a speeding transport truck but there was no justice because the truck driver said he was in a hurry to deliver a very important cargo, the trucking company was big and rich and hired a high-priced lawyer who swayed a judge who finally allowed himself to be bought-off, and that was that. In my story I would peacefully protest outside the courthouse or the trucking company's head-quarters and would be tolerated so long as I didn't put any names of the guilty on my signs, in which case the signs would be destroyed and I would be beaten with impunity. Occasionally people who knew my story would give me a sincere, but practically meaningless "thumbs up" and I would end the story by asking if we want a country where lives are so cheap and justice so clearly the preserve of the rich. I'd also point out that our personal tragedies are really quite inconsequential to most people and that after a while we'd realize that the world keeps turning for everybody regardless of our individual pain and suffering.

But I didn't have the time to blow that up into a genuine parable.

Then I thought of asking my readers to imagine a country somewhere, ... a small, not very rich or powerful country, but bigger and more powerful than its neighbouring country nonetheless. The thing was that this country would invade its neighbour every few years or so and enslave and kill people at random. But when they weren't doing that, they'd make commercials asking wealthy international tourists to come and enjoy their sandy beaches and their friendly hospitality. They'd also take great pains to inform the rest of the world of their rich and varied national culture.

I wonder if there was such a country how many people would overlook their occasional sadistic killing sprees and actually consider the country to be a possible vacation spot.

I suspect that most people would recoil at the idea of treating this country as a full member of the international community.

But here we go. The United States of America has invaded two countries and has probably caused the deaths of two-million Iraqis and Afghans, and the displacement of millions upon millions more. MILLIONS of people. MILLIONS of lives. MILLIONS.

And yes, a minority of about twenty-thirty percent of the population is so deluded, racist and fucked-up that they actively support these abominations, while a larger minority was actively opposed to them but having marched peacefully in the streets once in a while and having elected a Democratic president, to no effect, they're all out of ideas. But there's a big mass of US-Americans in the middle who have their own problems and they're barely even aware that their country has killed millions of people and ruined the lives of millions more. They were all lined up outside department stores a few days ago for the big "Black Friday" shopping extravaganza, occasionally pepper-spraying one another to get at the great deals. I get that some people were opposed to mass murder but couldn't stop it. But I can't allow myself to smile at revolting commercials encouraging people to turn into robotic consuming monsters. And I can't find anything other than disgust for the actual people pressing against the doors of their local Wal-Mart trying to get ahead of everyone else to save 40% on some useless piece of shit that they don't need. Killing millions of people should at least get you a "tsk-tsk" now and again, surely?

Here in Canada, we are acquiescing to a prime minister who did not respect the majority opinion of the last parliament but he expects us to respect the majority now that it favours him. We are acquiescing to a government that has caused the torture of dozens of innocent Afghan peasants. We are acquiescing to a government that is lying, bulling, stealing, and killing all the while treating Parliament itself as a bothersome fly.

We are far too comfortable about the blood that is being spilled by weapons and policies paid for with our tax dollars. We are becoming too nonchalant about the torture and other war crimes being done in our names. We are too blase about the lives being ruined by Canadian governments.

Do Really Bad Newspaper Columnists Have Awesome Oral Sex Skills?

2011-11-25T08:20:00.001-08:00

How do these incoherent babbling lunatics, serial plagiarists and constantly wrong fuck-ups continue to find work?

Surely there are higher-quality apologists and rationalizers for the system lining-up to provide the same sort of bullshit at a far more reasonable rate?

Perhaps we must just imagine that our most hated writers have massive saliva-producing tongues that can raise even the whitest-haired editors and publishers members and bring them to shuddering, almost cardiac-arrest producing orgasms.

Day-after-day.

Civilization is a Powder-Keg

2011-11-24T09:18:00.000-08:00

Super busy. Didn't have a clue what to write. Went and looked at unpublished drafts of entries and decided to put this out, ... whatever it is.

The world isn't flat. It's round. But for tens of thousands of years, humanity, if we thought of it at all, believed that the world was flat, because we are so insignificant, and the world is so vast, that we simply couldn't perceive things accurately (or simply in their entirety). [Evidently, the Ancient Greeks, noticing how islands rose up from out of the horizon on the Mediterranean, decided that the world was round and they calculated the size of the planet by measuring the curve as determined by the height of a mountain and the distance between when it first appeared over the horizon and when it came fully into view.]

Through ice-ages, and periodic warmings, and across vast migrations, humanity has adapted and survived. And, I should add, individuals often didn't grasp that they were adapting to changing conditions, but thought they were conforming to the way things always were.

With the rise of civilizations, great masses of human beings came to be subjected to changing conditions created by their fellow man. People became enslaved. People were made exiles. Religions were created and imposed and stamped-out. Livelihoods became upended. As humanity increased in numbers and our technology became more sophisticated, these convulsions became greater and greater, affecting more an more people with increased intensity.

Something enormous is happening today. For over a thousand years, some kind of formal democracy was developed in the Mediterranean, and then spreading out and shifting its centre into North-west Europe. This "democracy" has achieved great things, and, without being too Eurocentric, aspects of it have held out an appeal to people in other societies as well. [I really don't want to glorify European civilization and disparage other civilizations. The First Nations in North America had their own version of self-government which included many democratic practices. Agricultural villages everywhere had and continue to have their traditions of decision-making which put our present elite-controlled, centralized systems of domination to shame. But I do think that the enshrining of rights and equalities into legal codes is unique to Europe and is seen as attractive by hundreds of millions of non-European peoples.]

Some would argue that the democracy of Western Europe and North America was made possible by the economic wealth (created by capitalism, and nothing else 'natch!) that made it affordable. I have long argued that it was more likely that democracy created the relatively greater equality of wealth, which created a more robust economy which made capitalism possible. I believe that even after giving technology, plundering the rest of humanity, and capitalist economics all their due, that it was the rise of democracy that made the West rich. Lo and behold! The height of democracy in the West came out of the crises of the Great Depression and the Second World War, and its flowering between 1945 and 1973 produced the capitalist postwar "golden age." The right-wing counterattack since 1980 has targeted democratic strongholds and institutions, producing more poverty and inequality than ever before. The elites are attacking democracy, they are winning, and we are becoming poorer.

About that "plundering the rest of humanity": I'm referring of course, to European imperialism. Whatever the limitations of the social-economic orders in other parts of the world, and whatever long-term benefits other parts of the world obtained from contact with the Europeans, it cannot be argued that European imperialism constituted a net loss for the rest of the world. Tens of millions died as a result of British callousness and expropriation in India. Tens of millions of Chinese peasants died of starvation as the Europeans squeezed their civilization for everything they could. Millions upon millions of Africans were sold into slavery, or reduced to absolute penury as the Europeans laid claim to their lands. Millions of Native Americans, North and South, died of diseases and as a result of cruelty and deliberate slaughter. Whatever the benefits of a railroad running through (white-owned) plantation country down to an ocean port where European freighters waited to take their produce to Europe, Africans, and others, lost more than they gained from contact with the white man.

Here's a bunch of links that were supposedly important to me while I was writing the above ...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/03-6

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/03-1

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/02-2

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/09-0

Nobody Home ...

2011-11-23T09:51:00.000-08:00

We shone a special camera at Ezra Levant's stupid head. Turns out the fucker doesn't have a brain.

Big surprise.

Problems with the world ...

2011-11-22T11:55:00.001-08:00

Here are two videos that I just stumbled upon during the last few days. The first one is a Bill Maher, "New Rules" segment from early in Obama's term, during the health care bill "debate."

I don't find anything objectionable with it really. Nothing major anyway. I just think that it's wrong that people applaud his truth-telling but very few of us can articulate a way out of the mess. I'd like to hear someone attempt to defend a system that allows Halliburton to cut corners for profit even it means that "the troops" get electrocuted in the shower.

We know our society is an abomination, but we either do little or nothing about it, or we actively support it.

Here's the second video:

I listened to the guy for about two minutes and then I had to stop. Here's the thing: Even if he ends up making a lot of sense, do you know what I think?

This is a middle-aged white guy okay? And, speaking as a middle-aged white guy, I don't think we should stifle ourselves entirely just because a lot of other white guys have forced themselves upon millions of other people. But at the same time, I realize at this stage in my life, that us white guys have said quite a lot, and if we're going to MAKE people listen to us, we should have something to say.

For me, that guy represents a lot of what's wrong with the Canadian left today. He looks to me like a guy who isn't used to being listened to and so he wants to make the best of it. So he's going to talk goddammit. And that's a problem with us. We want to talk. We want to be listened to. If we were empty air-heads, we would simply lie cheat and steal to get to a place where people would listen to us and all we would have to say would be stupid banalities anyway. But, a lot of us choose not to play the game and as a result we get punished and that opens us up for all the abuses that poverty has to offer. So we're going to force each other to LISTEN while we talk goddammit!!!

As well, the guy is taking a long time to say how shitty the system is. But a long time complaint about the left that I've had is that we're great at identifying problems. What's needed now though are alternatives and some kind of blueprint for getting there.

What Now For Humanity?

2011-11-21T18:51:00.000-08:00

They wanted to stay in their camps because they camps were exciting places to be.

But they mainly wanted to stay in their camps because the corrupt, lawless states wanted them to leave their camps.

But the camps are coming down in a flurry of needless state violence.

And you can bet your bottom dollar that the clueless shit-heads who rule us are breathing a collective sigh of relief. (From Barack Obama on down to Ezra Levant.)

But here's the thing clueless shit-heads: The reason we call you clueless shit-heads is because you don't have a clue inside your shit-for-brains.

The political-economic system that you serve has failed, is failing, will fail.

And do you know how badly it will fail?

It will fail so bad that if Rush Limbaugh doesn't invest in enough security, his own "ditto-heads" will pull him from his car and rend him to pieces with their bare hands.

A new world needs to be created. And this world must be one that values human life for its own sake and doesn't seek to make humans conform to some arbitrary profit value system.

And that world will come. Despite the death-spasms of capitalism.

Shocking Video of Tea-Party Rally Tear-Gassed, Pepper-Sprayed, Assaulted: POLICE BRUTALITY!!!!

2011-11-20T08:29:00.001-08:00

If anyone has any videos of the Tea-Baggers having one of their rallies broken up, please let me know.

Or is it the case that those know-nothing hypocrites, with their Obama's birth certificate is fake, Obama's stimulus spending is bad, private health insurance profits forever, etc., etc., etc., ... Koch brothers/FOX News funded and promoted shtick means that they're just a bunch of stupid chumps whose delusions help reinforce the power of the elites?

Leave Occupy ALOOOOOONE!!!!

2011-11-19T08:00:00.001-08:00

Seriously. Let them do their thing. They aren't hurting anyone. Some people who were already having problems in their lives (including addictions, mental health issues and homelessness) have moved from one street or park to the Occupy camps and have brought their issues with them, but the elite concern for them is transparently hypocritical bullshit.

The idea that they're dirty and dangerous is bullshit.

The idea that others can't use their parks or camp-sites is bullshit.

The idea that they're just squatters with no purpose is bullshit.

Drooling morons like Terry Glavin have taken time off from brown-nosing imperialist torturers like General Stanley McCrystal to yammer stupidly about how the camps are a waste of time.

I'm skeptical of the Occupy Movement. But I support it and that means I support their right to a permanent occupation of St. James Park.

I'm skeptical of all their hopes and dreams but I'm on their side.

What is a movement that is trying to resist corporate control of the state supposed to do when the state arbitrarily decides to remove them? Meekly acquiesce? Yes, it's about more than the camps. I think the Occupiers know that too. They're just resisting for the sake of resisting perhaps. And I'm okay with that because resistance is the whole point.

What Dawg Said ...

2011-11-18T08:24:00.001-08:00

In the comments thread of one of his own blog entries:

At least the media seem to some extent to have exhumed the lede they buried. The net result has been to draw people's attention to the one-party state that presently prevails in Canada between elections. The potential for majority governments to behave this way has always been there, but Harper has exploited every opportunity to establish his de facto dictatorship, Who knows? We might get serious electoral reform out of this.

Dawg said two important things there. The first is that there has always been the possibility of a government abusing the latent power that a majority gives. harper, the anti-democratic thug, is the first prime minister to actually do so. Secondly, with the combination of the wholesale failure of the neo-liberal economic model and the naked brutality of "conservatism," there just might be a reckoning for these assholes. I hope to whatever that this is the darkness before the dawn. (But I've been there before.)

Non-Violence

2011-11-17T06:54:00.000-08:00

We have to change the cultural delusions about protester violence.

We need to have a mature discussion about this.

Yes: Employing violence against fellow human beings is inherently dehumanizing.

Yes: Peaceful processes have more legitimacy than violent ones.

Yes: Black Bloc window smashing seems formulaic and pointless.

Yes: Violence can spin out of control.

Yes: The police and the other servants of the state are more powerful than we are.

Yes: Employing violence will alienate non-activist citizens and be used to de-legitimize the protest movement.

But that last thing is something that needs to be addressed. There is a reflexive response to violence AT protests, even when it is all employed by the state to crush dissent, that somehow the violence is a product of the protests themselves. Furthermore, the general public is far more tolerant of state violence (unprovoked, excessive, and illegal) than of even justifiable physical resistance on the part of protesters.

Without having to argue for violent anarchy in the streets, we should at least internalize that fighting back isn't always the end of civilization and the precursor to the blood-soaked doom of our species, and then we should try to inculcate in the minds of others the idea that violence has to be put into context. Sometimes people resisting being wrongfully arrested, resisting being carted off to being tortured and humiliated, resisting being truncheoned or pepper-sprayed, resisting being rendered voiceless with their right to peacefully protest being lawlessly crushed, are justified. Sometimes anger against massive injustice and massive crimes is justified.

I am not, at the present time, saying that the people in the Occupy camps that are being razed in the USA should have fought back. It's just that when I hear and read calls from people sympathetic or supportive of the movement saying that violence must NEVER ever be employed, and that one can ONLY win through non-violence, I disagree.

In the first place, non-violent protest has utterly failed to even slow-down the abominations that are the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Saying things like "You might lose if you employ non-violence but you will definitely lose if you employ violence" is just making an assertion. Second of all, we are protesting against massively selfish psychotic murderers. True, they have a powerful state apparatus that can obliterate most opposition. Therefore, violence applied against them is suicidal. On the other hand, if these psychotic, murderous greed-heads know that no matter what they do, the people will be as meek as lambs, then what threat are any of our legal, peaceful protests?

It could just as well be asserted: "If you use violence, you might lose, but if you always practice non-violence you will definitely lose."

Yes, it would be unfortunate if things became violent. Yes, it would most likely be crushed. But could we please abandon the notion that it would be inherently wrong and should always and everywhere be condemned? Could we dispense with the dangerous delusion that physically resisting the injustice and oppression of the state is immoral and shameful?

Robert Fleming Gourlay

2011-11-16T03:55:00.000-08:00

His bust is at St. James Park in Toronto, where the Occupy Toronto camp is. How fitting. He was a Quixotic figure, but (as I said at Montreal Simon's place) I truly believe that its the slightly "off" obsessed types who are needed to change things.

Here's the entry for him at the valuable Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

Michelangelo as a Draughtsman

2011-11-15T08:25:00.001-08:00

I've always been very impressed by the power of his sketches. In their own way, they're just as impressive as his sculptures and his paintings.

Where Did the Left Go?

2011-11-14T04:38:00.000-08:00

Good article about our political confusion in the face of capitalism's failures.

Elsewhere, and not only in the US, political leaders long considered as models by the moderate left also face angry crowds. In Greece, the president of the Socialist International, George Papandreou, is pursuing a policy of extreme austerity: privatizations, cuts in the civil service, and delivering economic and social sovereignty to a ultra-neoliberal “troika.” The conduct of the Spanish, Portuguese and Slovenian governments reminds us that the term “left” is now so debased that it is no longer associated with any specific political content.

Read the whole thing by Serge Halimi.

Remembering Remembrance Day

2011-11-13T06:45:00.000-08:00

There's no doubt that Canadians of a militaristic bent like Remembrance Day. Along with most of us, there's a heartfelt appreciation for the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers down through the years.

I thought about putting quotation marks around the word "sacrifices" because it seems to me that most of these militarists use the word robotically with no real understanding of what the word means. But I decided to write it straight because soldiers have sacrificed. They have suffered and they have died. They have been traumatized, maimed, disfigured and abused.

I hesitate to say that they've died for our freedoms. World War I wasn't about a German attempt to take over the world. World War II was obviously more necessary for Canada to have been involved with but it was fought to contain Germany and that would have been the case had Germany been a liberal democracy or the genocidal racist monstrosity that Hitler had transformed it into. All the rest of it, including the peace-keeping, while it might have been worthwhile in some degree, I can't think of any time that our freedoms were threatened to any great degree.

And that includes our occupation of Afghanistan. We did not go into Afghanistan because our freedoms were threatened by Al Qaeda and the Taliban. We did not go into Afghanistan because we cared about the sufferings of people living under the Taliban. We went in because the USA's government wanted to lash-out militarily to take vengeance against the people purportedly behind the 9-11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and they were saying that other nations had to be with them or they would be counted as against them.

We have stayed in Afghanistan for over ten long years and in that time we, as Canadians and as members of NATO have been indifferent to the fact that the government we imposed upon them (and which sustained its hold on power through electoral fraud) is brutal and corrupt and creates its own insurgency. (Deluded morons such as Terry Glavin imagine that the NATO powers have "overlooked" the corruption and brutality of the Karzai regime but this is nonsense. We provide them with the bulk of their government revenues and their military protection. If we truly cared about the sufferings of the people of Afghanistan we could haul-up Karzai and his warlord governors and tell them in no uncertain terms that they must put the money we are giving them where it has been assigned to go or we leave them to their fate and find other Afghan leaders to support.) We Canadians have been indifferent to the fact that in some years NATO airstrikes have claimed more lives than have Taliban bombs. We Canadians have been indifferent to the fact that innocent Afghan peasants who we have turned over to the Karzai regime have been tortured. We are indifferent to our own complicity in creating the anger that has caused the insurgency to continue to grow throughout our soldiers' role in the occupation.

But yet, once again, on Remembrance Day, along with the veterans and the civilians who are good of heart, the militarists also stand silently at attention looking sombre.

The militarists vow never to forget, but they never knew anything in the first place. They hear the sound "sacrifice" in their brains and it means nothing but a young man lying in dignified repose beneath a waving Canadian flag. They mouth banalities about how war is horrible but they actually revel in it. They talk about freedom while seeking to remove them from anyone who would dare question the causes for which we ask our soldiers to fight, kill and die. They talk about democracy and human rights but cheer when stephen harper shuts down democracy to cover his complicity in war crimes. They avoid totally the fact that THEY are creating the insurgency which kills and maims and traumatizes Canadian soldiers. They do this by rabidly defending a mission to prop-up a government of thieving, torturing pedophiles. They do this by cheering on the NATO airstrikes that decimate entire villages. They do this by turning their eyes away from the "hunter-killer" squads that roam the Afghan countryside murdering people who they have heard are somehow connected to the insurgency. These death-squads kill innocent people and carve their bodies up for trophies.

The create the rage that leads Afghan peasants to join or support the insurgency and it is this insurgency that is killing and maiming Canadian soldiers.

These militarist fools have learned nothing and are incapable of learning anything. But they stand there year after year, looking like the fools they are, and sadly, as a society we take them seriously. But for me personally, it's a revolting spectacle.

ETA: [Similar sentiments here.]

Matt Taibbi Re-evaluates OWS

2011-11-12T05:49:00.000-08:00

In Rolling Stone, via CommonDreams.org:

The right-wing media wasted no time in cannon-blasting the movement with its usual idiotic clichés, casting Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of dirty hippies who should get a job and stop chewing up Mike Bloomberg's police overtime budget with their urban sleepovers. Just like they did a half-century ago, when the debate over the Vietnam War somehow stopped being about why we were brutally murdering millions of innocent Indochinese civilians and instead became a referendum on bralessness and long hair and flower-child rhetoric, the depraved flacks of the right-wing media have breezily blown off a generation of fraud and corruption and market-perverting bailouts, making the whole debate about the protesters themselves – their hygiene, their "envy" of the rich, their "hypocrisy."
The protesters, chirped Supreme Reichskank Ann Coulter, needed three things: "showers, jobs and a point." Her colleague Charles Krauthammer went so far as to label the protesters hypocrites for having iPhones. OWS, he said, is "Starbucks-sipping, Levi's-clad, iPhone-clutching protesters [denouncing] corporate America even as they weep for Steve Jobs, corporate titan, billionaire eight times over." Apparently, because Goldman and Citibank are corporations, no protester can ever consume a corporate product – not jeans, not cellphones and definitely not coffee – if he also wants to complain about tax money going to pay off some billionaire banker's bets against his own crappy mortgages.

That's not even the meaty party. It just sounds familiar. Like the stupid drivel I get for not laughing along with torture-enthusiasts.

There's Gold In Them Thar Hills!

2011-11-11T03:52:00.000-08:00

The notion that the super-rich don't have enough money to tax in order rectify our current imbalances is repeated with tiresome frequency. But few people are saying that taxing the super-rich will eliminate all our problems in an instant. What most advocates for fair taxation are saying is that increasing taxation on the wealthy will begin to change things for the better.

Redistribution of income has been taking place since 1980, when the top 1% already had a large piece of the pie (7%).

Then they took a second piece (7% more).

Then they took a third piece (7% more).

That's over a trillion dollars a year of after-tax income that would be going to the other 99% if it weren't for 30 years of tax cuts and deregulation.

If the median household income had kept pace with the economy since 1970, it would now be nearly $92,000, not $50,000.

Besides which, remember that the end result of all this tax-cutting and other sorts of pandering to the wealthy has been the economic disaster we have now.

What To Do?

2011-11-10T08:57:00.000-08:00

I suppose that I could wax indignantly and at length about Dalton McGuinty's jaw-dropping hypocrisy when talking about whether the Occupy Toronto camp should obey Mayor Stupid's request to dismantle itself:

McGuinty said he would leave the matter in Ford’s hands, but asked protesters to exercise their rights “in a way that is respectful of the rights of others and respectful of the law.”

This from the premier who secretly gave lying thug Police Chief Bill Blair the Charter-shredding powers under the Public Works Protection Act at the G20 conference in Toronto.

Instead though, I'd like to address some tactics. Millions upon millions of Canadians are vaguely sympathetic to the Occupy protesters. A smaller number of millions are unaware of their existence. And a middling number of millions are opposed to them for some reason or other. But I'd like to ask how many millions of Canadians think a bunch of peaceful protester camps are going to alter Canada's current political-economic power structure one iota.

I'd say 99.9% would say that they won't achieve anything significant.

The Left has to get serious about how things actually work. Politics as usual doesn't work. Social movements as usual don't work. Social movements and full-time politicians have to work together at all levels of government to understand the power dynamics of capitalism's political, economic and media strengths and to figure out how to circumvent them.

Real change is only going to come through political-legal avenues. Real change has almost never happened as the result of an afternoon's protest, peaceful or otherwise. Standing around for an hour or two speechifying doesn't put any "pressure" on elected officials in thrall to the rich.

I have said it before and I'll say it again; we have nominal political democracy. It is the undemocratic nature of our economy that renders it only nominal. In the absence of a violent revolution to seize control of our economy from its present owners (which would be messy and unpredictable in any case) we should entrench the human rights of workers within their workplaces. This will simplify the problems of governments to a great degree as the independent generators of wealth will look after their own to a greater degree than at present, while their majority voters will vote to pay taxes to the state to obtain their collective goods (libraries, health care, education, roads, public transit, etc., ) that are important to them, but which wealthy elites do not care about.

It is better to work seriously with the system we have rather than engaging in useless "belling the cat" exercises.

I Couldn't Agree More

2011-11-09T11:00:00.000-08:00

The right to be angry ...

Out of this crouching and unseemly cowardice, a new liberal esthetic was born. To be taken seriously, one must be, above all, polite and upbeat.

Someone takes your job and puts your pension into their pocket, be polite and upbeat. Someone marches you into murderous and wasteful wars on the basis of lies, be polite and upbeat. The government suspends most of the Bill of Rights, be polite and upbeat. In short, if you ever really want to “get anything done”, you must, before all else, be polite and upbeat.

If you don’t believe me when I talk about the degree to which the so-called left has internalized the message that being unflinchingly critical is tantamount to being pathologically angry, try the following sometime.

Walk into a room of middle-of-the-road Democratic voters and point out what is undeniably true: that the US is, to paraphrase King, far and away the biggest purveyor of death, destruction and terror in the world. Even if you do so in the most affable and breezy of tones, I guarantee that within a few minutes at least one, and probably several, of the people hearing your exposition will assail you with charges about your being pathologically “negative” or “angry”.

There was a telling exchange at Dawg's blog recently. Dawg provided yet another list of harper's destructive attacks on Canadian democracy and the confused psychopaths managed to make the whole conversation about how unpleasant I was in the comments section. You'd think they had missplaced priorities until you realized that they hated democracy and cheered harper's assaults on it.

Fuck 'em.

Let's Eat!

2011-11-08T10:52:00.000-08:00

Eat dem woids!

Random Saturday Morning Thoughs

2011-11-05T05:54:00.000-07:00

First: Are the restrictions on the policy options of the European Central Bank deliberately designed to prevent it from being able to print money and therefore devalue (however slightly) the financial wealth of Europe's elites? Or is there some threat from the US-Americans and their embattled economy, that Europe is not allowed to devalue the Euro and gain whatever advantages would accrue from a cheaper currency?

I have no idea.

Second: Congratulations the people at Occupy Oakland for their successful and inspiring general strike!

Observation: While I didn't go into conniptions about it (as representing the downfall of Western Civilization), I said at the time that the Black Bloc window-smashing at the Toronto G-20 seemed ritualistic, pointless, and counter-productive. If they weren't provocateurs at the Oakland march smashing windows, I'd still say their actions were stupid. Not necessary. Turns the public against you and for no reason. Shutting down the city was a far more powerful statement than smashing a few windows.

An Interesting Interview

2011-11-04T22:06:00.000-07:00

I've got my thoughts about this ...

The Longines watch company interviewed every presidential candidate except the winner!

Tactical Genius: (The Science of Revolution)

2011-11-04T20:27:00.000-07:00

Protest Rally + ???? = Totally Peaceful Revolutionary Outcome!!!!!

Giorgio Mammoliti and Paul Watson

2011-11-03T08:02:00.000-07:00

Just a moment's reflection. The incompetent, blubbering coward Mayor Rob Ford has a right-hand man; the arrogant, hypocritical homophobe Giorgio Mammoliti. (Oh yeah, the cry-baby, ignorant, incompetent, lying sack-of-shit Rob Ford is a homophobe too.) Mammoliti is an enthusiastic advocate of the mayor's cut-cut-cut, anti-union agenda. But Mammoliti was once a union member himself, with CUPE, and he was very protective of his perks then. What's changed? Simple. Mammoliti has a new job and during the course of this new career, power shifted to a simpleton right-wing buffoon and his allies. Mammoliti's self-interest (which made him an active union member as a worker) has now compelled him to become a right-wing, anti-union, anti-public services shill.

Sometimes, self-interested, arrogant pricks can help a good movement if there's something in it for them. In this case they are doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Some people might say that Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd is doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. I'm not sure I include myself in that group. Driving whales and other forms of ocean life into extinction might be worse than putting some ships out of action. Anyway, I'm bringing up Paul Watson in this post along with Mammoliti because he's another example of how leaders aren't always pleasant human beings. A documentary came out about Watson last summer and I remember the reviews saying that it shows a man with a simplistic, black-and-white view of the world, and himself, and that he disregards people close to him (including his own children) for his causes. Sort of like a man-child in some respects.

And I thought; well of course. Causes aren't sustained by part-time activists like me, trying to sustain work, family, and some degree of balance, in our lives. They're sustained by people fixated on an idea and often oblivious to everything else.

Just some reflections as I'm too busy for sustained blogging.

Crazy Proposals

2011-11-01T08:18:00.000-07:00

I'm sure these ideas wouldn't pass muster with the "Saddam Hussein's WMDs are going to kill us all!!!" crowd. (Or the "The Muslims are sneakily going to impose Sharia law on all of us and left-wing multiculturalism is stopping us from fighting back!!!" or the "Global warming isn't happening but if it is it's the sun's fault and I know this because I read scientists and pundits who are paid by the oil industry and not the climate scientists who have been corrupted by the nefarious academic grants complex and who have resisted the tawdry offerings of the oil industry to debunk the whole global warming scam" or the "the amount of loans given to poor African-Americans by banks strong-armed by a series of Democratic federal governments and that couldn't be paid back is what almost sank Wall Street and caused the international financial crisis" crowds for that matter!)

But here they are:

The default setting for thinking about other human beings is to wish them well and try to ensure that they don't starve to death, get poisoned, be enslaved or get murdered.

That being the case, the wealth of the world should be redistributed enough to ensure that everyone gets a subsistence income to allow them confidence in the necessities of life. (Which would go a long way to reducing the "children as a retirement fund" behaviour that people in desperately poor societies are forced to engage in.)

Set about designing an international economy that is based on the continued provision of the necessities of life for everyone, rather than the "build a lot of environmentally destructive junk and sell it to those people fortunate enough to be able to afford it so as to justify your continued existence" system that is leading the human race to its destruction.

That's all.

Crash the Party?

2011-10-31T16:10:00.000-07:00

A good summation of the rivalry between capitalism and democracy in the United States and a call for the OWS movement to run candidates against the Democrat establishment.

A good read.

Slandering the Occupiers

2011-10-30T04:37:00.000-07:00

You can tell when your opponents in a debate are intellectually bankrupt when they make up lies about you. This isn't just "ad hominem" attacks (by which I mean genuine ones), but lies about you that are directly related to the issue at hand.

Even in the USA and Canada, where there's a constant bombardment of pro-corporate propaganda on a daily basis, the majority of the population agrees with the Occupy Movement. That's probably because the vast majority of people are either in the same boat as the people in the "We Are the 99 Percent" images or they know people who are.

The Tacitus/Trevino site: "We Are the 53%" doesn't resonate quite so well because most sane human beings look at a picture of somebody saying "I've been fucked-over by the system and I'm ten grand in debt and I work two minimum wage jobs and I haven't had a week off in four years, but I'm not complaining." and they think: "There's a stupid chump." and not "My God! What an inspiration!"

But what's even more indicative of their flailing is the way critics of the Occupy Movement have to toss out lies about the occupiers.

"They're unemployed bums who don't want to work."

Um, morons? The majority of the 99 Percent are saying over and over that they're OVER-WORKED.

"They hate America/Canada."

Some of them might. But some of them hate the elites who have dominated our societies since forever but who have, in recent decades, upturned the postwar compromise and dedicated themselves to blatantly fleecing everyone else.

Some of these "anti-American radical lefty lazy-assed haters" are actually veterans who served overseas. It's amazing isn't it though, how chicken-hawk chumps will become so indifferent to the presence of "the troops" when "the troops" don't march in lock-step with the delusions of the chicken-hawk chumps? But that's no surprise. For all their wargasmic enthusiasm for "the troops" while they're blowing away official enemies, US society has, for decades, been indifferent to the persistent over-representation of veterans within the US homeless population. (The same dynamic is at work in Canada, where the federal government began to nickel-and-dime wounded soldiers in order to contain spiralling costs. The fact that the costs were spiralling as a direct result of committing "the troops" to extended combat tours for over a decade didn't seem to factor into their policies. Apparently "the troops" were collectively deciding to milk the system dry by losing limbs or suffering psychological problems from witnessing the horrors of war, and they needed to be brought back in line.)

Yes, yes. A lot of the Occupiers look like the same old crowd of lefty-hippies. They're either poor (and therefore, by definition, "losers") or they're middle-class or wealthy (in which case they're spoiled, elitist "champagne socialists") who can be disregarded. (Do you see how it works? Whereas multi-millionaire drug-addict, Viagara-swilling Rush Limbaugh is a "man of the people"!) These are the same lefty nut-bars who said that free trade deals were going to devastate our economies. Ooops. These are the same lefty nut-bars who said that there were no WMDs. OOps. These are the same lefty nut-bars who said that Afghanistan would be a disaster. OOps. These are the same lefty nut-bars who have always said that there capitalism is inhuman and amoral. Ooops.

But aside from the presence of the people who always turn out to be correct about everything, there are a lot of ordinary US-Americans and Canadians who have just finally realized that the system is rigged against them and who are standing up for themselves. And, as a result, they find themselves slandered and demonized by the scum-bag morons of the bottom of the right-wing barrel.

And the people who are trashing them are either deluded chumps or criminal elites and their lying sycophants. End of story.

Rob Ford and Bill Blair: Two Lying Sacks of Shit?

2011-10-28T19:26:00.000-07:00

An "ambush." An "attack."

I, like the folks at Toronto Life was initially sympathetic to Rob Ford's response to his encounter with Marg Delahunty. He said it was dark, people were yelling "We've got you Rob Ford!" He's had some death threats in the past. His six-year old was with him and she was scared.

But it was all lies.

Yes. There was an encounter that morning. It was already bright out. She's a comedienne in costume with a camera crew. (Very few assassins come at you with plastic swords and a film crew.)

Look at the video. He's grimacing and asking if he can get to his car before giving up and stalking back into his house.

Ask yourself: If this woman had just sent his daughter into the house screaming, would this rage-prone fuck-head of an incompetent mayor have been quietly hissing that he just wanted to get into his car? I certainly wouldn't be doing that to someone who had just traumatized my kid.

Do you think Mary Walsh would be pushing on with her Marg Delahunty routine after she'd just sent Ford's daughter shrieking with terror into the house?

Rob Ford is a lying sack of shit. But we already knew that with his (far more important and far more blatant) lying about how he'd cut taxes without cutting services "Guaranteed."

And now he's saying that he didn't berate and curse at the 911 operator. Of course he did. He claims he was swearing but at no one in particular.

Did you see his nauseating, self-pitying orgy of bullshit with the press later? What a contemptible, cowardly, buffoon. "I've been doing a great job running the city." More fucking lies. The police told him to call 911 when he feels threatened? So, you felt genuinely threatened by the camera crew as they were packing up to leave? (He pretends he doesn't even remember whether they were still there when he got back into his car at 8:30 to go to City Hall to fuck up the city some more.)

And of course, his miserable fan-base lap it all up. Stupid shits. These people are shameless liars and self-deluders.

Speaking of which: So Chief Bill Blair, the lying thug, backs up Ford? He listened to the of Ford's 911 call? So fucking what? In the "lying thug" link you can see how worthwhile Blair's interpretation of actual recorded evidence is. Given the fact that Blair's police force is the only city service that didn't have to cut its budget, it isn't outlandish to speculate about collusion (and pressure on the offended 911 operators).

Sorry Rob Ford and Bill Blair. But when you blatantly lie about really important stuff, it destroys your credibility on pretty much everything else.

Post For the Day

2011-10-28T12:03:00.000-07:00

"an arab running around"

2011-10-27T05:26:00.000-07:00

From the Montreal Gazette, via pogge: Abdullah Almalki, a Canadian was referred to as an "imminent threat" to Canada's national security by the RCMP in a letter sent to SYRIAN INTELLIGENCE.

At the same time they were spreading outrages claims against him, the RCMP was internally saying:

"O Div. (Ontario Division) task force are presently finding it difficult to establish anything on him other than the fact he is an arab running around."

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Documents+tortured+Canadian+Almalki+posed+terrorist+threat/5605604/story.html#ixzz1bzBkS1k3

Almalki discovered this through a federal Access to Information Act request.

Almalki once worked for Human Concern International in under Ahmed Said Khadr, the highest-ranking Canadian in Al Qaeda.

AHA!

Except for this: "National Post Apologizes to Human Concern International"

Human Concern International ("HCI"), an Ottawa-based registered charity, has been supporting the needy both in Canada and elsewhere for the past 23 years. It has never been controlled by the late Ahmed Said Khadr or his family. Khadr was a volunteer with HCI from 1988 to 1995, working in Pakistan on relief and development projects. In 1995, Khadr was arrested in Pakistan on charges of financing a terrorist bombing of the Egyptian embassy to that country. HCI severed all relations with Khadr on Dec. 3, 1995. Khadr returned to Canada after his release and started a separate organization, Health and Education Project International, which has no ties to HCI.
In 2001, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) alleged that Mr. Khadr had used his position with HCI to funnel money for terrorist purposes. HCI has consistently denied that any money was funnelled through its organization for terrorist purposes, and has advised the National Post that it is willing to open its books for inspection by any interested government agency. The National Post has no reason to believe that there is evidence of any misuse of HCI funds to support terrorism. HCI itself has never been accused of terrorism or of supporting terrorism. The Post has no reason to believe that any of its other volunteers or staff have been accused of terrorism or of supporting terrorism.
Incorrect information appeared in an editorial in the National Post of March 6. The National Post apologizes to HCI, its board of directors, volunteers and donors for any harm or embarrassment its errors may have caused.

Almalki also sold two-way radio equipment to Microelectronics, a company controlled by the Pakistani military (and a US ally at the time). This store-bought equipment was all exported legally in compliance with Canadian regulations.

The donut chomping desk jockeys at CSIS and the RCMP really ought to have more on a Canadian citizen before they start shooting off their mouths to foreign intelligence agencies, don't you think? Because they DESTROYED Almalki's life and got him subjected to over a year's worth of torture in a Syrian prison. And the piece-of-shit harpercon regime still refuses to acknowledge the Canadian government's responsibility for any of this. Miserable lying cowards.

YouTube Embed of Early Mitch Hedberg

2011-10-26T22:54:00.000-07:00

He was an ordinary dude. He seemed to be a nice guy. He made people laugh and most of the time the laughter wasn't at anyone's expense. He seemed genuinely surprised at his enormous success. I really wish that I'd known about him before he died ...

March for the Robin-Hood Tax: Toronto, October 29th.

2011-10-25T19:42:00.001-07:00

Be there or be square!

Silly Things About Qaddafi's Death

2011-10-24T15:26:00.000-07:00

So, as I said, Qaddafi was a dictator who practised torture (which I oppose more than your average North American) and who was most definitely nutso. All that having been said, he had been (and maybe still was) an authentic Arab nationalist. Even if that Arab nationalism was in his past it was still enough to make him a target for Western imperialists (which is what every "humanitarian intervention" is all about).

So, he's was a grade-A, certified OFFICIAL ENEMY and therefore it's cool to hate him and kill him and then lie about it afterwards and say stupid things about him.

Here's the lying bit: I'm in "Shwarma's King" on Yonge Street making an order and they've always got CNN blaring in the background and I'm watching the footage of Qaddafi's last moments (the pretty anchorwoman cautions me that these images may be "disturbing") which I'd seen already.

So there's the old guy, already dazed and bloody, being manhandled by a group of rebels, and there's all sorts of shouting in Arabic, and he's getting bashed around pretty good, and then get this: The CNN anchor says (as if it's a genuine possibility) that maybe Qaddafi was shot in the head execution style (like she says the guys in the later video footage with their arms around each other glorifying in the fact that they shot him in the head are saying) OR he was killed in a "crossfire" (as Libya's current Prime Minister is saying). This is even more obviously stupid lying that bush II and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney's garbage about Saddam Hussein's WMDs was. The reason CNN and other of the system's mouthpieces are saying this is just to provide cover (however insultingly ludicrous) to their war crimes.

Before that, I'm walking by a "National Pest" newspaper box (like I'd ever buy that piece of shit!) and I see a headline about Qaddafi and the "psychology of dictators." I can't be bothered to read it. It's no doubt some armchair psychoanalysis from some dimwit. I'll respect those fuckers when they print front-page stories about the childhood trauma and inherent mental deficiencies that explains the callous selfishness and stupidity of bush II, or the (probably fascinating) reasons behind the amoral, arrogant cynicism and shameless hypocrisy of Barack Obama.

Exult in your "triumph" dip-shitz. Then, hopefully it's back to the larger project of fucking-over all your fellow human beings on the planet in the service of your deluded political economic project. The "success" of which project will eventually drag us all down so that there are no bullets in your soldiers' guns and no airplane fuel for your fighter-jets and then god help you all.

Grip Glutz vs The Sensual Santa

2011-10-22T10:39:00.001-07:00

Today, my contribution to the cause is to clean out the rotting stuff from my fridge; empty my compost bin; learn the skill of punctuation; and do almost a week's worth of dishes.

Last night I went to listen to Seth interview Daniel Clowes (whose original comic story "Art-School Confidential" had me in tears the first time I read it) at the Harbourfront Centre's International Festival of Authors.

During the audience Q & A that followed the talk I got to ask who would win in a battle between the Sensual Santa and Grip Glutz. Clowes thought that it would be a helluva wrestling match, but that Sensual Santa would win. (I thought it might be the other way around, but he's the God of Eightball so he should know.)

On the death of Mommar Qaddafi

2011-10-21T04:17:00.000-07:00

Some guy came up to me on the street tonight and told me out of nowhere that Qaddafi was dead. I asked him: "Who's next? Obama?"

The guy says: "No. Raoul and his brother, what's his name? Castro!"

There's a guy trained to hate the official enemies. I was in a hurry to get to the liquor store so I let him pass.

In his short career, Obama has killed more people than Fidel Castro. Maybe even more than Qaddafi.

I'm undecided about Qaddafi. People I respect say he really was crazy. There's no question he was a dictator. I haven't studied his regime too closely because most of the readily available sources will be pro-USA propaganda, ... which is to say, useless bullshit.

Whatever his faults (and I'm sure there are people, ordinary Libyans, who are justifiably happy that he's dead), Qaddafi didn't die because he was a dictator.

He died because (at one time anyway) he was a genuine Arab-African nationalist.

If he'd been a complete USA stooge he could have boiled his political enemies alive on state television and he'd have been safe from US "justice."

And, the biggest threat to MY freedom wasn't Qaddafi. It's the US government. Working through their puppets in Ottawa.

The world is run by crazy people, so fight back!

2011-10-20T08:28:00.000-07:00

Now, for the record, "The world is run by crazy people" is also something said by the disgusting KKKate Makkkmillan of smalldeadbraincells infamy.

But KKKate is the sort of person who would wonder why you spat in her face after she called for the re-opening of the residential schools and who believed that Iraq had WMDs.

It's also believed by people like kryntgathf-adfadf, who trolls at Dr. Dawg's blog.

But kdrerayf-asdlfkj also believes that if politicians in a government commit war crimes, they can be absolved from their war crimes if they win a subsequent election. (There's an extended "debate" about this asinine contention in the comments section.)

So, who cares what those miserable deluded shit-heads think? They're part of the bad craziness that I'm talking about.

Let's pause to remember (since all the assholes who talk about Iran, Libya, Syria, etc., fail to remind us) that the handsome, articulate, intelligent President Barack Obama has given himself the power to declare anyone a terrorist and kill them and their children with impunity.

That's fucking crazy.

Many expected President Obama to re-establish the accountability of government to law. Instead, he went further than Bush/Cheney and asserted the unconstitutional power not only to hold American citizens indefinitely in prison without bringing charges, but also to take their lives without convicting them in a court of law. Obama asserts that the US Constitution notwithstanding, he has the authority to assassinate US citizens, who he deems to be a “threat,” without due process of law.

In other words, any American citizen who is moved into the threat category has no rights and can be executed without trial or evidence.
...
This great danger that hovers over America is unrecognized by the majority of the people. When Obama announced before a military gathering his success in assassinating an American citizen, cheers erupted. The Obama regime and the media played the event as a repeat of the (claimed) killing of Osama bin Laden. Two “enemies of the people” have been triumphantly dispatched. That the President of the United States was proudly proclaiming to a cheering audience sworn to defend the Constitution that he was a murderer and that he had also assassinated the US Constitution is extraordinary evidence that Americans are incapable of recognizing the threat to their liberty.

We Canadians have a government with a finance minister whose projections for the government's finances were off by over $50 billion and they campaigned on their economic competence.

They altered government documents, lied to Parliament about it, refused to tell Parliament how much their policies would cost, and shut-down Parliament twice (once to evade responsible government, and the second time was to shut-down an inquiry into the possibility that they are complicit in war crimes) and then they went on to win a majority government through the ignorance or authoritarianism of more than a quarter of the voters!

And, now, proof is out that NAFTA has been a disaster:

NAFTA has become an international example of severe structural problems in the food chain, from how it produces its food to what and how much (or how little) it consumes.
Mexican malnutrition has its roots in the way NAFTA and other neoliberal programs forced the nation to move away from producing its own basic foods to a “food security” model. “Food security” posits that a country is secure as long as it has sufficient income to import its food. It separates farm employment from food security and ignores unequal access to food within a country.

The idea of food security based on market access comes directly from the main argument behind NAFTA of “comparative advantage.” Simply stated, economic efficiency dictates that each country should devote its productive capacity to what it does best and trade liberalization will guarantee access across borders.

Under the theory of comparative advantage, most of Mexico was deemed unfit to produce its staple food crop, corn, since its yields were way below the average for its northern neighbor and trade partner. Therefore, Mexico should turn to corn imports and devote its land to crops where it supposedly had a comparative advantage, such as counter-seasonal and tropical fruits and vegetables.

Sounds simple. Just pick up three million inefficient corn producers (and their families) and move them into manufacturing or assembly where their cheap labor constitutes a comparative advantage. The cultural and human consequences of declaring entire peasant and indigenous communities obsolete were not a concern in this equation.

Seventeen years after NAFTA, some two million farmers have been forced off their land by low prices and the dismantling of government supports. They did not find jobs in industry. Instead most of them became part of a mass exodus as the number of Mexican migrants to the United States rose to half a million a year. In the first few years of NAFTA, corn imports tripled and the producer price fell by half.

But our elites like watching millions of people starve so it's all good. And we're all too busy doing nothing really to stop it.

Egg-zack-a-lak-a-lak-a-lee!

2011-10-19T03:48:00.001-07:00

Good ol' pogge lays it down:

For going on six years now we've had a federal government that has consistently demonstrated contempt for democratic principles and institutions. The same group is back in power and we'll have no opportunity to unseat them until 2015. It's generally acknowledged that of the newspaper editorial boards that endorsed a party, over 90% of them endorsed the Conservatives even while less than 40% of voters did. Perhaps Hebert should consider the possibility that the current demonstrations are as much for her benefit and for the benefit of her colleagues as for the benefit of politicians.

Read da ol' ting.

I'm Part of "Occupy Toronto"

2011-10-18T10:22:00.000-07:00

Just saying. In case anyone wonders. I'm working, so my participation will be spotty. But I was down there on Sunday night and I was taking part in meetings this morning. For all the reasons I've been saying. There is a global sanity movement, instigated by the total failure of neoliberalism and by the looming ecological catastrophes of industrialization and (to a great degree) capitalism itself.

If people are gathering around this nucleus, then I have to be a part of it. Things must change and we must make them change.

Criticisms of the Occupations of the Financial Districts

2011-10-17T06:37:00.000-07:00

I was initially skeptical of Occupy Wall Street when I first heard about it. It seemed like a small gathering of the faithful with yet another pointless short-term expression of protest. But it's inexplicably been allowed to continue and, thanks to the inherent brutality of the NY Pig Department ("Awwww! Some of us ain't all so bad! It hurts to read this anti-cop bigotry! We might get so mad we'll pepper-spray your eyes and then bash your fucking head in!"), it's garnered a lot of publicity. Over half the American public supports Occupy Wall Street. (Contrast that to the 27% that has a favourable impression of the Tea-Bagger Party; essentially tea-baggers liking themselves!) I still wonder what the occupiers in the various cities want to accomplish. I wonder how they imagine that murderous, psychopathic greed-heads will make important concessions to a peaceful sit-in. What I don't wonder about, is whether Occupy Wall Street is right, or whether they're justified. I also don't trouble myself with nonsensical worries as to whether they're violent crazies out to destroy all that is good and true.

"What are they protesting about?" (Asks Glenn Greenwald sarcastically)

Seriously? A massive recession, caused by private greed and criminality, and bailed-out by the public at the cost of education and social programs?

I think becomes clear is that growing wealth and income inequality, by itself, would not spark massive protests if there were a perception that the top 1% (more accurately thought of as the top .1%) had acquired their gains honestly and legitimately. Americans in particular have been inculcated for decades with the belief that even substantial outcome inequality is acceptable (even desirable) provided that it is the by-product of fairly applied rules. What makes this inequality so infuriating (aside from the human suffering it is generating) is precisely that it is illegitimate: it is caused and bolstered by decisively unfair application of laws and rules, by undemocratic control of the political process by the nation’s oligarchs, and by a full-scale shield of immunity that allows them — and only them — to engage in the most egregious corruption and even criminality without any consequence (other than a further entrenching of their prerogatives and ill-gotten gains).

Anyone who expressed difficulty seeing or understanding what motivates these protests revealed many things about themselves. None is flattering.

Speaking of which; here's a comment from a mouth-breathing cretin, "sad but true" at Dr. Dawg's:

An alternative take would be that the occupy movement is just your standard socialist protest rally with limited appeal beyond the usual audience, and that they have generally missed the essential point, that leftist notions of entitlement are themselves largely responsible for the global financial crisis, so that what we see is actually a sort of self-flagellation of the failed offspring of the entitled classes, unable to come to terms with the fact that the promised Obama unicorn was not there waiting for them as a prize for their radical politics. Much of the world will choose to ignore these protests. Each country has its own day of reckoning ahead for the financial arrangements they have tolerated, there may not be much transferability from nation to nation. But a gaggle of incoherent street youth and perennial complainers have no real message and will fade away with the end of the autumn weather. I don't see anyone protesting links between big corporations and the government of the PRC, for example. Why not? Wrong ideology! But that's where the problems really exist, the draining out of wealth to the hive state organized by socialism is what we need to fight against, not wealth itself. In any case, the entitled classes want to be wealthy without working for it. That's a dead end under any kind of political leadership.

I replied to the dunce to the effect that, actually, Wall Street caused the financial crisis, and that millions of US-Americans are angry not because their welfare cheques haven't grown at twice the rate of inflation, but because they're being downsized, they're losing their homes, they're working several shitty jobs at once, they're drowning in medical and student-loan debt, and their whole political class is comprised of the puppets of the same banksters who caused the recession that finally pulled the plug on their ability to survive. (This "sad but true" character would probably fit in quite well with the "53%'rs" whose motto seems to be: "We're chumps, but we haven't yet been destroyed by health care bills so it's all good.")

Here's Chris Hedges asking some more questions to try to help shit-heads such as "sad but true" focus:

What kind of nation is it that spends far more to kill enemy combatants and Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it does to help its own citizens who live below the poverty line? What kind of nation is it that permits corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons and daughters? What kind of nation is it that tosses its mentally ill onto urban heating grates? What kind of nation is it that abandons its unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators? What kind of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate its own citizens? What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our children and our children’s children?

The present political-economic system has failed and is failing. And it is killing the planet. Even if the OWS protesters are a despised minority (and it appears that they are not), they are still right, and we ignore them at our specie's peril.

Trevino's "Tacitus"

2011-10-14T04:16:00.000-07:00

So, "A Tiny Revolution" has two posts.

One introduces us to this group "The 53%" and compares the stoops showcasing themselves in it to the Roman-worshipping prisoner in "Monty Python's 'Life of Brian'" which is pretty funny.

In the second post, he points out how "The 53%" (of people who make enough to pay taxes and who differentiate themselves from those of their fellow 99% who aren't billionaires through this awesome achievement) is the brainabortion of "Red State's" Erik Erikson and Josh Trevino, communications director for the right-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Trevino used to host a right-wing discussion board called "Tacitus." I used to post there under the pseudonym "smartz." That's why my e-mail is "smartzeethwap." ("smartz" was the pseudonym of a late-night computer trivia contestant at a bar I was in once. Around about midnight we all noticed that "smartz" wasn't answering any questions. We looked around and found some guy passed out at the bar using the trivia game box as his pillow. We tried yelling at him: "Smartz! Wake up! You're missing the game!" to no avail.)

"Tacitus" was pretty good in that you weren't allowed to use profanity and you had to provide sources for your claims if challenged. It ran during the lead-up and first couple of years into the bush II war on Iraq (which was based on lies).

I suspect that the reason Trevino took it down was because so many bright, articulate right-wingers were documented believing all the stupid drivel about Saddam's WMDs and predicting what a roaring success the occupation (which turned out to be an evil clusterfuck) would turn out to be. Mustn't leave evidence of one's own titanic stupidity and ignorance.

Anyways, it appears Trevino hasn't learned his lesson. He'll eventually have to take down his "53%" thing to, as more and more of its posters sink into economic penury.

Whatever Happens, Failure is Failure

2011-10-12T03:46:00.001-07:00

And neoliberalism has failed, is failing, will continue to fail.

Treating the earth as both a resource to be strip-mined and as a toilet for our increasing production of toxic garbage is a literal dead-end.

Treating other human beings as an expense and demanding that they justify their existences according to the value of financial profit is inhumane and self-evidently self-destructive to the cause of humanity in general.

The anger boiling over across the Middle East, in Greece, in Ireland, in Iceland, in the USA will spread. It's already toppled governments in South America.

Look at the way that the elites are doubling down on the failed policies now. Trying to grab more from a shrinking economy from the people who have taken it on the chin for decades now, as a result of their failed policies.

Our elites are deluded and they cannot change. Their only instincts are to make things worse. Therefore, the anger will grow.

Don't Be a Stupid Chump!

2011-10-11T10:55:00.000-07:00

That's it.

That's all I got time for today.