Commentary on Taibbi's Commentary on I.G. Report

I feel compelled to address this subject because I need to believe that liberals (and/or progressives) are salvageable. Conservatives, for the most part, adhere to a worldview that is almost completely full of shit. They indulge in brazen hypocrisy so often that it is hard to imagine they're capable of better. Reality seems to have a liberal bias. But, sadly, with the demonstrated incapability to recognize the monstrousness of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Justin Trudeau, liberals are showing themselves subject to the same toxic, partisan insanity that conservatives are. The terrifying levels of self-delusion that went into "Russia-gate" demonstrated by liberals came as a further blow to my dwindling faith in humanity. I want to post this piece in the hopes that a progressive "Russia-gater" might somehow read it and have the scales fall from their eyes as they suddenly grasp how utterly ridiculous, counter-productive and insane their conspiracy theory was.

The shit-for-brains "Russia-gate" conspiracy theory goes like this: Donald J. Trump (held up as a figure of pop-culture laughs for decades before exposing himself as a shameless racist) might have been groomed by people from Russia as far back as 1987 (ie., the last days of the USSR) to be an political-intelligence asset for them. 1987 was the year that Trump went to Moscow with vague plans of building a hotel there. The hotel was never built despite there having been numerous rounds of discussions all the way up to 2014.

Somehow, even though the project never got to the point where even one shovel went into the ground, it was still enough to make Trump want to become President of the United States so that he could eliminate sanctions placed on Russia by Barack Obama for Russia's having seized the Crimea in 2014. [Do we follow that? In order to get a hotel built in Moscow, Trump would become the POTUS, do Vladimir Putin a favour, and thereby get the approvals and the financing for his dreamt-for hotel that he never built.] The decision to step-up support for Trump went into high speed in 2012 (says long-time conspiracy theorist Malcolm Nance) on the evening that Obama beat Mitt Romney. Within a year of that event the Internet Research Agency (IRA) had been created and would begin its sophisticated psy-ops campaign to influence US-Americans to elect Donald J. Trump as President.

The St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency is a troll farm. It's run by a billionaire who (not surprisingly) knows Russian leader Vladimir Putin. It spreads disinformation around the internet with a pro-Russian bias. One way that it self-finances is by creating online groups of non-IRA members (attracted to whatever political cause is being used) and letting paying advertisers have access to them. All-in-all, this outfit (which has morphed into "Russia's vast troll army") is alleged to have spent somewhere between $100,000 and $1,000,000 on US facebook and other social media sites on a number of themes during the 2016 election cycle. Supposedly this piddling amount can be credited with sowing divisions between US-Americans that wouldn't have otherwise existed, or turning the election in Trump's favour. (FWIW, Israel has its own internet trolls, as does the USA.)

Along with the IRA, Russian intelligence hacked the servers of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election, as well as the e-mails of Hillary Clinton advisor and campaign chairman John Podesta. (These are still just allegations by the way.) Russian intelligence then gave this information to Wikileaks to release. (Julian Assange denies this. So does Craig Murray, a former diplomat and current Wikileaks envoy who claims to be the person who received the leaks and gave them to the organization. Robert Mueller never bothered to interview either of these men in his quest to leave no stone un-turned to discover the truth about the 2016 election.)

Anyhow, as we all know, the whole thing was full of shit. And now we find that it was based on shit from the get-go. The US Justice Department Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, has released a report on the inquiry into the investigation of Donald Trump's Russia ties. Rolling Stone politics writer Matt Taibbi (who has already detailed the glaring journalistic failures of "Russiagate") summarizes the Horowitz Report and lays out the general idea:

The Guardian headline reads: “DOJ Internal watchdog report clears FBI of illegal surveillance of Trump adviser.”
If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a “clearing” of the FBI, never clear me of anything. Holy God, what a clown show the Trump-Russia investigation was.

Probably the same way that all powerful actors are "cleared" in the Anglo-American countries. Despite massive evidence against those being investigated, those bureaucrats who could prosecute are too afraid of rocking the boat and pissing-off powerful interests to actually enforce the law. Either because they're guilty of things themselves or they're simply cowards.

Taibbi describes how the FBI essentially LIED about their target (Carter Page) in their application for a warrant from the FISA court, and that (contrary to Democrat and allied media denials) the so-called Steele Dossier was the "central and essential" source for their application. And, as their "central and essential" source, the Steele Dossier (and subsequent breathless journalistic "bombshells" based on it) was garbage.

Steele in his “reports” embellished his sources’ quotes, played up nonexistent angles, invented attributions, and ignored inconsistencies. The FBI then transplanted this bad reporting in the form of a warrant application and an addendum to the Intelligence Assessment that included the Steele material, ignoring a new layer of inconsistencies and red flags its analysts uncovered in the review process.
Then, following a series of leaks, the news media essentially reported on the FBI’s wrong reporting of Steele’s wrong reporting.

After beginning this piece I discovered that Glenn Greenwald (who has also eviscerated media conspiracy theories about Russiagate) has weighed in on the Horowitz Report too.

If it does not bother you to learn that the FBI repeatedly and deliberately deceived the FISA court into granting it permission to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign, then it is virtually certain that you are either someone with no principles, someone who cares only about partisan advantage and nothing about basic civil liberties and the rule of law, or both. There is simply no way for anyone of good faith to read this IG Report and reach any conclusion other than that this is yet another instance of the FBI abusing its power in severe ways to subvert and undermine U.S. democracy. If you don’t care about that, what do you care about?
* * * * *
But the revelations of the IG Report are not merely a massive FBI scandal. They are also a massive media scandal, because they reveal that so much of what the U.S. media has authoritatively claimed about all of these matters for more than two years is completely false.

This is why it's so disheartening to read otherwise intelligent people babbling about the "Russian usurper" and "Moscow Mitch" and how there was collusion goddammit but Trump obstructed the investigation and that's why Saint Robert (blood on his hands) Mueller couldn't prove it. I watch writers I used to respect turning on a dime from opposing US militarism and spying to condemning Trump for "not listening to his generals" and hoping that the CIA can save us from the Mango Mussolini.

When I read such nitwit garbage and delusion and stupidity and gullibility and xenophobia, I am again reminded of the reasons why I'm such a despairing pessimist.

Stirring World Events

So the Democratic Congress has voted to restrain Trump from war with Iran.

The Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday passed a non-binding War Powers Resolution that would prohibit President Donald Trump from taking further military action against Iran without first gaining congressional approval.
The resolution—officially House Concurrent Resolution 83—was passed 224-194, largely along party lines with just three Republicans and one Independent joining with Democrats in favor of the measure. While eight Democrats voted against the resolution, four others did not vote. Read the full roll call here.

I can't help but remember when the Republican controlled Congress voted against Obama's call for military action against Libya. (Obama decided to attack Libya anyway. And the Republicans would have called him "weak" if he hadn't called for an attack on Libya. They would have screwed him either way.)

It's never clear how much of these US military actions, and the debates over them, are about US presidents seeking political gain and their oppositions basing their responses on partisan issues.

What is not at issue though is that there are dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of real human beings, whose lives are being devastated by the political games of these super-corrupt, amoral psychopaths. 

I mean, look at the main players of this pissing contest: A repulsive ageing grifter with a combover named Donald Trump and an alcoholic, botoxed, out-of-touch oligarch named Nancy Pelosi.

The United States has been too powerful for too long. That pathetic specimens of humanity such as Trump and Pelosi can play with the lives of so many people in their ignorant, partisan, navel-gazing contests with zero consequences. 

Now, certainly, at least some of those Democrats who voted against war with Iran did so out of conscience. And maybe a few of those Republicans who opposed Obama based their decision on consistent moral principles. But as Glenn Greenwald once said, Democratic leaders (like the revolting Hillary Clinton) often have very flexible views about what is right and what is wrong.

Here she is on critics of her and Obama's attack on Libya:

But the bottom line is, whose side are you on? Are you on Qadhafi’s side or are you on the side of the aspirations of the Libyan people and the international coalition that has been created to support them? For the Obama Administration, the answer to that question is very easy.

But here she was maintaining the citizenry's right to criticize the wars of Republican george dubya bush:

I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration, somehow you're not patriotic, and we should stand up and say, 'WE ARE AMERICANS AND WE HAVE A RIGHT TO DEBATE AND DISAGREE WITH ANY ADMINISTRATION!'

And Greenwald's critical eye is the main reason why partisan Democratic blogger "Driftglass" is always reduced to pathetic whining whenever he thinks about him.

The Peace Movement's Brief Awakening

So Donald Trump assassinated Iranian military leader Qassem Soliemani (as well as Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, leader of an important Iraqi Shia militia that is a part of Iraq's official military establishment). Many people, both for and against these murders, say that this is tantamount to an act of war. Trump himself doesn't appear to think this. Personally, I think Trump wanted a distraction from the impeachment drama, and that his long-term exposure to psychopaths like John Bolton, Sheldon Adelson, Pompeo, and the other assorted human garbage in the USA's mainstream media, has caused him to lose all sense of proportion. On the other hand, people confidently predicting an Iranian retaliation ignore the huge disparity in power between Iran and the USA. Sure, Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz, but then what? The USA would launch airstrike after airstrike and turn its major cities into smoking ruins. People who imagine that Russia and/or China would come to Iran's assistance similarly forget Russia's relative weakness and overestimate China's devotion to Iran. Both of these countries would counsel restraint.

Regardless, the prospect of World War III has produced a flicker of life in the West's moribund peace movement. Don't expect it to last. People are always bitching that I'm so negative. I, conversely, bitch about how progressives and leftists are deluded shit-heads wedded to masturbatory outbursts of stirring rhetoric while being short on proposing solutions or making their actions match their brave words.

The peace movement has been slumbering because those who tend to organize it and those who tend to show up at its rallies all have this dull sense of the futility of their actions. They don't consciously realize (and will never consciously admit) that gathering in a public place for an afternoon to wave signs and shout things has about zero influence on the insane mass murderers they say they're trying to influence. The USA has been rampaging from Afghanistan to Libya (and elsewhere) for DECADES now. At first there was a peace movement. Especially when it was the Republican, George Dubya Bush who was in power. He stole two terms of office and carried on slaughtering regardless of the peaceful afternoon rallies calling on him to stop. Then, it was the debonair, inspiring symbol of so much that is good, Barack Obama who carried out the killings and assassinations (admittedly with a greater degree of restraint than any other likely candidate for the office of president would have shown) and the peace movement pretty much went to sleep. Now, the obnoxious, disgusting human swill, Republican Donald Trump is seemingly moving the country towards a nation-to-nation war with Iran and there are rallies again.

But what hasn't changed is that teams of organizers working for a couple of weeks or a month to organize a peaceful rally, and hundreds (or even thousands) or ordinary people showing up at these peaceful afternoon rallies are still completely ineffectual at influencing the decisions of powerful murderers who are accountable to a very few oligarchs in the Military-Industrial-Complex (and other coteries of scum). This uselessness will soon make itself undeniable and the peace movement will go back to sleep. (Sleeping the sleep of the righteous, knowing that they demonstrated their opposition to this evil, even if it had zero impact.)

Prove me wrong.

The People's Right to Go Ape-Shit 2

I wrote this 2013 post as a reply to a comment saying that fear of police violence was a factor in people's reluctance to defend democracy. I was also, at the time, inspired by my anger at the treatment of protesters during Wendy Davis's filibuster of an anti-choice bill in the Texas State Legislature a couple of months before. I recalled seeing footage of goons from some Texas police force (state troopers or legislative security of some sort) roughly dragging away (mostly female) protesters when they shouted in anger at the way Davis's filibuster was being illegitimately attacked in bogus rulings from the Speaker of the House.

Futile Musings About Saving The World

It's going to be unseasonably warm here in Toronto for Christmas. There'll be no snow on the ground. I heard it's going to be around 5 or 8 degrees Celsius. I don't think we'll have a "white Christmas" in this part of the world for the rest of my life. (However long that will be.) I recently asked a group of highschool boys if anyone had ever told them that up until the mid-1990's, in this part of the world, if they made an outdoor ice-rink in a public park that it would persist from at least December 1st to February 1st. They hadn't been told that. (One of them thought that would have been "pretty cool." I'm not sure if it was a joke or not.)

UK Elections, "Afghanistan Papers" and Terry Glavin

So I wanted to write about the Washington Post's "Afghanistan Papers" but while I was working up the enthusiasm to do that there was subsequently the tragedy of the Labour Party loss of the 2019 UK election. I literally AGONIZED over which topic to write about. I simply COULDN'T do a post containing two such disparate topics! And I SURE AS HELL WOULDN'T write two goddamned posts! But prayze gord I was saved by Terry Glavin!

You see, I was at work and I wanted to find something to read about Jeremy Corbyn, post-election and google's top-hits for me was something stupid by the National Neo-Liberal Prostiganda's Barbara Kay and then an anti-Corbyn editorial from Maclean's. I decided to skip Kay's effort and read the editorial. Now the thing is that I'd gotten it into my head that this was some editorial written by the magazine's committee representing the magazine as a whole. So I read the ridiculous headline: "Jeremy Corbyn's defeat is a win for the democratic world" and then I skipped the sub-title and went into the actual editorial. By the end of the second paragraph:

The crushing and richly-deserved defeat of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has led the once proud and gallant party of the British working class to its worst humiliation since 1935, should have been sufficient to put a spring in the step of any decent social democrat. It could have been the moment when Labour began to free itself of the Corbynite millstone that has been hanging from its neck since September, 2015.

I could tell this was the opinion of one unhinged, prejudiced individual and not an editorial committee pretending to be "objective." "Who the fuck is writing this dreck?" I asked and scrolled back up. That's when I noticed the sub-title:

Terry Glavin: Britain will not be yanked out of the western alliance. Its leader will not be a man who has counted holocaust deniers among his friends. It’s a victory of sorts.

"Terry Glavin!" I sneered out loud. Then it dawned on me. My post in response to the "Afghanistan Papers" was going to deal with the fact that Canadian governments and media behaved exactly the same way as successive US governments and US mainstream media did. And among those who pretended that we were going from success to success in Afghanistan (and who smeared their critics as "Taliban lovers" and "traitors") was Terry Glavin. Through the miracle that is Terry Glavin I could write about both of these topics and connect them with the slime of stupidity that dribbles from his pen!

[Note: I'm not even going to investigate or bother to refute Glavin's asinine "a man who has counted holocaust deniers among his friends" smear against Corbyn. I've investigated a few of the allegations of anti-Semitism against Corbyn and found them all to have been garbage. And Glavin is simply a detestable scumbag so I'm sure it's just more deranged lying on his part.]

Now then, there was a brief flurry of interest a few weeks back when the Washington Post released its "Afghanistan Papers" series. The title they'd chosen was meant to mimic the famous "Pentagon Papers" that had been leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. The "Pentagon Papers" was an internal study of the history and evaluation of US policy during their conflict in Vietnam. It found that the United States had committed numerous illegal actions and that governments from Eisenhower to Johnson had repeatedly lied to the US-American people about their involvement in the war and in the progress that had been made towards their stated objectives. So too, the "Afghanistan Papers" (which I'm not linking to because the Washington Post is behind a paywall because Jeff Bezos didn't become the richest man in the world by giving stuff away) is an internal study of US policies and progress in Afghanistan since they invaded that country 18 years ago. And, just as with the "Pentagon Papers" it turns out that the US government has been lying to the people and to itself for almost the whole time.

I can't say that I was exactly blown away by these revelations. Here's a blog post I made in 2011 mocking the claims that we were "winning" in Afghanistan. Recently, The Mound of Sound looked at the USA's own counterinsurgency manuals and found they were calling for 20 soldiers for every 1,000 citizens in order to effectively monitor communities and suppress insurgents. Canadian general Rick Hillier had insisted that Canada could effectively contain Kandahar Province in Afghanistan with 2,000 Canadian Forces personnel. We didn't. (Though here are posts 1 and 2 containing reviews about the CF's battles with the Taliban for Kandahar.)

Basically (unless you had your head up your ass) it shouldn't come as a surprise that rampaging through a country looking for insurgents; offering bounties to corrupt warlords for finding insurgents; imposing super-corrupt governments on a people; killing as many civilians through air-strikes as were killed by the Taliban; wasting resources on corrupt "development" projects (such as schools that fall to pieces a year after their construction that are staffed with absentee or incompetent teachers who are simply paid placeholders in a corrupt system of patronage); countenancing a police force and military staffed with extortionists, kidnappers, rapists and murderers and etc., etc., will make "winning hearts and minds" difficult, if not impossible. (I mean, unless your a Catholic, institutional child rape tends to be a deal-breaker.)

I remember raising the issue of child rape with Terry Glavin. At the stupid blog where his deranged screechings were posted I asked him FIVE TIMES to comment about the Afghanistan National Police's propensity to rape children. He deleted each and every one of those requests. Without comment. All the while self-righetously braying about how the anti-war left has disgraced itself. Terry Glavin is a gutless, pompous, deluded, obnoxious windbag, hypocritical lying scumbag.

Now then, why did the Washington Post (of all places) publish the "Afghanistan Papers"? I mean, aren't they owned by super-plutocrat Jeff Bezos? The guy who is also a CIA contractor? Well, rogue journalist Caitlin Johnstone lays it all out for us:

After all, by WaPo’s own admission it both sought and published the Afghanistan Papers in order to take a swing at Donald Trump. According to the Post it went down this path in 2016 initially seeking documents on Michael Flynn, who was then part of the Trump campaign, after receiving a tip that he’d made some juicy statements about the war in Afghanistan to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). WaPo then made the decision to publish the papers now rather than waiting for its legal battle for more information to complete because Trump is currently in the midst of negotiating with the Taliban over a potential troop withdrawal.

So this newspaper series is the happy result of an inter-oligarchic pissing contest. (Johnstone goes on to discuss how ominous it is that it takes an institution as powerful as the Washington Post to be able to extract basic information from the government.

Independent political writer and journalist Ted Rall isn't impressed with the WaPo's achievement though:

   “The Afghanistan Papers” is a bright, shining lie by omission. Yes, our military and civilian leaders lied to us about Afghanistan. But they could never have spread their murderous BS—thousands of U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Afghans killed, trillions of dollars wasted—without media organizations like the Washington Post, which served as unquestioning government stenographers.

            Press outlets like the Post and New York Times weren’t merely idiots used to disseminate pro-war propaganda. They actively censored people who knew we never should have gone into Afghanistan and tried to tell American voters the truth. ...

What was my reward for being right while everyone else was wrong? Hundreds of death threats. Getting fired by my client newspapers and magazines. It’s hard to believe now but back in 2004 George W. Bush was popular and being compared to Winston Churchill; that was the year that the “liberal” New York Times and Washington Post stopped running my work.

            Major news outlets and book reviewers ignored my books. Editors refused to hire me. Producers wouldn’t book me. Anyone opposed to the Afghanistan war was censored from U.S. corporate media.

Agreed. Because basically anybody who was paying attention (and who wasn't a delusional whackjob like Terry Glavin) would have known all of this already. I'll admit to enjoying hearing about how amoral psychopath Donald Rumsfeld complained about not knowing who the "bad guys" were in Afghanistan. But that's about it. And the fact of the matter is that the Canadian government and the Canadian media behaved just as badly. And therefore we wasted BILLIONS of dollars on this adventure and traumatized, crippled or killed hundreds of our soldiers and did the same to thousands of Afghani people. A-N-D we debased our parliamentary traditions and safeguards to cover-up our complicity in torture with the Afghan prison system.

On to the tragedy of the Corbyn/Labour defeat in the recent UK election. First it's noteworthy that all the neo-liberal scum gleefully pointing out that this was Labour's worst defeat since 1935 could hardly bring themselves to say that Corbyn's 2017 election showing had been Labour's best since their landslide victory in 1945. Most of these pukes (like Glavin) will revert to the false allegations of Corbyn enabling Labour to become an anti-Semite party (if he isn't an anti-Semite himself). You see, people like Terry Glavin hate Arabs so much that they simply swoon over a country that abuses Palestinians, steals their lands and has its military snipers murder innocent men, women and children if they approach the prison walls the Israelis have built for them to protest their treatment.

Aside from the baseless smears of anti-Semitism (along with the laughable fictions of Corbyn being a Cold War traitor or a terrorist sympathizer) why else would shit-head Glavin claim that Corbyn's defeat should "put a spring in the step of any decent social democrat"? I'm not sure, but it's possible that Glavin had his funny-shaped head shoved deeply into his stinking, hairy asshole when "social democrats" like Tony Blair were embracing US-American [illegal] wars of choice and imposing neo-liberalism and austerity on ordinary Britains. Corbyn was the first Labour leader in a long time to have rejected those noxious policies. Perhaps Glavin is ecstatic about the defeat of a man who challenged the NATO alliance that has been wreaking so much havoc around the Middle East and neighbouring lands where Glavin likes to locate his own masturbatory fantasies?

Unlike blithering idiot Terry Glavin, sane social democrats and socialists recognize Corbyn's defeat for the enormous tragedy that it is. It is the product of years of over-the-top smears and assaults (many of them from middle-class errand boys and girls of the corporate state). And it was also (as Ian Welsh tells us) the result of the irreconcilable differences within the Labour Party itself:

What urban liberals don’t seem to understand is that there was a genuine split in traditional Labour voters over Brexit. Progressives in London were Remain; working and middle class voters in Labour’s northern strongholds were for Leave.There was no way to split the difference, though Labour tried. Going Leave alienates London voters and gives the LibDems a chance to eat Labour’s lunch in greater London. Going Remain means losing the northern strongholds....But when you look at the ridings Labour lost, they include a lot of the Northern bastions. Places Labour hasn’t lost in decades. What you see is that the Brexit party (which ran in Labour leaning ridings, but not Conservative ones) made the margin of difference, and often more than it.By going “People’s Vote” Labour lost a big chunk of the north. It’s just that simple. BUT there was no good answer, going “Leave” would have lost a lot of other seats.

Whatever the case, the British voters who voted for serial liar Boris Johnson, or who simply didn't vote for Corbyn, were either witless fools or amoral greed-heads. BREXIT will have a slightly negative impact on Britain's economy; REMAINing would have had a slightly positive impact. More importantly, Johnson's campaign lies about reinvesting in the National Health Service will quickly be abandoned (unless they become a public subsidy to privatized service providers which will be paid for by cuts elsewhere). The foreign wars that Glavin rubs himself out to will continue (at public expense and to private profit). All in all, a bad show.

A Book, Tulsi Gabbard, and Andrew Scheer

Greetings and salutations imaginary readers! Today I feel like mentioning three things: A book I'm reading; Hawaiian congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard; and, finally, something miserable warbling I heard coming out of Andrew Scheer's mouth on the news the other day.

First, the book: James C. Scott's Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.

Scott is a political scientist at Yale University. He's got a couple of other anarchist-themed books under his belt. I might check 'em out at some point in the not-too-distant future. But, anyway, this book is a summary of the work of others (people who study prehistoric agriculture, geographic history, and all sorts of other fascinating topics) and a distillation of their recent findings.

The jist of it is that agriculture predated "civilization" by a few thousand years at least. And when the first farmers were "farming" it was more an addition to a multifaceted strategy of opportunistic hunting and gathering and pastoralism. Sedentary farming took place first in naturally rich soils on flood plains such as those of the Tigris-Euphrates, the Nile and the Yellow River and the Indus Valley. As well, gathering together of large communities (Scott estimates that some pre-civilization towns and rural communities in the Tigris-Euphrates region  reached numbers of 1,000 to 5,000 people, together with their farm animals (and unwanted pests such as lice, rats and sparrows) were already creating disease vectors that would bedevil later walled city-states and which may have been responsible for many of the "collapses" of these societies.

Being an anarchist, Scott has a critical view of the supposed "glories" of ancient civilizations. Aside from the fact that "permanent" stone structures ("permanent" in that they left evidence of their existence for later archaeologists to find) such as walls and buildings, also meant crowded, foul and pestilent living standards, the fact is that palaces signified social inequality; writing and counting probably had their origins in the need for "statistics" (information about the STATE, such as population, grain harvests, etc.,) which meant coercion and exploitation. In short, the earliest states (like most later ones) were built on human exploitation.

Scott hypothesizes that these civilizations were grain/cereal-based because grains ripen on a more dependably uniform basis; they can be easily seen growing in the fields and they could be transported relatively cheaply after processing. All these attributes are beneficial to those who would assemble and move this resource. So far as the people who actually grew the grain, cereals provided fewer calories per input of work than many other food sources. Cereals were therefore grown to benefit the rulers of states rather than the needs of the producers.

There is a lot here for libertarians of whatever persuasion to like. And some reviewers feel obligated to point to the blessings of civilizations for those of us in the present day who enjoy them. Reading the book simply as an expression of an idea based upon evidence, as this review does, is the best attitude to take towards it.

Next up: Tulsi Gabbard.

Ms. Gabbard is, as I've said before, an odd duck. Raised in an extremely conservative Hindu family, she signed up for the US military after 9-11. Going to Iraq as a medical officer she saw the violence and the futility of the Occupation. She says she also saw there the deleterious impact of religious fundamentalism. (I'll speculate that this was due to the rise of sectarianism and extremism in general on an Arab society that had been primarily secular under socialist and later, Baathist ideology.) Both of these experiences made her re-think her allegiance to US foreign policy and the imposition of one's religious views on society. Gabbard apparently still holds conservative personal views but her actual voting record on LGBT-issues is now very good.

During the early years of Barack Obama, Gabbard was seen as just the sort of new Democrat the party was looking for. A woman of colour and a veteran, she seemed to tick-off all the boxes. Gabbard gained the support of progressive Democrats (and the hatred of amoral, hypocritical, centrist Democratic Hillary-bot fuck-faces) for resigning from the Democratic National Committee complaining of their rigging of the primary process for Hillary Clinton (subsequently validated by Wikileaks) and went on to endorse Bernie Sanders for president given that Hillary Clinton was a warmongering asshole who loved to put the troops in harm's way just so she could close her eyes and imagine all the brown people being slaughtered.

Gabbard has been criticized for being friendly with the murderously Islamophobic Hindu nationalist Modi of India. (Publicly though, she's done nothing more than any other mainstream US politician has done, which is to make friendly, neutral noises about the prime minister of a huge country.) She's been criticized for past statements condemning GLBT people. She's been criticized for constantly advertising her status as an active-duty military officer. She's been criticized for having met with Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad during a visit to Syria. Smug, arrogant asshole Jeffrey St. Clair of "CounterPunch" criticizes her for doing all of these things while being female.

Now, don't get me wrong. There's a lot to criticize Tulsi Gabbard for. And if I were able to vote in the Democratic primary it would be for Bernie Sanders. But she is the most consistently anti-war candidate out there. She has the courage of her convictions. She will say what she feels with little fear of the political ramifications. She will actually call US-backed rebels "terrorists" because that is what they are. She straight-out punctures US propaganda about the conflicts in the Middle East. She destroyed the presidential aspirations of the cynical, corporatist Kamala Harris by simply listing "achievements" from Harris's record.

To some shit-assed Hillary-bot, these are mortal sins. But who cares what they think? Not me. I encourage Gabbard to stay in the race. Here's the thing. I don't relish talking about the physical appearance of a female politician. I don't think it's relevant to the job they're going to do. But the popularity of Justin Trudeau, .... the appeal of Barack Obama, ... the interest that was shown for the ridiculous Sarah Palin, ... the sad fact is that when a political party can find an attractive package to sell to people, they'll do so and it will work. While she might have been scarred by acne earlier in her life, Ms. Gabbard is now a very attractive individual with considerable poise and a pleasant speaking voice. Her physical presence, plus her veteran status, plus her visible minority status, plus her controversy (which wouldn't, on its own, be enough to merit pop-culture interest in her) are what enable her to get on mainstream shows such as "The View" or "Stephen Colbert." And when she gets on those shows and condemns the regime-change wars directed by monsters in Washington, she reaches millions of US-American viewers who wouldn't have been exposed to such clarity of thinking. She reaches ten times as many people as Jeffrey St. Clair will reach in his entire life. And, being attractive, being a veteran, ... these things alone will make her listeners more sympathetic to her anti-imperialist views.

If she is a latent Islamophobe, ... well, that would be regrettable. But ask yourself; if you were living in Lebanon right now, which would you prefer: A US politician with Hindu Nationalist sympathies who will NOT finance an armed Jihaadist rebellion/civil war in your country? Or some DLC corporate Wall Street/MIA shill who has been trained to show "tolerance" to Muslims, while all the while raining death and destruction down upon them?

Finally, a look at pathetic overgrown altar boy Andrew Scheer.

Now, in his job as propagandist for the Liberal Party of Canada, Montreal Simon does tons of work bashing conservatives (including Andrew Scheer) to the extent that you'd think the Conservative Party was actually in power in Ottawa. But they're not. It's the Liberals who are backing murderous sanctions on Venezuela, and applauding the slaughter of indigenous people in Bolivia, and running roughshod over indigenous people here in Canada, and propping-up the petro-pushers and etc., etc. ... So why should I talk about the loser Andrew Scheer?

Well, yeah, as Simon says, they're dangerous. A party of cretins, closet-cases, con-artists, creeps and Cro-Magnons. (Apologies to Cro-Magnons. Alliteration made me do it.) The Conservatives bear paying attention to.

But the reason I'm talking about this spineless, corrupt mediocrity is because I heard him (on the TV in the cafeteria at work) bleating about how hard the Liberal government is making it for oil industry investors in this country. This made me think how sadly debased our politics are here in Canada. We have a Liberal government that couldn't meet stephen harper's carbon emissions targets; that uses the police to impose a pipeline route on the sovereign territory of a First Nation that doesn't want it; that found $4 billion to bail-out a US-American company that didn't want to continue with its pipeline of bitumen (and the Toronto Bay Street parasites who'd invested in the project). And none of it is enough for Canada's "conservatives." From the ignorant, bigoted assholes in their yellow vests all the way up to Scheer himself; these imbeciles pretend that the only thing hindering investment in Canadian tar is the Liberal government. Not the low prices for oil. Not the reality of global warming. Not the constitutional obligation to obtain the consent of the affected First Nations.

The fact that this whining, deluded and/or cynical dipshit is the leader of the opposition and his reality-free ravings get a hearing on our news channels speaks volumes of how primitive and useless we are as a society.

Well, that's all I had to say really.

Postscript:

And, two days later, Andrew Scheer resigns. Seems there was a "slush fund" or some damned thing or other, whereby Andrew of the Speaker's Residence and Stornoway and the $200,000 a year that is all the sweeter when your housing is paid for, was sending his kids to private school using Conservative Party of Canada money. This was the party that balked at paying $90,000 to cover Mike Duffy's fundraising expenses (which [sigh!] let's not forget, these charlatans had ALSO tried to put on the public's dime); but somehow they missed Scheer paying private school tuitions with their money?

It seems more likely that there had been more than a few winks and nods about all this and now that the malcontents are seething and Andy wasn't retreating, that they've used these "revelations" to push him out. Scheer could probably say that the party always knew about this, thereby making them look bad, but that would also burn his bridges with them. And, perhaps, there's more they know about him.

Of course, that's all idle speculation on my part. The end result is that the party with the grassroots of moronic bigots and christo-fascist closet-cases is going to be expected to barf-up a "socially moderate" con-artist. Which doesn't seem bloody likely. Fucking losers.