It's my understanding that Joe Biden doesn't like the English because of his Irish ancestry. Which is ridiculous because why the fuck should anyone care? He doesn't side with the Palestinians against the Israelis. He doesn't side with African Americans against Whites. He imposes the same sort of hegemony worldwide on befalf of the US Empire (Bill O'Reilly's "White, male, Christian power-structure") that the English used to inflict on their Empire in the 18th and 19th Centuries.
Crystia Freeland is a right-wing neoliberal. Justin Trudeau is an amoral air-head. The Liberal Party of Canada is a party of amoral, opportunistic freaks. Even at that, they represent the slightly more socially conscious aspect of Canadian capitalism. The possess the "intellectual rigour" (for want of a better term) that doesn't see yet more cuts to taxes and spending and further de-regulation as the solutions to any and all economic problems. So when (from the headlines of stories that I can't be bothered to read) the CBC is only presenting the responses of Pierre Poillevre, Bill Morneau, and other right-wing assholes, I decided to see what the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives had to say. (That link goes to a page of collected budget responses from several Canadian lefty organizations.)
The Book of Revelation is a silly piece of writing. But the very real possibility that Netanyahu is prepared to risk World War III to keep himself out of prison, along with the sad, sick truth that our debased political culture means that the USA's leadership will consent to this, and blame the people Israel attacks, has caused me to worry about this "work of prophecy."
Because John of Patmos (or whoever) wrote that the final battle of the world would be at Har Meggido, or Harmageddon in Greek. And Tel Meggido is in Palestine:
And there are plenty of ridiculous US politicians who believe in all this "End Times" mythology and they're thinking this too. They're thinking of helping bring back the Second Coming of their Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and Judgment Day.
I don't have time to watch this now but it is something I'm interested in and I want to be able to watch it later. Perhaps any of my two or three readers might take a look at it as well. It was the first entry in the weekend political-economy wrap-up at Ian Welsh's blog.
I don't follow things too closely anymore. I know that Biden has passed things (even watered-down, unnecessarily expensive and inefficient because of the inclusion of private sector profiteers) that the Republicans wouldn't have even thought of doing. But I also know that he has made stupid excuses for not doing things, like allowing the hitherto unknown entity of the Senate Parliamentarian to abandon raising the federal minimum wage. The biggest thing that I've heard that Biden is doing though is appointing actually decent people to rule on corporate mergers and competition. "Antitrust."
In my last post about CBC coverage of the Gaza genocide I responded to the one-sided coverage of Israel's claim that the battle against Hamas militants was pretty much over:
It also provides an opportunity to give someone from the Israeli Wehrmacht time to gloat about the military defeat of Hamas without giving anyone from Hamas a chance to respond. Hamas has always been a lightly armed military force. So it has always been incapable of large scale military offensives. But are they still killing Israeli soldiers? We don't know. We've seen plenty of footage of IOF members acting like idiots inside homes devastated by Israeli bombs. But for all we know, in northern Gaza, Hamas operatives could still be emerging from tunnels and picking off Israeli soldiers on a daily basis.
There's been almost zero reporting on IOF casualty figures.
Later in the day I saw this Richard Medhurst video:
It shows footage from last week of IOF foot-soldiers being ambushed and another video of a tank being destroyed. Whatever you think of Medhurst's commentary, when he says that Israel is probably lying when they publicly acknowledges only around 250 dead IOF, he's probably right. The numbers of wounded are far higher and standard ratios of killed to wounded in war point to a much higher figure.
[Also, I just have to say that I don't think the IOF soldier in the thumbnail is grinning at the camera. I don't even think he knows it's there. He's just looking around frantically and happened to look into the hidden camera's lens.]
So, this morning, the big stories were about the Bank of Montreal being sued by customers about fraudulent e-transfers and another story about Trudeau's testimony about whether China paid to bus some Chinese-Canadian seniors to a polling station to elect a candidate they allegedly liked.
As well there was this one: "Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh says 3 sons in Gaza killed by Israeli airstrike."
First of all, while hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are being deliberately starved to death and while there is ongoing video footage available of this, the CBC has refrained from showing images and interviews with starving parents and their concerns for their starving children. Likewise, footage of psychotic Israeli civilians colluding with the Israeli Wehrmacht to block food and medicine from entering the Gaza strip and turning their blockades into a holiday, is likewise readily available. I daresay either one of these stories would make for compelling news and guarantee high ratings. But to juxtapose these stories would have Canadians up in arms and would put enormous pressure on the Trudeau government to punish Israel.
"Islamism." "Antisemitism." "Illegal immigration." These are three things that one or both of the liberal/conservative divide obsess about. But a look at current events and the history of the past half-century clearly shows that our elites clearly can't be too concerned about these issues since they do so much to perpetuate them.
