I'm trying to focus my thinking about current events. I only read a few (mostly US-American) websites and I try not to pay attention to the news outside of whatever those sites are talking about. I've decided to try writing more here to get me to look at the news more comprehensively. In that spirit, I decided to look at the CBC News website. I want to know what the CBC is talking about given all the real information about AI, West Asia, Ukraine, etc., that I get from the sites I regularly read.
So, today, November 9th, 2026, CBC News has a bunch of stories about IVF and other reproductive issues, such as egg-freezing. I suppose that's interesting on some levels, but it isn't exactly crucial information for understanding today's world. Russell Brand got sentenced to 10 years in prison. People are using illegal drugs in public. Somebody in Toronto is removing trees "suspiciously." They're shooting bears at dumps in Inuvik. A 19-year old won the PGA. Some hockey player isn't going to play for Winnipeg's next game. And 39 people died in a boat accident in Senegal. There were a few other stories.
Mostly trivial stuff. Mostly stuff that can't really be connected to the main events and trends going on in the world today. The rise of oligarchic feudalism and the continued hollowing out of the economy and the majority's living standards. Nothing about major wars and genocides. All just unimportant slop. Stuff to distract us from understanding the world that the CBC (a propaganda outlet) serves.
Mark Carney has taken advantage of Donald Trump's imbecilic attacks on Canada to push a radical, far-right agenda, all while paying lip-service to the idea of "resisting" Trump and pursuing "Canadian sovereignty." The racist grifter Pierre Poilievre cannot play that role because he spent too many years telling Canadians about his masturbatory fantasies of himself and Trump playing with each other's bodily fluids. The fact that Carney remains Trump's lickspittle ally doesn't register because Canadians are, essentially, complacent, ignorant people with short attention spans and a corporate media system that works to keep them that way.
Carney is attacking the right to collective bargaining. He's unilaterally attacking First Nations rights to consultation about Canadian assaults on their lands. He's going gung-ho on NATO's delusional imperialist agenda. He's publicly supporting Trump's illegal, murderous assaults on Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and Palestine. He's subsidizing the fossil fuels industry and its commitment to global heating for short-term profits. He's all-in on the shit-for-brains/anti-human "Artificial Intelligence" boondoggle.
Carney wouldn't be able to do all of this if the Canadian Left hadn't shown itself to be an irrelevancy decade after decade. Our electoral system is partly to blame for this. First-Past-The-Post means that (as is even more the case in the USA) legislative authority is traded between two pro-business parties. (That was the real reason that the idiot Justin Trudeau reneged on his promise to change our electoral system. The massive majority the Liberals received when stephen harper made the Conservative brand toxic was the elixer, but it was the way that FPTP limited Canadians' democratic options that was at the base of it.
But elections are one thing. A Left that has neither strategy nor tactics cannot be expected to be an effective extra-parliamentary resistance. I have said for years and years at this blog, and I continue to say, that peaceful, one-day marches will not sway politicians who are controlled by corporate capitalists, domestic and foreign. All the money and power is on the other side. The people of Canada are fodder for them. The political class's material self-interest comes out of servitude to the profit-above-all capitalist agenda. They aren't going to deviate from that course just because we took an afternoon to register our displeasure.
For pointing out this obvious reality I was derided as a negative nelly and I eventually gave up on arguing my case, both online and face-to-face with other leftists. I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that my exiting myself from the fight is what has doomed the Left to failure. I'm irrelevant. The Left has failed all by itself. With its merely performative protests, its unwillingness to inflict/suffer consequences, its stupid, sanctimonious adherence to non-violence, ... the Left has made itself irrelevant as well.
I'm no expert in such things at all. But if the weirdo who blogs at "Moon of Alabama" is right, then the new moon of November 8-9 is going to be the time when Trump will try one last bombing campaign against Iran.
Working against this is Trump's realization that both the USA and Israel are running out of long-range offensive weapons (meaning that their fighter-jets will eventually have to fly into Iranian airspace to hit their targets, with all the risks that entails) and defensive interceptors.
Trump also knows that the Gulf states are highly vulnerable to Iranian retaliation. All of the assets there, from the central fossil fuels and infrastructure, to the undersea internet cables, to desalinization plants, could be obliterated, throwing the region's and the world's economies into a black hole.
Furthermore, Israel is a small country. A densely packed country. And Iranian patience with the zionist entity is approaching a breaking point.
One of the video channels that I watch (can't remember if it was Danny Haiphon, or Jackson Hinkel, or The Grayzone) said that Trump is insisting that if there is an attack on Iran, then Netanyahu's airforce is going to be taking a leading role in it. For much of this conflict it has been the USA doing the work of attempting to re-open the Strait of Hormuz and attacking Iranian targets. I don't know how a US President, who is being blackmailed by an Israeli politician, who forces him to start a war that everyone knew had a good chance of turning out badly, negotiates in such a situation.
Leaking the videos of Trump raping adolescent girls would be a huge thing. It would undermine the influence of the USA grievously. It would be massively destablilizing. There would be rage and there would be calls for all the rest of Epstein's fellow degenerate murderers to be exposed. Because the Epstein case shows the total moral depravity of the West's ruling classes. As well, Israel revealing this evidence of Trump's monstrous behaviour would rebound against them. That they knew about this. They had this evidence and they chose to conceal it until Trump stopped obeying them. It wouldn't exactly make the Israelis look less disgusting than they already do.
It's also not clear that Israel's military leaders are prepared to sacrifice their country to protect Naziyahoo from going to prison. So there's that.
But what is the alternative to a reckless, likely doomed-from-the-start assault on Iran? The continued throttling of the world economy as oil is prevented from exiting the Strait of Hormuz. Tankers are being destroyed. Strategic reserves are dwindling. Prices will continue to inexorably rise.
Iran is demanding the removal of US military bases in the region. (This has already happened. But Iran will not allow the USA to return and rebuild those bases.) It is demanding the removal of the Israel Child-Killing Force from Lebanon. It has the USA's puppet monarchies on the ropes.
Trump could hold off on attacking Iran only to eventually be forced to concede to the end of the US-American Empire sometime in 2027. Meanwhile, Iran is building its relationships with Russia and China. Ukraine is crumbling. The delusional European leadership trying to build the capacity to challenge Russia militarily but the people of Europe don't seem to have any interest in such insanity. If Russia manages to end the war on its western flank it will have more resources to share with Iran. China is also increasing its aid to Iran. China has zero interest in preserving the USA's ability to bully and threaten and subvert.
Personally, having written all this, I think that Trump will take the second option. He will avoid instantaneous destruction from attacking Iran and will opt to drag things out until the inevitable becomes unavoidable.
I was reading something just now that had been written on January 30th, 2026, about how the protests in Iran had been co-opted by Mossad/CIA agents.
It just occurred to me how disgusting that was. I've long been an opponent of dogmatic non-violence advocates. But sometimes, mass-rallies do represent the views of what might possibly be an important demographic.
Whatever the case, some people think that publicly demonstrating your opinion to your government via a mass-rally is a valid way to influence your government.
And, so, at a time when the besieged Iranian government was suffering from an attack on its currency or whatever it was using to import needed necessities, and it privileged some of the more protected demographics, perhaps for venal reasons, perhaps for rational reasons of national survival, this would inevitably have meant that some people who were already suffering under the USA-imposed/Illegal/47Years of illegal sanctions, would find themselves in very dire straits indeed.
And, for the sake of argument, let's imagine that the government of Iran is NOT run by hopeless, delusional, fanatically-narcissistic psychopaths, and that they are, instead, sane, empathetic men, who (whatever their delusions and the justifications for those delusions) responded to the currency attack with desperate measures, which they knew would harm people outside of protected circles. AND they would only grant whatever concessions they could when they were forced to by public opinion.
And, in authoritarian states, as Iran is, ... it takes considerable guts to organize a public demonstration. (Which, I suppose, is a big reason why, say, Canadians, of the "activist" persuasion, are so addicted to them! They haven't figured out that governments at the centre of imperialist systems know that they aren't threatened by the stern looks of disapproval of the tiny minority who have enough resources to have the time and the energy to be concerned about issues outside their immediate self-interest.)
....
Anyway, the point that I don't want to lose is that public demonstrations can sometimes be dangerous to organize and/or participate in. In some countries anyway. And Iran is such a country. [And saying that doesn't make me have to concede that the "Mad Mullahs" need to be wiped out with a nuclear bomb and the 4-million innocent civilians who die with them are necessary "collateral damage."]
But these public demonstrations were no more than what Canada's are: an expression of disagreement. or an expression of discontent.
These were people under forty-seven years of crippling sanctions, being subjected to further deprivations because of a recent attack on their country's currency, to which their government was responding as best as their preconceived ideas could muster, ... being FORCED to speak out, to say to their own besieged government: "WE have our limits! WE are AT our limits!" because desperate times call for desperate measures.
And to have those demonstrations within the crisis to be infiltrated and expropriated by agents of the people who caused the crisis, ... which is to say CIA and Mossad ... the cynicism of that.
I like Owen Bean as an actor. He's quite good. And for a guy with such "presence" he's been a pretty good sport about being relegated to being the villain who dies, or the hero's right-had man who dies.
All that having been said, it took obviously more than just that to make YOOtOOBE put the British TV series "Sharpe" into my feed.
And, as a result of that meta-subsiduary I tried to watch "Sharpe."
It reminded me more and more of "Master and Commander."
Go to Ian Welsh's blog for a more eloquent critique. But the 18th-19th Century British aristocracy were a pretty capable bunch of scumbags. Like, some accident of history made the British temporarily better at incorporating new ways to kill people and they ran with it.
But watching the first episode of "Sharpe," ... first of all, there's an Irish soldier who risks his life to defend the treasure of the army that was going to execute him.
Then there's the conversation between Sharpe and the Spanish count who sides with the French. In my view, Napoleon could have saved himself a lot of grief (and deprived us of Goya's masterpieces about the war that actually got fought) by just forcing his will through the existing monarchy.
Apparently the opera "Carmen" was related to a lot of bleeding-heart, "woke", pinko-commie-faggots, leaving post-Napoleonic Spain for France.
The brother of the contested title of "Count" says that he's backing Spain against the old-order of Catholic superstition and royal dictatorship.
Sharpe says something stupid about not caring about anything outside of his mission and then the battle was going to resume but I couldn't bring myself to watch anymore of that dreck.
This oligarchic nightmare we are living under is the direct result of the success of the ancient British aristocracy to maintain their hold on power over the world and to also delude working class people into thinking that they're free.
Napolean did fuck up though. And Goya's prints ARE worthwhile for showing us what we should avoid.
Why do the European vassals in NATO want to continue to drag out Ukraine's agony? They are desperately trying to militarize themselves (after severely damaging their industrial base by cutting themselves off from Russian energy) and they are launching a brazen campaign of propaganda trying to instill fear in their populations that Russia is attacking them. It doesn't appear to be working because what neo-liberal shit-heads don't (and can't) understand, is that when you constantly fuck people over they see no reason to die for you.
You know, developed countries like Canada could have led the way. We have the ability to provide decent housing and nutrition to everyone in the country. We have a fairly educated population. And we had the productive capability and the financial wealth to design a society, a steady-state society, that requires far fewer resources and labour, to maintain our infrastructure and a more leisurely lifestyle for everyone.
The problem of course is capitalism and Leftists' pathological adherence to compromised electoral politics and performative-only protest.
We needed to shut-down the oil industry. This could have been done in a gradual fashion while the national government financed investment in 21st-Century industries (pharmaceuticals? green energy?) to replace the jobs displaced in the petro-provinces.
GENOCIDE
The fact that, for three goddamned years, Israel has been free to conduct a live-streamed genocide in Gaza (and to a lesser extent in the West Bank) and that Canada's government continues to aid and abet it, ought to be cause for reflection on the part of the Left on the worthlessness of our strategy and tactics.
Other groups and individuals obviously have the time and the resources to devote to this issue. And for three years there's been nothing but disorganized, desultory, campaigns against various individuals and meaningless street marches. These groups should have, and could have, come together to come up with more sustained, meaningful actions. Campaigns against specific, particularly egregious nazi scumbags, like the crew at the wingnut-welfare National Pest, or the nauseating Atrocity Hausfuhrer, or some death-industry manufacturer exporting the tools of mass-murder.
AI
Aside from war, so-called "Artificial Intelligence" might be the single greatest misallocation of human resources in the history of the human race. It's certainly demonstrates that we do not have, but that we DO need, democracy.
Below is a video from a guy calling himself "Adam Somebody" wherein he refers to "smooth-brained dictators" [building ridiculous megaprojects].
This whole "AI" fiasco is the product of a society that allows individuals (so far all male) become multi-billionaires. Such undeserved levels of extreme wealth also mean undeserved levels of extreme power. Power over people and resources. For people who really aren't all that amazing to begin with. It allows Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg to blow over $80 BILLION on his moronic "Metaverse" project.
"Artificial Intelligence" makes the "Metaverse" look tiny by comparison. Our capitalist system, oligarchs, financial institutions, "investors," corporate clients, etc., ... our "elites" had the wherewithal to put TRILLIONS into something which (if it works) will deliberately displace 20% of the OECD labour force, while simultaneously draining gigantic levels of resources, convincing people to kill themselves or others, and weaken human being's thinking abilities. (Trying to find a link for the current amount of financial wealth put into AI so far didn't get me a total figure. But I did see two headlines, one saying that $1.5 trillion for 2025 and $2.5 trillion in 2026. So THREE TRILLION DOLLARS in the last two years.)
And it doesn't "work." Which is to say, it isn't profitable. The whole thing is a Ponzi-scheme. The only sector actually profiting is the chip manufacturers. And they're getting money from selling to people who have been losing money year after year. And the whole thing requires hideous "data centres" that drive up local utility bills (sometimes by 25%) while providing few jobs.
If we lived in a democracy, "AI" wouldn't even be a possibility. LLM's that hallucinate, designed to destroy the livelihoods of a quarter of the workforce, being used now to displace 5-10% of the workforce, only for asshole employers to discover that they don't work and they are increasingly unaffordable.
I daresay a democratic society would have made better use of $8 billion dollars over ten years.
I used to hang around on rabble.ca's "babble" until May, 2006, and, since then, I've been found at www.enmasse.ca and www.breadnroses.ca. Even more lately, I've been at EnMasse, but also numerous blogs from the progressive side.
I'm sometimes rude to people and I've been accused of "schoolyard taunts," so, here's my schoolyard.
