2014: Will the Left Pull Their Heads Out of Their Asses?

Will leftists finally figure out that an afternoon's protest isn't worth the energy that goes into organizing it?

Will leftists finally figure out that if they believe that the government is comprised of psychopathic, inhuman murderers, then peaceful protest is useless?

Will leftists finally figure out that if the state is a conglomeration of power-mad psychotic, inhuman, selfish murderers, armed to the teeth with the latest weaponry and forewarned by a massive surveillance network, ... that smashing a few windows isn't going to do shit against it?

Will leftists finally clue in to the fact that their removing their marginal, insignificant contributions from the system isn't going to impact anything other than (probably) negatively impact their own quality of life?

I advocate something between gullible belief in the system and radical rejection of the system (in favour of nothing at all or some idiotic "anarchist" lifestyle). At the moment my ire is directed to the navel-gazing "radicals" who pompously pronounce how the whole system is rotten, but whose rejection of the entire system is really nothing more than petulance. The vast majority of the population, the society in which they live, believes in the system in some form or other. These "radicals" seem incapable of raising their heads above their tiny social circles to notice how marginal and insignificant they are. They have  brains though. They have good analysis. But it needs to be tempered by reality. It needs to be tempered by the goddamned inescapable fact that the vast majority of people disagree with them. It needs to be informed by some sort of testing against fucking reality. WORK WITH REALITY, don't ignore it because it's inconvenient.

But my anger can as easily be directed to those dullards, plodders and sell-outs within the NDP and the Liberal Party of Canada (especially the latter), who deny the horror of the system and propagate more of the same filth. Canadian Liberals are not quite as bad as the deluded, blood-soaked, corrupted, lazy, arrogant US Democrats, but they're awful fucking close. Just as there are about 5 semi-decent Democrats amongst the 200 or so Democratic legislators, so too are there a few decent Liberals, elected by generally decent people. That the NDP under the conniving Mulcair wants to transform itself into the Second-Coming of the Liberal Party is even more craven and disgusting and depressing.

I no longer have much bile against apolitical types. They've done more to build lives for themselves than I did with my "activism" and ideals. And who can blame them for not dumping harper when it was OUR RESPONSIBILITY to lead the way in that regard? WE FAILED, not them.

harper Tweets About the Ice Storm

Montreal Simon has another great indictment of the usurper. Far be it from that garbage-head harper to interrupt his Christmas in hiding to make a personal appearance during this crisis.

The Usurper's Christmas Message

I'm sort of an all-or-nothing kinda guy. You know, if I don't believe in a religion, then I stop going to church. Canada, and Canadians, are either historical entities trying to build a just, humane society for themselves and others, or they're not. Leftists should either dedicate themselves to achieving change or they should just STFU.

Christmas is supposedly a season when Christians celebrate the birth of their saviour, but in our more secular times it's really supposed to be about reaching out to others and gifting each other in the spirit of self-sacrifice that this Jesus character supposedly did when he had himself born amongst us. Or, it's supposed to be family and friends getting together, blah, blah,blah. It's also a bunch of pagan winter festivals dressed up in Christian garb.

Thank god for the three wise men though! They brought bona-fide presents and thus serve as the real reason for the season; consumerism. Kids love Christmas, partly because of the lights and the decorations, but really, it's about the material goods.

I stopped liking this holiday a while ago. Stress. Family get-togethers always meant stress. There were a couple of years when I had a house and could afford to entertain friends, but those days are gone. But Christmas keeps coming every year. The shmaltzy, bullshit Christmas carols by musical acts seeking to cash-in keep playing in all the malls and other such spaces. Canadians continue to abuse the First Nations. We continue to belch carbon gases into the atmosphere. More and more, Canadians appear to me to be a selfish, childish, deluded people. The "spirit of the holidays" is nothing more than people getting together with people they already associate with and to hell with everyone else.

Bullshit.

And speaking of bullshit; nothing epitomizes the emptiness and hypocrisy of the holidays better than the idea of a cruel psychopath like stephen harper bothering us with a "Christmas Message" based on the fact that since he stole the office of prime minister he's entitled to spew some sort of seasonal nonsense at us.

I read his stupid statement and I was going to go through with it, but it would be redundant. I already have no time for the seasonal bullshit and I've already said what I think of this bullshit artists. Who cares what he had to say? It was all meaningless lies anyway.

Revolution - the ONLY Solution

There's just no other way. We cannot "reform" capitalism. At least not in the way that US Democrats, Canadian Liberals and "social democrat" NDPr's want to do it. They want painless reform, ... as in reform that doesn't anger the powerful. It can't happen. It's their mewling "vision" of compassion and social justice that's produced this sorry state.

The root of all the terrorism and war and most of the problems in the world is human greed. The movement of liberal democracy produced substantial benefits to many people since the 16th Century. But liberal capitalism grew along with it, and while it too produced many benefits, it also produced a lot of misery and its time has passed. It has now metastasized and is devouring its host, liberal capitalism. That and it's put humanity on a suicidal trajectory.

We need an eco-rational economy. We need to destroy social inequality. We need rational, fact-based politics, not the capitalist-sponsored abominations of Barack Obama, george w. bush, stephen harper and Rob Ford. To achieve this, we must have a revolution. A democratic, mass-based revolution. One that builds on the quasi-democracy and set of rights that we now have. We must fight to rollback government incursions against this democracy and these rights. What we should not do is pursue the shit-head strategy of certain anarchist radicals, or Marxist radicals, or any sort of radical who believes that the hard-won agency and autonomy ordinary people enjoy is utter bullshit and that we should reject everything entirely and retreat into individual insignificance. (This pointless and petty refusal was called "Going Galt" [as in John Galt, as in Ayn Rand's tedious novel] when right-wing idiots responded to Democratic Party victories in the United States, and it's called "human strike" by marginal, unimportant anarchist thinkers on the left.

We need to think and act big and in accordance with forces as they actually exist.

There is no other way.

Wut We's Got's To Do

My point about the lack of a response to the TTC fare increase was that I, who have been told several times that my plans are too grandiose, am pointing out the sheer invisibility of the standard leftist response to problems. If I had my druthers, I'd be organizing a transit-users' strike, or an occupation of City Hall and Queen's Park, until said powers-that-be find the goddamned revenues from out of their tax-cuts for the rich or their general corruption funds, to pay for the existing service levels and to invest the billions more that are needed to restore the system to a state of decency.

Overall, to defeat capitalism, we need to democratically expand the rights of workers within their workplaces. We do this through the present constitutional-liberal rights system. Because that is the hegemonic system, and the most peaceful way of doing this massive switcherroo of power.

It needs to be something big. The brain-dead status-quo has failed and will continue to fail.

And What Is Everyone Doing About Toronto's TTC Fare Increase?

Just to bring non-Torontonians up to speed: Toronto has gone from having what was widely regarded to be a good public transit system to having what is widely regarded as being a bad transit system. Bus service in the outer city is deplorable. Long waits to get on over-crowded buses, or to watch over-crowded buses pass your stop. Streetcar service that can mean it's faster to walk from Yonge to Bathurst than it is to wait for a streetcar. An over-crowded subway system prone to signals breakdowns and other interruptions.

This has happened because for the past few decades, neo-liberals have convinced people that taxes are an unmitigated evil, that the public sector is a complete waste of money, and that nothing can be achieved via democratic collective action. It's gotten to the point where you'll hear from a surprising number of ignoranmuses saying that the TTC should be privatized; thereby revealing their total cluelessness.

So, due to inflation, increased ridership, and what-not, the TTC is raising its fares by a nickel next year and again in the summer, just to maintain its existing poor service level.

What are the various groups dedicated to improving public transit, or transit users' rights, going to do about this? From where I'm sitting, the answer appears to be nothing. I've not heard of any protests. I've not seen any literature being distributed. I've not seen anyone.

Why don't I do something?

I tried to get Canadians to do something about a stolen election, to no effect. The progressive movement's big players likewise did nothing, although they could have done something with their amount of resources. This fare increase is an outrage, but we can't escape from the trap of kabuki protest, and so we do nothing.

Whose Side Are You On?

Do you stand with the victims or with the aggressors?

Do you stand with the tortured or the torturers?

Do you stand with the oppressed or with the oppressors?

Do you stand with the raped or the rapists?

Do you stand with the weak or with the strong?

Do you stand with the poor or with the rich?

It's amazing how many "conservative" bloggers stand on the wrong side of things, isn't it?

NORTH KOREA!!!!!

Last summer, North Korea's mad ambitions to attack the United States [actually desperate blustering in the face of USA/South Korean provocations] were all over the news until a bomb exploded at the Boston Marathon. "Poof!" North Korea's inscrutable threat vanished into the thin air from whence it came.

But now North Korea is back in the news. Supposedly the boy-dictator is killing family members and stuff.

It's either the tonic for a slow news day or North Korea is being targeted. (Not that I have any respect for that regime.)

Soldiers's Suicides: Too Little, Too Late

So retired general Rick  Hillier is calling for action, a public inquiry, a Royal Commission, something, into the recent spate of soldier suicides, and, as well, he offers qualified criticism of the harpercons' Veterans Charter:

The other area Hillier pointed to for improvement was the new Veterans Charter, in particular the part of the charter that replaced a pension for life or payment system with lump-sum awards and allowances.
"Many of us, certainly, almost all of us, agree that the charter is now lacking," he said.
He said the system now does not provide ill and injured veterans with the support they will need throughout their lives. And it does not go far enough to make sure they are properly taken care of for their entire life.

Too little, too late Mr. Hillier. You, more than anyone else, are responsible for our troops being sent to the hotly-contested Kandahar Province. And the time to have spoken out against the harpercons' symbol of their obvious cynicism and hypocrisy was before their bullshit Veterans' Charter became law.

[Just to point out: As progressives have called for social-economic policies to give young men a greater range of choices than unemployment, poverty wages or crime, whereas "conservatives" say they have "zero tolerance" for crime and advocate locking them up, only to end up smoking crack with them on a regular basis, ... so too do progressives despise war while still calling for decent conditions for ordinary soldiers as long as they exist, whereas "conservatives" make all kinds of ceremonial bows to the greatness of the military, only to repeatedly cast them aside like trash should they become wounded or otherwise useless.]

Canada Post

Basically we've got tens of billions to waste on fighter-jets and 3 billion to simply lose on public safety, but Canada Post has to cancel home delivery to save us money. So says Canada Post management and the think-tank that CP's prez is connected to.

It's also a good idea to eliminate 8,000 decent jobs and raise user fees during a recession.

These people are fucking morons.

Rob Ford and the Murder of Anthony Smith

For the record: The alcoholic, hypocrite, incompetent, infamous shameless buffoon has insinuated that a Toronto Star reporter is a pedophile. The Star is talking with its lawyers. Because unlike Rob Ford, who knew there was a video of him smoking crack, the Star might actually sue when someone defames one of their own.

Just wanted to point out that, as far as a Rosie DiManno (Rosie DiMoron around here usually!) column says, the assertion that police transcripts attribute his murder to non-related gang violence is unaccompanied by the actual transcripts that would establish the truth of the matter.

Which means that it could be just as Ford staffers told police; Smith's murder was related to the crack video.

The Shamelessness & Stupidity of Rob Ford

A while back, somewhere, I mentioned a book about stephen harper's grievous damage to Canada's parliamentary institutions. The political-scientist authors wrote that our institutions were designed with an implicit trust in the good faith of those who would be working within them, and that harper has no good faith and abused that trust and thereby weakened those institutions.

The same thing applies with Rob Ford. Our political tools weren't designed to deal with an obnoxious cretin who, after months of lying, has finally admitted to having smoked crack with gangsters in a drunken stupor, but who then refuses to resign. Our institutions were designed for better people than this imbecile and his die-hard, shameless, hypocritical fan-base.

And, really, it couldn't be helped. I mean, how stupid do you have to be to tell yourself: "I'm 45 years old and the mayor of Canada's largest city. I think it's cool, it's "gangsta" of me to party with these criminals. I'm not even concerned that I've stated publicly that I have 'zero tolerance' for gangs and drugs. I can barely register having made these two contradictory sentences."

How stupid must you be to, at heart, KNOW that you've smoked crack, used heroin, and been filmed while doing so by these same gangsters, and to still somehow imagine that if you lie long and hard enough the police evidence of all of this isn't going to come out?

How shameless do you have to be to believe that despite the infamy you've brought upon yourself and your city, the complete and total hypocrisy that you've displayed, the sheer amount of blatant lying that you're now exposed of, that you somehow have the right to carry on?

The decline of capitalist democracy started with Reagan and Thatcher. These two mediocrities were allowed to say any stupid, deluded thing that came into their heads, because, no matter what else, it attacked and pissed-off the "progressives." It pissed-off the people who the patriarchal, mindless authoritarian, fascist-headed dimwits hated. So it's all good.

We need a politics that IGNORES the KKKate MakkkMillan's of the world. Not one that panders to it.

Canadian Failure Makes You Sick?

Are you sickened by your fellow Canadians' failure to do anything about stephen harper? What did you do to bring him down? What did you do to try to get others to do something about him?

There needs to be something big, something huge, to change the present arrangement of power between corporate capitalism and the earth. That's what we should be focused on. But we're incapable.

A Little Observation About This Rob Ford Nonsense

So, the radio's going at work. Talk radio. Some guy, John Oakley, who, it seems, has his tongue so far up Rob Ford's ass-crack that he can almost reach the hole, is conducting yet another attempt at a defense of his hero. He has Ford's lawyer on, letting the guy talk about how his client is being tried in the media.

Time for the callers. And this one right-wing, whining baby, starts going on about how Ford's predicament is the intended product of a deliberate campaign of left-wing intimidation and smears. You just better believe that all those leftist politicians are just as dirty as his hero, Rob Ford, and the right-wing has got to learn how to play rough, the way the left does, and start looking for the dirt on all those Laytons and Vaughns and whoever.

Sure. Not surprising. Not remarkable. But let the significance of this guy's insanity sink in.

Supposedly, David Miller was likewise getting wasted with criminals back in the day, but the right-wing was too decent, too gentlemanly, to go after him for it. You see, the right-wing is all about the policies; the cut and thrust of competing ideas. Character assassination, or the airing of dirty laundry, are not their sort of politics.

Bwa-ha-ha-ha! Yes. All about the policy. Except for the fact that Ford is an ignoramus and an incompetent, and that "Ford Nation" has less than zero knowledge of the city's financial situation, the costs of government services, zero grasp of logic, and zero grasp of what Rob Ford actually does (Etobicoke supporters of Rob and Doug were shown to be completely ignorant of the brothers' attempts to close a much-utilized community centre). They also have zero in the way of intellectual or moral consistency.

You will notice that there are numerous right-wing and centre-right councillors at Toronto City Hall. None of them were despised to the extent Rob Ford was both before and after becoming mayor. That's because none of them were as obnoxious and ignorant as Ford was and is. It's that simple folks.

But seriously, ... this is a left-wing conspiracy? What part? Where did it begin? When Ford (for whatever drunken-stupor reason) first decided to consort with the gangsters he said he had zero tolerance for? Were the gangsters who documented his buffoonery part of this left-wing conspiracy? Is Chief Blair and the Toronto Police Service a part of this left-wing conspiracy? Was the US-based gossip website Gawker brought in as a ringer; part of an international conspiracy to bring Ford down? Was the Toronto Star's decision NOT to publish the stories about the crack videos their reporters saw part of the conspiracy?

Do you grasp how utterly insane one must be to see this as a left-wing plot?

But this is the thing about these people: They're so stupid, that their thought patterns come out looking like insanity.

They don't even notice their own hypocrisy. Leaving aside Ford's miserable failure as a financial manager, let's look at his management of his office. Ford loyalists receive plum positions and salaries higher than the prevailing rate. It seems they don't have to do much in the way of work for the city to get these salaries. Lower-level staffers are paid on the city's dime to run personal errands for Ford. But Ford Nation, who were so up in arms about a councilor buying a bunny suit with her office budget so that she could walk in a parade, or who complained about Kyle Ray's publicly subsidized retirement party, care not a whit about Ford's personal extravagances. They don't even care that their hero is out getting wasted most days and nights. They justify this indifference by pointing to his fiscal prudence, so I guess we do have to talk about it. It doesn't exist. Ford is an incompetent and a liar. His fiscal management skills exist only in the imaginations of his deluded fan-base. So there's really no excuse they can have for their indifference to his laziness and wastrel ways.

 "They all do it!" shout the right-wingers when they can no longer deny their politicians' failure and corruption. These are the people who rail about government waste and corruption louder than anyone else. When their team (of incompetent scum-bags) invariably end up being the dirtiest, smelliest, scuzziest politicians around, their response is to degrade our political culture even further by hypocritically, and falsely, insisting that all politicians are the same.

No my friends; Rob Ford is the only mayor of Toronto to have ever hung out at crack houses doing drugs with gangsters. I'm depressed that that even needs to be said. But that's where these cretins have taken us, isn't it?

Oakley thanked the caller, but I suspect he wasn't convinced. Either that or he had his own insanity to blurt out and couldn't wait to get to it. No, Oakley's focus was about the rule of law, and how Ford, who has lied throughout this whole sorry affair, and who has been photographed with the gangsters, video'd doing drugs with the gangsters, and who lied for months about his knowledge about the video, isn't getting a fair shake in the media and is being tried in the court of public opinion with all this errant speculation that his desperate attempts to get the video might have something to do with the murder of one of the gangsters in the photograph and the shooting of one of the others. Such speculation is irresponsible, and more importantly, very chilling. If you condemn people without a trial, well, that's just like the Soviet gulag.

That's right. Public speculation about Ford's criminality is akin to Stalinism.

As I said; so stupid they're insane.

Dear stephen harper: Shove your Hockey Book Up Your Ass

Gawd. His pathetic warbling and now his asshole attempt to appear like a regular guy, some stupid ghost-written piece-of-shit about hockey. He's like some cheesy Hollywood movie slime-ball. His attempts at being nice are so transparently fraudulent, as he stabs everyone in the back.

Mr. Myxpikellix

Impressionable Youth

It's weird how something you experienced as a youngster can make such a strong impression on you ....

I Hope Day Don't Have Dee Lady Moaning On Dis Voision

Stupid & Shameless

That's about the size of it for your "conservative" political base. Soon, we'll find out that somewhere between 15 and 20 % of Torontonians are debased enough to say: "Sure, he beats his wife and fucks underage girls, and drives drunk, and sends his city-paid staff to run personal errands for him, oh yeah, and then there's that whole 'media-circus' about the crack smoking with the gangsters and stuff, ... but I think he's done a good job fiscally."

Or the Conservative Party delegates who came out of their last coven still believing in stephen harper, even though that asshole had, by that point, changed his story at least three times since the Senate scandal broke.

The shamelessness of Rob Ford, to stubbornly think he can carry on, even after his total hypocrisy on pretty much everything he claimed was important, ... that's the same stupidity and shamelessness of the US-repugnicans who dragged Clinton through the Lewinsky scandal, wherein the shape of the President's penis became a topic for public discussion, who then shrieked how it was an assault on the dignity of the office of the president to remark upon bush II's cretinism, and who now carry pictures of Obama with a bone through his nose.

These are the same types who let bush II shit on their Constitution but who are now patriots standing up to Obama's depredations.

But every time I write this shit, I think of the "progressive" partisans who turn a blind eye to Obama's stated belief that he is constitutionally empowered to kill them.

Ah, fuck it all.

Scandal-riffic!

Gawd, but Rob Ford's stupidity and hypocrisy, .... his total lack of shame, ... his bullshit apologies, .... it's like as if all the mental sludge of the "Blogging Tories" ooozed out of their brains and congealed into this rancid parody.

And stephen harper's response o his own self-inflicted disaster betrays the man's innate cowardice, selfishness and sleaze. T'would appear that Duffy has destroyed him. In denial, harper the pathetic imbecile, thinks he can throw Nigel Wright under the bus. harper is a dead man walking though. he's implicated and his months and months of lying are all public record.

Finally, Peter Mansbridge; the scumbag's softball interview with the brothers Ford doesn't surprise me. This is the dunce who sat there chatting with harper about how Canadians were too stupid to grasp the genius of harper's Afghanistan policy. He's just a tool.

Us vs. Them: Part XXIX

When we on the bleeding-heart, loony left hear about gang violence in Toronto, especially the shootings in the Eaton's Centre, Yonge Street or the Danzig neighbourhood, ... we tend to want to see the perpetrators apprehended, but there is also a lot of discussion about how these gangs and the accompanying violence, were the product of Harris-era cuts and neo-liberal hopelessness and austerity in general.

Right-wingers, on the other hand, say that they have "zero tolerance" for these products of their own creation. They advocate police violence against them, stiffer penalties, lengthy jail terms (regardless of the costs, which they ignore entirely). They also, stupidly, reject government programs to direct young men away from gangs ("hug a thug" programs that only coddle these scum).

Then, it turns out, the tuff types are actually smoking crack with the gangsters.

Un-fucking-believable.

Rugga-Bugga

This isn't a life.

What I Tried To Say

How did we get to the place where Rob Ford is not only happening, but we're all reconciling ourselves to his existence? For this to have happened, we needed a critical mass of people who still support him after all the hypocrisy and ridiculousness.

Ford Nation

Argh. No, he's NOT doing a good job for the city otherwise. Add up the extra expenses of his subway fever and get back to me.

When stephen harper rocks out ...

So, apparently the gutless coward (who prefers to skip the country when the pressure's on, or at least hide from accountability to Parliament) was turning on the "charm" again, exploiting his apparently okay voice (I've never heard it) at some club somewhere.

Between his fall from power and his imprisonment for war crimes, SUN News could feature him in concert, out of gratitude for all the government advertising that kept them afloat for so long. Then, harper could learn how few Canadians actually give a shit about his singing.

But when harper is rocking out, ... do you suppose the stupid idiot fantasizes about twenty-something female chippies sucking on his slimy putz?

The Ford Brothers and SUN News

The fact that the ridiculous Ford brothers, Rob and Doug, ... the slobbering imbecile and arrogant doofus, have gone to SUN News is perfect. Rob's ignorance and incompetence were initially trumpeted by the SUN newspapers and his public humiliation is the epitome of what their level of right-wing populism always leads to and what it always means.

These are all stupid people.

And SUN News shows its desperation and failure by giving these two toxic blowhards a forum in a doomed attempt to stave off their inevitable bankruptcy and demise. These vermin were all made for each other.

They're sure not here for our benefit.

Not In The West? (a reply to PLG)

Yesterday I asked out of frustration just how the progressive "tactic" of isolated protests (which is the chosen form of activism by the people whose politics I mostly share) is supposed to provide any sort of real change to the world we all describe as veering towards some sort of apocalypse.The always worthwhile Purple Library Guy responded in a way I was not expecting:

Thwap, if you want to make a difference, move to Latin America. If you want to win, go to Venezuela. If you want to struggle with a chance of winning, try one of the places where there's some progress but it's hard to say what might happen, like Argentina or Brazil. If the world changes it will start from there.

If you're a bit more audacious, go to Spain or Greece and fight austerity with Syriza etc.

Canada is the place change will reach last, probably slower even than the US itself. As the old order crumbles across the globe, we'll be largely unaware of the news. I don't think radicals can do much here except on a very local basis, trying to build little enclaves less affected by the cold neoliberal winds and gradually grow and connect them.

I have a couple of problems with this: First of all, it removes our responsibility as radicals for the failure of North Americans to adequately respond to the outrages of our short-sighted, self-centered elites. I've always asked how apolitical people who are busy living their lives are supposed to behave differently if we're not giving them some sort of realistic program that speaks to their own experiences. Secondly,.it is my belief that if changes are going to be lasting, they have to originate from within the wealthiest, most powerful countries.

The USA is not as powerful as it once was, and it has become distracted by its own desperate efforts to maintain control over Middle East oil supplies, and has therefore lost control of many South American countries. But Colombia remains a powerful enemy; one which could probably destroy Venezuela militarily. And Obama showed he can still make short work of non-compliant Central American governments in Honduras. I think the corporate state is too powerful to be met by "people power" in the USA, but this isn't the case in Canada yet. We Canadians could tame our own state elites and serve as an example for the benighted people of the United Police States of America.

This is not to criticize PLG, who I have tons of admiration for. These are just my own thoughts on the subjects he raised.

How Is It Supposed To Work?

I won't ask the Liberals. They're clueless. "Compassionate Capitalism" or some sort of nonsense. In their language, that means slashing services for the poor in order to afford their tax-cuts for the rich "come hell or high water." Of course, the rich are supposed to "create jobs" with their tax savings, but that's just a religious mantra, never explained.

I won't ask the social democrats because they're too busy turning themselves into stupid liberals.

So, I ask the radicals: How are your protests supposed to change anything? Some of you even believe we live in a total sham democracy. That our rulers don't even pretend to listen to us. So what's the point of protesting then? To let the sheeple know what you're about? As if that matters.

It boggles the mind really. The complete and total lack of a coherent strategic analysis on the part of the Left. Complete and total.

Useless.

Political Loyalty

 
Ford Nation continues to love their boy. Of course, the same thing holds true for the party faithful and stephen harper. But it ain't just a conservative thing. Look at the supposedly progressive types who still praise the record of the disgusting Dalton McGuinty! Or the pathetic rationalizations of Obama supporters! (If you google "obamabots" you'll get too many links from even more pathetic repugnicans who wanted to be part of a human centipede with Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan to be able to find a sane critique of Obama.)

I think the reasons for this loyalty above sanity or decency isn't so much partisanship as it is human stupidity. The same reason the entire Canadian left was incapable of rising to the challenge of stephen harper.

We, as a species, are unfit for survival. We made a pretty impressive showing when you think about our rivals on this planet. But we've created more problems than we can now solve and this pathetic loyalty above our values is a symptom of our incapacity.

Weep For Me Jimbo ...

First of all, let me begin by saying that I despise Jim Flaherty. He's a cretin whose economic understanding is stuck in the 19th Century. What he does that isn't based on two hundred year old cliches is based on crude, deliberate fraud. He's a thug, who has made more people homeless, condemned more children to poverty, caused more suicides, caused more suffering overall, than perhaps any other finance minister in Canadian history. He's an enemy of democracy, what with his serial mega-omnibus bills that have entire sections in them with nothing to do with his balliwick. He's a hypocrite. Just recently I pointed out that the snivelling cockroach's yammerings to First Nations peoples fighting for the preservation of their land was rank with double-standard given the career criminals that populate the harper regime.

So, I could do nothing but snicker when I saw Flaherty's stupid face on the TTC's television screens, tearing up  in response to a reporter's question about the drunken, crack-smoking buffoon Rob Ford. Here's a different take on it:

Forget politics, just for a second. Ford’s spectacle has a lot of people talking about politicians as human beings. The mayor deserves not just help, but our sympathy, some say. There’s no place for ridicule that might reinforce the stigma attached to addiction. Ford’s stubborn determination to hold on renders that conversation moot, but at least it reminds everyone that he’s a human being.

Flaherty, standing alone at that podium, gave voice to that humanity. He must have known the question would come. He must have had an answer at the ready. His friendship with the Fords is no secret. Still, he could barely find the words. We expect stoicism from people in power, not tears and tied tongues. Flaherty’s supposed to be able to answer any question. He’s supposed to be measured, or angered, or dismissive, as required. But his friend is going through something no one knows how to handle, and it was all he could do to struggle through a sentence or two.

When politicians show emotion, they’re often subject to ridicule. Yesterday, to the internet’s credit, there was none of that. There was just a man who cares for his friend and wishes him well, otherwise helpless—and dealing with it in public, on the job.

 What bullshit. The mayor and most of his fan-base had zero empathy for crack smokers until Rob himself smoked the shit and then it became impossible to deny it any longer. The shit-head Ford even voted against anti-gang programs, calling them "hug a thug" bullshit. Well, ....

Ford recently teamed-up with uber-shit-head Georgio Mammoliti in a campaign against city workers sleeping on the job. They should be fired. No exceptions, no excuses! ("Fuckin' A Rob Ford! Get those lazy, over-paid sons-of-bitches!") Then it turns out that thanks to police surveillance, we now know that Ford is doing a whole lot of anything but work during all hours of the day and night.

Ford and Flaherty are stupid men. Stupid bullies. I mock Flaherty's tears. They make me smile. It's only when somebody close to him (thanks to similar retrograde political beliefs) is hurting (thanks to his own reckless stupidity) that this imbecile begins to feel emotion.

Jim Flaherty, ... if you feel so bad for Ford (who did have all those possible video holders beaten-up or even killed I wonder?) you can go visit him in prison, in your retirement, after harper's regime goes down in toxic flames. You can then sit and wait after Ford drags his ass back to his cell and talk with the imprisoned stephen harper. Though I bet that even you wouldn't be able to bear the deranged, self-pitying rantings of that egomaniacal mediocrity.

Ah-yasss!!! Ha-ha-ha-ha!

So, My Boss Likes Rob Ford

Tells me that after he buys me lunch and news about the drunken buffoon comes on the radio. He likes the job he's doing so far. Mistakes the St. Clair streetcar line for LRTs. Thinks the cost overruns during construction were caused by ... ? (They were actually caused by lawsuits brought about by people opposed to public transit in the first place.)

Ford got the Toronto unions to sign a four-year deal that was tough on them because, at the start of his term he seemed incredibly popular while they weren't, and they knew he was a maniac who would gladly provoke a strike.

We should have a left-wing mayor try that tactic with a powerful right-wing group.

But Ford's whole budgeting is based on total delusion. He's wasted $1.1 billion on the public transit file. He continues to destroy public housing while hypocritically wailing about rotten living conditions.

I do believe though, that if Rob Ford was a black populist, like some of those high-level black Republicans, ... that if a black Rob Ford smoked crack with gangsters, they'd forgive that too. But if a pseudo-progressive black mayor smoked crack, they be calling for blood. (Whereas we really just want this embarrassing incompetent to resign.)

Thinking Big ...

I was recently told that my hopes n' dreams failed because my plans were too grandiose. I should think about smaller-scale things and do what's within my own personal capacity.

1. I see "smaller-scale things" as either being useless protests about some sort of recent elite atrocities, or as an attempt to mitigate the symptoms of a disease for which I have the cure.

2. I never, ever thought that I could accomplish anything on my own. My delusion was that many people (especially the left-wing big-wigs who are, evidently, bereft of ideas) would hear what I had to say, and either show me where I was a complete fucking bone-head who forgot something obvious which rendered all his schemes worthless, or, better, decide that what I proposed made sense and they would all do what they could to spread the word and try to make it happen.

Alas! Everyone else is doing "1" and the people without ideas are too busy with "1" to even think about getting off their hamster wheels.

Imagine If Canadians Controlled the Canadian Economy

COMPANY PRESIDENT

"So, let's have a vote! Should we protest the government's confiscatory taxation policies by shutting down and re-opening as another entity in Mexico?"

MAJORITY IN THE WORKPLACE

"No."

COMPANY PRESIDENT

"The absentee shareholders would like us to cut costs and dump our untreated wastes in the community drinking water. What say you?"

MAJORITY IN THE WORKPLACE

"No."

And on and on it would go. The centralized power of corporations, cut into and dispersed.

Why Wouldn't One War Criminal Welcome Another War Criminal?

So, the blood-soaked war criminal, anti-democratic, complete and utter shit-head, Dick Cheney was in Toronto yesterday. Speaking to a bunch of brain-dead sheeple about some stupid thing or other.

Disappointing.

Canada puts out the welcome mat for a mass-murdering, corrupt scumbag like Dick Cheney.

But it's no surprise. What with our illegally installed regime of the war criminal stephen harper. These blood-soaked cowards like each others' company.

Nothing About Rob Ford

It looks like the big, incompetent, obnoxious hypocrite is toast. I've got a swarm of fruit-flies in my kitchen from a week's worth of dirty dishes.

So, I'm busy.

So here's another video (or two) ...

and ...

and ...

First Up-Close Glimpses of Neptune and Triton

This video is now about a moment in history:

harper the gutless

It's so obvious by now that he's a complete coward whenever it comes to accountability. It must be because he knows he's an utter fraud in everything.

Today I only ask if he's so cowardly that he'll resign before having to face the voters in the face of Mike Duffy's revelations of his serial lying to Parliament.

Belling the Cat

Once upon a time, there was a group of human malcontents. Very idealistic malcontents. They championed such things as social justice, human equality, environmental sustainability, individual freedom and world peace. But their lives were made miserable by THE SYSTEM. The System was controlled by powerful elites. Selfish people who valued profit and excess over social justice and the environment. Psychopathic authoritarians and militarists who promoted wars and oppression.

Sadly for the idealistic malcontents, The System was an effective propaganda exercise and millions of ordinary humans had bought into it. The idealistic malcontents would try to raise their voices above tiny squeaks but they were drowned out by the constant barrage of misinformation, lies called "traditions" and the deluge of daily elite nonsense. Whenever the malcontents tried to face off against the elites in the streets they usually got their asses kicked and their values distorted or mocked.

"Oh how wonderful it will be when the system finally topples!" the idealistic malcontents would say in their burrows. "We'll abolish profit. We'll abolish capitalism! We'll abolish war! We'll have human equality! No more cars! A world of humanistic science and ecological sanity! A world of healthy human relationships instead of competition and oppression! No more patriarchy! No more sexual oppression! Total artistic freedom! Genuine democracy!"

They spoke so long and at length about how wonderful it would be that they began to get excited about the possibilities. They went on and on until they started to sound as if these achievements had already been made. Then, one of them remembered where they were and said:

"How are we going to even begin to realize any of this?"

At that point, the whole burrow went silent and the idealistic malcontents began to drift away to their everyday lives alone or in small groups.

The Ungovernable

Yesterday, I posted another picture of this same banner:

Today, I just thought about what it means. What do these people do day-to-day? How truly "ungovernable" are they? Do they ever access public services? Do they ever obey laws?

I'm bitter. I'm a bitter broken man. Lately, my ire is directed at these radical blabbermouths; going on and on about how awesome they are, while remaining nothing but a tiny group of irrelevant people.

Anarchist Fantasies

I once knew an anarchist. Nice guy. Very intense. He started an anarchist discussion circle. He was really stoked about how these high school kids were getting radicalized by walking the picket-line with their teachers.

There was him (mid-twenties), me (late-twenties), a 19-year old dude, an 18-year old dudette, and about three teeny-boppers. The first meeting was just a discussion on principles, dominated by him. The second meeting, a week later was about possible "actions" we could do. The third meeting, there was just me and him. Embarrassed, he mumbled something about how losing the dead weight made us stronger, or something like that.

At times, support for the fucking harpercons stands at near 40% of the adult population in Canada. But somehow, the Great Awakening is just around the corner. Um, ... no it isn't. The country isn't even close to the anarchist mindset. Any initiatives we have will have to work within the dominant paradigm. Which is not to say that we mustn't work to change that paradigm. But gradualism is an unavoidable reality. (Or, if "gradualism' isn't the right work, simply wishing away present conditions isn't going to work.)

African Immigrants

So, in my line of work, I've ended up working with co-workers who are African immigrants. This is really a new one on me. In retrospect, it's not all that amazing. I've heard of Somali refugees, and Eritreans, ... and there've been a couple of cabbies from the Sudan come to think of it.

But in my working experience, immigrant co-workers have been mainly Eastern European, South Asian, and Vietnamese, truth be told.

One dude was from the Congo. He grew up in Brussels, Belgium though, lived in Paris, London, New York City, and settled finally in Toronto. (For some strange reason, he'd lived in Toronto, moved to NYC, and then came back to Toronto.) I was thrown for a bit of a loop. I mentioned that I knew about Mobutu and Kabila. Later, it occurred to me, a dude I'd written an essay on, Patrice Lumumba. I asked him (since I've discovered that some people revered as heroes by the Left, aren't as esteemed by their countrymen) if he was still a hero. He said, yes, Patrice Lumumba is still very much a hero to the Congolese. (He'd stated earlier how Lumumba was killed by the CIA and the Belgians.)

The other dude was from Zimbabwe. He ran afoul of Mugabe 13 years ago, lived in South Africa for a short while, before choosing Canada. On that plane trip 13 years ago, he stopped at Heathrow airport. He left behind two boys, then aged 6 months and two years old. He hasn't held them in his arms since.

Jim Flaherty on First Nations Protests

Canada's incompetent finance minister, the gnomish Jim Flaherty, warned that a nation-wide campaign of blockades would negatively impact his delusions about Canada's economic growth. (The story is at "Stun New" who I won't give links to.) Flaherty also warned the First Nations themselves that there aren't different legal regimes in Canada. There's one set of laws and if the First Nations break them, they'll be in BIG trouble.

His words would have a lot more weight if his own government wasn't a serial violator of the law. But even if harper wasn't a criminal on many levels, on Native land, retained by them through solemn treaties with the Crown/Us, there ARE different legal regimes. So shut the fuck up you ignorant dweeb.

Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere

 
This is a book that I just finished. Paul Mason's Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The new global revolutions. It was written in the supposedly heady days of 2011, when the "Arab Spring" and "Occupy Wall Street" and the anti-Austerity riots were raging across Europe. Apparently it's based on observations that became his blog. (Or something.)

I find it an excellent, but frustrating book. Excellent because it provides a great summary of the structural causes of the present economic crisis. Frustrating because there's all this self-evidently crapola nonsense about how ordinary people forming these groovy, out-of-sight networks in order to pull together and demand massive, but undefined, changes, are shaking the elites to their core. (Now, of course, it's 2013 and Qaddafi's fall has brought disaster, Mubarak's military deposed the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood, Syria's dictator has fought the USA's Al Qaeda cat's paws to a standstill, Obama has crushed "Occupy" and continues to bamboozle US-American progressives, and Canadians are swooning over pretty-boy Justin Trudeau.)

I, of course, know what the answer to the failures of democratic capitalism is, but nobody listens to me.

It's a good book. I'd recommend reading it. I thought that I'd be able to write a better review but I honestly don't give a fuck about much anymore.

Treaty Rights vs Court Injunctions

So the corporate polluting scum got a court injunction to force the Mi’kmaq FN to stop their protest. But the Mi’kmaq's Treaty Rights should have made any such injunction null and void to begin with.

The RCMP should be disbanded.

harper the Gutless Coward

It's one of the sickening puke's most revealing traits; his cowardice. Proroguing Parliament, squeezing out a tepid throne speech, leaving the country the very next day to continue hiding from the Senate scandal, and then ordering a military assault on the First Nations as well.

What a disgusting excuse for a human being.

What Can Be Done About RCMP Attacking First Nations?

What can be done, by us, against the RCMP's hyper-militaristic bullshit against unarmed First Nations protesters? The Elsipogtog people were trying to stop the land destroying obscenity of "fracking" from poisoning their water and fouling their air. If this ecocidal behaviour isn't stopped dead in its tracks, we're all fucked.

The rancid coward, stephen harper, fucked off to Belgium, the day after his snivelling throne speech, partly due to his desire to avoid accountability for his fraudster (and thuggish) Senate picks, but also, no doubt, so that he could hide from the fall-out of this raid.

Corporate destroyers and their legal injunctions are meaningless. The abusive, sexist, corrupt, racist, murderous, lazy and stupid RCMP can just shut-the-fuck-up about defending public safety and the rule of law.

But what are we going to do about it?

What are we going to do to help the Elsipogtog people?

Down is Up

 Lotta talk and writing about harper's throne speech yesterday. A prime minister who holds Parliament in contempt, and we're talking about his latest effort to re-brand his party of corporate fraudsters, torturers, rapists and closet-cases, as if he's a genuine democratic politician. The helmet-headed scum-bag got his majority through fraud, and instead of tossing him in the slammer we talk about his bullshit throne speech.

Well fuck that. harper is degenerate scum and he always will be. he's garbage to me.

Then we have those pathetic fraudsters, Georgio Mammolitti (or whatever the fuck his name is), the Toronto City Councilor/kept man. The sneering puss-ball has a nice, below market-value bungalow, where he preens and primps himself for whatever developer sugar-daddy is paying his way. This guy was the sort of self-entitled asshole who makes for a hard-driving union representative. Now that he's switched to the other side, that same sense of entitlement allows him to grandstand on bullshit like some city worker asleep on the job. The last Toronto worker found napping (a TTC ticket-collector) turned out to have been a genuine hero who was on heart medication and who died months after his public humiliation.

Look, sometimes union people sleep on the job. Sometimes minimum wage workers sleep on the job. Sometimes executives pad their expense accounts and violate labour and environmental laws, kill people and have their corporations declare bankruptcy to avoid any consequences for their larceny and fraud.

A corrupt, anti-democratic piece-of-shit like Mammoliti has no right to be calling out anyone with regards to their work ethic.

Speaking of pieces-of-shit who have no right to criticize anyone, Rod ("Mayor Stupid") Ford piped-up on the topic of sleeping workers. This stupid, useless turd works half a day (between his late-morning hangover and his late-afternoon shakes), doesn't have a clue about the basics of his job, and yet people record his crack-induced ramblings about his workforce? He refuses to divulge his itinerary, even though he's paid on the taxpayer's dime, and he has the fucking gall to talk about accountability???

We live in a topsey-turvey world people. Where up is down and down is up. That these disgusting clowns get even a semi-serious hearing, is a travesty beyond description.

Ah, fuck it ...

Here's a video ...

... ah yasss!

Chicken-Hawk Scum-Bags

A good survey of the harpercon's dismal record of hypocrisy and deceit. I can't believe that we didn't force these ugly fuckers from power years ago. Canadian apathy.

This Oughta Mean Something ...

International cover-up of genotoxic environmental catastrophe? I'm one of those limp-wristed "pwogwessive" types whooz against things like the death penalty. But maybe an uprising, followed by executions of those who launched the invasion of Iraq in 2003 would teach these scumbags some fucking lessons?

Do you think rumsfeld, Condi, Cheney or bush II would die as well as Saddam Hussein? No fucking way. Of all of them, I think Condi would die the proudest. She was, I think, the most deluded. Cheney would have had a pathetic heart attack long before the sentence was carried out. rumsfeld would convince himself that it wasn't happening until the last few seconds, and bush II would be weeping and shitting himself, a goddamned disgusting spectacle.

"A war president. With war on my mind."

Hanging wouldn't be too good for the stupid dry-drunk.

Economic Incompetence

What we're seeing in the USA's political-economic policy isn't so much "policy" based on flawed theories, as it is naked, short-sighted greed, being justified with a fig-leaf of delusion. They want more and more money. They don't want to share it. They want to "invest" it in an unregulated, totally subsidized gambling casino, where it can either be lost in a swamp of corruption and fraud, or (preferably in the eyes of the greed-heads) it can continue to accumulate (forever) while remaining hermetically sealed from the real economy and the "greedy" hands of the majority who need to pay the rent and save for education and retirement and health insurance.

They delude themselves that they're job and wealth creators, but nobody believes that anymore. The plain evidence shows that they are wealth and job destroyers.

Here in Canada, we stagnate along, as our shriveled gnome of a finance minister practices his own style of austerity and incompetence, luxuriating in the stability brought by the more restrained neo-liberalism of his Liberal predecessors. ("Conservatives" have always been the idiot cousins in the neo-liberal family. Their wild-eyed fantasies are the only permissible deviations from neo-liberal gospel. If their delusions produce disasters now and again (think their puppet-masters), one has to admire their exuberance. Besides, their excesses helpfully make the "liberal" version of neo-liberal austerity and greed look sensible.)

Of course, the USA (and Europe, and China, and India) are looming for disaster. When those big economies go down, little Canada will get sucked-down along with it. The past thirty years have been a steady downward course. Austerity, stagnation and decline. It's required literally tens of trillions of dollars to prop-up the world capitalist economy. It's time to call complete bullshit on these morons and greed-heads. Complete bullshit.

The World Is Made for Edward Burkhardt

Remember the CEO of Rail World Inc., and owner of the MMA trains that derailed in Lac-Megantic, killing 42 people? He pushed deregulation, fought unions, pursued profit over safety, and when the inevitable happened, blamed everyone but himself and had MMA declare bankruptcy so as to escape paying for his own disaster.

This is the naked face of capitalism. This sort of shriveled soul is the hero in an Ayn Rand novel. (That horrible writer's main character pretended to run a railroad herself!) This is how capitalism avoids being as bad as Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Burkhardt wasn't setting out to deliberately kill anyone. He just wanted to make a buck. So, when people die (as was inevitable) he can delude himself into saying that it was just one of those crazy things.

In short, he's a child in a man's body. And we give these imbeciles free rein of their selfish ambition because we've elevated their materialistic values to our highest values. It's a world of clods. Made by clods for other murderous clods.

ain't nobody gonna save Canuck democracy!

Murray Dobbin gives us a terrifying overview of the 31-year "trade" deal with China, in an essay entitled "Who Will Save Canadian Democracy?" I'll skip ahead to the answer:

Who will save us from this repugnant, anti-democratic initiative? Probably no one. The only player to come to the plate has been the tiny Hupacasath First Nation of BC which challenged FIPA in federal court. Unfortunately the judge not only found for the government, he assessed costs to the band of over $100,000.  They are appealing (donate here – deadline Sept 30)   the case. But ultimately it is the provinces which hold the real power to save democracy.

What are they waiting for?

Here's the thing; Murray Dobbin was one of the people I contacted about my initiative to build a nation-wide protest movement to force the harper government to resign. He told me he was too busy to read it.

So, let's review: Dobbin looks over the imperiled state of democracy in Canada and sees no likely candidates for its saviour. He gets a message from a stranger asking if he'd like to have a look at a way to challenge harper and, while there's nothing else he's aware of happening at the moment, tells the stranger that he's too busy.

It's pathological. "Workers as Citizens" is the most realistic and all-encompassing strategy there is for the democratic destruction of corporate power, and left-wing academics simply stared at me when I presented it to them. Left-wing activists respond with non-sequitors about how co-ops are groovy. Working within the formal political process makes people into deluded chumps. It's much better to chant at a rally for an afternoon or write criticisms of capitalism in left-wing media.

It's why we fail people. And something makes me think the problem is structural. It's not going to happen, NOT because people's brains are incapable of grasping it. It's because something in the zietgeist isn't happening and there's a switch turned-off somewhere.

A Thought Experiment

Think about the disaster of Afghanistan. We've been there for over ten years. We've spent billions.

Why?

To defeat an insurgency that remains as strong as ever.

To defend a government that is as corrupt and unpopular as ever.

To defend a program of school-building that is marred by theft and fraud.

Rosie DiMoron says that this multi-billion dollar project was vindicated by the fact that the Canadian Forces learned to fight again, but I rather think some well planned war games could have done that for maybe tens of millions, rather than ten billion dollars.

Imagine a peaceful program of domestic spending of $15 billion that had such poor results. The fur that would have flown from the militarists and neo-liberals. But wasting it on a fucking war, and these scum don't even bat an eye-lid.

They have no legitimacy.

I Got's Woik 2 Do

Argh.

I Don't Care About the US Government Shut-Down

I really don't care about the Republican Congress shutting down the US Government until Democrats agree to reform the Affordable Care Act. (or "Obamacare"). Because "Obamacare" is a Repug-inspired, shitty piece of legislation that forces people to buy something they don't want (and was upheld as constitutional by a Supreme Court that privileges corporate power over individual rights) and because the Repugs are a repugnant group of assholes who just want to preserve the "free-market" hellish nightmare of uncontrollable corporate fraud that was the status-quo.

Both sides are anti-democratic, inhuman monsters. This struggle between them is therefore irrelevant, so far the purported issues involved. The real-world economic impact of the shut-down is not irrelevant, but I don't know where I stand on that either. The economy is already doing shitty. Perhaps a self-inflicted catastrophe will shake up US-American society and produce a democratic backlash?

Dean Del Mastro Goes To Prison

I'd like to see that rancid, corrupt, election finance law violating, robo-Con deception scum-bag go to prison. I'd like to see his fat stupid face distorted by bawling and tears. I'd like the incarceration of this harpercon scumbag to be the biggest nail in turd-boy stephen harper's desperate attempts to dispel the stench of his party of fraudsters, morons and his appointed incompetents, wife-beaters and chiseling dead-beats.

Stress

So here's a video:

The Rob Ford Revival

Rob Ford's chances for re-election have improved lately:

Almost half of Torontonians approve of the job Rob Ford has been doing as mayor of Canada’s largest city, a new poll suggests.

Forty-nine percent of the 1,082 Toronto residents over 18 surveyed on Sept. 21 and 22 indicated they supported Ford, an increase from 44 per cent at the end of August.

It's because 1) Rob Ford will never lose the support of the most stupid and/or ignorant of the electorate, and 2) Ford's opponents sought to steal his thunder on the idiotic Scarborough Subway and only ended-up playing into his hands.

Let me deal with the latter factor first.

The subway idea is a stupid one. There isn't enough money. Despite the surprise announcement from dim-bulb, Jimbo Flaherty (more on that later), there still isn't enough money. (At least from the present set of political-economic circumstances.) With neither the city, nor the province, nor the federal government willing to pony-up the tens of billions of dollars necessary for an integrated system of subway lines that the city needed ten years ago, the Metrolinx light-rail system was the most realistic alternative. It even had its own long-term benefits, including integrating suburban riders better integration with existing bus lines and lower maintenance costs for the TTC. Finally, the lower cost for the LRT's would mean more money to improve services in the desperately under-served hinterlands.

But Rob Ford has stoked the anger of a vocal minority of Scarborough residents who have come to believe that the LRT is a slap in their collective face. Too clever by half, transit committee chair Karen Stintz thought she'd get behind the proposed subway line proposed by the too-clever by half Ontario Liberals, who fucked everything up by proposing a shitty two-stop subway for one billion dollars more than the longer LRT route would have cost. Suddenly, Rob Ford was back in play. He led the charge against the two-stop route, not Stintz. And then, sleaze-ball harper and shit-head Flaherty found (at the drop of a hat in the age of austerity) $660 million dollars. Now THERE's co-opertative urban transportation planning for you. "Hey! We've got $660 million to buy votes for our pal Rob Ford, if you want it!"

Disgusting.

But none of this should matter if actions and words had consequences in right-wing politics. Rob Ford is the incompetent, ignorant fuckwad who said there was hundreds of millions of dollars in wasted spending ("gravy" as he put it) at City Hall. Once he became mayor, Mr. Gravy Train was slashing TTC service, library hours, park wading pools, and on and on, and even mused about closing women's shelters to save half-a-million dollars.

And everyone with half a brain also knows that Mayor Stupid, the same asshole who turned down provincial money for anti-gang initiatives because he called them "Hug a Thug" programs, is actually smoking crack with those gangsters.

He's the scum of the earth and he should be political poison. But you can say and do any fool thing you want when you're a "conservative." These people are idiots and fuck 'em.
 

Scott Neigh's "Talking Radical: Gender & Sexuality"

So, a while ago, I reviewed my friend Scott Neigh's book Talking Radical: Resisting the State. Now I'm working on the other volume in the series (I believe they might be the first two in a larger series): Talking Radical: Gender & Sexuality.

I believe that this is the more powerful of the two. And I don't know why. Maybe because I'm acclimatized to the structure of the books more or what. But I thought the account by the First Nations woman, Doreen Spence, who as a nurse in a Catholic hospital, spoke out against the involuntary sterilization of a First Nations girl (remarking how the Catholics are always whining about how we need to respect their values when they say they won't do abortions ... waitaminnit! This bears looking into! Because the Catholic Church is supposedly against birth control as well! Including sterilizations! It's possible that in this instance, the leadership at this hospital were prepared to put racism over St Thomas Aquinas. They're supposed to be against riches, usury, torture and etc., as well. So who knows.) was very gripping.

The account by the Quebec labour leader, Madeleine Parent, struggling to unionize Dominion Textiles workers (especially the women) in the face of criminality and oppression from the Duplessis government, the Dominion Textiles company and various corrupt police and judges, was inspiring.

And the account by the women's rights/anti-violence activist Lee Lakeman, on the rise of feminist activism in the 1970s and 1980s is similarly well told.

 

So, I'm about one-third into it and I thought I'd recommend it. I loaned it to a teacher at my son's school and she's wanting to get her own copy now.

The Failure of Human Agency

I wrote this in a recent comment and thought I'd expand upon it.

Larger forces (environmental, economic, technological) are going to have to blindly guide blind humanity towards a different form of social organization.

We are incapable of doing it ourselves. (By "we" i  mean the better sort of humanity, like us, who act as our species' rational conscience.) Our elites, meanwhile, will lead us to ruin.

In other words, human beings are incapable of thinking about a better world, seeing what needs to be done in order to attain that world, and doing the work necessary to see that that world is built. I now agree with Marx in privileging the power of larger social-economic forces to decide things, over the autonomous agency of individual human beings.

The social-welfare state of the 1945-73 period was the product of Fordist manufacturing processes, the Great Depression and the social organization of resources in the capitalist democracies that ended unemployment, brought widespread prosperity and temporarily destroyed the self-serving myth that a more just and equitable society was possible.

Certainly, individual human beings (tens of millions of them) made decisions and steered little pieces of their world towards that end, but their efforts would have been for nothing without the assistance of those blind larger forces.

And it's not as if that pro-capitalist, consumerist, anti-environmental, population-explosion inducing world didn't contain within it the seeds of its own destruction. Hell, it's still possible that we'll destroy ourselves with the nuclear weapons we built during that era.

We "progressives" simply have to face the fact that we're outnumbered by the dismally stupid and the totally ignorant. The "Occupy" movement failed because camping out in the park discussing and debating forever while police truncheons split the skulls of the discussants isn't a viable revolutionary strategy. "Idle No More" has restored some pride to many First Nations in Canada, and it briefly impugned upon the consciousnesses of the people from the settler society, but flash-mobs in shopping malls aren't going to bring the Canadian state to its knees.

The best we can do is conduct an orderly retreat; forget holding the line. We're out-gunned and overwhelmed. Especially by the stupid.

No Vision

What does the opposition stand for? Free pot (maybe)? The environment? (Elizabeth May will need more friends then.)

We're supposed to vote without knowing anything.

On the road ...

I'm in transit today. Doing a lot of errands that have no money attached. Hope it's not as stressful as this:

Happy trails to me.

Miley Cyrus, Rob Ford and Skyler White

I was FRONT PAGE NEWS that 20-year old pop super-vixen Miley Cyrus and her fiance Liam Hemsworth have definitely called it Quitsville. I'm not sure of the reasons for the split, but it was a long time coming. Also, the bungling Obama's attempts to start World War III appear to be stuttering to a halt; the hunger-strike in California prisons is over, teachers are being clubbed by riot police in Mexico City, global warming, financial system tottering ... but on the front page of newspapers is the denouement of the wedding plans of two celebrities.

Despite his aides tweeting (on "Twitter" 'natch!) that he'd be there for a mural unveiling, crack-cocaine abusing Toronto mayor Rob Ford was a no-show. It was a "scheduling issue" apparently. An unscheduled hang-over is more like it. Like the big blob of incompetence didn't even wake up until 10 am (the time of the scheduled event) and was capable of nothing more but puking all over himself before dragging his ass to the medicine cabinet for some headache pills.

Finally, ... There's lots of hate on the intertoobz for television character "Skyler White" (played by Anna Gunn) on the fictional television story "Breaking Bad." For those of you not in the know, Skyler is the wife of Walter, an underpaid high school chemistry teacher who finds he has lung cancer and in desperation, begins cooking and selling crystal meth to try to put money away for his family after his death.

Walter's plans go bad from the very beginning and his secret life as a meth cook/gangster begins to take up more and more of his life. Skyler goes from being suspicious, to angry, to frightened, to unwilling accomplice, and always a thorn in Walt's attempts to hermetically seal off his two lives from each other. Throughout this process, a lot of viewers have decided that Skyler is a big pain in the ass who should be killed.

If you google "hate skyler white" you'll get lots of analysis of this phenomenon, but here's my take: Because of the excellent writing and acting, viewers are led to sympathize with Walter White, at least somewhat, and at least in the early seasons. Some people, forgetting that it's all fiction, or forgetting the simple fact that Skyler's character isn't privy to all the sufferings and traumas endured by Walter's character, see her as being unreasonably unsympathetic to the poor guy. Skyler's character doesn't watch all the scenes that we do. That's the whole point.

Also, what Skyler does to try to protect her family, is to try to divorce him and lock him out of his own house and keep him away from his kids. (She also has an affair with her boss.) This part, I could see some men being uncomfortable with. While it's true that men have dragged women through the shit since time immemorial, it's also an undeniable fact that some women have taken the steps to equalize justice in family law to maliciously devastate hapless men. Watching the painful battle between Walter and Skyler at this point is going to twing the heart-strings of some men taken to the cleaners by ex-wives, despite the fact that these two fictional characters are inhabiting quite a different context.

Finally, and at the root of it all, is plain old sexism. Skyler inhabits the traditional role of stay-at-home mother. (At least until she takes a job which Walt chooses to see as emasculating him.) She's not doing all the awesome crimelord-problem-solving-action-shoot-outs and stuff her husband is doing. She's trying to protect herself and her children from whatever the hell it is that Walter is doing. That isn't as sexy. You couldn't make as outrageous a show from this story based on Skyler White's perception. But her choices would make more sense if the (most definitely overwhelmingly male) haters could just get over the fact that she's a woman. But since she is a woman, she's a stupid bitch who should STFU and get out of the fucking way and make them a sandwich and give them a blow-job while she's at it and ha-ha! aren't we funny for talking this way about the stupid ho's?

It's not funny and you're fucking morons.