Happy Pride

Here's an article from the Globe & Mail about it.

I have no idea what I'm doing. I just googled these things.

And the first tune on the radio that I knew was explicitly gay:

Bwa-ha-ha-ha!

I'm seriously just too busy to post anything else.

Nauseating Spectacles

Dalton McGuinty testifying about his scuzzery. "This is a partisan circus."

Listen fuck-face; YES! The Hudak-PC's are a bunch of hypocrites. You STILL wasted almost a billion dollars cancelling gas plant contracts that the ONDP told you not to start in the first place. You then illegally deleted all the records of the decision making process to spend ONE BILLION dollars of OUR money to benefit your stupid party and then you demonstrated contempt to the legislature when the majority of the people's representatives demanded to know how much this all cost them.

Fuck you! You lousy piece of shit. Your only saving graces are that you're too stupid to come up with such tactics on your own. You had to wait and watch stephen harper do it first. All of it. Finally, it's clear you lack the mental wherewithal to grasp the magnitude of your anti-democratic behaviour.

Dunce.

Peter MacKay who says he wants to continue as Defence Minister. It's obvious that blunder-boy hasn't cemented any employment contracts with military contractors yet. Anyway, he likes jerking-off to the idea of wounded and maimed CF troops suffering as they're unable to access medical care for the injuries they received on his and stephen harper's mad-fool crusades.

Finally, ... I invite this utter creep to my dinner table. Well, more like he shows up whenever I'm hosting a party. He'll snicker about how he'd like to rape the attendees or he'll launch into a round of Holocaust denial or just some really vicious racist "jokes."

But it would be silly to ban him from my table. I just ignore him. Plus, we must welcome a diversity of viewpoints in our own fucking houses, and blah, blah, blah.

I am, of course, referring to krgythnsf-kareaf, or "KZ" at Dr. Dawg's place. In this case, a discussion about police brutality.

Ban the mother-fucking trolls.

Oh yeah; before I forget: Barack Obama lecturing anybody about anything to do with his totalitarian spying program. God, I hate that sanctimonious asshole. He's possibly worse than Tony Blair and that, of course, is saying something.

Youth Unemployment Statistics

The CBC asks the question: "Why are so many of Canada's young people out of work?" The article gravitates between the stupid premise that today's young people have a greater sense of entitlement than previous generations ...

As a recent cover of Time magazine suggests, this has been interpreted by some as entitlement and laziness on the part of millennials who feel like they should be handed more than they’ve worked for.
Likewise, a request for personal anecdotes for this story was met with comments claiming, “the majority of [millennials] have their faces buried in their cellphones instead of doing their job” and that they are “useless mouth pieces whining about ‘poor me.’”

... and the more reality based notion that there are fewer and fewer positions that pay enough to cover the cost of living AND the student loan debts that are incurred to get a university education which is increasingly being seen as obligatory by most employers ...

Part of the problem is sheer competition for skilled jobs.
In 1990, little more than half of the Canadian under-30 population had completed some form of post-secondary education. By 2011, that number had ballooned to 75.5 per cent.

...

Another effect of the increase in the number of people with degrees is the watering down of an education’s value.
According to a survey by Career Builder North America, 36 per cent of employers are now hiring college and university graduates for jobs that used to require only a high school diploma. And 45 per cent of the employers who raised their hiring standards said they are looking for candidates with at least a four-year degree.
...
Nearly half of young people in Canada are now employed in retail, food service or clerical work, which doesn’t offer a lot of opportunity to save for retirement or put a down payment on a home after student loans.

Hasn't it always been this way though? Aren't young people traditionally less employed because that's the story for the beginning of one's labour history? The Financial Post says that the gap between youth and adult unemployment is the highest it's been in over 35 years. The article includes the interesting fact that post-secondary education is not only a good way to train for a decent job, it's also a good way to suppress youth unemployment. As more young people go to college or university, those who opt out and seek to go straight into the labour market after high school suffer for it in terms of higher unemployment:

Here's what the official numbers from StatsCan look like:

The line is going up but it doesn't appear to be rocketing skyward. But let's put that into some context: More young Canadians are in post-secondary education than ever before, lowering the actual size of the labour market. If they were out of school and looking for work, what would that line look like? Also, we hear about these young people refusing to leave the nest or returning to the nest, or some such other expression ["boomerang generation"] to mean that young people are either not leaving the parents' home or are returning to it in their early-thirties. Again, armchair sociologists/psychologists attribute this to some aberration of a particular generation; these are just spoiled kids who refuse to work. Why it isn't interpreted (with an equal amount of worthlessness) as the increased love of this generation for their parents, is an interesting question. The hard, cold facts are that the jobs aren't there or they're very precarious and few and far between. Plus, the cost of living has risen every year for decades now while wages are, for those who have them, fairly stable.

How many of those youngsters living at home, playing video games and smoking weed, have (wisely) left the labour force (because the jobs often aren't there) and do not therefore appear in the statistics? (Please understand, I'm not saying that living-off one's parents and living a life of empty idleness is admirable. But sometimes it can be seen as semi-rational. If people without college or university who ARE looking for work have 14% unemployment rates, and young people with diplomas or degrees have double the national unemployment rate, what would that rate look like if all the slackers were kicked-out of their parents' houses and forced to look for work.

The fact that these slackers are a large enough demographic to even be mentioned in these articles is a sign that the economy is failing young people. And it fails because manufacturing jobs are being automated or shipped overseas. It fails because the white collar field has been shedding workers by the tens of thousands, year after year, for decades. And it fails because the public sector is seen (by the witless) as an absolute drain on the economy rather than as a provider of necessary public services or as the employer of last resort.

There has been a war on the worker. This much is obvious behind all the yammering about "competitiveness" by economic hacks. The true costs of this war continue to be masked by misleading statistics.

PS:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/06/21/bc-unpaid-interns.html

http://action.sumofus.org/a/mcdonalds-debit-card/?akid=1837.812472.YUJGzV&rd=1&sub=fwd&t=2

A New Direction?

There's a question mark there not because I'm asking anyone's opinion, but only whether I'm too distracted and lazy and sloppy to stick to it. But, anyway, ... I think instead of having this blog serve as a source of criticism of the system and an occasional call to arms for the left, what with my criticism being useless and the left's idea of "resistance" appearing to be useless rallies and online carping.

Instead, I thought that I'd make this blog a place to reflect about the reasons why the left succeeded at one time and why we fail today. I'll also be attempting to write more descriptive-predictive things about the world economy. I used to have a far more detailed grasp of the way things work than I do now.

How exciting ...

Book I Read ...

Just thought I'd should mention a little gem of a book i recently read. War At Sea: A Canadian Seaman On The North Atlantic, by Frank Curry.

In many respects, it's unremarkable. It's a little repetitive and there's not much in the way of broader insights about the effect of the war on Canadian society. Curry seems almost entirely uninterested in providing much background about himself or with providing us with even the months in which events are occurring.

On the other hand, it is a highly engaging first-person account of what it was like to be an ASDIC (Sonar) operator on a Canadian corvette in the North Atlantic during World War II. You really get a feel for what he was experiencing when reading his anecdotes. For instance; I won't ever forget that sailors experience a real charge when they get the smell of land close by after a long ocean journey. There's other stories; some of them tragic, like the iron ore freighters destroyed by magnetic mines off the coast of Nova Scotia, or the harrowing rescue of an injured worker aboard a floating drydock in the middle of a North Atlantic storm. Or the tension of a four-day mission to guard a ship as it repaired a break in the North Atlantic telegraph cable.

Curry was in London when Hitler's "Vengeance" weapons (the V1 and V2) were being fired at the city in the war's last days. Here is Curry's account of the first days of missiles and rockets:

As night came and darkness descended, bombs continued to arrive from the southeast. Now, in the darkness, their roaring engines and great flaming sheets of fire took on a diabolical cast. At midnight, I stood alone in Leicester Square as a bomb approached. There it was, low over the rooftops, a monster sent b the very devil. Its roaring engine shook the buildings surrounding the square; then it shut off and there were a few moments of piercing silence that seemed a lifetime Finally it exploded, just across the square, behind the first row of buildings. It was as if the end of the world had arrived, and when I continued toward my hostel, I was in a state of shock.

I've never read such a compelling description of the sight of these early rockets.

It's a nice little book if you're into that sort of thing.

I Give "Em Two-and-a-Half Years ...

The handover of military authority is complete! The Afghans have taken control over security from NATO. NATO forces themselves will move to a supportive and mentoring role, except during battles, where they'll supply air strikes and medical evacuations. In 18 months, NATO forces are supposed to be out of the country altogether.

I give them a year to survive after that. Then the whole rotten structure will collapse upon itself.

I wonder what hysterical, ranting gas-bag Terry Glavin will say to rationalize his decade + of stupidity and slander?

Since 2012

Okay. So, since 2012 we've known about the election fraud (on top of contempt for Parliament, and the cynical abuse of the power of prorogation to a) avoid a vote of non-confidence and b) avoid scrutiny on war crimes).

This is a fact. The harpercons' abuses have been monumental since 2009 and they went into overdrive in 2011. From 2011 to today, 2013, we have been living under a corrupt, anti-democratic, fraudulently elected regime.

And what have we done about it???

What have the Opposition parties done about it?

What have the leaders of the protest movements done about it?

What have you proposed to do about it?

What does it say about us that we're so intellectually barren that we can't stir ourselves in the face of a blatant assault on the fundamentals of our democratic system?

What does it say about us?

Why are we so useless?

Piece of Shit

Canadians did not have proper respect for their democracy. And so they elected cretins and allowed themselves to be fleeced. Some of us went through the futility of ceremonial protests.

And trolls show up here and snicker and giggle like the demented shit-stains that they are.

Don't Blame the Shlubs. Blame the Left Leadership

My view on ordinary apolitical Canadians is that I don't blame them for not having taken to the streets to take down the fraudulently empowered stephen harper. How was that supposed to have happened? At 3pm, June 2012, each individual apolitical ordinary Canadian is simultaneously struck by visceral disgust with the harpercons' systematic dismantling of their democracy and they all go out into the streets, in Toronto, in Montreal, in Timmins, in Saskatoon, etc., ... and then what?

No. I blame the politically active progressives and their institutions and leaders. If those millions of ordinary Canadians had taken to the streets, what would we have done with them? We would have taken them all to City Hall, or a provincial legislature, or Parliament Hill or whatever, and gotten everyone to chant for a few hours before we'd sent them home after having told them they'd successfully "sent a message" to stephen harper. The more ambitious amongst us would have insisted that people stay at the protest site and stand around and complain about the present and speculate idly about the future.

And if, someone from the crowd had suggested actually taking steps to genuinely DO SOMETHING, the leadership would have gone silent and stared stupidly at that person.

Violence Against Women Is No Big Deal

That's why it's so prevalent. That's why ordinary average joes, "good guys" do it so easily. Our society (patriarchal) devalues women. I have my issues with the whole "rape is not about sex, it's about power" thesis, but I do know that rape isn't "surprise sex." Rape is meant to take something from someone without their consent. And to steal from people is to disrespect them. To violate them through rape is to show contempt for them. And to take pictures about it and joke about it is to treat the victim as less than human. And this is done to women with such frequency because men devalue them. And, in a bit of a downward spiral, it's "no big deal" because they're only women and that's the way you treat them.

To repeat: When you already devalue someone, it becomes "no big deal" to violate or destroy them. When you don't think twice about something because it's no big deal, it means you can do it without altering how you perceive yourself. When society devalues women, then your average guy can violate them without altering his self-perception of himself or abandoning all the other traits that make him a "good" guy in the eyes of society. And then they're shocked when their behaviour is condemned as rape and they start to cry in court or double-down on their misogyny.

Busty Hookers, Cocaine, Crack Cocaine, Child Pornography and Fraud

That's about the size of it. What should you expect to find with right-wing politicians? These are people who slash much-needed services for the poor, and who want to toss their fellow citizens into the cruel hands of private health insurance parasites, ... and it's all based on a "respect for taxpayers" mantra that is total bullshit. The people who vote for this scum, are, generally, the stupidest and/or most ignorant people on the face of the earth.

"Uh, dah! I support the troops fighting terrorism in Afghanistan! Even though I've never been in danger of terrorism. Even though I don't give a fuck about Afghanistan. Even though it's cost us tens of billions of dollars. I just think war is cool. Plus I don't like fags. Plus, ... lower taxes! Too bad my tax savings are offset by user-fees and the deleterious impacts of neo-liberalism!"

It's either that or by these intellectual turd-offerings like internet yahoo Patrick Ross or other deluded patsies like Michael Sona.

I'm not saying it's evil to do drugs. God knows I'm living in a glass house in that department. But the difference is that unlike, say, Rob Ford, I'm not pretending to be some lock-em-up, law-n-order, hard-ass, while at the same time I'm out smoking crack cocaine with gangsters. (Ah, Rush Limbaugh! You hypocritical con-man. Go look for the clip where Bill Maher shows a picture of his tacky bedroom and identifies Limbaugh as the brazen con-man that he is.)

I'm not pretending to be some religious "family values" practitioner, who at the same time consorts with busty hookers and people who jerk-off to child rape. Like certain pieces-of-shit in our political landscape do.

I'm not sure who is more contemptible; the sleazy medicine-show hucksters like harper and Hudak, or their nitwit voting base begging to be fleeced.

Sadly, the left-wing is so completely useless that we can't even get our act together enough to do the amount of work necessary to topple these hypocrites and morons from power.

Democracy Decays ... whatev's

Anti-democratic sleaze-ball Dalton McGuinty presided over the deliberate deletion of government emails that detailed the costs of cancelling the gas plants and what the government knew about it. This deliberate cover-up of public information, this destruction of public information, should have been a criminal offense. But accountability has never been a pressing concern for our capitalist quasi-democracy.

The whole Liberal gas plant fiasco stinks to high heavens, but the only people who seem really fired-up about it are the hypocritical shit-heads who support the Ontario PC's and who think the imbecilic Tim Hudak and his retrograde policies are the answer to the province's woes.

Meanwhile, incompetent ass-wipe Peter MacKay used the DND's National Investigation Service to track a "leak" that revealed Canada's participation in a maritime training exercise with the US called "RIMPAC." Even though the source for the information that the preening dullard read already states (four times) that its information came from a Pentagon press release, MacKay still turned it over to the NIS who took a month to find this out.

If only MacKay had been concerned enough about the leak of the Colvin emails as he is about stupid shit like this?

Finally, the cracker Ford brothers in Toronto lashed out at Toronto City Councillor Jaye Robinson of hypocrisy for skipping out on a meeting forcing it to end for lack of quorum. Robinson had criticized Rob Ford for being so lazy, stupid and irresponsible, that he allowed his crack cocaine and drinking and all the feuding and fighting of his dysfunctional existence to interfere with his duties as mayor. That's why, when Robinson stayed home with a chest infection, Doug ("the doofus") Ford, lied his fat-ass off and said the meeting was cancelled when it clearly wasn't.

Because he's a shit-for-brains almost as much as his repulsive, pathetic brother. The sick thing is that the intellectual failures who vote for this scum are going to take the comments of a former Ford ally as just one more part of the vast conspiracy against their idiotic hero.

This is the level our democracy has sunk to. And it's worse but I'm done typing today.

Newspapers Routinely Slander Politicians ...

In Right-Wing-World it is simply a given that a newspaper with a vendetta against a hero of the people will invent scandalous accusations, of, say, the Mayor of Toronto smoking crack cocaine with gangsters, just to pick on him and be mean and try to destroy him to protect their union-buddies and the whole tax and spend agenda.

Yes sirreee. Happens all the time. Are you surprised? Nothing those lefties do can surprise me anymore.

Oh my god. Is anyone going to be able to stop these absolute cretins???? Would anything ever convince these shit-for-brains that their heroes are all idiots and scumbags?

Sadly, the world they think they live in is becoming our world. Because these morons and their heroes are in power and we have to live with all their insane delusions.

Then I think about all the intelligent, decent, progressive people who are willing to give Barack Obama a pass on his whole murder operation and using the scraps of the US Constitution that remain after bush II used it for toilet paper and just setting them on fire.

And I decide, to hell with it. I'm going to roll another joint.

Radiation in Space

NASA's Mars Rover (or whatever) has done some studies or some such. The gist of it all is that there's so much radiation in space on the way over and then hitting the surface of Mars itself, that any human beings sent on a mission to Mars would die of cancer eventually. We just can't give them enough shielding.

The article says that it's Earth's magnetic field and not its atmosphere that protects us from radiation from solar flares and what-not. But still, ... when you think about how harsh the universe is, ... how fragile we are, ... and think about what a thin film of gases protects us from annihilation, ... the stammering idiots and their hooting and guffawing about how environmentalism is evil totalitarian nonsense and how absolutely nothing must bar the progress of the magical God-derived system of capitalism, ... it's really quite sickening.

Watch this video. (The graphics are beautiful.):

I've noticed ...

... that when right-wingers start off, it's always about the stupid leftard fairy tree-huggers who don't know shit from shinola about the real world. Then, when you bring on the facts and arguments that decimate their arguments and leave them looking like the ignorant chumps that they are, they start whining about your  rudeness and your "elitism."