I've "found" a new aide for Paul Calandra

If he wants one that is. I don't know what his staffing situation is. (I suspect, that given Calandra's propensity to lie and cheat, his staff turnover must be horrendous though.)

Anyway, it seems as if this guy David Aryan charged a number of foreigners $25,000 for the privilege of coming to work a low-income job in Canada, but the jobs didn't exist (and neither did the employer). Aryan even made these people pay their way over here for this privilege.

Aryan can't pretend innocence in this matter, because the employer had ceased to exist months before the harper government approved the work permits. Not that he doesn't try to impersonate integrity (after a fashion):

CBC News tried to find Aryan, but his Toronto office is empty and his cellphone doesn’t accept messages. He responded to an email, saying everything that went wrong in this case was Tehrani’s [one his foreign clients] fault.
“Tehrani has been one of the most problematic clients that I have served, in the past two decades,” said Aryan.

...
“Tehrani decided to not follow the instructions he was provided … he further took the liberty of taking matters into his own hands and approached his employer directly. He proceeded to aggressively demand his employer to allow him to begin working immediately.”

One wonders what "instructions" were issued for when to approach an employer who didn't exist months before the work permit was issued? One also wonders how Aryan assisted Tehrani when it turned out the employer didn't exist? (Tehrani tracked down someone associated with this firm, but was given denials and empty promises.)

Unashamed to plead innocence, Aryan is also unashamed to play the victim:

Aryan claimed it was Tehrani who was “cheating the system.”
“I believe that he is playing victim here while throwing me under the bus, simply because I was doing my job according to the books.”
When asked how he justifies his $25,000 fee, he said the money isn’t for job placement, but for various other services, including an “employment search.”
...
“I do not find it of any relevance to the matter. My prices are what they are and no one forced Mr. Tehrani to sign the contract that he did,” said Aryan.
[Former CEO of the Immigration Consultants of Canada Regulatory Council Phil] Mooney said consultants are only supposed to charge for immigration advice and paperwork, not for a job. He added that Aryan charges at least 10 times what a consultant should.

So, even though it appears that Aryan is still advertising the empty Toronto office space as his place of business, I can't make myself believe that he'll still be in his line of work for much longer. He's going to need a new employer. And that's why it was fortuitous that this scandal broke so soon after Paul Calandra made headlines for his boorish behaviour in Question Period recently.

Because (as is well known), Calandra is the sort of scum-bag who would screw over his dying mother to make a buck! He's perfect for another low-life, small-time, shameless, amoral piece-of-shit like David Aryan! 

Seriously! What is it with "conservatives"??? Criminal junkies like Rob Ford and Rush Limbaugh who pretend to be "zero-tolerance" for drugs and gangs, until it turns out they're drug addicts who consort with gangsters? (Or who take Viagra pills with them to the Dominican Republic!) Homophobes who cover for a fellow Republican Congressman's predilection for teenage boys? Draft-dodgers who start wars, use the military as a weapon to beat their political enemies with, and who then betray and abandon wounded soldiers as a matter of policy?

Who is so ignorant and debased as to vote for this scum? Who put an "X" beside Paul Calandra's name on their ballot? What do they think of him now? What do they think of themselves?

Paul Calandra Should Have an 18-Year Old Former Escort for a Wife

Then the small time con-man, amoral sociopath, pathetic laughing-stock, could go on double-dates with stephen harper's other friend, small-time con-man, amoral sociopath, pathetic laughing-stock, Bruce Carson.

Moron the Vile Paul Calandra

You see, we have a Parliament. Through a crappy, "first-past-the-post" electoral system, we elect people to represent us. Those representatives ("Members of Parliament" or "MP's") tend to come from those organized ideological entities called "political parties." These parties have the financial resources, the affinities with the hegemonic culture and etc., to be able to wage these campaigns and appeal to broad groups of similarly afflicted Canadians.

But, you know, as opposed to tiny groups of super-brained anarchists who already know how everything should work but couldn't explain it to you if their lives depended on it, ... these MPs and this system are (for better or for worse) what we have to have any sort of say over the big issues in our lives.

Should we be educated by the public sector using tax revenues for the purpose? Should people who want to practice surgery have certain credentials? Should their be a reasonable faith that our food not poison us?

On and on it goes.

Should I have the right to call stephen harper a shit-head without worrying about a knock on my door at night? (Some people in some countries don't have that freedom.)

It's not a perfect democracy. FAR from it. But I believe that incremental change is the surest path to progress. We should cherish what we have while working to make it better. By "better" I mean more representative and more democratic.

Which is why I've been so consistently angry about the harpercons and their continuous demonstrations of contempt for our democracy, and with the opposition parties and the progressives who show themselves incapable of resisting them.

Calandra's recent display of contempt for the Leader of the Opposition's request to find out just how long members of the Canadian Forces would be in harm's way, as Calandra's boss, stephen harper, loans them out to curry favour with Obama, is really the worst sort of disrespect for our system of government.

And, let's remember, the reason that an idiot like Calandra has any influence over our lives is due to a little something that I like to call "our system of government."

That's right; the source of Calandra's and harper's authority is something that they have no respect for themselves. And I have asked and asked, since harper stole re-election upon his contempt of parliament conviction, just why is it we should listen to a single goddamned thing his so-called "government" has to say?

It turns out that Calandra (in an off-hand way) has confessed to only repeating the talking points handed out to him by the young fanatics (fanatical about being brazenly stupid corruption monsters I guess) in harper's debased and corrupt PMO.

harpercon thug, Dimitri Soudas says that those twisted gnolls in the PMO shouldn't be given short shrift, as they've helped the Conservative Party go from victory to victory and then steal a majority government.

The longer we tolerate these monsters, the more damage they will do. The more blood will be on our hands and the more shame we will have to endure. The more our democracy will be debased. The more lost we will become.

Dregs of Humanity: Paul Calandra Edition

Take a look at this piece of shit:

This shameless buffoon has been very busy under stephen harper. That's because an utter scum-bag like stephen harper finds vile, revolting specimens like this to be highly useful.

The idiot's name, of course, is Paul Calandra. Paul will go on and on about how hard-working his father was. Seems to me that Calandra Senior should have spent less time at work and more time instilling values into his son. Calandra also goes on at length about (I believe) his two daughters. I hope and pray that someone besides this dirt-bag is teaching those kids about being a decent human being. Because Paul Calandra is just not up to the job.

Paul's latest act of moral failure is his behaviour in Question Period last Tuesday. Thomas Mulcair asked the government for specific dates about the beginning and the end of the Canadian Forces' participation in the conflict in Iraq. Calandra chose to stand up three times and condemn the NDP for something somebody associated with the party said about Israel's attack on Gaza.

The pimple-brained, harpercon lapdog, Speaker Scheer found this brazen contempt for the very basics of parliamentary procedure fine and dandy and arrogantly passed over Mulcair's right to ask two more questions, and skipped over to Justin Trudeau. Trudeau, true to form, is always more happy to piss on the NDP than to stand-up for the rights of Parliament, and he nattered away with his own questions.

Now, first of all, Paul Calandra is a "Conservative." And it's no longer news that the Conservative Party of Canada are anti-Canadian criminals with complete and utter contempt for our parliamentary system of government. They are a selfish mafia-type organization, full of half-wits and deluded religious freaks and self-hating closet-cases.

But on top of this vile hatred of Canada and Canada's quasi-democracy, Calandra and the Conservative Party also want to avoid any sort of accountability for their commitment of the lives of other people (those in the Canadian Forces) who they are exposing to great harm in Iraq. Calandra believes the lives of our soldiers are playthings for stephen harper to share with his big buddy, Barack Obama, to try to be his friend. harper wants to play with his toy soldiers, and he doesn't want to have to face up to the fact that they're real human beings, representing us and being paid for by us.

Given the Conservative Party's documented sadistic hatred of "the troops," this shameful, disgraceful behaviour is going to be even more revolting after harper commits ground troops into direct combat with ISIS and then tosses the maimed bodies and minds of our soldiers onto the scrap-heap upon their return to Canada.

Finally, Paul Calandra stands up in Question Period and brays like the jackass he is about how much he supports Israel's deliberate slaughtering of innocent men, women and children in Gaza. I'm sure that Calandra has some idiotic, incoherent justification for his cheering-on of mass-murder. But the same can be said for capitalist pigs who let their containment ponds for mining waste rupture poisoning the water supply for thousand of people, or who let their tanker-cars and train engines to deteriorate and crash and kill dozens of people. Who knows what child molesters do to rationalize their behaviour?

Paul Calandra is on a moral par with those sorts of people. He's an absolute disgusting disgrace.

Parliamentary Radicalism

"But thwap! If you're poo-pooing the massive people's march against climate change yesterday, and calling for (unstated) radical alternatives to marching, why the fuck do you believe in voting and parliamentary politics????"

I know exactly why I'm doing this. I think it's more powerful to pass a law telling capitalists (or any other oppressor) that they have to do something, rather than pleading (or "demanding" as we like to delude ourselves we're doing) that they do something.

After the landslide victory of the British Labour Party in 1945, one of their members Hartley Shawcross (apparently, later "Baron" Shawcross) responded to hooting and hollering from the Tory side of the House about a trade union disputes act, and said that the members opposite can carry on all they wanted to but that "We are the masters at the moment and shall be for some considerable time."

This has been remembered as I remember hearing it: "We are the masters now." The link goes on to say that this seemingly arrogant statement caused his reputation a great deal of damage and was, if anything, uncharacteristic of the man. But I think it would be an excellent thing to say to the brainless shills of the Conservative Party, and the corporate fucks in the Liberal Party, and to any capitalist lackey politician, once a majority of people's representatives were elected behind a genuinely democratic mandate. It would be a great thing for the majority to say to the wealthy minority, once their power was broken.

And their power could be broken through "Workers as Citizens." Because it is the power of money that weakens and undermines the latent power of "one person, one vote." That's why our system of representative democracy is unable to deliver the goods. There was a moment in time, 1945, when the capitalist system was off-balance. Whatever the real causes of the Great Depression, that economic catastrophe discredited the capitalist system. And, what's more, the ability of the capitalist nation-states to find the money to fight World War II and thereby provide full-employment, when they'd spent ten years telling people that they couldn't fight unemployment in the Great Depression, REALLY got people angry. The Fordist system of production made it union organizing relatively easier. The almost simultaneous (for historical purposes) arrival of universal suffrage meant that elites had to square the experiences of the fifteen years before 1945 with the reality of mass elections.

And thus, the welfare state was born. And living standards improved markedly all across the board. And the capitalists and their minions set to work trying to discredit and undermine it from the very beginning. Whatever the merits of their case (and they were few) the economic crisis of the 1970s was their moment to say that the postwar compromise was finished. And 1980 (with Thatcher and Reagan in power, and with the crackpot ideas of Milton Friedman in the ascendant) was when the counter-attack began.

And it was the fact that the postwar compromise had left real power still in the hands of the capitalists that made the job all the easier. The US Federal Reserve answered to the financial sector, not the people. It obeyed the Friedmanite order to raise interest rates and through millions of people out of work, devastating the power of labour. Industrialists could decide to invest or not invest. And, thanks to the beginnings of globalization, they could invest anywhere in the world. They'd invest wherever labour standards were lowest. The workers of the wealthy countries were now put in direct competition with workers in poor countries. Industrialists could move factories to wherever they wanted. They could automate those jobs that they couldn't export.  They could punish governments that didn't entrench their powers into investor rights deals (which they called "free trade" deals), and reward those that toed the line. They were then advised to attack the welfare state, and labour unions, and everything else that gives ordinary people a chance, a pause, a place to stop and gather their breath, an independent source of subsistence and dignity.

And, because standing up to them meant economic crisis, politicians obeyed. And because command economics (as in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China) and development economics (in the then-named "Third World") had failed, and because "social democratic" policies that refused to deal with the realities of power in a capitalist society had failed, people came to believe that (as Thatcher put it) "There Is No Alternative."

But there IS an alternative. A public sector run by the workers and the people and a democratically elected government! Independent workplaces where the workers have a commanding say in how things are run! A government that can set taxation and social spending and regulations according to the needs and demands of the majority and not a minority!

All of this is possible if we use the democratic system to give workers this power as a legal right.

I mean, for fuck's sake! What are the alternatives that most everybody else is offering?

In the USA the hope of most progressives, the Democratic Party, at one time controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress. What happened? They bailed-out the banksters and continued the bullshit War on Terror.

Does anyone seriously expect either the Liberals or the New Democrats to behave any differently here in Canada(that is, without a radicalized MASS movement FIGHTING for genuine change)? The Democrats are totally corrupt, but the NDP does what it does out of fear. It does what it does out of a misguided attempt to show the business class that it is "responsible."

And why should progressive Liberal Party politicians, or progressive NDP politicians listen to the radicals? What do the radicals have to offer? Insignificant numbers and ZERO analysis.

"Throw a rock through a window."

I mean, seriously, what the fuck?

Other left-wingers come up with excellent critiques of the status-quo and excellent models of how institutions could be run, but without dealing with the root of the problem, the control over the economy (and to a great extent, the culture) of our society, their points are moot.

Read this post and then get back to me on how unrealistic my ideas are. (Read this post too.) And, all the while, reflect on the goddamned reality that nobody else has come up with anything of any practical impact in all the years I've been crying in the wilderness.

I am so fucking sick of this bullshit.

Unlike childish and deluded radicals, I acknowledge the historical reality of the resilience of the Anglo-American political system. I acknowledge the historical reality of the unintended consequences of revolutionary upheaval. (In this, I am on the side of the vast majority of people who reject the radicals' idiotic calls for everyone to smash the system and then take a a leap into the revolutionary dark.)

THAT is why I have so much care for our present quasi-democratic system and all that was achieved over centuries of struggle. I do not pretend to know how the world should be arranged, how it should function day-to-day. I just know that
people should have a say in their conditions of employment, and whether they should even be employed. I don't advocate destroying the political system we have. I advocate using it to its maximum potential, and then, gradually strengthening it once the overwhelming power of capital against the people has been eliminated. I don't advocate destroying the economic system we have. At first, under "Workers as Citizens" there will be supply and demand. There will be wage inequality. There will be the profit motive. But then, using unemployment as a weapon will be gone. Attacking whistle-blowers will be gone. Threatening the people's representatives with retaliation for majoritarian policies will be gone.

"Workers as Citizens" is like that missile fired into that convenient ventilation shaft in the Death Star in "Star Wars." (Except that it doesn't blow everything to Kingdom Come afterwards. I don't know! Pretend that instead, the missile makes flowers bloom everywhere, like the climax of "Yellow Submarine" and the Death Star becomes a floating hospital/cruise ship in space or something.)

The majority of people need to get behind something, and that's only going to happen if we give them something that is familiar to them. Something that doesn't alienate them. Something that speaks in the language they're familiar with.

And we, the supposedly full-time world-changers, have to get it through our thick skulls that wandering around in large groups for an afternoon doesn't fucking change anything. Millions marching against bush II's invasion of Iraq in 2003 didn't stop that invasion and all the horrors that followed. The march against climate change last Sunday, ... how much influence can you see it had on Obama or harper?

Gawd! I am so fucking sick of this bullshit!!!

2 Days after the great people's march against Global Warming

By tomorrow, it'll be as if it never happened. Amirite?

Or will I be proven wrong?

Will it actually be the case that a bunch of people marching around city centres all over the world will actually convince everyone who makes their millions in the fossil fuels industry, and every politician who owes their career to big oil, to shut-down and go home?

What we need to start doing is convincing ourselves, and then others, that some things are worth fighting for. And by "fighting" I DON'T mean peaceful marches, signing petitions and everything else that doesn't ordinarily get confused with "fighting" unless leftists are hallucinating about how to change the world.

Why I'm a Leftist

I'm a leftist because I'm all about the fucking truth man!

"If you don't know where you're going, you might not ever get there."

Truer words were never spoken.

How is this utopia that you dream about supposed to function? Who is in charge?

Nobody is in charge?

Okay. How does that work?

Do people earn incomes? (Does everybody have to work?) If they earn incomes, where do they put their savings? How does society invest in the future? How are rail networks maintained? Who does that?

Where does nuclear waste get stored? Who decommissioned nuclear power plants? How will the rich countries help the poor countries respond to global warming? How do we make sure everyone has enough to eat?

What happened to the plutocrats?

This post's title was originally going to be a play on the movie quote from "Star Wars" - "I felt a great disturbance in the force." I was going to write "I feel a great 'enh' in the force" or "a great shrugging of shoulders in the force." Actually, I didn't know what the actual words would be. I was trying to convey a shrugging of shoulders. A sort of confusion and indifference.

When I picture politics and the left, all I see is this grey cloud, and through the haze, I can occasionally see figures engaged in some pointless activities. Wandering around with signs and banners. Petitioning. Meeting. Writing stuff. None of it seeming to have much effect on anything.

Leftists though, seem to share in the delusions represented by this other Yogi Berra quote (which I found at that link):

“We're lost, but we're making good time.”

That's leftist delusion in a nutshell. The idea that we're eventually going to arrive at a victory, or the promised land, whatever, (And sooner than you think!) Only we don't know exactly (at all) where it is, or how to get there. You can't make good time if you're lost!

Jesus-fucking-Christ!!!!!!

You can't make good time if you're lost!

Say it out-loud to yourself: You can't make good time if you're lost!

Start thinking seriously about the world you want to see. Start thinking seriously about how to get there.

Note: I won't post this at "EnMasse" because probably the only one who would answer would be the idiot "Slumberjack" who is a fanatical devotee to the time-wasting insanity that I'm talking about here. Gawd! It makes me nauseous just imagining it.

It Can't Be the Case That Everyone Else is Burned Out?

Maybe there's all sorts of Toronto lefties with blogs or twitter accounts that I don't know about, who are themselves heartily sick of the uselessness of most left-wing "activism" and who have decided to absent themselves?

Is that why harper is able to put boots on the ground in Iraq, and engage in ludicrous sabre-rattling with nuclear armed Russia, and here in Toronto, there's no response of any significance?

But that can't be it. Because the usual suspects haven't seemed to stir themselves. Me, I campaigned for a local socialist's shot at a council seat in the upcoming election. (I live in Ward 25. The denizens of the garish "Bridle Path" are my ward-mates. I can't find any information about my councilor's rivals.) I've also attended a few meetings of the free public transit people.

The English-Canadian left really is disorganized and dispirited. It might be because we have no fucking clue what we want. The NDP fills us with ennui. We don't appreciate parliamentary democracy. We sense that occasional fits of mass milling about in the streets is meaningless. We reject violence altogether. We have no weapons in our arsenal. We have no tactics. We have no aims. Once in a while we plead with our masters to heed us. (Occasionally we provoke mirth and merriment by labeling our pleadings as "demands.")

If I'm wrong, correct me. Please.

The Uses of ISIS (with an update)

For some reason, the Turkish government doesn't like the Syrian government. So it lets Sunni fundamentalist terrorists cross into Syria through the Turkish-Syrian border.

Saudi princes, and the emirs and princes or whatevers, of places like Qatar, are corrupt and, as far as the Koran goes, decadent, sinful. There are probably a lot of young men who would like to topple them. But it's hard to get started in these well-armed police states. Here's a great idea! The corrupt rulers fund these armies to overthrow the secular Assad regime (just like they did when the helped fund the battle against the Soviets in Afghanistan or the battle against the secular Qaddafi in Libya), and these angry young men go and fight, and perhaps die in Syria. (Along with radicalized young men from the West; some of who were enraged by the slaughter of their co-religionists at the hands of Britain and America.)

Those young men from the Arab principalities might hope that they can get their weapons and their fighting skills in this conflict, and then, if they win there, they'll turn their weapons against those corrupt rulers back home.

But that'll probably never happen, because of the USA. The USA is never going to tolerate an independent, radicalized, fundamentalist "Caliphate" in the Middle East. Therefore, it will never happen. And that's find with these sheiks and emirs and princes. They tolerate the Jewish state of Israel and its daily abuse of the Palestinians after all. Life is pretty sweet for these rulers and they don't really want to rock the boat.

So why are they funding these armies in the first place? Because, they got the green light from the USA. As in Afghanistan, as in Libya, as in Syria. Al Qaeda and its variants help to terrify stupid people in the USA. They justify the bull-shit con-job called "The Great War on Terror." Lately, ISIS is helping to destabilize the recalcitrant Assad regime. They were allowed to conquer Sunni Iraq and force the Shiite, pro-Iranian Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki to step-down.

And now, well, not too long ago, the USA was thwarted from its desire to bring its air-force in to help the fundamentalist rebels against Assad. Now, Obama is claiming the right to attack ISIS in Iraq and Syria and is warning the Assad regime not to attack US planes in Syrian airspace. It's now so fucking obvious what the amoral, psychotic scuzz-ball Obama is doing. It's now so obvious what the uses of ISIS are.

The War on Terror is the biggest scam in the history of the world.

UPDATE

And, of course, Vladimer Putin, has been sidelined by the US-American fostered fascist uprising in the Ukraine. Remember how the US fabricated a chemical weapons attack on civilians in Syria and blamed it on the Assad government? Supposedly this was a line that Assad was told not to cross by Obama, or there would be consequences.

Realize that if Putin didn't care one way or the other, he wouldn't have said anything. But Putin (and China) back Assad, and so Putin took something that the senile Secretary of State Kerry said, constructed an arrangement whereby Assad would get rid of his chemical weapons under international supervision. This, combined with the reality that the US, British, and indeed, the world's population would not support yet another US-led invasion of a Middle Eastern country, forced Obama to concede to reality and cancel his scheduled air-strikes. 

Putin had to be punished for this. The Ukraine crisis is a manifestation of the global rule of the United States. It was not created only to distract Putin from Syria. Having Russia put off-balance by chaos in the Ukraine helps to solidify NATO and humble a still-powerful rival. It all works out. (Or that's at least what the arrogant, blundering psychopaths in charge of the USA's foreign policy want to beleive.)

The Senses-Shattering Conclusion

Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI

Okay. So I've figured that they don't thwart the main bad-guy in the recent clash in California. But they do uncover some of the weaknesses of his crazy mind-control/spying/totalitarian plan. Or something.

I haven't got the details of this all figured out at all, as you can see.

But it seems to me that it ties up a lot of knots to have the goal for the final battle to be to stop the bad-guy from doing on a global scale what he just achieved (at great cost) on the state-wide scale. That way, everyone understands the issue already going in.

Also, her hacker friend gets caught and dies from lack of medical care, and he's supposed to be helping her figure out how to stop the last big evil, so it makes sense to have it based on the thing behind their last confrontation.

This being a Hollywood excitement action extravaganza, good and evil are almost always personified by two characters who actually fight with each other. But the young woman will now be a warrior in her late-twenties and the baddy is supposed to be a politician in his mid-fifties by now. I've decided to have him the recipient of all the innovations in body-suits, cybernetics and what-not, that his soldiers get. Perhaps as he rises to POTUS he could do so on a wave of virile fascist front-line thwarting of the evil terroristic threat. Regardless, of that, it will make the final fight

It's also occurred to me that the heroine is supposed to live as a fighting fugitive, which wouldn't give her enough time to develop a love affair with the white boy who gets to realize that he is not the chosen one. He is going to be a minor political figure in California. His response to the failure of the street demonstrations is to go into formal politics himself to change the laws that made it so easy to crush dissent. (The propagandist will refer to this guy's impoverished consistency as "losers" and he will to white-boy politician as a fascist wannabe, because he wants to make it easier for his dregs of society voters to riot and threaten civilization.)

I want to use the love-interest guy to also get across the fact that a privileged person can actually have ideals and want to help.

To do all this, he'll have to go with the heroine after the fight in California. Perhaps he'll be part of the plan to initiate the final battle. Whatever the case, he's going to be killed; dying heroically or not, I haven't decided.

The propagandist is going to be captured and totally humiliated by the heroine. (BTW: She doesn't work alone. She leads a small army.)

There will be a financial sector crisis, brought upon the world as a result of financiers' corruption and greed. The resultant world-wide crisis is what will spur the bad-guy to make his totalitarian system cover the entire globe. He'll propose this at an international conference to deal with the financial crisis. This conference will take place at a super-remote location because there is rioting in every city on earth. The capitalists will be talking to their politician  hirelings about how they will have to put the screws to the shlubs of the world. Thinking that nobody will ever hear their words they are blatant about how little they care for the sufferings that will result from getting the increasingly impoverished humanity to bail them out of the crisis.

Thanks to the heroine and the hackers, all this will be broadcast to the people of the world.

The juiced-up, cyborg POTUS bad-guy will start to make noises about how the capitalists need him more than he needs them. State control of the weapons of war and surveillance has given him power to bring the capitalists to heel, a-la Hitler or Putin.

That's when the good guys strike, and there's the big confrontation and yadda, yadda, yadda, and many people die but the heroine lives and kills her arch-enemy.

Disaffected cops and soldiers throughout the USA side with the people. Ka-Boom! An Arab leader who is in the pay of the CIA and who was supposed to launch an attack that was to justify rallying around the flag betrays his handlers and uses his weapons to arm the people who force a peaceful coup. He publicly renounces the cynical plot he was a part of.

Anonymous hackers, inside and outside of the government, cripple the surveillance apparatus.

Everything comes crashing down and it is wondrous to behold.

So, that's the real bare-bones of it. "greg" in the comments was thinking it was ten hours long before this part, but I've written a script before (it's never been shown to anyone, but its formatted). The rule is one minute of screen time should take up one page. I've gotten a lot of shit covered for a one and a half hour movie in a script that's ninety pages long. If this is all handled economically, it could be done in two and a half to three hours.

So, This is where it bogs down a bit

In all honesty, I've been making-up a fair bit of what I've written in the past few days as I've been typing it. I've had some basic ideas and they've been fleshed-out as you see them here.

Now, what's supposed to happen is the heroine is supposed to meet the baddy again, more as an equal than as an unarmed, overwhelmed teenager. I don't know if she'll win this confrontation or not.

She's supposed to meet the hackers, especially that lead guy. I don't know the logistics of that yet.

She's supposed to reconnect with the white boyfriend. Actually they're supposed to become lovers during this act. He's going to have gone into formal politics. He's going to represent the truth that there are some decent people in politics, even though they are (as we'll see) doomed on many levels. He'll make his comment about being "colour-blind" and she'll retort that based on her personal experience, and her intimate knowledge of racialized prisons, abuse of First Nations, abuse of immigrants, pervasive racism in society, that she can't get colour out of her mind. (Don't worry; I'll find some genuine expressions of these sentiments, so it'll be more eloquent and articulate.)

Anyhow, he'll help her.

Seeing as how there are hackers involved, I think the bad-guy governor is going to be proposing some internet spying thing that locks-down people's computers when they search for "terroristic" things like "social justice" or "environmentalism" and etc. (Because it's already accepted in our society that the NSA records everything we do for future reference.) Then, people's cellphones are activated so that "intervention agents" can track you, until maybe you remember to throw your cellphone away, when, by that point, public cameras are watching your every movement, so that you're caught, interrogated, and, if you express any genuine interest in any of these "dangerous" ideas, you're held in "protective custody" for psychiatric treatment. If you're recalcitrant, you'll get brain-surgery. And if you're poor or on social assistance, forcible sterilization.

I've got somewhere I have to be in a couple of hours. So chew on this in the meantime.

More Movie Madness

Why am I using my blog to dream up a plot for a Hollywood depiction of radical revolution? We all know that I used to type passionate denunciations of the sickening system we find ourselves in. But after a few years of doing that, I started to think that it was pointless. To continue to fulminate online without doing anything about it is the worst pomposity. So, I tried to organize something big in the 3-d world. Alas, the 3-d world let me down. I am, at present, trying to work with local activists on the issue of affordable mass-transit, but I am finding the meandering and lack of professionalism of my colleagues a bit of a hard slog.

I do remember that people found my constant harping about the uselessness and pathological levels of inability on the left to be tiresome. Even I realize I can't keep up on that forever, non-stop.

So this movie summary is something different and constructive. I'm also finding it cathartic to write about an alternative to the mindless, formulaic Hollywood epics about (ordinary people who find themselves to be extraordinary) people bravely going up against imaginary evils and villains while, all the time, real evils and real villains run rampant.

I told a friend about this and I told him I thought I'd put the whole thing online and just leave it there. So that's what I'm doing.

So, now that the heroine has been smuggled out of Los Angeles, we can come to the second act of the film. This is where she comes into her own. The Yoda/Mister Miyagi figure starts the training, but he soon realizes she's beyond him.

One idea I have is him smashing a bunch of expensive looking statues, explaining how they are not necessary for his survival. Then he stops himself from smashing another one because it is a work of artistic beauty and it makes his world better by existing. (All the other things were actually cheap replicas, which he destroyed for demonstration purposes.)

Just a thought.

These people aren't pacifists. They use the martial arts, plus weapons. Out in the desert. I think I'll have her rescue some smuggled-in Latin Americans from a gang of beefy, corn-fed, right-wing racist gun-nuts. A quasi-fascist "militia."

I think I will have her and her mentor observing them with a large group of immigrants who they've captured. While they're thinking about how to respond, the racists start killing their prisoners, calling them a cancer that needs to be eradicated. This will cause the heroine to throw caution to the wind and simply attack. In the process a few of the racists will be killed while the rest manage to escape.

This will provoke an outraged response from the Hannity-type propagandist. But no one will know about her involvement. All her actions will be designed to ensure secrecy and the covering of tracks from government investigators. There'll have to be a bunch of nuts-n-bolts planning to convey all of this.

Next, she will take on an oil company that wants to start fracking in a community, against the community's wishes. In so doing, she will also have to go up against the state agents (police and military) who are helping to enforce this private company's orders upon the people of the community. (This will include the destruction of solar panels and the outlawing of the collection of rain-water. Which are a couple of things that these psychotic institutions are trying to enforce.)

Finally, I want to have her come into Canada, where some First Nations women will show her the ecological abomination of the Tar Sands and describe for her the suicidal nature of the "machine" of industrial civilization. How the insane desire for "more" has infected the mind of humanity and is causing them to engage in such monstrosities of the Tar Sands, and so much more.

Throughout this part of the film, references will be made to world-wide struggles of poor people against the system, and how they're being suppressed with increasing brutality. This brutality is to be personified by the police sergeant. This period takes years and sees the heroine age from a teenager to a woman in her mid-twenties. The police sergeant will likewise age and increase his power. I think he'll go from being the Chief of Police in Los Angeles to become the Governor of California as the elites praise him for his ruthless suppression of the growing underclass revolt.

Something he attempts to do in California, as governor, is going to draw the heroine back. And, I think, this is where I'll introduce the computer hackers. Especially this one. I want him to be physically handicapped, and I want to base him on this young man who was severely handicapped who I used to see on the bus in Hamilton. I think he had limited use of his arms and his head flopped to one side. He was in a big wheelchair with padded supports for his head and arms. I think he had to be strapped upright. He had to travel with a sibling. They were obviously poor, especially since their stop was in one of the poorer neighbourhoods. But he always had on these hilariously offensive t-shirts. A different one every time I saw him.  At some point, I just stopped seeing him. I'd see his sister from time-to-time, but never him. I don't know if he died, but I think he did and that made me sad at the time. I want to base a genius hacker on him, and he is going to be a major ally of hers. But he's going to die at the hands of the system. Probably he'll be arrested and denied medical care while in prison (which happens a lot in prison systems anyway).

I will have this guy survive long enough to plan the big confrontation though. And a computer simulation of him will help the heroine carry-out their big operation. The computerized voice will even produce filthy insults when she's not moving fast enough.

So that's what I'm typing for today.

More of that Movie Idea

Part I, II, III

It just occurred to me; the heroine is going to be assaulted by a team of cops, including the lead villain, and then the big baddie is going to depart, to bust other heads, and that's when she's going to continue fighting and that's when she's rescued by the mentor-figure.

I decided I'd have him say that one reason why he came to help her was because he admired that she continued fighting. Because (as it turns out) he is a fighter.

So, why not make explicit her reasons for continuing to struggle? So then I thought that while she's recovering from the initial beating, she replays in her head the way her parents were broken by unemployment and poverty and preyed-upon by religious hucksters. The way her boyfriend was gunned-down in the street by the cops. The way her brother came back from the military overseas mangled and betrayed. The way her boss exploited her at work. And to have all this fill her with rage and galvanize her to continue to struggle.

The rescue should be a confusing affair. Hand-held camera. But we see that in this noisy, semi-confined space, the rescuer employ sticks and knives to disable the cops by attacking the gaps in their riot gear, before taking the heroine by the hand and whisking her away.

He takes her to his home. He's a janitor. He was involved in "Justice for Janitors" in the 1990s. His wife works as a medical assistant. They have a few kids. Two will be devoted to their parents' ideals. The oldest will be consumed with video games and consumerism.

He tells her about, not a permanent political movement or secret society, but a tradition. Of human beings who recognize what "enough" is. People who believe that living in harmony with others and with the earth, is more important than having more than one needs. That is the statement of the official message of the film.

I'll have him take some liberties with history in describing the Great Sword Hunt in 16th Century Japan. After a period of social and political chaos in Japan, the warrior-farmer Hideyoshi managed to win the battle for supremacy against his main rivals and become ruler of Japan. Hideyoshi was afraid of continued social unrest, so he ordered the Great Sword Hunt, which took all the weapons away from the peasantry, putting them at the mercy of the Samurai, who despised peasants so much they would use their necks to test the sharpness of their swords.

To counter being deprived of weapons, some peasants developed the martial arts, using their bodies and objects around them as weapons. Some Samurai were fair to their peasants. There was no fighting. Some Samurai were rapacious and cruel. Sometimes there was fighting. Fists and feet were never enough against men armed with swords or spears, some on horseback, or teams of archers. Some peasant warriors were able to maintain their dignity and their lives. Many who fought were killed. Many were chased away and became bandits.

Here, he describes a story based on the histories written by Linebaugh and Rediker, such as The Many-Headed Hydra, about the continuous elite process to exploit people and the planet, and to oppress and even destroy those who resist them.

He points out that this is not a continuous line of elites. Throughout history, various gangs of greedy people contended with other gangs. Some rulers were overthrown and their entire families exterminated. Sometimes people from the bottom, greedy and ruthless, rose to the top of the game, and their descendants stayed at the top for centuries, even if only to regress to privileged obscurity.

In the same way, their movement of ordinary people is not some permanent secret society of rebels. Rebels would become bandits or pirates. Some would steal as much as they needed to survive and live independent lives. They would rob only from the rich. Some bandits and pirates became like their oppressors, greedy and cruel. Sometimes children of activists become corrupted by the society they live in and reject their parents' values and imitate and lust after the power and privileges of kings or nobles or, now, the super-wealthy. Sometimes, they just forget everything in the struggle for survival. But then they remember again, that they don't need riches and power to be full human beings.

That having been said, he and his wife are activists. They know about others, doing other things around the country and around the world. More than that, it seems possible that never before have the people of the world been easier to unite while the system has never been more vulnerable and the world has never been more threatened. The financial system is tottering. The economic system is buckling under its own contradictions. Global warming, mass-extinctions, other things are undermining the planet's ability to support sophisticated life.

So that's where he's going to ask her to join them. He's not aware that she's "The Chosen One" (although there is nothing tangible that does any choosing) and will become the "leader" of this movement.

Then the television set intrudes. Those three cops who were wounded when the mentor rescued her are being portrayed as victims of an unprovoked terrorist assault. They've managed to identify her from surveillance footage of the rally and they're now looking for her. The propagandist is leading the charge in demonizing this teenaged girl as a "child terrorist." A "black widow spider" with a poisoned mind.

The police sergeant/main bad guy is being interviewed about this cowardly, crazed attack upon his men, as well as on his "successful management" of the violent rally. The fair-wage demonstrators (who had toned-down their message and their tactics in a futile attempt to win the sympathy of the liberal betrayer politician) is being depicted as a bunch of losers who have been duped by violent enemies of the nation into attacking the police and rioting.

Anyway, it becomes clear that the heroine cannot go home. The police are looking for her. One of the mentor couple's kids delivers a USB stick to her parents and they open it up to find a recording from her saying that she's safe, she's happy, she's with people who can help her, but that she won't be able to see them for a while. She'll try to communicate with them once in a while. But not to tell the police at all about this recording.

The mentor takes her out of the city (I'm thinking Los Angeles at the moment) in his working van. They'll be going to a safe-house with friends of his outside of the state. Perhaps in the desert country in the South-West. Like Arizona or something. Perhaps they'll be First Nations or perhaps they'll be people who help Latin Americans crossing the border illegally looking for work.

That's my typing for today.

Movie Idea III

Just making a new post for every stage. I ain't talking about sequels. Part I and Part II.

So, after we've had the introduction to the oppressions of capitalism and racism, and the meeting that exposes the delusions of the left, we get to the rally itself.

This will introduce us to two more figures. First is a Sean Hannity-type propagandist. He'll be denouncing the fast-food workers' campaign as a violent Marxist plot led by losers and malcontents. He'll be interviewing experts, economic hacks and authoritarian assholes, who will assist him in this campaign.

Second will be the main baddy. A police sergeant in his mid-thirties. (That might be kind of young, but the story depicted is going to encompass around ten years or so. Hmmm. I guess he could be in his mid-forties.) is what's called "the creative process" ladies n' gents.

So, anyway, the police are going to attack the rally and the heroine is going to get attacked and sexually assaulted by the villain and his subordinate cops. He will then leave to direct other attacks on other protesters. The heroine will continue to struggle against the cops holding her and that's where the "Yoda" or "Morpheus" or "John the Baptist" sort of character shows up. It'll be an older Japanese dude, skilled in the martial arts ...

I've tried to make it clear that this is a film based on the simplistic, escapist stories told by Hollywood, onto which a left-wing social justice agenda is being tacked.

That's all I feel like typing for today.

Movie Idea Part II

No, no. It's not a sequel. I haven't finished describing the film idea I brought up in yesterday's post.

So, the black, female heroine comes from a working class background and her parents are rendered unemployed by the forces of capitalism. They descend into poverty and religious hucksterism preys on them.

Of the two young men in her life, her brother and her boyfriend, one will be shot dead by the police and the other will enlist in the military only to become maimed and subsequently abandoned and betrayed by the country he fought for.

As a result of her parents' unemployment, she will, at the age of 16, get a job in one of the few industries available, fast-food. There she will (obviously) be treated poorly by her employer and join the movement for higher pay. Perhaps it will be anger at the specific injustices of her workplace; more likely her participation will be based on a growing awareness of the institutionalized injustices of the wider US-American society that will motivate her.

In the preparation for the ...

It occurs to me now that it should be the boyfriend who is killed by the cops. That gets him out of the way for her to meet her white boyfriend. The white boyfriend's role (you will recall) was to be a foil for a number of issues, especially the trope of the white male "chosen one" that most mainstream movies utilize.

In preparation for the big demonstration for a higher minimum wage, there is going to be a meeting. This meeting is going to depict at least two things: One, is that the fast-food workers themselves have a natural sense of justice and a desire to do something about their predicament, but little confidence in their ability to navigate the complicated legal and political realities of organizing.

That's why there will be union organizers present, who will make a big show of their knowledge of the law and who will argue (understandably) for union certification, and (corruptly) that the movement be "responsible" in order to attract the support of the LIBERAL POLITICIAN.

The LIBERAL POLITICIAN (henceforth to be written uncapitalized) should probably be introduced early on, in little snippets, showing him mouthing platitudes about hard-working ordinary Americans, while driving around in chauffeured limos and hobnobbing with obvious representatives of the 1%.

Along with the boring union hacks are a few young radicals. This group will include the white boyfriend. They will be talking about the power of non-violence. They will be talking all sorts of airy-fairy stuff, as well as some sectarian nonsense. Perhaps it will be here that the white boyfriend gets his opportunity to say how "colour-blind" and cool he is about racial differences. Perhaps that will come later. Because when he says it, the heroine is to give him a dressing-down for it and I'm not certain if it works that she's so articulate and assertive early on.

The point of the meeting scene is to show how the union movement has been co-opted into the system and how the radicals are sectarian and delusional.

That's all i feel like typing for today.

Movie Idea

So, lately (or since forever) there are a lot of  movies out where some young guy finds out that he's "the chosen one" and he has to save his people (or the world, or the universe) from some evil threat. The threat is "evil" because it is. It does bad things because it is bad. It is going to kill a lot of people.

In the interests of feminism, they're starting to have super-skilled female characters who are (at first) greater warriors than the male lead, but fate is destiny and they resign themselves to second-banana status. (Besides, they also fall head-over-heels in love with the hero too.)

At some point, when the evil danger is at its strongest, the hero realizes that, like it or not, it's up to him to stop the bad stuff. Even if it means his own death. That's when his misfit (but powerful) friends, including his warrior-princess girlfriend, rally around him, risking death to fight evil alongside the chosen one.

So, they make these movies. And the "evil" is just some meaningless aphilosophical twaddle. And it's not even important that the evil minions might as well be cardboard cut-outs. This fantasy-heroism doesn't inspire anyone in the audience. The companies that make these movies come out of the same system of thuggish criminality that destroyed the Occupy Movement and which is responsible for the militarism and racism on display in Ferguson, Missouri. It's the same culture that has just gone  on record as defending the indefensible massacre of innocent Palestinian men, women and children in Gaza in "Operation Protective Edge."

So, I thought about writing a script for a movie that incorporates the whole idea that "evil" can be defeated by a small team of heroes in an exciting battle that happens after all the plot-lines have been established and every supporting character gets their little scene and the macguffin has been found or what-the-fuck-evah.

So dig, the "hero" is going to be a "heroine" from the get-go. A young black female. Because there simply isn't enough of that stuff. And, obviously, it's to be set in the USA. Because that's where the money is. And that's where the evil people who rule the world are. (As opposed to the evil people who wish they ruled the world.)

It'll probably start in a movie theatre and she'll be there with her boyfriend (No, she's not going to be a lesbian. Because I think I want her to have a white boyfriend who will go "B-but I thought I was the chosen one!") This boyfriend with her in the movie theatre is black. He is probably going to join the military and come home maimed and traumatized and ignored/abandoned by the government. (She'll have a brother too. He'll be shot dead by white cops. Or that'll happen to the boyfriend and her brother will be the betrayed veteran.) Anyway, guess what's on the screen? One of those movies with the white-guy hero, doing one of those scenes where he decides that it's up to him to stop the bad guy, even if he might not be the chosen one, and his friends stand beside him.) Her face is of indifferent indifference. She doesn't even know she's bored. Her boyfriend is enjoying it.

Her and her family are really going to be put through the wringer. Her parents are going to be hard-working people whose jobs are taken away from them. I hope it's not ignorant stereotyping, but right now, I want to have them fall into that religious hucksterism in a big way (her parents) because I want it to be shown that most of that religion stuff is a scam. She's going to see the fancy clothes of the minister as her impoverished parents drop money they can't afford into his collection plate.

It starts when she's sixteen years old and she has to work in fast-food. I haven't decided if she gets raped by her boss or just ripped-off. Because she's going to get sexually assaulted by the main bad-guy. A police sergeant who becomes an "expert" on "domestic terrorism" and who rides a wave of right-wing hysteria and corporate cynicism to become ... wait for it ... President of the United States of America!

Anyway, ... that's all I want to type for today.

Israel's Moral Depravity

Somebody left a copy of the Toronto Star lying around the other day. Out of curiosity, I opened it up to the opinions page and found this nauseating example of complete moral depravity:

"World too hasty in judging Israel’s conduct in Gaza: Israel’s conduct should be judged on the same level as that of other democracies during wartime."

Let's be very clear here, for all the racists and sadists, "Operation Protective Edge" was not merely a "war of choice." It was a slaughter of choice. The only step lower for Israel to go is to put a few hundred Palestinian men, women and children into an amphitheatre and film themselves using them for target practice. This had nothing to do with Hamas kidnapping and murdering three Israeli teenagers, because the Israeli government knew that Hamas had nothing to do with it.

Supposedly Hamas hides their weapons under civilians' homes and inside hospitals and UN buildings. They don't conveniently locate them in distinct ammunition storage containers for easy destruction, the way any other army of any other state does. Wait! "Palestine" isn't a state. It doesn't have an army. If they were, Israel wouldn't be allowed to impose curfews and "diets" on them! If Palestine was a country, then a war would have had to have been formally declared upon them and the Palestinians could have turned to the UN as a full-member state and asked for a cease-fire against Israeli aggression.

Where, by the way, did the Polish Underground store its weapons during World War Two? In ammunition dumps? This question, please note, is not meant to equate Hamas with the Polish Underground, or Israel with the Nazi Occupation of Poland. It is, gentle reader, merely meant to outline the stupidity and ridiculousness of condemning Hamas for hiding its weapons under houses in one of the most densely populated places on earth.

I have already outlined in detail that both Israel and Palestinians have a right to defend themselves. What Israel doesn't have the right to do is to steal the Palestinians' land, shoot them when they protest, and abuse them on a daily basis. Which they do. A handy rule-of-thumb in human affairs is that weak people tend not to attack strong people. It seems even more logical to add that weak people tend not to attack strong people, repeatedly, over and over again, attacking them no matter how beaten and bloodied they get. (Obviously, there are some racist fuckwits who will maintain that the Palestinians are not normal human beings, but instead, deranged Arab-Muslim death-cultists who "hate" Jews the same way that Hitler hated the Jews, because the root-cause of anti-Semitism is internal evil that invents some piss-poor justifications for its genocidal inclinations. I don't subscribe to this drivel. I'm pretty sure that Hitler's genocidal racism is different from Palestinians' anger against their Israeli occupiers.) So, if we accept that both sides have a right to defend themselves, and also accept that it's more likely that the more powerful Israelis are the aggressors in this relationship, it should stand to reason that much of this conflict would die-down if Israel stopped attacking the Palestinians. Furthermore, any honest reading of documented history by a sane person would reveal that Israel has, in fact, been the aggressor against the Palestinians, over and over again.

Oh, and lastly, ... what the fuck does Hamas storing weapons under people's houses have to do with shooting little boys playing soccer on the beach?  The IDF has said that this was a regrettable accident, but it seems to me to be much more likely that the only thing they regret is that there was a journalist present. Why the fuck would you shoot four boys playing on the beach when you were supposedly trying to snuff-out Hamas and its weapons? I rather think that these disgusting racist cowards deliberately murdered many more children, only in those instances, there wasn't a reporter present to expose their crimes.

So, no. "Operation Protective Edge" was an unjustified example of deliberate mass-murder and anyone racist enough to cheer it on, or stupid enough to defend it as "self-defence" has automatically discredited themselves. Apologists for this crime against humanity are scum. Which brings me to this attempt to rationalize mass-murder by one Uri Dromi, former Director of the Jerusalem Press Club. His essay begins with a quote:

“This was the first air campaign in history where only precision-guided munitions were used. (We) approached each individual targeting decision with extraordinary caution. We had solid intelligence and a very strict target selection process . . . to minimize any risk of civilian casualties.”

You might think that this was the response of the Israeli government to accusations of using excessive force in Gaza recently. But actually, it was a statement of NATO rebutting the same kind of allegations regarding its 2011 air campaign in Libya.

This is the great thing about being a left-wing extremist. You don't get tripped-up in inconsistencies such as cheering for NATO's criminal behaviour in Libya and then feeling queasy watching the IDF shooting humans in a barrel in Gaza. I think both actions were abominations. I condemn both of them as brutality bathed in bullshit.

The statement regarding the Israeli conduct of war goes as follows: “I don’t think there’s ever been a time in the history of warfare when an army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza.” Again, these were not the words of an Israeli official spokesman, but of Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of the British forces in Afghanistan, someone who probably knows what he is talking about.

So, another imperialist shill supports another. Big fucking deal. You people don't grasp how discredited and disgusting you are. If you did, you wouldn't be using each other for "character" references.

Was there a UN commission established to investigate NATO’s Libyan campaign? Were there threats to drag Lt.-Gen. Charles Bouchard, the Canadian commander of the operation, to the International Criminal Court? Nothing of the sort. On the other hand, whenever it comes to Israel, there is this UN knee-jerk reaction to blame and prosecute.

This sort of pathetic, pitiful wailing actually exposes some interesting tensions at the upper-levels of the world's imperialist powers. There generally isn't much but sustained applause from the US-American corporate media when the USA is in conflict, but, while they maintain a consistently Israeli-enabling tone throughout all their reporting, US journalists do occasionally speak more critically of isolated Israeli atrocities. Perhaps this mild criticism is part of a sophisticated calibrating of Israel's place in the international pecking-order.  Other than that though, this sickening whining is useless.

No wonder Israelis are suspicious of UN commissions of inquiry. The one headed by Judge Richard Goldstone in 2009 condemned Israel for alleged crimes in the 2008 Operation Cast Lead. Goldstone regretted this later, writing in the Washington Post that contrary to what had been written in his report, “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.” But that was too little too late.

Sorry, you racist apologist for mass-murder; whatever Goldstone said, or didn't say, ...

The second, more significant reassessment by Goldstone is that he was wrong to conclude in his report that Israel intentionally targeted civilians "as a matter of policy"

Despite Goldstone’s misleading wording in the article, he is referring not to an Israeli order to intentionally murder civilians but a policy in which indiscriminate attacks were undertaken with a disregard to likely casualties among civilians.

...doesn't change the fact that "Operation Cast Lead" was yet another example of indiscriminate slaughter and crimes against humanity. It is a sign of being a humanitarian to acknowledge this, and a sign that one is losing sight of one's own humanity to grab at any straw to rationalize your revolting, racist blood-lust.

Now comes the sequel, with a new UN commission headed by Canadian professor William Schabas — a man who in 2012 already concluded that Israel was a serial war criminal. That this “judge” didn’t recuse himself shows how fair all this façade of international justice is.

Perhaps we should find someone who believes that Israel is a paragon of virtue? Or, perhaps someone who has no opinions on Israel whatsoever? Perhaps there's a hermit in the Gobi Desert who is qualified to head this investigation? Or perhaps we should take all of the IDF's own bullshit "investigations" of themselves and of Hamas and flush them all down the toilet where they belong? I really don't know what to say in the face of this nauseating self-pity.

Apart from this double standard, what bothers Israelis is that world public opinion can’t see that unlike Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, which are thousands of kilometres away, death tunnels from Gaza open up in the backyard of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, 500 metres away, and short-range mortars from Gaza have just killed two of the kibbutz members.

Well, I think it's pretty clear that if Israel wants the rockets to stop, then Israel should stop attacking the Palestinians. Stop stealing their land. Stop torturing them. Stop with the daily humiliations. Stop being the aggressor.  That is if (a big "if") Israel's leaders don't see those Israeli deaths as acceptable losses in their long-term campaign for the total eradication of Palestine as a political concept.

Perhaps people will start changing their opinion about what Israel is doing when Abu Khalid al-Kanadi (“the Canadian”), John Maguire of Ottawa and the likes of Calgary suicide bomber Salman Ashrafi return from the battlefields of the Islamic State and start practising their holy war back home.

Battlefields in wars subsidized by the USA and its whack-job, super-corrupt, medieval Arab allies in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and other such dictatorships.

In the meantime, Israel is also facing an internal challenge, with its 20 per cent minority of Israeli Arabs. If Israel were smart, it would have made them the happiest people in the country, fully equal to the Jewish Israelis. Regrettably, we have failed to do so, with one notable exception — the second premiership of Yitzhak Rabin (1992-95), when the government mounted a formidable endeavour to address the inequality of the Israeli Arabs.

Socio-economic grievances aside, the Israeli Arabs are torn apart by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, where, in the words of Israeli-Arab politician Abed al-Aziz Zoabi, “My country is at war with my people.” Their recent violent protests against the war sparked counterattacks and racist remarks by right-wing Jewish Israelis, which drove some people to rush to the conclusion that Israel had lost its liberal compass.

Not so fast. Again, Israel’s conduct should be judged on the same level as that of other democracies during wartime. Have we hurriedly passed a dubious “Patriot Act” restricting civil liberties? Have we put our Israeli-Arab citizens in concentration camps, like the Americans did to their citizens of Japanese origin during the Second World War?

Here, Dromi makes some points that should resonate with witless, hypocritical Westerners. But, once again, being a radical leftist, I have nothing to apologize for. I did not shriek for the Anti-Terrorism Act for Canada after 9-11. I do not cheer for the torture of my fellow citizens the way right-wing Canadian tea-baggers do. I supported the campaign for redress for Japanese-Canadians who were interred during World War II. I did not support the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, or Syria. Unlike Canadian colonialists, I want there to be justice, dignity and autonomy for the original inhabitants of this land, the First Nations. I have not lost my moral compass. I have not lost sight of the importance of our legal, civil, political and overall human rights, in this stupid con-job called the "War on Terror."

Above all, according to recent opinion polls, with all the rhetoric about secession, 77 per cent of the Arabs in Israel consider themselves to be Israelis (more, I believe, than the 49 per cent of Quebecers who want to remain Canadian, as one poll from 2013 showed). It’s up to us Israelis — and the news about the demise of our liberalism is exaggerated — to embrace them and to coerce our government to do so as well.

Considering that "the right of return" is a pressing demand of the Palestinian diaspora, and considering the hay that racist Israelis would make if 79% of Palestinians in Israel said they didn't consider themselves citizens of Israel, this shouldn't be too surprising.

There is no other democracy that faces such challenges, both externally and internally, and still keeps its democratic nature. Except that we don’t get credit for that. It reminds me of the joke about Bill Clinton’s visit to Israel. During a boat cruise in the Sea of Galilee, Hillary’s hat falls into the water. Bill steps out of the boat and walks on water to retrieve it. The press, in hot pursuit in another boat, concurs: Clinton can’t swim.

Uri Dromi is the Director of the Jerusalem Press Club. Between 1992 and 1996 he was the Spokesman of the Rabin and Peres governments.

Ha-ha-ha! Ahem! It's long been established that many of the "challenges" that Israel faces are produced by Israel's policy of the theft of the Palestinians' lands and their oppression of the Palestinians when they protest. Stop doing this, and many of your "challenges" will disappear.

I'd like to conclude with a joke of my own though. In 2014, Israel used a pretext to justify an attack on the crowded, outdoor prison camp/home to 1.8 million Palestinians, called "Gaza." They killed well over a thousand innocent men, women and children. And the USA shipped military supplies to them the whole time. And zionists worldwide cheered them on. And some people said that killing innocent civilians in such a way was a moral outrage. And miserable excuses for human beings like Uri Dromi were either too stupid, too racist, too deluded, too much whatever the fuck sort of failure you think explains it, to shut-up, and instead, wrote sniveling apologies for it. And media outlets like the Toronto Star didn't have the sense not to print such garbage.

I admit; it isn't a very funny joke.

Infantile Anarchism

Getting the world that we want is going to be a struggle. This should go without saying. It's going to mean a struggle between those who have, those who think they're happy in the present circumstances, and those who are unhappy with the system - many of whom are also those who are have-nots. It's going to mean weak people going up against strong people. In this day and age it's going to be unarmed civilians going up against a militarized state.

We have two options (that I know of ) for this struggle.

1) My proposal is that we work with the system we have. We work with the system that evolved, slowly, painfully, over centuries. We work with the system whereby our rulers claim their legitimacy to rule over us and we force them to abide by the letter of their own laws or else openly renounce their legitimacy.

2) We  call for the total rejection of this system. We mock the centuries of struggle to win political, legal and social equality as human rights. We hold out for some vague, undefined mass refusal by "everyone" and the total revolution that will follow which will inevitably produce a much better society than the one we have now. (We incorporate the desperate protests in places like Ferguson Missouri or rural New Brunswick where First Nations are trying to stop "fracking" on their lands, as signs of this coming show-down. We completely ignore that these desperate people with their backs to the wall often get their asses kicked, and often don't win anything substantial. Sometimes they're not even capable of mitigating the latest atrocities being committed against them.)

This is what I found so infuriating about that pompous cretin "slumberjack" at "EnMasse." The dangerously deluded, childish nature of his/her radicalism, never dawned on him/her. We have gigantic problems on this planet that needed attending to a decade ago, and this idiot seriously believes that we have all the time in the world to wait for an undefined revolution that will never come. I've read a little bit about anarchism over the years. If there is some deeper, clearer, more coherent vision underneath it all, it eludes me. "Slumberjack" was asked repeatedly to clarify his/her yammerings and charmingly answered me with insults. I suspect the emptiness of his/her intellectual construct was revealing itself and "slumberjack" masked his/her terror with lies and denials.

harpercons; No Idea How Stupid They Are

So, it's now obvious to people of normal intelligence, how embarrassingly empty was the blustering on the Ukraine Crisis by Misters harper and baird. Evidently they'll "stand-up" against Putin's (imaginary) aggression in the Ukraine, but please don't think that this means actually contributing militarily!

For domestic consumption, Harper's government claims to be leading the Western response. Foreign Minister John Baird has insisted that "no other government has stood up more forcefully and aggressively against the Russian aggression in Ukraine."

Really? Those are big words. But this week's NATO summit in Wales will expose a gap between words and deeds.

Faced with a pressing need to offer more than ringing denunciations of Russian aggression, NATO's 28 members are being challenged to increase their defence budgets.

Harper intends to do no such thing. As long as that's true, Harper will be speaking loudly, but carrying a small stick.

It's a pity that Israel didn't need military assistance when it was massacring the Palestinians. Then harper could have shown all those Canadian Jewish voters he's pandering to the truly shallow level of his devotion to their cause.

But you'd think that someone smart enough to steal an election would have the brains not to squeak so loudly about "standing-up" to tyranny in a situation like this. The Russian military are not unarmed Palestinians. To "stand-up" means more than just getting up off your ass. It means more than that. harper, baird, look it up.

The thing is, harper and baird, aren't that smart. This incident is proof of that. People of normal intelligence know more than to shoot off their mouths about how tough they are when a fight is in the air. People of normal intelligence know that to do so is to draw attention to themselves and make it more likely that they'll be asked to join the fight. People of normal intelligence and a normal degree of shame would realize that to slink away after all their blustering would be humiliating. Obviously, harper and baird do not possess a normal level of intelligence, hence their (and our) current humiliation.

One-Stop Shoppe For Crisis in the Ukraine

This article by Robert Parry, "Who's Telling the 'Big Lie' on Ukraine," is an excellent summary of the crisis so far and the laughable bullshit and shameless lying, and hubris, and horrifyingness of the Washington elite's imperialist fantasies.

I cannot believe the grip of the corporate media in America. I cannot believe how willingly infected we have become here in Canada. What am I saying? The head of B'nai Brith is so depraved that he saw fit to nominate racist torture advocate, stephen harper, for a Nobel Peace Prize. (To be fair, Frank Dimant was thinking about harper's whole-hearted support for slaughtering Palestinians, and NOT about harper's murderous hatred for the First Nations or his enabling of torture of Canadian citizens and Afghan prisoners.)

Together with the hysterical, hypocritical coverage of the ISIS crisis ("ISIS Crisis" - Pat. Pending, thwap inc.), this Ukrainian nonsense has me feeling more hopeless than ever before. People being threatened by the religious lunatics in ISIS have already been devastated by the events unleashed by bush II's invasion of Iraq. They've been suffering for years. But they're now a convenient humanitarian cause now that an official enemy of the USA targets them. The USA (and its disgusting allies) have left a trail of blood all across South-West Asia, but now that they're going to bomb someone else, they're heroes?

ISIS is a tool. It is a tool of the USA. It is a more important tool to the corrupt Arab monarchies in the Middle East. That the obscurantist, medieval drivel of Saudi and other Arab princes partially aligns with the goals of the Washington foreign policy elites means that the deluded half-wits in ISIS are allowed to receive weapons and funding and wreak havoc for a little while. The Obama administration wanted Iraq's Maliki gone, and ISIS (adherents of the Sunni version of that particular sect of religious delusion) has been allowed to destabilize Iraq and contribute to his downfall. But it's thus far and no farther for ISIS. That's why ISIS has taken hostages and is murdering them one by one. They knew their ambitions were bigger than Washington would allow them. They probably honestly believe in their brand of religious jibber-jabber and they want to see a nation-state organized (so to speak) along the lines of whatever the fuck it is they believe in. These journalist-hostages are supposed to allow ISIS to solidify their hold on the lands they've conquered. But the USA wants only one central government in Iraq. It has to be weak, and easily bullied, but its nominal legal authority must hold sway over all of the oil-rich country. That is why ISIS is intolerable to the foreign-policy elite and why it will be pushed back and, if it continues to fail at toppling Syria's Assad, eliminated altogether.

If the US corporate media spent as much time telling people about where ISIS came from, and who its enablers are, the self-righteous moralism about this crisis would be greatly reduced. (That is, assuming the US corporate media would HONESTLY describe the origins of these terrorists. Which is like hoping that Santa Claus is real. It won't happen.)

I was going to write about the Ukraine this morning. That article I linked to is really good. And, really, of the two crises, that in the Ukraine is more important, because Russia remains a nuclear power and an able military great power. While Putin (whose country is far weaker and poorer than the USA alone, to say nothing of comparing it to the coalition against him) has been pursuing diplomacy, the Russian nationalists under attack by Ukrainian fascists, have apparently been kicking ass. NATO's air force won't be going up against outdated Libyan or Iraqi fighter-jets. Watch harper's and baird's embarrassing blustering evaporate when Canadian C-18's get shot down over Russia. Russia's anti-air attack defenses are state-of-the-art and haven't been degraded by a decade of wearing down as Iraq's were. NATO's European soldiers aren't going to blindly march to their deaths just because their leaders are too debased to stop kissing Washington's ass. It will be up to the USA to do the heavy work against Russia. And they've been fighting so long against countries like Grenada and Afghanistan that they might not be prepared for a military almost as well-trained and armed as they are. It will be a slaughter.

I think Obama knows this. Part of this crisis shows that Obama is just a hollow shell of a man, doing what the US elite consensus wants. But I also think some of this is personal. It moves forward because Obama, instead of feeling grateful, felt humiliated when Putin provided him with a way out of a proposed attack on Syria. Obama won't commit to a direct attack on Russia. He'll ratchet down the rhetoric as the thugs in Kiev flounder militarily and economically and politically. Obama will hope that the Ukraine that is left behind will be so weak and chaotic that it will continue to irritate Russia.

On the other hand, the US foreign policy establishment is not monolithic. Picture Obama riding a seething mass of forces, sharing the same basic trajectory. There are more hawkish elements who might be so deluded as to force a showdown.

We can only stare in outraged horror at these, and other mental abominations. Impotent to do anything about them. Lacking in the resources to counter the corporate media onslaught.

Progressives vs Global Warming

Up until 2014, progressives (the people who recognized the danger for what it was) had made little headway against the factors causing global warming. There'd been scattered protests, there'd been books, media campaigns, blogs, petitions.

But it was in 2015, six months after the IPCC's Fifth Assessment, which detailed how global warming had arrived, its consequences would be horrendous, and it was then self-sustaining; that progressives really got it in gear.

2015 in Canada saw a series of rallies, with literally HUNDREDS of people converging on downtowns in major cities across the country on July 1st, demanding action. These rallies were capped-off by one big rally in Ottawa on July 31st, right before the election campaigning for the scheduled October 15th election began. 20,000 people told the politicians from all the parties that they were keeping an eye on them and that their statistically insignificant numbers would be voting for the party with the best position in confronting human-caused climate change.

After a bitter campaign, marred by widespread, blatant harpercon fraud, the Liberals under Justin Trudeau formed a minority government. stephen harper hanged himself in the bedroom closet on Sussex Drive, being found hanging there naked by his wife who read the post-it note on his chest which said "Fuck you! I always wanted to die this way."

(The Conservative Party of Canada met for a leadership convention in February, 2016, where it was revealed, to their great surprise since they'd been believing their own fraudulent polls and election results, how unpopular they were. The gathering was attacked by a mob of Calgarians ... an indication of the hatred for them around the country ... and Pierre Poilievre, Julian Fantino and Jason Kenny required hospitalization from being assaulted with baseball bats. Peter MacKay had lost his seat and had dedicated himself to dog-breeding, which involved himself and unnatural acts with dogs in the neighbourhood.)

Elizabeth May's tireless campaigning raised the Green Party's share of the vote by 2% which translated into her keeping her seat and Bruce Hyer losing his to the NDP.

Thomas Mulcair kept the leadership even though his strategy of impersonating the Liberal Party of Canada after the Liberal Party of Canada's mewling, hypocritical neo-liberal bullshit had alienated moderate Canadians everywhere, saw the party fall from Official Opposition to 21 seats. Freed from any threat of having his words affect policy, Mulcair's NDP soon affected a greater devotion to social justice and environmentalism.

It didn't matter because Justin Trudeau teamed-up with the rump of Conservatives to continue subsidizing the Tar Sands, to build bitumen pipelines across the wilderness and to build super-tanker ports off the British Columbia coastline.

Progressives realized they couldn't depend upon the politicians anymore dammit. A series of creative protests by small bands of environmentalists kept the pressure on. (Try to imagine the "pressure" of a banner hanging from a public building saying "Action NOW on Climate Change! Stop the Tar-Sands!")

Direct Action in British Columbia slowed down the construction of the bitumen pipeline to the sea, until the RCMP staged an incident where provocateurs threw a rock past the police line and this "justified" tear-gassing and brutally beating the demonstrators present, with First Nations' activists being singled-out for extremely gruesome treatment.

Justin Trudeau furrowed his brow and bit his lower lip (in a stunningly fetching expression) and opined about how troubled he was from violence originating from any side and that he hoped things would be peaceful from now on.

Peaceful it was, since civil liberties were suspended in the area (making it the third "Charter-Free Zone" since the signing into law of the Charter of Rights & Freedoms). First Nations and Environmentalist organizations which had been infiltrated or spied-upon for years up to this point, were raided and their members arrested and held without charges as accessories to commit terror or some-such bullshit.

Literally THOUSANDS of activists (in a country of over THIRTY MILLION PEOPLE) protested ineffectually over this trampling of citizens' rights.

By this point, worldwide floods and droughts (plus financial market speculations) were causing the prices of basic foodstuffs to shoot through the roof. A campaign, ineptly led by Ezra Levant, was started to convince poor Canadians that eco-anarchists who impeded the refining of bitumen and who advocated expensive subsidies for renewable energy were behind the price rises. It didn't matter that Ezra Levant was so dreadfully incompetent with this portfolio. Our oligarchic media gave him and his colleagues ample air-time to spew their bullshit and grassroots political hacks spread the word on cyber-space and social media.

Ignorant people didn't know what to believe, especially given the distractions of world-wide explosions of TERRORISM around the world (which was actually poor people in South America, Africa and Asia rioting for food hand-outs so that they and their families wouldn't starve to death).

Justin Trudeau convinced himself and self-deluding Liberals that the only reasonable course of action was to take money from other social programs to pay for food rations for the poorest. Taxing rich people and corporations to obtain revenue was seen as "irresponsible."

Ungrateful rich people across Canada bitched that their taxes were too high as they "invested" in fraud-based derivatives and pushed up real-estate prices in Toronto and Vancouver, until a financial scandal somewhere else in the world sparked another world-wide market crash. Trudeau then decided that the only responsible thing to do was to conduct a $20 billion bail-out of Canadian investors, so as not to suffer lasting economic harm. The GST was raised along with EI premiums, in order to pay for this.

(The NDP was prepared to vote against this, fulminating on the injustice of it all, until the Conservative Party decided to fuck with them. Pretending that they gave a shit about the opinions of their middle and working-class chump supporters, the Conservatives voted against the bail-out, forcing Mulcair to have to whip his caucus into supporting what he'd condemned only days earlier. The bail-out passed.)

At this point, the last polar bear died, prompting Ezra Levant to say that the Arctic was safer than ever. The perma-frost melted in an explosion of methane into the atmosphere.

Activists were split. Some advocated a concerted take-over of the Liberal or NDP parties. Others joined the Green Party which would see it's seat numbers soar from 1 to 6 in the 2019 election. Many "radical" activists scorned the neo-liberal sham of electoral politics and insisted that their internet activism and occasional rallies were the only game in town. The remnant that attacked the Liberal Party found themselves swamped in a sea of pathetic, corporate-type, deluded, amoral sociopaths who insisted that Justin Trudeau was all-seeing and wise and dreamy and a Liberal therefore good and politics is about the art of the possible.

Attempts to infiltrate the NDP were destroyed by engaging the activists in widely separated meetings that were announced at short notice and dominated by boringly-dressed union gold-brickers who bent procedures to ensure that the activists would stymied until they could be physically attacked at the party's convention.

Asia descended into chaos as powerful countries attacked each other in wars over resources. Washington provided as much assistance to its allies in these conflicts to try to ensure their victories in these struggles. Meanwhile, elites in the USA, Canada and Europe patiently contained desperate floods of refugees (condemned as disease-ridden carriers of terrorist ideologies) in Africa and South America, as they waited for starvation and violence to depopulate these areas, and thereby open them up to colonization by the lucky few in their own societies who could afford to purchase estates there.

Lack of food, lack of money to pay for air-conditioning in summer, lack of money to respond to power-failures in the deep cold-snaps of winter, also culled the herd in North America and Europe. The casualties were mainly among the youngest and the oldest of the lowest income quintile. This was seen as a virtuous process, because poor people weren't stuck with babies they couldn't afford and, meanwhile their measly inheritances from dead parents helped sustain them for another year.

Crumbling enclaves of wealth walled themselves off into armed compounds, as civilization collapsed around them.