There's not as many blogs and online alternative news sources that I read nowadays. Having read them all one day not that long ago, I turned to CBC News in desperation to read something else. I wasn't expecting any sort of enlightenment. But I was entertained by the vapid, obviousness of the propaganda.
First off, it seems that mainstream outlets such as the CBC have been forced to walk-back their sensationalist headlines about anti-Semitic "pogrom" in Amsterdam.
The leaders of the Gulf Monarchies get a living subsidized by their cut of the swag for keeping the price of oil "reasonable" to the USA, Europe and Japan. Obviously, this must involve pay-outs to other power blocs in their societies, and, a "security" establishment to eliminate radical nationalists and others. Since the huge increases in oil prices after 1973, the subsidy has gone into annual pay-offs to entire populations. (similar to Doug Ford's upcoming $200 bribe to Ontarians) the bullshit public-sector jobs and other perks for the population, cost less than the price of pursuing independence and an extortionate price for oil* and genuine economic development. For decades they have beein importing Asians and Africans and Filipinos to do the work that the Arab working class used to do. And they treat these "guest workers" as veritable slaves. It's all cheaper (in the short run) than creating a viable future after the oil runs out. (Or stops selling.)
MBS and the others at the top of this infernal system are degenerates who don't give a shit about anyone but themselves. Many of them have never like the Palestinians. But they are Arabs and co-religionists with the Palestinians. And even these sold-out Princelings who bribe their populations must occasionally bow to public opinion. Especially if many members of your military/security apparatus are also vulnerable to public opinion. Especially if the pay for being a lieutenant in such an army isn't enough to drown your anger at the Zionists' treatment of your fellow Arabs. Or the anger of that lietenant's family and friends which he will notice when he is not at work and will have to live with.
These Arab puppet-monarchies are probably handing out bonuses and promotions as I type. And MBS is calling Israel's genocide a genocide because he just has too. (He might even mean it for all that I care.) But, recently I head that Iran has a million-man army. At first I thought: "So What?" Neither Israel or the USA is going to invade Iran with troops. And there are all those countries between Iran and Israel.
But consider this: Iraq hates the US-Occupation and no doubt the Iraqi military AND the far more viable Iraqi militias could easily side with Iran. Anti-aircraft and anti-missile defence systems could defend the movement of that million-man army through Iraq, co-ordinated with Syria and Hezbollah and pro-Muslim/anti-Zionist/pro-Arab/pro-Palestine nationalists in the militaries of the Gulf monarchies.
*The same way the capitalists have priced things elsewhere.
Jonathan Glazer's film "The Zone of Interest" (based on a novel by Martin Amis) was about how any attempt at a normal life by mass murderers is fraudulent. The story deals with an SS commandant of a nazi extermination camp trying to pretend that he is just a man providing for his family as best he can by being an efficient functionary for his employer. The film shows that his inhuman behaviour hollows out his own humanity and that the world he has created is a lie.
I still get into it with fuck-faces who dream of stuffing their noses up the rancid shit holes of vermin such as Pee-Pee Poilievre and stephen harper. On phase-buck recently, some douche-bag (obviously riffing off of US-American stupidity) told me that "the Conservatives are the party of the working class." (This was after he farted out how socialism will destroy civilization.)
And I'm just getting warmed-up!!!
It's how the individual representative of the species survives. Look at children fighting over stuff. Three-year olds don't really recognize the humanity of the individual they're struggling against. (Very often we have to dehumanize the humans who have things that we want. Israelis and Arabs is just the most recent graphic example.) Much of childhood is learning that you can't have everything. Much of being an adult is knowing how to navigate society to maximize what you get. (This doesn't have to mean material things.)
But the main thing is that we're selfish.
Being gullible, childish and ill-informed, many Westerners of a progressive bent are brainwashed and therefore their analysis of the world is poor. From those hopeless intellectual failures who have always seen any criticism of Israel as anti-semitism, to those liberal (or liberal influenced) types who believe that the unsavoury character of some opponents of the Washington DC imperialists makes defending them, or seeing things from their perspective, as "supporting" them. (Protesting the invasion of Iraq equals supporting Saddam Hussein. Criticizing the occupation of Afghanistan makes you a Taliban lover. Condemning the starvation sanctions on North Korea means you embrace Kim Jong Un. And so-on and such-forth ["Putin puppets" "PRC-puppets"].)
It seems that some Israeli hooligans provoked a riot in Amsterdam with their obnoxious behaviour. (Tearing Palestinian flags from private residences/chanting "Death to Arabs!"/jeering during a moment of silence for the victims of flooding in Spain.) They were fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv that was in Amsterdam to lose to Ajax Amsterdam 5-0.
Minor riots with Maccabi fans actually took place on two nights. On the night of the 6th to 7th November, a day before a game against Ajax Amsterdam, hooligan soccer fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv, presumably under Mossad 'protection', teared down Palestinian flags from private Dutch dwellings (video) and attacked Dutch taxi drivers of Arab descent:
Taxi Driver @DutchTaxiDriver - 2:55 UTC · Nov 7, 2024Schandalig en onacceptabel: een Amsterdamse taxichauffeur aangevallen en mishandeld door Maccabi hooligans. Dit geweld moet stoppen. Steun voor onze chauffeurs die onze stad draaiende houden, ook in moeilijke tijden. #StopGeweld #Amsterdam #RespectVoorChauffeurs #Ajax
Outrageous and unacceptable: an Amsterdam taxi driver attacked and abused by Maccabi hooligans. This violence must stop. Support our drivers who keep our city running, even in difficult times. #StopGeweld #Amsterdam #RespectVoorChauffeurs #Ajax
VideoAs The British Mail Online reported yesterday:
Israeli football hooligans tore down Palestine flags as they marched through Amsterdam in a Wednesday night of chaos ahead of Maccabi Tel Aviv's visit to Ajax.Videos show dozens of hooded figures dressed fully in black cheering and chanting 'f*** you Palestine' and 'ole' as one climbed halfway up the front of a building and removed a flag on the Rokin, a major street.
Footage also shows one thug thumping a taxi with crowbar before the driver takes off, while there have been reported clashes between the visiting hooligans and cabbies.
Meanwhile, clips shared by a prominent pro-hooligan page depict bust-ups purported to be between Maccabi fans and a group of Moroccan Ajax supporters.
On the evening of November 7 Maccabi Tel Aviv lost its game against Ajax Amsterdam. Ajax won 5 to 0.
Before the game a minute of silence was asked for victims of flooding in Spain. The Mossad directed Maccabi hooligans ignored it.
After the game more scuffles and riots reportedly happened. But this time the Zionist hooligans were apparently in a minority against a group of pro-Palestinian Ajax fans and had to flee to their hotels.
Caitlin Johnstone shows how this is being presented and mentions the hypocritical pearl clutching of Western politicians:
Whatever fascist authoritarian policies Trump might introduce have only been made possible by the authoritarian powers enabled and maintained and used and expanded by the Democratic Party over decades of bipartisan anti-democratic policy. Remember that the post-9/11 "Patriot Act" was built on J. R. Biden's "Anti-Terrorism" legislation. The surveillance state, the transfer of military weapons to local police forces, the incarceration state, torture, extra-judicial killings ("targetted assassinations" or "murder") have all been embraced by Democrats as well as Republicans.
I've seen a few of those red paper poppies here and there and I realized that November 11th is coming. That's the day when the empty-headed war-mongers dress up in funeral formal and go to war memorials and try to look solemn and grave while ignoring the fact that their careers are a direct contradiction to the ceremony they're attending.
Veneration for veterans? The best one for that was stephen harper. The complete intellectual failure and the pants-pissing coward who infamously nickeled and dimed wounded veterans (sadistically) and shared the psychiatric records of their ombudsman.
Anti-war? Our current prime minister, the air-head narcissist Justin Trudeau, is aiding and abetting a genocide in Palestine. Way to go Justin! The Canadian soldiers who were killed or wounded or traumatized fighting the genocidal nazi regime can now be said to have helped achieve the victory of Canada so that Canada could go on to support genocides it approves of. Also, with his shit-for-brains total support for everything that Israel is doing against Palestine, Lebanon and Iran, and with everything that NATO has been doing to provoke Russia, he is well on his way to making sure that this country did its stupid part to cause World War III.
It's my personal, unsubstantiated belief that the leak of 5-Eyes intelligence that revealed Israeli plans to bomb areas including Iranian nuclear power stations and what-not was approved at the highest US levels to deter Israel from doing so.
First of all, Hamas came up with the October 7th, 2023 attack all on its own. Sources that I read for analysis believe that neither Hezbollah, nor Iran were informed about it. It was an indigenous Palestinian initiative.
Netanyahu however, was warned (apparently) about the upcoming Hamas attack by Eyptian intelligence, Israel's own intelligence agency, and US intelligence. Netanyahu let it happen. This was an Israeli decision. Netanyahu and some of the leading figures in his extremist coalition made the decision to ignore the intelligence and allow the attack to happen. This was something that the USA was going to have to respond to. I don't think the USA was in on Netanyahu's plan to allow Hamas to attack.
Zionism is a very powerful element in US politics (as is a callous disregard for human life) and therefore Biden allowed Netanyahu to do his slaughtering of Arabs thing (while making noises for his domestic constituency about how upset he was about it and making bullshit ceasefire proposals) and waited to see what happened.
1. I think the main USA/NATO plan was for the sanctions to cripple Russia's economy, making the war with Ukraine unaffordable. In a one-to-one conflict, super-corrupt, smaller Ukraine could never hope to prevail against less-corrupt, much larger Russia. I believe this possibility was also on Putin's mind and it was one of the reasons he attempted to pursue diplomacy to avoid a war. (I'm sure that he had other reasons.)
Kamala Harris did miserably in the primaries for the 2020 election. She didn't even carry her home state of California. I'm no longer a regular viewer of Jimmy Dore since he went off the deep-end on a number of issues, but his response to Harris's opening of that campaign rightly exposed her as the empty shell that she is:
So the pro-genocide vermin are upset about alleged [I'll get into that later] chants at a rally supporting Palestinians' humanity and protesting Israel's nazi-like genocidal policies saying "Death to USA/Israel/Canada."
Political leaders are condemning what they describe as "hateful rhetoric" from a speaker at a pro-Palestinian rally in Vancouver who told the crowd that "we are Hezbollah and we are Hamas."
Both groups are listed by Public Safety Canada as terrorist entities.
That terrible day, October 7th, 2023, when this entire crisis started, totally unprovoked, when Hamas ... I'm sorry, I just can't play this stupid game. Israel is a racist shit-hole of a country with an army of cowards, incompetents and child killers. Hamas gave them a taste of what they deserved and their fucking IDF slaughtered at least half of the 1200 Israelis who died that day.
And criticizing Israel for committing a genocide isn't "anti-semitism" and if that dipshit Poilievre was standing in front of me saying that it is and spewing the rest of his garbage I'd be hard pressed not to smash his stupid fucking face in.
But while Trudeau spoke about the need to fight rising antisemitism in general, Poilievre largely offered a pointed criticism of the Liberal government.
"This ideology that seeks to divide out people based on race and ethnicity, that has led to these horrifying outbursts of hatred, are not from the bottom up. They are from the top down," Poilievre said.
The Conservative leader pointed to recent controversies — such as the appointment of Birju Dattani as chief commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the granting of a federal contract to a group who employed a consultant that was accused of posting antisemitic content on X — as examples of the government's failings.
"It is time for the people to change the government," he said to a loud applause from the room.
Poilievre said if his party forms government, he would defund the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and deny federal funding to universities that "spread antisemitism or make Jews feel unsafe and uncomfortable on their campuses."
"We will put behind us this ugly ideology that has divided our people and we will reclaim the country that we knew and love," he said.
Trudeau was more diplomatic, but he too yammered about antisemitism and mourning only the Jewish Israeli deaths and not the 200,000 innocent Palestinian men, women and children slaughtered by the Israeli nazis.
The prime minister spoke generally about the need to combat antisemitism in Canada in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack waged by Hamas militants.
"What makes this barbaric attack that much more agonizing is the fact that you're reliving this nightmare every single day. You relive it when cowards shoot and smash the windows of your schools and synagogues in the middle of the night. You relive it when antisemites wave the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah on the streets of our cities," Trudeau said Monday.
"It is unacceptable for any of this behaviour to be normalized. It is incumbent on me and on every leader … to give antisemitism no quarter, to stop this rising hate and to reverse its spread."
While Trudeau received applause for his remarks, the applause that greeted Poilievre was notably louder.
And then the Nazi ambassador from racist, nazi shit-hole Israel had the unmitigated gall to whine about not sending Israel weapons they need to kill babies and for saying the Palestinians deserve their own country.
Iddo Moed, Israel's ambassador to Canada, spoke before Trudeau or Poilievre took the stage and praised Canada as a friend of Israel, one with "integrity and honour."
But the ambassador also questioned some of the Liberal government's recent actions, such as barring certain military exports to Israel and the Liberal support for a House motion on Palestinian statehood.
Moed did say he was encouraged by the recent designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.
"In a world that is increasingly dangerous and where evil sadly does exist, Canadians and Israelis must work together in defence of our people and our values as liberal democracies."
These people are degenerate scum.
As I said, the unipolar world is over. It's beginning was marked with George Bush Sr.'s orchestrated Gulf War, as a demonstration of the oh so brilliant doctrine of "What we say goes!" And it consisted of growing hubris and belligerency up to the present day. But US capitalists short-sightedly gave manufacturing over to China and Russia recovered from the implosion of the Soviet Union and spreading scientific knowledge around the world has given other countries more weight. Like England before them, US elites have concentrated on the easier profits of financialization, which has produced trillions in artificial wealth, which requires creative fraud to find new avenues for "investment" producing the 2008 financial crisis and the explosion of inflation in real estate as private sector billionaires exploit every means available to monopolize and gouge.
I never did have much of an idea about how it worked. I don't know how it was collected or how rebates are determined. I don't have the inclination to do much research these years. But sources that I have read and respected for years have said that the Carbon Tax was a good thing and that maybe half of Canadians actually got money back from it.
But being an ignoramus, it's entirely possible that Jagmeet Singh's NDP had a good reason for deciding they don't like it. But ... aw hell, I guess I should bestir myself to look it up;
...
Well, this guy says that the NDP (federally and in BC) are just stupidly trying to steal something out of the right-wing populist playbook used by Trump and Poilievre. Stupid because the carbon tax works and stupid because the sort of people they're appealing to (low information, anti-tax voters) aren't going to switch from the Conservatives to the NDP as a result.
But really, what is the strategic benefit of endorsing your political opponents’ most effective — and disingenuous — position? Do New Democrats seriously believe that ‘axe the tax’ voters are now going to rush away from the dissembling Poilievre and the outright climate-change-denying Rustad? (And, c’mon: anyone who says he believes in climate change, but doubts that it’s a problem, is absolutely in denial.) Nope. Low-information, anti-tax voters will still pick the obvious choice and, David, Jagmeet: it’s not you!
Even more ridiculously, Eby and Singh say they are going to shift to policies that make big polluters pay, taking the burden off the working class. And they’re going to do it by trashing the single tax policy that, through its enforced neutrality, has actually put more money back in the hands of low-income voters.
The NDP itself is saying something like the carbon tax isn't as good as a massive investment in public transit, energy efficient buildings and clean energy.
Canada has missed every single climate target we have set, and the Liberals are not on track to meet our current weak targets. The Liberals have staked their entire climate plan on the carbon tax. Putting a price on pollution is important, but it's not nearly enough.
While families are being asked to pay more, the Liberals are still giving huge subsidies to big polluters. That’s not right. Canadians want to see real leadership and bold investments in clean energy and sustainable infrastructure that will help us fight the climate crisis while creating good, sustainable jobs.
Instead of the Liberals expecting the carbon tax to be a silver bullet, we need immediate investment in transit, energy-efficient homes and buildings, and clean energy. We need a real plan that supports workers and creates jobs in communities across Canada, instead of continuing to subsidize big polluters."
Yeah, but the carbon tax doesn't hurt. And distorting it as if its a real burden on most Canadians only endorses the whole right-wing slurry of nonsense about global warming being a hoax by liberal "globalists" to control us. I think it was a bad move.
Ukraine's expired president Zelensky did not get approval from the Biden ADMINISTRATION to obtain long-range missiles with which to strike Moscow and other targets inside Russia. (I say that it was a decision of the Biden ADMINISTRATION because it's an open question as to how much leadership Biden himself is capable of wielding. What with his crumbling brain and all.) There seems to be division among Biden's team, with racist, stupid, psychotic Secretary of State Antony Blinken wanting to expand the war and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin being opposed. Since the US military would be the people who actually deliver the weapons to Ukraine and help with the firing of them into Russia, they can effectively block that happening.
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| This is from an image search for "grifter politician." I didn't want to post a picture of Doug Ford's ugly mug. I've heard it's a good film. |
The fat fuck first bellowed his garbage about CUPE Ontario leader Fred Hahn being a "disgusting human being" and an "antisemite" for condemning genocide-committing Israel's presence at the Olympics. Then he got enraged at Toronto school children participating in a march in support of the First Nations at Grassy Narrows (supposedly there are two valid "both sides" to poisoning an entire community and then abandoning them). Now he's yammering like an idiot about building a 50-80 km tunnel under the 401 to alleviate gridlock.
His being premier is an indictment of our society.
Desperately stupid Conservative Party of Canada supporters shrieking about Liberal-NDP corruption as if nobody ever heard of Mike Duffy, or Paul Carson. As if they forgot about their party's disgusting electoral fraud in the 20 federal election. These imbeciles rant and rave about Jagmeet Singh's pension (supposedly if the Trudeau government falls, Singh will inevitably lose his seat and his MP's pension will be smaller) as if Pierre Poilievre isn't also going to receive a pension. As if Poilievre hasn't spent his entire working life as a politician.
Catholics continuing to go to their churches on Sundays to take moral instruction from a mobbed-up group of pedophiles.
The Democrat fuck-faces at "DailyKos" believing they're supporting good vs. evil by playing a game of "nuclear chicken" with Russia, using Ukrainian nazis as their proxies.
Fans of Donald Trump.
Deniers of global warming.
Antony Blinken singing "Rocking In The Free World" in Kiev.
People who say that the pandemic was a hoax.
Supporters of Zionism.
When I first got on to Instagram a few years ago, I went to the "search" page and the company already offered me lots of images to look at. Apparently some people or things are "trending" and they're presented to you even if they're not the sorts of things you post or that you'd have otherwise shown an interest in.
At the time, there were lots of pictures of a WWE female wrestler named Rhea Ripley (who has impressive shoulders) and, also, pictures of a female singer named Doja Cat. I don't know why Rhea Ripley was trending, but Doja Cat was then currently on tour.
Over the years, along with my searches for cartoonists and friends I notice brief waves of images of various celebrities coming and going. And, for the past couple of months it's been this young woman named Sabrina Carpenter who has had a big hit with the song "Espresso" which I still haven't listened to. She appears to be a tiny thing who likes to have a lot of fun and is automatically friends with lots of already established pop-culture celebrity giants. Some unasked for pop-culture headline on my browser homepage described "Espresso" as enjoyable, meaningless fun.
Good for her.
I like a good time as much as the next person. We can't spend all our time on doom and gloom. We don't all have to be saints wearing hair shirts until peace and social justice have been achieved. So, I personally have nothing against Sabrina Carpenter. It's just that watching all these pop-culture figures and events going on while Israel is perpetrating a hideous genocide of the Palestinian people, and our own political leaders are providing Israel with diplomatic cover and (especially in the case of the USA, financial and military support without which the genocide couldn't even be carried out) makes me a little nauseous.
Caitlin Johnstone makes an eloquent case for empathy and connectedness and morality:
Why should you care about Gaza? Because we can’t keep living like this. Our species cannot continue living on this planet as though what happens to other people and other organisms around the world has nothing to do with us. We don’t live in that kind of world anymore.
For better or for worse, we now live on a planet with eight billion humans who are no longer separated by distance in the way we used to be. This species which spent so much of its development relating to itself in units of small tribes is now an intimately networked global community whose behavior is literally altering the face of this planet, and we need to start acting like it. We need to start doing what Einstein called “widening our circle of compassion” beyond our small tribal units of people we personally know and like, or we simply won’t be able to survive and thrive on this planet.
The inability of ordinary people to think globally is directly affecting our lives in the here and now.
I agree with everything that she says there. Unfortunately I believe, and have said so many times at this blog, that there are large numbers of people (perhaps the majority) who are simply not wired to care about things beyond their immediate circles of self/family/friends/community. Which isn't to say that they're callous and indifferent about human suffering. If they become aware of it they'll probably respond in a decent fashion. It's getting such people aware of things in the wider world that is the challenge.
People who don't read. People who watch the news but who are so zoned-out that it hardly registers. People who are so incurious about the world they live in that they can't find their own country on a map. People who for all intents and purposes imagine that people drove cars in the Middle Ages.
Which is what makes it so criminal for the CBC to have such limited coverage of a live-streamed genocide. Right-wing shlock outlets like SUN Media or The National Pest will cover Israel's genocidal policies and the protests against them from a pro-zionist, pro-genocide perspective because they're scum. The people at the CBC know better but, nonetheless, have a job to do in the propaganda system. So they ignore or downplay the genocide.
Johnstone's article shows the serious consequences of business as usual.
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| This image search led me to something personally interesting. |
In this excellent entry about the USA's hypocritical "De-escalation for thee, but not for me" attitude vis-a-vis Iran and Israel, I was struck to read shit-head SoS Antony Blinken say this about the dangers of Iran retaliating against Israeli terrorism:
“Further attacks only raise the risk of dangerous outcomes that no one can predict and no one can fully control,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken proclaimed on Tuesday.
It just so happens that it was at CounterPunch that I first read this essay: "The Left Can Only Win if There Is a Left" and I decided to check out who the writer was.
Last month I posted a brief missive about the CBC's consistently pro-military, pro-war spending stance. I recently read this excellent article from Mark Leith at rabble.ca: "Reflections on military propaganda in Canadian media" that says it much more excellently:
This is what I mean when I say that elites can factor in our peaceful afternoon protests. Supporting racist Israel's genocidal rampage in Palestine is evidently very important for our elites. But they're aware that other people in the population feel strongly opposed to allowing a racist state to commit genocide.
So they let those other people blow-off steam.
Outlets like the CBC refuse to report on it. Other, less respectable outlets (such as The National Pest) instead write about the [imaginary] antisemitism of the protesters against genocide and make THAT the conversation.
The protesters should have invested in a campaign to mobilize many more people in the population. If it's necessary to be peaceful, but effective, you need millions and millions of people out in the streets shutting things down. And if the mainstream news isn't doing it. And if they don't magically click on our websites, you have to take it to THEM any way that you can think of.
She really lays out how insane, reckless, self-destructive and self-deluded it would be.
To judge from the presence as recently as July 19 of Chinese soldiers in Belarus, where over the course of a week they executed military maneuvers with Belorussian troops on the Polish border, the answer may very well be that the current Washington regime’s imbecilic bellicosity toward both superpowers led Moscow and Beijing to sign an ACTUAL mutual defense pact. So yes, Russian soldiers will very likely assist Chinese ones in the event of a U.S. war in East Asia. And those Russians are some of the most battle-hardened troops on the planet.
The lousy idea of war with the five-thousand-year-old civilization, cherished by the American right, stinks for a multitude of reasons. Following the bleak, hypothetical scenario that pentagon and also China expert David Goldman tweeted June 18, a Chinese blockade of Taiwan would end the island’s gas supplies in three weeks, leaving it without power. Then “the U.S. blockades Chinese trade via the Strait of Malacca…China blockades South Korea and Japan (which import virtually all energy).” Unlike those nations, China produces 80 percent of its energy, and Russia can replace half its food imports by rail.
“Japan and South Korea shut down. China tightens its belt but keeps functioning: World stock markets crash, etc…China can conduct its blockade using nothing but missile launchers on the mainland.” Since there’s no way to disable these, “1) The U.S. sends F-18s to hit mainland targets and China destroys the Okinawa and Guam airbases. 2) The U.S. sends carriers to attack China, and China sinks them. 3) The U.S. fires missiles at China from the Philippines, and Chinese missiles obliterate the Philippines. 4) We go straight to a nuclear exchange.
...
These warmongers actually flirt with policies that will cause this catastrophe, and catastrophe it is, because what Goldman omits is that Moscow and Tehran would likely rush to aid their ally China and pile on – and with Russia in the fight, it becomes incandescently nuclear, with cities in the U.S., Russia, Europe and China incinerated.
It's possible that Trump has lusted after East Asian women. It's also highly possible that, being a stupid racist, he finds all non-white women disgusting on a conscious level and therefore has an almost total loathing for all societies outside of the "garden" of Europe and the Anglo-American empire. Which means that he would happily go along with this titanic stupidity.
And, when I say "stupid," I mean the same sort of lazy, stupid, shameless stuff that all the neo-cons who concocted the destruction of Ukraine, like Victoria Nuland. I mean the dictionary definition of "mediocrity," Antony Blinken. I mean the brazen, arrogant, idiot, Hillary Clinton, who will condemn one country for bombing a hospital while giving another one military aid and diplomatic cover. I mean every single fucking idiot who genuinely thought that we could "win" in Afghanistan by propping up a government so violent and corrupt that the goddamned Taliban seemed preferable. Like Hillary Clinton, or stephen harper, or whatsisface, ... Terry Glavin.
These shitheads are all eminently capable of orchestrating such a disaster. As well, they'll all be genuinely surprised when they realize that those really ARE nuclear armed missiles in the skies over Washington DC. (They'll be surprised and will have, what? five seconds to "think" about it?)
Ottenberg's article is from this weekend's offerings at CounterPunch. These always include a generally eye-opening news round-up of the terrible, stupid things our elites are doing offered by Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey St. Clair. Those things tend to end off with a long, depressing series of factoids about our dying eco-system. I tend to skim those because I don't find them as entertaining as the entries that show how elite scumbags reveal themselves to be the sickos they are. When I see those statistics and stories of the natural world's agonies, I just think: "Yes Jeffrey. And with all your time and connections and audience and networking, ... what are you DOING about it???"
Actually, it all goes back to 1980 and Reagan and Thatcher. Actually, it goes back to the "stagflation" of the 1970's that "discredited" Keynesianism (and "re-credited" 19th Century economics which political-economic philosophy has gone on to wreck things ever since as "neo-classicism" or "neoliberalism").
But, regardless, it sounds like an interesting book. It's called When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s and it's by John Ganz.
I'll put them in my 2024 Readings post when I'm finished. But I'm not done reading The Essential Erasmus or The Clockwork Universe yet. But reading them at the same time has made me think what a loathsome time it was when religion ruled our minds.
We had to create some sorts of explanations for the mystery of existence, and it's not like everything in religion would have been self-evidently stupid. A lot of morality and ethics is based on the realities of life and of participation in a society. All pleasures are passing and giving oneself over to them can be self-destructive. Selfishness and cruelty have to be suppressed or else life will really be "nasty, brutish and short." But at the end of the day, the religious explanation is a false one. Science will never explain the mystery. It's mysteries all the way down. But science is a more systematic way of trying to explain and understand things than is just making shit up. Which is what religion is.
I read Desiderius Erasmus's number-one smash-hit "The Praise of Folly" thirty years ago, and it had hovered before me having been mentioned in history books (along with Machiavelli's The Prince) since childhood. It was one of those books that apparently had a lasting impact on Western Civilization. Erasmus was described as a brilliant man and a humanist and a moderate. Someone who railed against the corruption and dogmatism of the Catholic Church while still wanting to prevent a schism within Christianity and all the violence it would inevitably create. He was the toast of Europe and both Hans Holbein and Albrecht Durer (and other artists) painted his portrait.
It turned out that I liked "Praise of Folly" but there were a couple of moments (one I remember in particular about strong, healthy looking beggars) that struck me as problematic. Just like nowadays, when assholes see a poor person receiving assistance before they've been reduced to starvation and rags, Erasmus believed that 16th Century poor people were all scammers, living it up on alms at the expense of decent folk.
There's even more of that shit in the first piece of this collection of his works. "The Handbook of the Militant Christian" was written as a guide to life at the request of the battered wife of some drunken, boorish knight. I found it to be obnoxious. Garbage from start to finish. Along with a few more jabs at poor people, Erasmus writes harshly about enslaved people as if it's self-evident that they're scum. He comes across as a hypocritical prig. In the brief biography at the beginning of the book it's mentioned that he was often financially straitened due to his love of fancy clothes and fine food. He spends the whole essay writing about the disgusting appetites of the poor and about the emptiness of the pleasures of this world but he was clearly unable (for his entire life) to live up to the standards he was constantly scolding others to aspire to.
The whole thing with the stink of religion is how it took the reality that pleasures are fleeting and that they often have consequences, and blew that up into a hatred of the world and a self-denying, self-hating rejection of life itself. In return for constantly denying oneself any taste of the good things in this one, brief life that we have, and for hating oneself for failing to do so, Erasmus (like so many other religious charlatans) offers the imaginary reward of eternal life with an imaginary God, which he describes with vague, meaningless superlatives. That so many people lived for so many centuries under this garbage delusion was just so depressing to me.
Edward Dolnicks The Clockwork Universe is about the impact of Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton (with assists from Galileo and Kepler and a few others) in the transformation of European culture from the Medieval to the modern. And reading it at the same time as Erasmus's puritanical screed only compounded my horror at the stifling, distorting, wasteful impact of religion on human thinking.
Again, ... we felt that we HAD to come up with something. And since it was invented bullshit, we probably HAD to insist that it not be questioned. Because, inevitably, the obvious failings and contradictions would blow everything asunder. It was a stage we had to go through but it's depressing nonetheless. This idea of this psychotic, angry God (who is simultaneously loving and awesome and just the best and always helping us except when He isn't and then it's our fault for failing) who punishes us with plagues and fire on Earth and who threatens eternal torment for us in Hell should we fail to live up to His impossible standards, ... what sickening vomit.
[God probably thanked Himself that He had Satan conveniently ruling over the Hell that the damned got sent to. What would He have done without Satan providing that dumping ground?]
The thing about Erasmus is that I wouldn't expect him to have risen above the superstitions that permeated the world he was born into. He actually did criticize the rote-learning and the dogmatism of many Christian educators and thinkers. He could see clearly in many ways. But by his own standards he fell short. First there was the hypocrisy of his lifelong indulgences in food and clothing. But for someone who claimed to understand the New Testament, he seemed unable to recognize that Jesus hadn't been a member of any nobility. Many of the Apostles were fishermen, which would have been the maritime equivalent of the rural peasants Erasmus so clearly despised. "Christian Charity" is supposed to be given happily, not (as would seem to have been the case with Erasmus) stingily as if all in need are potential grifters.
Obviously people were different back then. Life was much more violent and crude and therefore so were the humans who lived through it. But even for his own time, ... well, for a man of reading, to so clearly have missed the message of what he was yammering about, it's inexcusable for any age.
What do I know? I know that I wouldn't vote for either of Biden or Trump. Trump is a corrupt, racist, murderous asshole who has allied himself with even more dangerous, right-wing groups, like the evangelicals and the Heritage Foundation. He probably will implement some sort of fascist political order if elected. But where on earth did he get the power to impose a fascist regime in the USA, which is supposed to have a system of "checks and balances" to stymie legislative or executive overreach and defend minority rights? (I was pointing out since 2012 that the USA's political-legal system adequately prevents a government from doing things FOR US-Americans, such as provide public healthcare, while still allowing them to do things TO them, such as assassinate them overseas, spy on them, or otherwise abuse them.)
The other day I was somewhere that was playing horrible propaganda service "CNN" and they were reporting on Russian missiles hitting a hospital in Ukraine and making all the appropriate noises about how terrible it all was.
The deliberate suppression of Israel's deliberate, systematic destruction of Gaza's healthcare system on the part of hacks like CNN and the CBC ad nauseum made me, well, nauseous.
Caitlin Johnstone noticed it too: "Oh, Looks Like Bombing Hospitals Is Bad Again"
Kyiv and its western allies are saying the children’s hospital was hit by Russia, while Moscow says the hospital was hit by a Ukrainian air defense missile during Russia’s attack. All that’s clear as of this writing is that the hospital was bombed either as a direct or indirect result of the Russian missile strikes, and that western leaders are responding very, very differently to this news than they have been to deliberate Israeli attacks on hospitals throughout the Gaza Strip.
...
“This is abhorrent. Striking a children’s hospital — and the innocent children inside — cannot be justified,” tweeted Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, adding, “My heart goes out to the families who are grieving — and Canada’s commitment to Ukraine remains as strong as ever.”
...
Since October 7 there have been hundreds of documented IDF attacks on Gaza’s healthcare system, which according to the UN has been mostly destroyed by this onslaught.
Oxford University professor Nick Maynard has accused the IDF of “systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling the whole healthcare system” in Gaza after spending time working there during Israel’s bombardment of the enclave.
,,,
Where was all the outrage about all this? Where were all the statements from western officials about how “abhorrent” it is to attack those hospitals? Where were all the western news media headlines explicitly naming Israel as the perpetrator of those attacks, like they’ve been doing with Russia? Nowhere to be found.
This is because western empire managers do not actually believe that there is anything “abhorrent” or “horrific” about attacking a hospital — at least not one which provides services to Palestinians or other populations who are not favored by the western empire.
Some are saying it was an errant Ukrainian anti-missile projectile. Regardless, the USA provoked the war in Ukraine and it is subsidizing the genocide in Gaza and the Western mainstream media is playing its part to brainwash us instead of informing us.
This morning the CBC News website featured this story: "Trudeau heads for the hotseat at NATO summit as allies question Canada's defence commitments." It was accompanied by three other stories all of them about Canada's failures to meet the 2% of GDP spending on war and criticisms from foreigners of this failure.
Nothing from anybody calling for Canada to leave NATO. Nothing from anyone criticizing the dangers of NATO and the wasted resources on weapons of war.
This is how the CBC slants opinion. The same way that it maintains acquiescence to Israel's genocide of the Palestinians by simply failing to report on it for days at a time. And when it does report about that story it tends to be slanted to Israel's side.
The bosses at the CBC have a particular agenda they're trying to advance and it's not hard to see what it is.
Trump is a ridiculous liar. Hillary Clinton lost to him in the Electoral College because her own record, her beliefs, and her unprovoked abuse on the grassroots of her own party discouraged voters from bothering to come out. In the face of Trump's numerous, stupid, brazen lies, Joe Biden could only offer rebuttals (delivered with actual physical and mental exhaustion) and was overwhelmed by his own visible struggles with his developing senility.
And, the whole time, hardly any mainstream commentator reminds us of the million dead Iraqis, the millions of refugees from the Middle East, the agonies of Libya and Yemen and Syria. The genocide in Gaza. The starvation sanctions in Venezuela. All the inhuman filth that both these monsters oversee.
After fourteen years the UK Conservatives deservedly fall from power. Keir Starmer's UK Labour Party wins by default. But Keir Starmer and his partners are all braindead neo-liberal shitheads who are dedicated to serving the sociopathic desires of the oligarch class and so Starmer will now begin to shit his pants in public and being genuinely mystified when people start to complain about the smell.
The anti-genocide encampment at the University of Toronto was dismantled following a successful injunction against it. Noteworthy is the fact that the judge said that the U of T governing council and its zionist allies absolutely failed to prove their calumnies against the protesters being violent anti-semites. Dear U of T president and fellow scum: You're the ones supporting the mass murder of innocent civilians, through terrorism, torture, assassination, bombing and starvation. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.
Finally, the CBC is a disgrace.
