So, the cunning neo-liberal with the Nazi Grand-Pappy resigned. Ostensibly she couldn't bring herself to go along with air-head Justin Trudeau's "Axe the GST" political stunt.
On Friday, you told me you no longer want me to serve as your Finance Minister and offered me another position in the Cabinet.Upon reflection, I have concluded that the only honest and viable path is for me to resign from the Cabinet.
And yet, so many progressives continue to operate under the delusion that the USA is a force for morality in the world.
Even though Canada gives standing ovations to nazi soldiers (and Crystia Freeland knew who he was because he was HER people), and even though (as we all know) Canada assists in genocide (which was supposed to be one of the reasons you DON'T give nazis standing ovations), small-"l" liberals think we're on the side of the good in Ukraine.
And any asswipe who calls me a "Putin-puppet" is a fucking NAZI. Because they support NAZIS.
But the USA is backing nazis in Ukraine to force that rump-remnant of a country to fight on, demanding that they start dragooning 18-year olds, even though Ukraine has a demographic crisis.
All so that the bitch Lindsey Graham can get a cut of the swag from Ukraine's rare-earth minerals. Oh yeah, and to weaken Russia (which has surprised itself with its economic and industrial capabilities thanks to this crisis).
And that goddamned tottering, senile fossil "Genocide" Joe "Biding His Time Until He Finally Fucking Dies While Babbling About Corn-Pop and Filling His Diaper One Last Time With a Huge Helping of Senile Shit" might, in his dementia, decide "Fuck-it! I'll listen to shit-for-brains Blinken and start a nuclear war. What do I care? At least my precious crack-head Hunter will spend his last minutes on earth a free man!"
The Ukrainian military is dominated by fucking nazis. And nazis are bad because they deliberately slaughtered innocent men, women and children to try to exterminate entire groups of people. (Jews, Roma, Slavs, and others.)
But Canada is providing diplomatic and military assistance to nazi-pig shit-hole racist Israel, as it slaughters tens of thousands (perhaps anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 innocent men, women and children in Palestine. Why? Because they're Palestinians. And Israel wants their land in Gaza and the West Bank. (And then it wants to move on to Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.) Because Zionists are lunatics, driven mad by murderous European Christian racism, who are also stupid. Because smart Jewish survivors (and their descendants) responded to Christian hatred and bigotry by embrace universalist, internationalist, socialist respect for all races and creeds and colours. They didn't embrace a fanatical, exclusionary, racist nationalism that was based on smashing in the faces of a militarily weaker society.
And Justin Trudeau says he'll "abide" by the ICC warrants (whatever that means) while the contender for our garbage-culture country's federal political leadership Pierre Anus-Brain says that arrest warrants for people who have deliberately destroyed all the schools and hospitals and power generators and water facilities and who have attacked food-aid convoys and who have executed healthcare workers in cold-blood and who have raped prisoners to death (and a television poll of that racist, shit-hole country's nazi population showed that the majority of them don't have a proble with that) is "wokeness."
Pierre Anus-Brain's whole life is an indictment of this country.
And a big reason why we support Israel (besides being shit-head racist assholes) [Crystia's Jew-hating Grandfather might grock the diplomatic-political rationalizations for his grand-daughter's support for Israeli zionist-nazis.] is because the much more powerful-than-us USA supports Israel. And they'll kick our asses and maybe even assisinate any politician who dares speak out against nazi-level atrocities. And Justin Trudeau and Melanie Joly are probably just coward and stupid air-heads, incapable of grasping the enormity of their failure.
So the ICKF ("Israeli Child-Killing Force") got their cowardly, incompetent asses kicked by Hezbollah when they attempted their ground invasion, and so, like the cowards they are, they focused instead on killing Lebanese civilizians by dropping bombs on them from airplanes since Lebanon has no air-defence to speak of. Lebanon is a divided country, created by European imperialists, with various sectarian groups in it, some of whom are seriously antipathetic to Hezbollah. The most craven and stupid among the population (and every large group has a craven and stupid minority) will idiotically kill anti-Israeli Lebanese in return for Israeli (and maybe USA or Arab puppet-state) money. Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire to stop the slaughter. Israel has violated the ceasefire hundreds of times by continuing to bomb Lebanon, but racist shit-for-brains, shameless liar, psychotic narcssist, nepo-baby Antony Blinken put Israel in charge of enforcing the ceasefire.
Still, Israel and the USA know that Hezbollah remains a potent enemy. So, immediately after throwing in the towel on the ICKF's ground invasion, they unleash their shit-for-brains/head-chopping/Islamist-extremist terrorists on Syria. Because Iran's military assistance to Hezbollah goes through Iraq and Syria, with Syria being the weakest link. The USA wants to crush all vestiges of Arab independence. The child-torturing Syrian President Assad is independent. So the USA will use al Qaeda to attack him.
Whatever the latest acronym they've chosen for themselves, these are pretty much the same Sunni-extermist human garbage that used to be ISIS/ISIL or Al Qaeda or the Al Nusra Front (or what-the-fuck-evah). The other side in the "Clash of Civilizations" that we all had to surrender our freedoms and privacy to our governments so that they could protect us from them.
It's all been a huge, stupid lie. But thankfully for US stupid, psychopathic elites, most of the denizens of the world are stupid as well and they haven't figured this out. And don't expect our corporate media of sycophants, careerists, dullards, ignoramuses, hypocrites, shills, morons, patriots and idiots to do anything to change the lamentable state of the citizenry's analyses.
Our society is rotten to the core. And at that core is a Black Hole.
There's no telling what's going to happen with the USA and Israel's apparently successful installation of Al Qaeda as the government of Syria. And it's hard not to see this as a "win" for the dementia-addled US empire. (There HAD to be a relative decline of US power after its artificial pre-eminence in 1945, but it's clear that at present, the USA has become a hollowed-out financialized economy dominated by gouging oligopolists with the living standards and life expectancies of ordinary citizens declining.) All of this dangerous lashing out by the USA and Israel is a sign of weakness. Assad of Syria was weaker. But that had always been the case.
But what about the supposedly rising powers of Russia and China and their supposed "unlimited partnership" that makes a whole that is greater that the mighty sum of its parts?
Perhaps Russia and China (and Iran) realize that they're only going to get stronger as the years pass. Whereas (as the clear decline of Europe, and the hell-holes that Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya became after US-American "victories", and the nightmare of Latin America under US-American domination demonstrates) the USA will only get weaker, ... perhaps they're prepared to sacrifice Syria, Hezbollah and the Palestinians.
Why should they respond to this dubious "success" with a war that nobody wants and which (in the case of Iran anyway) invite total destruction? The USA will do enough to destroy itself without either of those powers doing anything to help that along. And, also, it's entirely possible that the brainiacs in charge of US foreign policy underestimate the dangers of a shit-head Sunni-fundamentalist government in Damascus. There is going to be chaos and it might also be the case that (in the years since the "Rules-based International Order" has been harassing China and Russia, that those two countries have been coordinating their responses. And they can afford to play a long game.
Trump is a racist. But a very superficial one. He probably doesn't like Jews, but he can get along with them if there's something in it for him. He definitely looks down on Black people. But he's capable of being friendly with Black celebrities and athletes who are nice to him. I've seen enough videos of Trump one-on-one with a person, or with small groups, to see that he is capable of a glib, superficial charm. He's always had this natural, cunning talent for playing JUST inside the law. In the same way that he can shrug-off all criticisms and insults as unimportant to him while relentlessly going for the jugular on other people's weaknesses, he can summon the appearance of genuine caring and concern for them. But it's all transactional for him.
The other day I had a kinda frightening thought. From what I've read about John F. Kennedy, he was a spoiled, abused rich kid who arrogantly yammered about things that he didn't understand in his quest to fulfill his father's ambition for his eldest son (John F. Kennedy's older brother who was killed in action in the Second World War). I read something about his early years and I was very unimpressed. During and after the Cuban Missile Crisis he whined about how his advisors had steered him wrong, but it's not as if what they were telling him wasn't much different from the stuff he'd been thinking and saying. Maybe the CIA didn't have to think about the politics of what they wanted to do in Cuba the way that Kennedy did, but if that was the case, denying the anti-Castro Cuban stooges their air support (for political reasons) neutered the whole military plan. And the military plan WAS THE PLAN. So it should have either been cancelled or (logically, but militarily disastrously) gone full-steam ahead.
Norman Solomon at CounterPunch sums up the definite and possible legacy of the narcissist, pathological liar, sociopath, amoral, racist, corrupt [and now dementia-addled] waste-of-skin, Joe Biden:
President Biden has never wavered from approving huge arms shipments to Israel during more than 13 months of mass murder and deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Biden’s crucial role earned him the name “Genocide Joe.”
That nickname might seem shrill, but it’s valid. Although Biden will not be brought to justice for serving as a key accomplice to the horrific crimes against humanity that continue in Gaza, the label sticks — and candid historians will condemn him as a direct enabler of genocide.
Biden could also qualify for another nickname, which according to Google was never published before this article: “Omnicide Joe.”
In one sense, it's too little, too late. As Caitlin Johnstone puts it:
The International Criminal Court has formally issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
No such arrest warrants were issued for President Biden or any of the other western officials who’ve been backing Israel’s genocidal atrocities, which is a bit like a judge issuing a warrant for a mass murderer but not for the guy who gave him the gun and stood next to him handing him ammunition and drove the getaway car and lied to the police to cover up the crime.
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???"
