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.
Canada's antiquated First Past The Post (FPTP) electoral system allowed the federal Conservatives under the racist degenerate imbecile Pierre Poilevre to eke out a narrow win in the former Liberal stronghold of Toronto St. Paul's. (Around 65% of those who voted voted Liberal, NDP, or Green. I'm sure few of them are happy with there being another MP for the Corrupt Shit-Head Party of Canada in the House of Commons.)
It seems that a Ukrainian fired, USA-supplied ATACM, using coordinates provided by the USA (likely from a surveillance drone flying over the Black Sea) trying to hit a Russian airbase in Crimea, was shot down and it expelled its cluster munitions over a beach at Sevastopol killing four civilians and wounding 127.
This is insanity.
The US foreign policy establishment wants to dismember Russia and subdue China because those two countries are powerful enough to effectively resist the USA-dominated international order. The US foreign policy establishment doesn't give a fuck about Putin's authoritarian tendencies or China's treatment of the Uyghurs. If it were truly the case that they cared about such things they wouldn't be subsidizing and protecting and installing fascist death-squad governments in Latin America, their own murderously racist police and prison system and their for-profit healthcare system, and they wouldn't support the hideous House of Saud, and they wouldn't support the Zionist-apartheid criminal state of Israel.
Joe Biden was never an intellectual giant. Today he is a shell of the mediocrity he used to be. If he isn't in the beginning stages of dementia, he is inarguably very tired and slow. At his best it's likely he'd have no real conception of the risks he's taking with all of humanity in his war with Russia. The rest of them, Hillary Clinton, Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, the Krazy Kagans, ... all of them, ... are shallow, stupid, vain, corrupt, useless individuals. Most of them have always been fat-assed armchair warriors who have never had a problem with throwing away other people's lives in pursuit of their sick delusions.
They call themselves "Realists" but that's such a stupid idea. If the USA doesn't really stand for anything other than the "interests" of its ruling classes, and this includes the profit-driven Military-Industrial Complex, why is it worth destroying all of civilization in a nuclear war to advance those interests? I mean, even I can see how these useless vermin can enjoy their careers of writing crappy analyses to justify the interests of the MIC and of US and international capitalism. They enjoy the lifestyle afforded by serving such wealthy masters and they get a little thrill thinking about the actual chessboard that their moronic plot play out on. But that could all come crashing down in an instant if heightened tensions and things like the cluster-bombing of Russian civilians on a beach in Sevastopol lead to full-scale nuclear war.
I called this post "Hopeless Liberals" because, sadly, there are a lot of liberals who have bought into this garbage. Hypocritical partisan hacks who supported Obama's continuation of bush II's imperialist foreign policy. (The foreign policy that they'd condemend when bush II was nominally in the driver's seat.) Hypocritical partisan hacks who gushed over the blood-soaked career of Hillary Clinton and who raged at Trump for "not listening to his generals" when he wanted to end the USA's illegal occupation of Syria. The absolute imbecilic cultists at "Daily Kos" who thrill to real and imaginary Russian losses in its war in Ukraine, imagining that Biden is supporting plucky freedom fighters against Russian imperialism when the reality is that Ukraine's military is dominated by bona fide NAZIS, that the war was stupidly provoked by the USA who repeatedly spurned a diplomatic solution to comepl Putin to accept for Russia what the USA would never accept for itself. And these "Daily Kos" shitheads jerk themselves off to their Ukrainian fantasies while excusing (or more often ignoring) the USA's support for Israel's genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.
Yesterday I read Henry Giroux latest article at CounterPunch. The first half of the article is about how the New York Times has been exposed for deliberately imposing a glaring double-standard on the actions and sufferings of Israels and Palestinians. The second bit is a diatribe about the dangers of Donald Trump and how the corporate media has normalized him and obscures the reality of Trump being a dangerous fascist.
Personally, I'm somewhere between Giroux and Caitlin Johnstone on this one. Trump really is a different sort of monstrosity from the Republican leadership that started to fizzle-out during the 1990's. But he's the product of a process of devolution. He's not the only whackjob ignoramus being supported by a movement of confused, reactionary ignoramuses in that party.
But my question for Giroux and anyone else who wants to shriek about the [genuine] danger of Donald Trump is this: If Trump is such an existential threat, why does the Democratic Party offer us Joe Biden as the USA's alleged democracy's alleged champion? And, if they're giving us Joe Biden and his support for the wholesale slaughter of all the Palestinians in Gaza is alienating Democratic voters and weakening his chances against Trump, ... why is it incumbent upon those voters to swallow their principles and side with Biden rather than Biden having to renounce his support for genocide?
I ask you: Is Israel's right to commit genocide more important than saving America's "democracy" from Trump's fascism? If so, why?
I could ask: "Where does this end?" but the question is superfluous. Biden is committing genocide. He can't go any lower. He can't be any more vile of a monster than he already is. GENOCIDE. Do not attempt to speak to me of the genocidist being the "lesser evil." Do not speak to me about how the demented idiot and his moronic advisors risking nuclear war with Russia and China are going to save us from the danger of Donald Trump's fascism.
If this is how it plays out, that Biden lost to Trump because US-Americans felt the way that I do, and they couldn't bring themselves to vote for Biden, then so be it. That was the role that people like me will have played in that tragedy. In the same way, the hopeless liberals who aceded to the Democratic Party's neoliberal policies and abandoned their principles and their brains to defend imperialism and mass-murder when it was a Democratic administration doing it, who made their party's brand so toxic that less and less people could bother to vote for it, played their own part. And they can eat shit and die if they want to guilt-trip me while portraying themselves as innocent.
Biden's work to expand the USA's Prison-Industrial Complex, and his work on "anti-terror" legislation that the creators of the Constitution-shredding "Patriot Act" praised as their blueprint, his compliance with Obama's insane "kill-lists", everything these fucking Democratic Party "liberals" contributed to the erosion of human rights in the United States is responsible for whatever capabilities Donald Trump has to crush those rights upon an election victory.
And the beyond ridiculous, pathetically sad liberal devotion to the whole "Russiagate" myth only served to give ammunition to Trump's fans that there is a criminal "Deep State" aligned with the Democratic Party that will fabricate charges and threaten people and spy on them, in a witchhunt against anyone they don't like. They will push "FAKE NEWS" against Trump to hobble him and etc., etc., ... Gawd, that "Russiagate" stupidity caused so much damage. And hopeless liberals refuse to this day to recognize it.
The Democratic Party's support for the same pro-oligarch policies as the Republicans is what is making the population more frightened, reactionary and extremist. And the fact that, even after everything, the Democrats are less terrible than the Republicans, doesn't cut it:
Biden rewarded Zients’s poor performance by making him White House chief of staff. Zients’s predecessor, Ronald Klain, was pragmatic enough to maintain close ties with the Democrats’ progressive wing. As a result, Klain steered Congress toward passing historic investments in clean energy and infrastructure and reductions in health costs, paid for by tax hikes on wealthy corporations. Plus, he empowered progressive personnel at the regulatory agencies to crack down on exploitative fees and corporate power.
The very last speech Klain presided over was one of the most populist State of the Union addresses in U.S. history. Letting Zients fail upward into the number two role in the White House sent a message to corporate America that the days of tough talk like that were over.
...
NOW, THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION HAS HAD SOME GENUINE, even populist, successes in the Zients era. But these have mostly come from independent agencies and their directors, like Rohit Chopra at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission, or Jennifer Abruzzo at the National Labor Relations Board. Biden nominated all of them, so he can take some credit for their achievements. But they do lead independent agencies—Chopra, Khan, and Abruzzo do not take orders from the White House. If Zients had disapproved of their antagonizing Wall Street and Big Tech ahead of an election, he could not have stopped them.
Moreover, Biden has done little to tout these accomplishments from his team. His communications officials routinely balk at even talking about actions against big business. If this was meant to show corporate America that Biden isn’t as scary as The Wall Street Journal editorial board makes him out to be, clearly it hasn’t worked. It never could. It is abundantly clear to the world that Joe Biden is a capitalist — it’s in all of his speeches, it’s why moderates united behind him in the 2020 primary, it’s something anyone with a passing knowledge of his 50 years in national politics could tell you. The C-suites are fully aware that Joe Biden is not a socialist bent on their destruction. They don’t care.
If Zients actually did unite the formidable power of industry behind Biden instead of Trump, or at least keep big money evenly distributed in the race, I’d have to grudgingly admit that it was effective. As Lyndon Johnson once said, “there’s nothing more useless than a dead liberal.” But that has not happened. Just as they have for 50 years, the captains of industry are mostly lining up behind the Republican. Whatever his ideology, clearly Biden does think the business world should have at least some set of checks on its power sometimes. That is enough for the billionaire class to prefer the fascist.
Liberals in the USA who support the rotten Democrats, Canadian liberals who fanatically worship the Liberal Party, British liberals who stupidly support the Labour Party of Keir Starmer, ... all of them are hopeless idiots.
All of these parties are leading us to global heating catastrophe, risking nuclear war by provoking Russia (and wreaking Ukraine in any case), and supporting genocide in Gaza. I refuse to go so low as to give them my support.
The other day I wrote that one thing to keep in mind as Antony Blinken makes statements clearly contradicted by reality is that the man is stupid. This is a guy who thought that singing a song about how fucked-up 1980's America was at the time (Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World") at a nightclub in Kiev would inspire the people of that country to fight on and continue to die for the USA's proxy war against Russia. No matter how you look at that action it looks stupid. Because it WAS stupid.
LINKJuan Cole does a decent job of explaining that it is Netanyahu's fascist coalition that has rejected Biden's deal.
On Sunday, according to the Israeli newspaper Arab 48, Netanyahu told the families of soldiers killed in the Gaza campaign, “There was no deal because we will not give up on completing the war objectives. The main disagreement with Hamas revolves around the commitment to end the fighting without completing the objectives.”
Netanyahu’s war goals are the complete destruction of Hamas (and apparently of Gaza in general). Netanyahu says he will not end the fighting until all his goals are fulfilled. He openly said that “there was no deal” because it would require stopping short of wiping out the people with whom he is negotiating.
Biden’s three-stage plan begins with a pause in the fighting and partial Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, then a prisoner exchange and complete Israeli withdrawal, and then the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip. But this plan implies that the fighting would end permanently so that rebuilding could start. Netanyahu is rejecting this third stage and pledging to start the war back up as soon as the hostage exchange is complete. You have to ask what is in the latter a proposal for Hamas, or for anyone in Gaza. Although Biden represented the plan as Israeli, Netanyahu has disputed that.
Elsewhere Cole lapses into his "responsible, mainstream centrist" persona that has tragically prevented him from seeing more clearly:
Yahya Sinwar and the other leaders of the Qassam Brigades, the Hamas paramilitary, who are doing the dickering are themselves wretched war criminals and you only wish they could be whisked off to the Hague for trial. If the Israeli military were merely trying to accomplish that goal, one could just wish it luck.
If you simply look at the nazi-level barbarism and the degenerate racist culture of the Israelis, then you would see what Hamas sees when they think about how to deal with it. Which is not to say that I want to have a beer with anyone in Hamas and talk about going fishing with them. I'm sure some of them are nasty, flawed, deranged individuals. But the blame for this bloodshed rests mainly with the USA and the Israelis. Hamas is a product of Israel's garbage culture of sadism and thievery.
The main thing that I want to say though is to read Cole's commentary with the understanding that Antony Blinken is the complete shit-for-brains that I've described him as here:
Blinken appears to believe that if he can get Netanyahu to pause the fighting and move to hostage negotiations, he can create momentum toward a truce and a cessation of hostilities, regardless of what the extremist Israeli government says in public.
But Blinken is naive if he thinks that Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich will yield to such mere diplomatic momentum.
Blinken is frustrated with Hamas because it wants more than a vague expectation of momentum toward a truce. It wants a genuine cease-fire and end of hostilities. This position implies that it does accept a ceasefire, it just doesn’t believe that the Israeli government does. And given how truculent and slippery the Israeli government has been on this issue, you can’t really fault this suspicion.
Thus we have an explanation for Blinken's nonsensical babbling. Blinken is an arrogant, racist imbecile. He's a shameless liar who is too stupid to know how to keep his story straight. Inside of his skull is a relatively small, smooth brain that smells suspiciously like shit. That's why everything he says is so disconnected from reality and insults the intelligence of normal people.
