Just a Link to an International Affairs Canada Report on Avoiding Complicity in Genocide

 

Actually the report is called "Preventing Complicity: A Review of Canada's Arms Export Policy."  I just found it the other day and I've only read a bit of it.

Double standards on part of Canada with respect to its declared commitments and values, particularly with respect to its support for the rules-based international order and the promotion of international law and human rights risks undermining Canadian diplomatic credibility and international standing. Moreover, Canada benefits from a rules-based international order in which the behaviour of powerful states, and their treatment of smaller-states, is regulated by universally respected and enforced international rules. Canada has recognized that contraventions or transgressions of international rules by any state threaten its interests, and therefore Canada must recognize that this applies equally to itself. Canada’s stated commitments to international law and the promotion of democracy and human rights is called into question by its trend of exporting arms to states involved in IHL and IHRL violations. Although Canada is a state party to the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), and despite having some of the strongest arms export controls in the world, a review of past policies shows that these controls are not always applied in an objective or transparent manner. GAC has applied overly narrow interpretations of risk in evaluating the potential for Canadian military goods and technology to be used in violations, often focusing on actual evidence of misuse of Canadian arms by the recipient state rather than on the prospective, “substantial risk” of misuse as required by its obligations under the ATT. This has rendered arms exports controls largely reactive rather than proactive, often responding to abuses involving Canadian arms rather than preventing such abuses and implicating Canadian-made arms in serious violations of international law. Recent Canadian arms exports to Israel (both directly from Canada and indirectly from the USA), despite credible evidence from international institutions of Israeli crimes in Gaza, have exposed further issues in GAC’s risk assessment methodology. The current volatility in the international system demands increased prudence in arms transfer practices. Following a review of these past and current policies, a consideration of Canadian interests and values, goals and objectives, relevant stakeholders, and programmatic needs, we present three costed options all aimed at strengthening arms exports risk assessment process and thereby preventing Canadian complicity in serious violations of international law. Considering all the relevant factors and pros and cons, we recommend fully incorporating Canada’s ATT obligations into domestic law and introducing greater external oversight of the export permit evaluation and risk assessment process via independent advisory committee.

 

Perhaps someone else might be interested in looking at it too.

A Worthwhile Condemnation of CBC's Genocide-Enabling

 

Yeah, yeah.  It's on "CounterPunch.org", but Ross MacKay's "Gaza and the CBC: Public Broadcaster Betrays Its Mandate" is a good summary of the network's disgusting coverage of the Gaza Holocaust.

Public media should provide a corrective to corporate distortions; yet Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC, has repeatedly failed in this duty. By refusing to deliver accurate, comprehensive, and contextually rich reporting on Israel’s assault, it has denied Canadians the information they need to act on conscience and to pressure their government to help end the savagery. In effect, the CBC has made Canadians complicit in genocide.

...

Reply to Cap

 It was supposed to be a comment repy but it was too long.  Here it is ...

Cap,

Many people see the ICC as an imperialist institution.  (I agree with it in principle but some of its critics do have a point.)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/13/from-icc-to-sportswashing-wests-self-serving-narratives-must-be-combated/

"'In March, the South Africa Communist Party (SACP) denounced what it described as the ‘imperialist bias’ of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The denunciation of the ICC as a “supranational institution at the service of imperialist states' came two days after the Hague-based court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and another Russian official for alleged war crimes in Ukraine.

The speed with which the case against Putin was lodged, discussed and followed by concrete action raised many questions about the integrity, balance and political agenda of the Western-inclined court.

While Palestinians immediately, and rightly, protested the hypocrisy of the ICC as it continues to treat alleged Israeli war criminals with kid gloves, Iraqis, Afghans, but mostly African activists and intellectuals found the ICC’s moral inconsistency reprehensible.

In the 21 years of its existence, “the ICC has not issued a single warrant of arrest for or prosecuted any United States or European president, prime minister or monarch as head of state,” protested Africa’s oldest communist party, echoing the cries of numerous organizations, politicians and activists who, for years, pointed out that Africa has received the lion’s share of ICC investigations and arrest warrants.

Indeed, since its existence in 2002, the ICC has been 'fixated' on Africa. As of June 2021, “all 44 people indicted by the Court have been Africans,” wrote Qumar Ba in Foreign Affairs, and 'ten out of its 14 active investigations involve Africa.'

This argument is not intended as a blanket defense of Africa. Many alleged war crimes have been committed on the African continent – in fact, in other regions in the Global South – many of which are associated with old and new civil wars, mass scale governments’ repression and violent crackdowns.

But why should Africa be the exception, when numerous and, at times, even more, alleged grisly war crimes and crimes against humanity were affiliated with Western governments? "

The USA has been happy to use the ICC as a weapon to bludgeon its opponents with, while remaining outside its jurisdiction by not being a signatory.

Which also means that Trump had no legal obligation to arrest Putin while he was on US soil.

The ICC's case against Putin has been critiqued by others very harshly.  To whit; the claim that Putin has kidnapped Ukrainian children and subjected them to Russification/indoctrination is false.  What actually happened is that ethnic Russians in the separatist provinces voluntarily sent their children to free camps in Russia, away from the war zone, with their stays apparently being around two weeks.  Some of these camps were apparently music camps for musically inclined children.

The following link takes you to an article that quotes from the author of the report on which the ICC case is based upon.

https://thegrayzone.com/2023/03/31/iccs-putin-arrest-state-dept-report/

When South Africa brought its case against Israel to the ICC, the USA was outraged.  But it's Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan understood that if he gave Israel a pass, then the credibility of the Court would be mortally wounded.

I think that your quote from TASS is supposed to explain to me that Putin has benefited from the warm welcome he received from Trump.

The point of my original post was probably weakened by my failing to mention that Putin isn't an international pariah.  BRICS is growing.  Putin remains friendly with China, India, Iran, South Africa, Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, and others.

The following link has a pretty good map:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/2/16/mapping-where-every-country-stands-on-the-russia-ukraine-war

I wonder what that map would look like if you removed some of the puppet-dictatorships that have followed the US lead in South America and Africa?

Besides not being an international pariah, I took issue with the arrogance and narcissism and stupidity of imagining that the be-all and end-all of international politics is whether "The West" likes you or not.

"The West" is perpetrating a deliberate genocide in Palestine and the countries with "The West" are intensely hated by many of the peoples of the world.

It is the CBC's stupid narcissism that I was objecting to.

"Even if Trump stops arms deliveries to Ukraine, denying US arms makers billions in profits, I'd love to hear your reason for believing that EU countries are less capable than Russia."

I don't quite understand this question.

This link shows the proportions of global arms exports by country.

https://www.statista.com/chart/18417/global-weapons-exports/

The USA, France, and Russia account for 61.5% of total arms exports.

Are we to imagine that the remaining countries that together comprise 16% of world arms exports can step in and replace the USA's aid to Ukraine?

It's long been understood that Ukraine faces a shortage of artillery and, increasingly, anti-air defence.

France exports fighter jets.  That's probably a big part of their overall exports.  I imagine that the UK and Germany also sell some big-ticket items that comprise the bulk of their export dollars.

This link discusses the issue:

https://www.voanews.com/a/can-europe-arm-ukraine-now-that-us-has-halted-military-aid-/7998393.html

"Can Europe make up for the shortfall of military aid from the U.S.?

'There is a sharp limit to what Europe can do,' said Mark Galeotti, executive director of the consultancy Mayak Intelligence and the author of 'Forged in War,' a military history of Russia.

'There are certain systems, ranging from Patriot missiles all the way through to spare parts for the Abrams tanks and Bradley personnel carriers, that the Ukrainians are using, that the only way the Europeans can get [them] is by buying them on the open market. And that is going to take time,' Galeotti told VOA, adding that some weapons systems ordered on the open market in 2022 were arriving only now in Ukraine."

You mention that Russia has been fighting for 3 years and still hasn't defeated Ukraine.

First of all: That's true.  What does that fact say about hysterical claims of Russia conquering all of Eastern Europe???

Secondly: Ukraine had the biggest army in Europe and was trained and armed to the teeth by NATO.  That army was virtually wiped-out and a second army was raised.  That army has also been almost completely wiped-out.

This is a 21st Century battlefield against peer technologies.  Drones are everywhere, on both sides.  Armies cannot easily gather in large numbers for a big PUSH as was the case in WW2.  Because now they can be seen by satellites and attacked by long-range missiles and drones.

Of course this has been difficult for Russia.

It is a grinding war of attrition.  But Russia is bigger than Ukraine and it is evident from Ukraine Armed Forces complaints that they are running out of men and material.

"Being able to grind another country's military into the dust is in any case no guarantee of victory, as the Soviets, as well as the US and its allies, found out in Afghanistan."

That's true.  But I don't think it's the point you wanted to make.  In Afghanistan, the USA armed and funded a reactionary, fundamentalist, misogynist jihad against a Russian allied government, in order to provide Russia with its own "Vietnam."  To weaken Russia.

Who cares that Afghanistan was plunged into decades of chaos and trauma?

It's the same thing in Ukraine.  Let us not forget the rise of Banderites in the Ukrainian military and society.  Unrepentant, WW2-style, NAZIS.  Being used as the USA's cat's paw to, again, weaken Russia.

If the Russian army defeats the Ukrainian army, the USA could sponsor terrorist elements indefinitely to continue to harass Russia regardless of the continued devastation of Ukraine.

You can read my blog to hear my thoughts about Putin, the origins of this war, the progress of the fighting.

If you disagree with me I'd be more than happy to have a respectful debate on it.

Pariah Putin Preens (per Pathetic Propagandists' Piffle Portrait)

So, Putin met with Trump.  Absolutely no details as to what was discussed.  Perhaps Putin managed to convince Trump of the irrefutable reality that Ukraine has lost hundreds of thousands of men, that it needs weapons that the USA and the rest of NATO cannot produce in sufficient quantities, that Russia's losses are manageable and its industrial abilities increasing, and, therefore, that Russia can continue to slowly grind Ukraine's military until it evaporates.

Trump is an idiot, but he can't be totally oblivious to facts.  He probably knows how to appraise a property.  I suspect he was capable of understanding all of this if the Russians broke it down into small enough chunks for him.

But I was curious as to how the Proudly Canadian CBC was portraying all of this.  It was pathetic.  It was brazen propaganda.  The only professionalism that it showed was an ability to stay on message.  A message that has been maintained for over a decade, regardless of any facts that might complicate things.  Apparently Putin is a pariah.  Albeit only in "The West."  He's been "isolated" and his puppet Donald Trump has given him a victory for reasons known only to Trump, Putin and Russian Intelligence.

The CBC had to constantly mention that Trump's problems are only with "The West" which means a USA that barfs-up leadership candidates like Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and it's poddles in NATO, plus one or two others like Japan and Australia.  That "The West" is the arbiter of international laws, and morals and diplomatic isolation is a given.  Even though it is supporting a genocide in Palestine.  Even though the rest of the world despises the imperialist USA and the past imperialist powers in "The West."

"Progressives" Who Want the Slaughter in Ukraine to Continue

 

For whatever reason, Trump wants to meet Putin in Alaska.  For whatever reason, Putin has agreed to this.  (The link shows the high-level of topics they intend to discuss.  Whether anything can be accomplished with this President, or any US-American government for that matter, is a different story.)

The hard fact of the matter is that Russia is advancing all along a very long front.  Ukraine is running out of men to dragoon into the armed forces.  The USA cannot match Russia's military-industrial output.  Not now, and not for a few years for some weapons, and not for many years, for others.

The war is lost.  Europe's delusional, incompetent leadership is vowing to purchase US weapons to give to Ukraine.  But, obviously, this plan bumps up against the USA's industrial limitations.  The war is lost.

But brainwashed "progressives" (who have had YEARS to understand the bases of this conflict and the realities of the war,no thanks to the mainstream media or the incoherent postings at Jeffrey St Clair's "CounterPunch") are still lost in a dreamworld wherein Ukraine has lost perhaps 150,000 men and the Russians 2,000,000.  [But we're still supposed to fear the Russian hordes sweeping across the rest of Europe?!?]

For them, any concessions [to reality] that Trump makes in Alaska will only reinforce their other nitwit delusion (planted by the psychotic Hillary Clinton) that he is Putin's debased anus-slave.

Jeffrey St Clair Should Hang It Up

 

I've long been a critic of useless, merely performative "activism."  Likewise, I am always astonished at the intellectual and theoretical poverty of people who have the enormous privilege to be able to have paying careers that deal with left-wing causes.  All that time, all those years, and while they've been there collecting their paycheques, practically nothing is done and, definitely, less than nothing is achieved.  Mewling leftists request information from others about "victories" because they are so few and far between and often so small that you can miss them if you blink.

Quick Note: China Dumping US Securities

 

China used to buy US debt to prop-up the US dollar so that the USA could purchase Chinese-made goods.  Then, as Trump and Biden began to put sanctions and import limits and stuff on China, they CCP began to look for alternative markets and even began to attempt to grow their domestic market.  Now, having lowered their exposure to US trade retaliation, China is also lowering its exposure to US financial shenanigans.  It has been dumping US securities increasingly over the past couple of years.

Token Outrage and Token Protest

 

So Mark "Total Fraud" Carney is saying out-loud that he condemns Israel's [nazi-level barbarism and racist sadism] actions in Gaza.  But Mark Carney is a total fraud.  His strong words aren't backed up by the sorts of actions that would reflect a proper response to any country committing a genocide by starvation and bullets and bombs.

Remember: Canada has sanctions on the country of Venezuela but not Israel.  We continue to have a free trade deal with Israel and we continue to send them weapons to carry out their genocide.

Psychotic Stupidity

 

I was on "PHazeBuck" [or "Metastasis"] a while ago and I was reading the comments in somebody's post about a police attack on a homeless encampment.  Some idiot wrote approvingly of the police action saying that they were all for helping the deserving but that this "hand-out culture" had to end.

Apparently people living in tents in public parks (or any greenspace they can find) because the cost of housing has soared past many people's incomes is a "hand-out culture."

Israel's Right to Exist

 

Israel, the United States, and its various lapdog nations and sycophantic blabberers, have long mewled about Israel's "right to exist."  No other nation has a recognized right to exist say the critics.  I occasionally wondered about the accuracy of that criticism due to my [admittedly hazy] understanding of things like the Treaty of Westphalia and the United Nations Charter.

But, whatever the case, it certainly seems that nobody from the USA or Israel got too broken up about Yugoslavia's "right to exist."  Also, US policy makers seem pretty vocal about their desire to see the Russia Federation (and Russia itself) broken up into component parts.  (Which will be easier to control.)  The hypocrites in the USA are always claiming to subsidize oppressed minorities in enemy countries with a view to sewing internal conflict and state-dissolution.  And, for Israel, it's attacks and other treatment of countries like Lebanon and Syria and the stated plans for Jordan and Iraq do not symbolize a recognition of those states' "right to exist."

Conclusion:  The USA and Israel have long since been run by hypocritical imperialist vermin and their arguments should be flushed down the toilet after we've collectively taken a dump on them.

Living Among Vermin

Caitlin Johnstone documents the horror:

Malnutrition-related deaths in Gaza are beginning to climb, with the health ministry reporting 18 in a single 24-hour period. Doctors report that people are “collapsing” in the street, and Gaza journalist Nahed Hajjaj is warning the world not to be surprised if the remaining reporters in the enclave are soon silenced by starvation.

Unless something drastically changes, things can be expected to get much worse very rapidly.

Meanwhile Israeli forces are setting new records with their massacres of starving civilians seeking aid, with 85 killed in a single day on Sunday. 

If this isn’t evil, then nothing is evil. If Israel isn’t evil, then nothing is.

...

The Pre-Genocide of the Palestinians Era and the Post-Genocide of the Palestinians Era

 

Canada has always been one of the apartheid state of Israel's biggest supporters.  Canada is, itself, a colonial project.  A country built upon stolen lands.  It has been a delusional lackey to the imperialists of Britain and the United States.  Under stephen harper I saw that, collectively, Canadians are unconcerned about complicity in torture.  Most of us are completely indifferent to whether there's any sort of democratic elements in our political system.  There's no push for greater democracy and we shrugged in indifference and apathy when the vestiges of democratic oversight were spat upon by the harper regime.

Twenty-Five Years of Cannibalism

 

Jack Rasmus has an excellent summing-up of the costs of over two decades of idiotic tax-cuts to the oligarchy and reckless war spending.

That bigger picture is the looming fiscal crisis driven by the growing convergence of runaway tax cutting since 2001, chronic escalating defense and war spending, more frequent deeper crashes of the economy with slower economic growth between, and now since 2022 accelerating trillion dollar annual interest costs on the US national debt.

The US national debt is on track to reach $38 trillion by year end 2025. Interest payments to bondholders are already exceeding $1 trillion a year. The Congressional Budget Office, research arm of the US Congress, estimates the national debt will reach $56 trillion by 2034 with interest payments of $1.7 trillion — and all that before Trump just passed $5 trillion tax cuts.

Thieving Oligarchs

 Two consecutive essays at Ian Welsh both contribute to an understanding of the collapse of the West, morally, intellectually, economically and militarily.

"The Best Short Summary of Why China is Winning & the West Fading"

Ford-Calandra School Board Take-overs are Land-grabs

 

From Education Action:

For years, this government has starved public education of funding. They’ve ripped $6 billion out of our schools since 2018. They’ve forced larger class sizes, stripped special education supports, and left students and staff to deal with unsafe, crumbling learning environments.

Now, rather than admit the damage they’ve caused, Ford and Education Minister Paul Calandra are grabbing more power — rewriting the rules so they can take control of school boards, muzzle parents and trustees, and force through their own agenda.

Let’s be clear: their agenda has nothing to do with student success. This is about money and control — and, most of all, real estate. The Ministry has given the job of supervising the TDSB to Rohit Gupta, someone with no known experience managing anything related to public education. He is the senior managing partner of Harrington Place Advisors.  Harrington Place describes itself as “bridging public and private sector priorities” by “unearthing latent demand and identifying high value opportunities for public sector assets. He has a background in working with the federal government regarding public-private-partnerships as well as in mergers and acquisitions for Scotiabank. Prior to working at Harrington Place, he led transaction negotiations with Metrolinx for Boxfish Infrastructure Group. This doesn’t mean that the Ministry plans to sell the TDSB to the lowest bidder, but it is interesting that it has chosen a supervisor with so much experience in real estate transactions. 

The Multi-Polar World

 

A lot of people are trying to see something greater in the emergence of the multi-polar world than is actually the case.  Obviously this includes those online geo-political analysts who see in countries like Russia an alternative to the godless, decadent, feminist, emasculated West. [With this subset of people including "Jewish controlled" in their list of the West's deformities.]

But there are also decent people, appalled at the murderous brutality and the shameless hypocrisy and the dangerous hubris and the titanic incompetence of the West's ruling classes who have convinced themselves that countries like Russia, China, India, Iran, are not themselves ruled by oligarchs, anti-democratic, often authoritarian, often religious bigots.

Trump's Gestapo & Leftist Failure

 

It's might be all over in the USA.  Trump's Triple-B bill, "Big Beautiful Bill" passed.  It included billions in funding for ICE, the agency that can grab anyone off the street for any reason and send them to some hell-hole overseas or within the USA itself, without any sort of legal oversight or rescue.  Trump now has his own personal police force.  His Gestapo.

Happy [Belated] Canada Day!!!

 

I've done a couple of posts in the past wherein I've written about my lack of enthusiasm for Canada Day.  You can look for them if you want to.  Obviously, my disaffection was even greater this year.  I'm going to share a quote from a CounterPunch article put up on the site today, July 4th:

The Israeli military forced us into displacement. We ended up in Gaza City on the streets. I have a family. I have children who are all under the age of 15. My wife is pregnant. My financial situation is not easy. A few weeks ago I had to sell some of my belongings. I had a stroller that I used to push the gallons of water on. I had a bicycle too and other things I had to sell to buy flour. We have no food, no water. We don’t have anything. I went to the US aid distribution sites and to the aid trucks. I went there seven or eight times to get food. About 20,000 people gather at the distribution sites along the Netzarim corridor early in the morning, but only 2,000 manage to get any food parcels. Why? Because of the overcrowding. Because of the number of people creating chaos. The food parcels they put in front of us are not enough compared to the number of aid seekers. The American site is a dead end. They told me that there is American aid in Netzarim. I went there. I walked 15 kilometers to look for some flour, rice or lentils. I couldn’t get anything. I went to the Netzarim aid site three or four times. All in vain. We go there only to find death in front of us. There was no food or water. There was only death. People were lying dead in the sand in front of us. I don’t know what to say. This situation is very hard. They told us there is aid in the trucks. Then, we went to the trucks. The trucks move very fast, running over people. The trucks were running on top of people! Today, I am unable to do anything. I used to weigh 90 kilos. Now I weigh only 58 kilos. Things are hard, really hard in Gaza. We are subjected to the worst torture in the world.

THIS is what Mark Carney, Justin Trudeau, Crystia Freeland, Anthony Housefather, etc., plus Pierre Poilievre and his team of troglodytes, all ENTHUSIASTICALLY support.

This is what the management of CBC News deliberately continues to enable and what Canada's mainstream journalists cowardly concede to allow their paymasters to enable.  It's what the fascist, rancid "newspaper" The National Post champions and celebrates.

Meanwhile, some "progressives" are mollified with token sanctions against a couple of particulary egregious nazis in Naziyahoo's cabinet (But heaven forbid sanctions against Naziyahoo himself!)  Whereas the more "radical" and "activist" among us dislocate their shoulders from patting themselves on the back for wandering around in large groups in public chanting like shit-heads.

I've joined those crowds.  I've written letters.  I joined Independent Jewish Voices (as a supporter) and suggested things.  But I had been in a serious financial/personal crisis in 2023 all the way til about this time last year.  But the full-time activists.  The academics and scholars.  The union movement activists.  They've watched this holocaust being live-streamed for almost two years.  For some of them, going to work for eight hours a day, five days a week, pretty much entails that they're supposed to be thinking about how to respond to this.  And, so far, what they've come up with is NOTHING.

So, with this complete moral failure, PLUS Carney's using Trump's threats as an excuse to [again] trample the rights of the First Nations, to "stand up" ["Elbows Up!!!"] to Trump by promising to buy billions of more in US-American weapons and trap refugees at the border and all the other stupid bullshit that Canada's servile politicians do, ... and the significant proportion of this country's population which supports all of this vile garbage, and all the other stuff that makes me depressed and misanthropic, ... fuck it.

How To Get Canada To End Its Support For Israel's Genocide of the Palestinians

 

We already know the answer.  It's the same answer for any and all revolutions.  Meet up in large (or small!) numbers somewhere, and chant moronically for a couple of hours.  Make sure not to damage any property or anything.  Then go home and await the fruits of your victory.  And if doing that once didn't have any impact, then keep doing it.  And doing it.  And doing it.  As people die and die and die and die.

Never stop to reflect that your "activism" hasn't stopped Canada from continuing to ship weapons to the Israeli nazi regime.  Or to stop Canada from continuing to disgrace us all by providing diplomatic cover for Israel's nazi war criminals.  The only thing keeping Palestinians alive is the material limitations of Israel's ability to slaughter them.

Don't open your eyes to the reality that your strategy and tactics are garbage.  Because that might cause you to have to actually THINK about possible alternatives.  And, since we're all brain-dead, that's a non-starter.

At least you can pat yourself on the back that you "did something."

Canada's Disgusting Culture

 

Look at it this way.  The Israelis are insane.  And they're very thin-skinned.  Even though they've been openly conducting a live-streamed genocide for over a year, they refuse to accept criticism for their nazi-level barbarism.  I'd say that anywhere between 80 to 98 percent of them are sincere when they label criticism of their racist sadism as "antisemitism."  These self-pitying, coddled idiots can't see that it's the genocide that has turned the world against them.  It's "antigenocidism" not "antisemitism."

The whole time though, the "rules-based international order" has aided and abetted them.  The USA has funded them and gone into overdrive to re-supply them with weapons.  The vermin occupying power in the UK, France, Germany, Greece, etc., attack pro-Palestine protesters and keep the trade and weapons and funding going for Israel's murder machine.  Canada assisted in punishing the Ansar Allah in Yemen for their defense of the Palestinians' humanity by assisting in the USA's "Operation Rough Rider."  Canada has also been instrumental in "training" the kapos in the "Palestinian Authority" in the West Bank to beat-down protests against the racist brutality of the Israeli occupiers.

That's what we do.  That's who we Canadians are.  Perhaps half of Canadians gleefully support the slaughter of Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, because of decades of brainwashing by a propaganda system that masquerades as "journamalism."  Most of us don't care one way or another.  It's happening to people out of their immediate zone of interest and so it might as well not be happening at all.  But the decent, sane minority are becoming increasingly disgusted and and then angry.

And so that's when our idiot leaders decided to pretend to visit an "aid site" (where starving Palestinians are shot by US and Israeli nazis for showing up to get food) and the Israeli Child-Killing Force ICKF supposedly fired "warning shots" over their heads.  And it was this shooting at privileged foreigners (rather than the mass slaughter of innocent Palestinian civilians) that empowered the cynical stooges in the West to issue strong words criticizing the Israelis and to implement token sanctions against Israeli inviduals.

And this weak sauce was apparently enough for a significant number of Canadian progressives who desperately want to believe that their culture isn't entirely irredeemable.

 Addendum to my last post: Biden would say he was "working tirelessly" to get the hostages returned.  He was lying because 1) He didn't give a fuck about the hostages because Netanyahu didn't (and doesn't) give a fuck about the hostages.  and, also 2) Because he was VERY tired and he gave in to his weariness by taking multiple naps and sleeping 10 or 11 hours a night and all the other things that a dying, senile man does.

But when he was AWAKE he did (to the degree that he was able) try to do all of the racist, imperialist, scum-bag/shit-for-brains stuff that he'd dedicated his life to.  Like destroying Social Security, exploding the prison population (especially with Blacks and Latinos), and approving wars and illegal sanctions thereby killing millions around the planet.

I guess I finally understand where Hitler's fans come from.  The same sort of filth who would feel a twinge upon hearing of Biden's cancer diagnoses.  "Except for the mass murders of entire peoples of innocent men, women and children, he was a good guy!"

Not the Brilliant Argument They Think It Is

 

I'm in a weird mood this morning so I looked at Driftglass and then Lawyers, Guns & Money.  

"Evil and Stupid" Driftglass refers to those "centrists" and "moderates" who advocate for a third political party between the extremists of the left and the right as "grifters."  As opposed to his preferred Democratic Party USA, comprised of  vermin who sell-out the lives of their countrymen to oligarchic parasites (most notably private health insurance, Wall Street and the military-industrial-coplex) and who traumatize and slaughter millions around the world, and earn a pretty penny for it.  (Clinton's net worth:  $120 million.  Obama's net worth: $70 million.)

But don't call THEM "grifters"!

But the L, G & M post is about people (like the stupid Jake Tapper) talking about Joe Biden's infirmity.

I've noticed a few Democratic Party cult sites working this meme recently; "Why are people talking about Joe Biden when the fascist threat of Donald Trump is standing right before us?????"

It's astonishing how fucking stupid these assholes are.  Let me try to explain it to them.

You see, a couple of books have come out about the last presidential election.  (One of them by Jake Tapper.)  The one that Donald Trump actually won.  They've come out NOW because now is most likely the best time for such books to come out.  Timely.  Recent history.  So, whatever one thinks of Jake Tapper, it's understandable that he would want to talk about the book he's trying to sell.

And, if you'll remember, the Democrats, seeing the FASCIST threat of Donald Trump, in their infinite wisdom decided to put Joe Biden up against him as the incumbent rival.  They did that even though they'd had been deliberately hiding Joe Biden from everyone due to his advancing senile dementia.  They'd been doing that for pretty much his entire presidency.

So, they had FOUR FUCKING YEARS to anticipate the fascist threat of Donald Trump and they decided that Biden was going to be their (and everyone else opposed to Trump) man.

Well, okay, ... Biden probably wouldn't have been their first choice.  But if the Democratic Party of the United States of America's power-brokers had really pushed for someone else, the increasingly addled octogenarian Biden would've gotten VERY UPSET.  And, for four years I guess, the power-brokers inside the Democratic Party of the United States of America felt that if there was ANYTHING worse than fascist Donald Trump, it would be the ire of a befuddled, 80-something-year old narcissist being turned on them.

Here's some further levity:

BTW one thing that isn’t appreciated nearly enough is that the Democrats handled an absolutely horrible situation last July basically flawlessly under the terrible circumstances.

So, in other words, when their disastrous decision to go with the senile incumbent inevitably blew-up in their faces, they anointed the senile incumbent's unpopular, untalented, insincere, air-head VP to carry their banner.  And when she lost against the monstrosity of Trump due primarily to her own lack of appeal, including her disgusting adherence to the Biden policy of GENOCIDE, zombie-like Democratic Party hacks like the LG&M blog say that the whole thing was handled flawlessly.

[Much of that post is quoting someone else who decries the ignorance of US-Americans about Trump's perfidy.  And the LG&M writers blames "journalists" like Tapper, and right-wing propaganda outlets like "FOX News" for that.  Conveniently forgetting their own discrediting of themselves with the "Russiagate" conspiracy theory.  And their continued discrediting of themselves by continuing with the absurd denialism and covering-up of Biden's infirmities that they started in 2019 and are still at it as of today.]

2025 Readings II

 Some formatting issues occurred in the original 2025 Readings post and I don't know html so I can't fix it.  So I'm gonna make this post the place where I try and start again.  Stuff will follow ...

I read most of This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress.

The first few essays all pretty much said the same thing: there is no Theory of Everything. After reading the first essay, the following essays fell flat-- the point had already been made.  ...  And the redundancy of essay topics truly blunted the edginess of any attempt at a novel argument.  ...  I will spare you my frustration about the jargon-filled and ego-laden, pseudo-arguments made in most of the essays – at least for now. On a positive note, a few of the essays did teach us something new, and made us think deeper, drawing us to lines of thought far-removed from our typical work and interests. Like Infinity by Max Tegmark! Who knew there is more than one type of infinity?! The essay on Entropy by Bruce Parker was similarly notable. It tackled a complex problem and was able to put in words the typical confusion many have when grappling with the concept of entropy, which measures the amount of disorder in a system. The idea also actually seems radical, and it is one of which I have never before heard.  ... Notice that you don't need to own the book to read the essays, they are all freely available on edge.org. 

The book had some good stuff.  Apparently there's nothing to the idea that the language you speak molds your brain differently from people who speak a different language.  I'm going to have to dig deeper into the ideas presented in Ross Anderson's "Some Questions Are Too Hard For Young Scientists To Tackle."  But this is the sort of book you read when you have a lot of time to sit and think and read further.  At least some of the essays, the interesting ones.

Um, well, ... you see ...

 

First I read this: "Dear Generation Z, Where Are You?" by Michael Albert of "Z" fame.  In this essay he asks why they aren't out protesting:

Great. But Gen Z, you are 70 million strong. 70 million. Where are you? First one, then another.

I tell myself you are preparing yourselves. You are meeting to get your arguments in order.  You will soon burst amorously onto the activist scene. Trump to savages education. Trump exiles students. Did Trump’s troops grab you? Grab a classmate? Grab someone across town? Trump commands whole universities to bend a thousand knees and some rush to do so. Are you at one of those? Are you applying to attend? Are you at work wondering who gets fired next? You must be minutes away from boiling over, mustn’t you?

How Far We've Come

 

Thom Hartman at "Common Dreams" has an editorial about the truly dangerous territory that Trump is taking the USA into:

Opinion | Do You Understand How Dangerous This Moment Is — How Far We've Drifted? | Common Dreams

He insisted that justice must be blind to nationality or legal status; that due process, as encoded in the Constitution, must apply to persons, not just citizens. If the government could arbitrarily decide who deserved rights and who didn’t, then no rights were truly secure.

It was a radical argument for the time, but the Supreme Court agreed. Adams won. And in doing so, he helped define a cornerstone of American jurisprudence: that the rule of law exists to constrain the state, not to be selectively applied at the whim of those in power.

Fast forward to 2025, and that principle is now under direct assault.

The Trump administration, enabled by allies in Congress and the judiciary, has weaponized immigration law and executive authority in ways that Adams would have recognized and condemned. They are now detaining legal permanent residents, like Mahmoud Khalil, not for crimes, but for speech. They are targeting foreign students and legal residents — often young people of color — for deportation based on political views, often under the thinnest pretexts of “national security.”

...

Because once the government claims the right to strip anyone of due process, rights cease to be rights and become privileges, granted or revoked at the whim of those in power. That is not a constitutional democracy. That is the scaffolding of fascism.

And sure enough, what began with undocumented immigrants is now creeping toward legal residents, foreign students, and even American citizens. The Trump administration recently floated the idea — with a straight face — of deporting certain American citizens to El Salvador.

Let that sink in.

So far as it goes it is an accurate summary of the openly fascist, dictatorial Trump regime.  But Hartmann fails to mention the contributions of the Democrats to this nightmare.  Biden wrote the pre-cursor to the PATRIOT Act.  Hillary Clinton normalized bush II's moving government communications to private servers.  Obama chose not to prosecute the previous bush II regime's use of torture.  (Because Democrats had approved of it at the time.)  And he expanded the state's surveillance of the populace.  And he arrogated for himself a supposed legal right to murder US citizens overseas.  

There's more, but we don't need more evidence that the USA's slide into fascism has been a bipartisan effort.

First-Past-the-Post Did It's Job

 

First, read Ian Welsh:

Five months ago I would have said, and did say, that the Conservatives would form the next government, with Poilievre (a Trump figure) as Prime Minister.

Going To Vote NDP Today

 

I wasn't going to vote because in my riding it's only a contest between the pro-genocide Conservatives and the pro-Genocide Liberals.  And I can't put the Liberal enabling of Israeli genocide of the Palestinians into isolation and imagine that I'm voting "lesser evil."  Too much "evil," not enough "lesser."

I wasn't going to go through the bullshit exercise of voting for a third party to have my vote rendered null and void by our archaic "first-past-the-post" electoral.

But then I saw the "Vote Palestine -dot-ca" website and my local NDP candidate checks off all their boxes and I thought that deserved my making the effort to go and expresss my support.  I also gave them some money.  

Then my dentist's office emailed me to tell me that as of May 1st I can apply for the Canadian Dental Care Plan, which is great because I need to put a crown on one of my teeth and I don't have insurance.  And that program exists because of the NDP.  

So, ... my vote is a statement and nothing more.

My Last Post on Trump's Tariffs

 This video from Adam Something mentions the Yanis Varoufakis article I mentioned the other day:

And here's an article from Jacobin's Branko Marcetic: "Trump's Tariffs Have Done What No US Adversary Could":

Yanis Varoufakis on Trump's Tariff Tactic

 

I read this yesterday.  I didn't expect to find Varoufakis talking about Trump's tariffs, but that was what I found and it ties into some recent posts.

For when US deficits exceed some threshold, foreigners will panic. They will sell their dollar-denominated assets and find some other currency to hoard. Americans will be left amid international chaos with a wrecked manufacturing sector, derelict financial markets and an insolvent government. This nightmare scenario has convinced Trump that he is on a mission to save America: that he has a duty to usher in a new international order. And that’s the gist of his plan: to effect in 2025 a decisive anti-Nixon Shock — a global shock that cancels out the work of his predecessor by terminating the Bretton Woods system in 1971 which spearheaded the era of financialisation.

Who Does Trump Work For?

 

Liberal anti-Trumpers have this fixation of having to believe that Trump must be somebody's servant.  For some of them it was, and remains the case, that he is the butt-bitch of Vladimir Putin.  Despite the fact that "Russiagate" turned out to be a sad fabrication, and despite the fact that Trump's actions towards Russia were often antagonistic, these "progressive" shit-heads continue to clamour for nuclear war based on their stupid conspiracy theory.

I'll Be Voting NDP This Election

 

I live in a riding where it's only between the Liberals and the Conservatives.  Since Justin Trudeau's disgraceful premiership I've decided that I will never engage in that empty farce again.  And now, with both of those parties signalling their craven and inhuman support for Israel's genocide of the Palestinians, I feel it would be personally defiling to vote for either of them.

But "First-Past-the-Post" renders my vote for anyone else null and void.  And, besides, I'm not all that crazy about the NDP anyway.

But the NDP candidate in my has checked all the boxes for Vote Palestine.Ca and the party has spoken out against Israel's monstrous behaviour, so I think they've earned my vote. 

Two Articles (or whatever) About Leftist Failure

 

Back in 2020, as the COVID pandemic was starting to take hold, Jacobin magazine featured an article by someone describing the state of the USA's working class as the worst in fifty years.  The mass unemployment caused by the need to quarantine might prove devastating to people with less resources to weather a storm than ever.

Views on Trump's Tarrifs

 

Ian Welsh says the whole thing has been done as stupidly as possible and will only wreck the USA's economy and accelerate its overall decline:

So, Trump’s tariffs are out. He claims they’re half of what each country tariffs the US, but in fact they appear to have been determined by dividing how much the US sells to a country by how much that country sells to the US.

In other words, the more your trade surplus is, proportionally, the higher the tariffs.

This isn’t, on the face of it, necessarily stupid. But… it’s being done very stupidly.

...

So this means that there’s going to be a massive economic shock: prices will go up and/or profits will go down and the US government will need to provide massive subsidies to some industries at the same time as Trump’s budget plan massively cuts revenue due to tax cuts for the rich.

...

Additional add-ons to all of this include the probability of a lot of free capital flows going away. Countries that want to re-industrialize with domestically controlled supply chains, and many now will, need to keep capital at home and the retaliation against the US is going to be against a capital flow/investment system which has, with a few exceptions like Japan, mostly favored the US.

I can’t even imagine how much US property in other countries is likely to wind up forced to sell to locals, or even nationalized outright.

All of this leads to the fact that this will speed up the loss of dollar privilege, and with the loss of dollar privilege and everyone reluctant to sell to America, well, there’s no way that the US standard of living doesn’t get hit hard.

...

Long story short: the US is going to be hit by a huge inflationary shock, a decline in standard of living and, unless other countries are stupid, lose most of its overseas rentier monopoly income. The EU is in for a world of hurt, but has options. China will feel it, but they’ll be fine, they don’t need the US as a market any more.

Dominik A. Leusder at Jacobin says that Trump's tariffs will cause stagflation; they are based on flawed historical political-economic analysis, but that nonetheless, they represent a coherent theory that has been around right-wing economic thinkers for a long time and which therefore needs to be taken seriously:

He began his speech with what amounted to a fever dream of American victimhood. Lamenting the “unilateral economic surrender” of his predecessors in the Oval Office, he decried being “looted, pillaged, and raped by friend and foe alike,” who “got rich at [America’s] expense” by way of “undervalued currencies,” “stealing our intellectual property,” and instituting “unfair rules and technical rules.” These trade barriers, whether tariff-based or not, were to be broken down. This effort would “supercharge the domestic industrial base,” while allowing the United States to pay down its national debt and reduce taxes.

The historical record, of course, begs to differ, though economic history does not seem to be Trump’s forte. At one point during his address, the president opined that the United States was “proportionally the richest” between 1789 and 1913, when trade barriers were in place, and that the Great Depression of the 1930s would have not occurred as it had if the ultraprotectionist 1930 Smoot Hawley Tariff Act had stayed in place longer.

Economic historians generally agree that the disastrous set of tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods worsened the Depression. And according to ad hoc estimates done by Evercore ISI, a prominent advisory firm for investment banks, the weighted average tariff rate of the “Liberation Day” measures were just under 30 percent, compared to the 20 percent of Smoot Hawley. All this in an economy in which imports are 14 percent of GPD, compared to 4.5 percent in 1930.

...

If anything, Trump has been consistent in his stance on trade since the 1980s, when Japanese (and to a lesser extent German) surpluses with the United States were the focus of his ire. He has been consistent in his (false) belief that bilateral trade is what determines the US trade balance, and that (as is equally false) bilateral deficits are “subsidies” to surplus countries. His belief that tariffs are a remedy for “unfair” trade is misguided.

But these moves are not the ravings of a power-crazed madman. They have emerged out of an internally coherent and consistent strain of thinking within American policy circles stretching back at least into the 1990s. This should give pause to anyone looking to dismiss Trump’s actions as thoughtless.

A right-wing (or whatever) writer "Simplicius" --- who I read for a more reality-based survey of the NATO-Ukraine/Russia War (since mainstream and many leftwards sources have turned their brains to shit on that topic) --- provides some useful information stating that Trump's tariffs aren't just some stupid shit that he pulled out of his stinking asshole.  They are, rather, based on the theories of some other dude:

It turns out Trump’s entire game plan may have been taken from economic advisor Stephen Miran’s playbook. In November, Miran wrote A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System, which according to experts precisely parallels what Trump is now attempting to carry out. One of the core tenets of the document is the deliberate devaluation of the US dollar in order to make US exports favorable again to reignite American manufacturing.

...

To summarize the above for the laymen, a country which holds the world’s reserve currency faces a significant dilemma wherein its national trade policy and monetary policy are effectively at odds against each other. In order to keep its currency as reserve status—and reap all the geopolitical benefits this creates—the country must hamstring its own economic output by running a huge trade deficit, which means the country imports far more than it exports, which hurts—or in the case of the US, kills—domestic manufacturing.

Why must a country run a trade deficit to retain its global reserve currency status? Because when your currency is the global reserve currency, the entire world constantly hungers for it in order to use it in all the various countries’ international trade between each other. The only way to keep those countries constantly supplied with dollars is for Americans to buy tons of foreign imports, which effectively sends dollars to those countries, since these purchases are made with dollars. If the countries instead bought a ton of US exports, they would be paying for those exports with dollars, which means all the dollars would be sent back to the US, and global nations would have a severe lack of US dollars. What would happen then? They would have no choice but to trade with their own currencies, which would mean the collapse of the dollar reserve system.

A simpler example: if a French person buys a $50,000 Ford truck and imports it to France, that’s $50,000 USD that leaves France and goes back to the US, lowering France’s dollar holdings. If an American buys a $50,000 French Peugeot to import it to the US, he sends his $50,000 USD to France, which increases its dollar holdings.

As seen, the only way to maintain the dollar’s reserve status is to make sure US dollars are constantly flooding the world, which can only be done by running a massive trade deficit where imports of foreign goods (outflow of USD) far outweigh exports of domestic goods (inflow of USD).

This contextualizes the Miran paper’s focus on the ‘overvaluation of the dollar’, particularly from the aspect of national security. Miran rightly notes that US national security is degraded in the current circumstances, by the erosion of manufacturing potential which leaves the US incapable of producing its defense imperatives. Miran’s thesis further provides for the tariffs being a tool not merely as some quick-and-cheap form of ‘revenue’, as some assume, but for the purpose of favorably rebalancing global currency valuations.

Personally, I think that regardless of whatever logic is behind this, it's all quite reckless and almost guaranteed to cause short-term disaster and pain from which it might be impossible for the USA to extricate itself from.  (Also, I don't know that the USA has needed to run a trade deficit in goods to keep the world satiated with US dollars.  There's been decades for which the USA has had trade deficits, weapons sales, and etc., from which other countries could build up dollar reserves.)

Finally, another right-wing site, "SONAR" hosted by former CIA analyst Larry Johnson, has this post saying that Trump is actually trying to lower the cost of servicing the USA's national debt:

Today, April 4, 2025, yields on U.S. long-term Treasuries experienced a significant decline as a result of the tariffs:

• 10-Year Treasury Yield: Fell below 4%, closing at 3.97%, marking its lowest level since October 2024
• This drop was driven by heightened recession fears following President Donald Trump’s announcement of aggressive tariffs on imports, which led investors to seek safety in government bonds
• .The decline reflects concerns about potential global economic downturns and increased demand for safe-haven assets like U.S. Treasuries.

In other words, the US Government received more money for a bond today than it did yesterday, and the US Government obligation to pay interest has shrunk. I had lunch with a good friend today, who has access to Trump financial officials, and he said this is the real purpose of the tariffs — i.e., restructure the US balance sheet, shrink the deficit and reduce the amount of short-term debt owed by the US Government.

...

While the tariff scheme is being attacked — correctly in my view — as a misguided trade policy, I have come to believe that is not Trump’s true objective.

Let me use a crude, oversimplified example, to explain what I thinkTrump is trying to do. Imagine that you are buying a home, and you have a 10-year $500,000 dollar interest only loan at 4.5%. At this rate, your monthly payment is $1,875. Now, what happens if that rate falls to 2.5%? Your new payment would be $1,041.67. You would have gained almost $10,000 dollars in your pocket by the end of the year (assuming you did not spend the savings). In other words, Trump is using tariffs in a bid to refinance the US debt at a lower rate. Remains to be seen if this works.

What happens if you are paying 4.5% interest on 8 trillion dollars in one year? You will pay $360 billion in interest. Let’s drop the rate to 2.5% for one year. You are now paying $200 billion in interest. Hell, with savings like that, Trump can buy a fleet of new aircraft carriers (kidding). That is what Trump is trying to accomplish

Of course, another option to lightening the debt burden would be to tax the wealthy.  But Trump is a wealthy man himself and he would find that sort of thing distasteful.

I reads another piece somewhere saying that a Russian politician compares the immediate future for the USA to the period of painful readjustment as a sanctioned Russia was forced to develop its own industry again which turned out to be a successful project.