The first section
has news like a Tim Horton's being closed for a few days. The big
headline says that the federal government might agree to help local
infrastructure projects. Well, yeah. It might. Or it might not. So
what's the big story?
Then there's a story
that the food banks (all charity operations) have bought a new
building. At least 3,000 people depend on that charity to stay alive.
How about the next time Mr. Irving looks for a handout or a really
cheap price on something, we tell him to go to a charity?
Then, with the whole
world seemingly in an economic crash, the editorial sees the issue of
selling wine in grocerty stores as the great question of the day. The
writer makes a bizarre connection between the ban on selling wine in
grocery stores to prohibition. (I would be happy to discuss this bit
of idiocy with the editorial writer. I have done several years of
research and writing on prohibition- and it had little to do with
banning wine in grocery stores.)
The big issue of the
day for Norbert is that the federal cabinet is meeting at a hotel
that's too expensive. (Citizens unite. Storm the Bastille.) Alan
Cochrane's commentary deals with another big issue of the day – we
should all go out and have fun in the snow. Then there's Richard
Saillant of “Over the Cliff...”, a book of nineteenth century
economics that blames the poor for causing the recession, and now
wants to punish them for it. Alec Bruce has nothing whatever to say.
The only item worth
reading in all of Section A is a letter to the editor from a Donald
Alward who corrects an earlier writer about Prime Minister
R.B.Bennett, one of the least appreciated but truly great people of
this province. He had to contend with the great depression and, in
contrast to the tone of “Over the Cliff” and of everything
Norbert Cunningham has ever written, he demonstrated compassion and a
willingness to do more than write economics books with ideas more
than a century out of date.
Let's take a serious
look at what's happening. Sixty two people in this world have more
money than the poor (half of the world) do. A dozen years ago, it
took 300 billionaires to reach that status. Now, it's just
sixty-two. The shift of all the world's wealth to the very, very
wealthy is the outstanding event of the last decade and more. In the
same period, many of the world's people have had to pay high taxes to
pay for wars to make the wealthy wealthier. Education, hunger,
sickness, starvation, death have become accepted as a reasonable
price to make the wealthy wealthier. New Brunswick accepts that we
let our hungry and homeless rely on charity. After all, we had to
make sure Mr. Irving got our forest for the cheapest, possible price.
Norbert Cunningham,
Richard Saillant, the masked editorialist, the whole staff of the
Irving press never mention the role of people like the Irvings in
what is happening to the world.
Of course not. The
wealthy are a superior race. It's like imperialism. The wealthy who
live by plundering have to justify it. And the justification is that
that those being plundered, from our native people to Africans to
Muslims (and, for many years, to Jews), are inferior peoples.
Some civil servants
get over a hundred thousand a year? Scandalous. Some private
business execs make that (and more) in a day? It's because they are a
higher order of humanity. And, like racial superiority, it's
inherited.
Alas! Their superiority does not extend to brains. The super, super
wealthy have gone from 300 to 62 in just a dozen or so years. And,
contrary to the nonsense that appears in Irving press, they do not
create jobs and prosperity. Overwhelmingly, they have created
poverty, death and massive destruction of the environment. And
there's worse to come as the super, super wealthy of the west fight
the super, super wealthy of Russia and China. The fighting in the
middle east is, essentially, a war between Russia and the U.S. And
there is no possible outcome that will make the middle east livable
again.
Canada and World is
four, lousy pages. Almost all of it is trivial. Only two stories are
worth reading at all.
On B1, we are told
that the federal government is thinking of putting more refugees into
New Brunswick's French communities. And this is pretty typical of our
whole attitude to refugees. What's in it for us?
I don't care whether
they all go to French communities or English ones. I do care that
they aren't being allowed to make their own choices. As well, the
more we split them into various regions, the more their own society
collapses. It's important for immigrants to have some cultural
familiarity around them. They have come from enough hell that the
west has caused them without being subject to even more of it.
And they still have
to face the Jehovah Witnesses banging on their doors.
B2's big story is
that a New Brunswick woman lost weight by running around her local
mall. The smaller but far more important story is that our Department
of Veterans Affairs has been letting our Afghanistan veterans down
badly.
This is quite common around the world. We're all out there proud and
noble on Nov. 11, and saying how much we remember their sacrifice.
But it's all gone by Nov. 12.
The Guardian has a
good article on The Cayman Islands as a tax haven for the very rich.
(Richard Saillant didn't have time to mention tax havens in “Over
the Cliff...”) In fact, I'm sending you a whole page of Guardian
stories about tax havens. They're mostly from the British point of
view – but it's very similar to Canada. Except for New Brunswick,
of course. The wealthy of New Brunswick are well-known for insisting
on paying their full taxes. In fact, that could be the subject of
Richard Saillant's next book.
CBC has the story
that the oceans are warming at an alarming rate – as a result of
climate change. Pay no attention. The Koch brothers say there is no
climate change. And, if there were any climate change happening, Mr.
Irving would be the first to let us know.
CBC, asks the
question, “Is Canada being snubbed by not being asked to attend a
Paris meeting with the anti-ISIS coalition?”
Of course it is.
Trudeau is going to be under tremendous pressure to fight ISIS as
well as anybody else the super-wealthy want us to fight. These wars
have nothing to do with helping anybody except the super-wealthy.
We're going to be told about the terrible atrocities committed by
ISIS. And there are such atrocities. And the Irving press will tell
us all about them. But you can be sure it won't tell us about the
American and British and French atrocities that far exceed anything
ISIS can do.
This is going to be
a tough decision time for Canada. The Anti-ISIS coalition is made up
of countries that have to kiss up to the U.S. to please their own
capitalists. If Canada joins that coalition, we might as well close
up shop and become an American colony.
Both CBC stories are
below.
So far, the candidates for Conservative leadership are Trump imitator
Kevin O'Leary, and Peter MacKay. Brian Murphy starts to look like an
attractive alternative.
Most readers
probably won't agree with the following article. But it makes good
sense. ISIS is not a significant threat to the west. In the U.S.,
American police are a far bigger threat. The war on terror has gone
on for 15 years, and the only one to benefit by all that cost in
money and human life has been ISIS. Worse, ISIS was created by the
determination of American capitalists to control the whole world,
killing millions as they have been doing it, and enforcing poverty on
regions like Africa and Latin America. And ISIS has been thriving on
money and weapons sent to it by the U.S. and our good buddies in
Saudi Arabia – not the mention the western capitalists who buy
cheap oil from ISIS.
For the most part,
our side is not a moral force in the world. It never has been. Our
side has created centuries of mass murder and slavery and
impoverishment. We are not 'good'. We are now even worse than we have
been over the centuries.
But, quite apart
from the ethical question, there's the practical one. ISIS and all
the groups related to it are not states. We can beat states by
destroying their structures. But there really is no structure in
these groups to destroy. That was the ignored lesson of the Russian
invasion of Afghanistan. They exist because they hate us. All they
need to survive is that hatred. ISIS has grown in the past year –
because our attacks encourage and spread the hatred of us.
For the sake of
everyone (except maybe the oilpatch owners) we need to end this.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176091/tomgram:_peter_van_buren,_how_to_resolve_the_isis_crisis/
The poor U.S. All
those bullies like Guatemala and Haiti and Cuba and Congo are always
picking on it.
By the way, the peace-loving U.S. has more aircraft carriers than all
the rest of the world put together. And aircraft carriers are
essentially offensive weapons. For the U.S., in particular, aircraft
carriers have almost no defensive value at all. Think about that. And
guess who the aggressor really is.
I have much more.
But I'd like to move to a pleasant topic.
Hong Kong is,
believe me, a very, very crowded city. There are virtually no back
yards or lawns. And there's also doubt about the safety of some
imported foods. So Hong Kongers have roof gardens – big time.
Why should the
people of Moncton care? They should because this is a city designed
for 1950, when the automobile was the whole future. A result of that
is that it can never hope to develop a workable public transit
system. The population is just too spread out. Dieppe and Riverview
are worse.
Does our city
council ever think of the future?
We can't rely on
cars and gasoline. There really isn't a choice. And to try it is mass
suicide.
Nor is most of the
housing suitable. The reliance on bungalows makes density of
population impossible – and you cannot have mass transit without
some density of population. As well, the reliance on wood for
building seems to be a severe fire hazard, requires considerable
maintenance, places limits on size.
Could city council take a brief break from drawings of the new hockey
rink to consult a bit about housing for the 21st century?
Perhaps of housing designed so that the roofs become usable space for
all the tenants, thereby freeing up all the land around them?
Then there's this
tipping hats business that I referred to yesterday. So far as I can
find, the origins of it are religious, particularly in Christianity.
And, I'm pretty sure that it has to do with putting women down.
In the synagogue men
have normally worn a head covering. I still have the one I wore
whenever I spoke at a synagogue. But that's because Jews had another
way of putting women down. They made them sit in a separate area of
the synagogue, and usually a less desirable one, perhaps up in a
gallery. And rabbis were, of course, men. Some of these practices are
changing, but it's a slow process.
Among very orthodox
Jews, men grow their hair – and beards. But women, on marriage,
shave their heads. They wear wigs for the rest of their lives. As
well, orthodox women stand when a man enters the room. ( I used to
enjoy that.)
And it may be
significant that Eve tempted Adam, not the other way around.
As well, Judaic
scriptures advocate the stoning of women to death –by men.
Men could be stoned
to death, too. But to the best of my knowledge, not by women.
https://carm.org/bible-difficulties/genesis-deuteronomy/why-was-man-killed-gathering-sticks-sabbath
Now, Jesus was a
Jew, and was raised in that tradition of woman's inferiority. It's
not an accident that his apostles were all men. So, of course, it
was the apostle Paul who wrote that women's hair should be long
because it is a glory. However, it must be covered during prayer
because if uncovered it is a spiritual distraction to men.
In short, woman's
hair is a glory unto man. But man's hair is a glory unto God.
It is not an
accident that, in the Catholic faith, only men can be priests. (There
is a story of a woman in man's clothing who made it all the way to
pope. You can probably find it under Pope Joan.)
Among Protestants,
some women are now accepted in ministries, but women are still far
from equal.
Judaism,
Christianity and Islam all originated in the same region. And, to a
very considerable degree, they reflect common attitudes of the
region. One was the inferiority of women. In one group, this shows up
in making them shave their heads. In another it permits them only a
limited role in the church. And in another it calls for the hijab.
We are not nearly so
different from each other as we like to think we are.
And if you're a
woman and I meet you, and I tip my hat, it's to remind you that my
hair is a glory unto God – and yours is not. And tipping your hat
back would be rude, and perhaps simply a snare and a delusion for me.
I shall be on guard.
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