https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/20/summer-weather-is-getting-stuck-due-to-arctic-warming
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/21/arctics-strongest-sea-ice-breaks-up-for-first-time-on-record
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/16/british-columbia-wildfires-state-of-emergency-declared
https://lfpress.com/opinion/columnists/dyer-scientific-word-is-out-on-coming-hothouse-earth
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/08/20/we-are-climbing-rapidly-out-humankinds-safe-zone-new-report-warns-dire-climate
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/08/20/former-koch-industries-lawyer-turned-top-trump-epa-official-set-deliver-major-win
Contrary to the not very intelligent opinion of New Brunswick Conservative leader Blaine Higgs, capitalism is very, very unlikely to deal with climate change. Indeed, it's whole pattern for the past forty years has been to pretend it's not happening.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/20/capitalism-alone-cannot-reverse-climate-change
Indeed, one could change that headline to read "capitalism creates climate change".
_______________________________________________________________
Perhaps Blaine Higgs will tell us again how capitalism allowed to run free benefits all of us.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/21/greece-europe-eu-austerity
The reality is that capitalism has done nothing to deal with climate change and, in fact, has been making it worse for at least 30 years.
________________________________________________________________
This opinion piece has some sensible things to say about the war in Afghanistan. Alas! It also is quite false on a major point.....
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/19/its-time-to-end-americas-war-in-afghanistan
Afghanistan did NOT promote the attack of 9/11 on New York. Some people who happened to be on Afghanistan soil at the time were among the planners. But in no way did the government of Afghanistan help them. In fact, it offered to send them for trial by an international court - which is the correct way to handle these things. But the U.S. refused the offer because the U.S. wanted a war in Afghanistan. As many an empire in the past has, the U.S. wanted control of Afghanistan for its mineral wealth and geographic location.
(And, in fact, the 9/11 attackers on the U.S. were NOT Afghanis. Most were our good friends from Saudi Arabia. Others were living in Europe.) The war on Afghanistan was not caused by the people of Afghanistan. It was caused by the greed of U.S. capitalists with the cooperation of their British (and, for a time, Canadian) puppets.
________________________________________________________________
The U.S. has Trump. Ontario has Ford. In that same category - but with less sense of how to even pretend to mean anything - New Brunswick has Blaine Higgs.
http://rabble.ca/news/2018/08/doug-fords-strong-start-appeals-his-new-fans
______________________________________________________________
And some sobering thoughts for Canadians.
http://rabble.ca/news/2016/08/six-pervasive-myths-about-canada-we-must-stop-believing#at_pco=smlrebv-1.0&at_si=5b7c44fa8927015f&at_ab=per-2&at_pos=1&at_tot=5
________________________________________________________________
Capitalism is based on self-interest and greed. That's it.
Socialism is based on the social principles of Christianity and most other religions.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/08/19/its-time-reclaim-socialism-dirty-word-category
______________________________________________________________
Perhaps the outstanding feature of the world since 1945 has been the inability of the world's most agressive country, the one with the most expensive military, to win wars.
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/08/20/fifteen-years-of-forever-wars/
______________________________________________________________
Disastrous flooding in Asia has killed thousands, and made over a million homeless. What it has not done is to attract attention from the western press. But this does have meaning for us. This is part of the process of climate change.
https://countercurrents.org/2018/08/21/kerala-flood-disaster-is-not-natural-but-man-made-warning-for-india-world/
________________________________________________________________
http://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/saudi-arabia-canada-1.4781002
_____________________________________________________________
I spent much of my life as a history professor. So I know that much of the history taught in our public schools is lies. The best general and popular history of the U.S. is by Howard Zinn. But even in American universities there is a fear of using Zinn's book. In fact, some American universities forbid it.
Check your local library for it. Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States.
https://countercurrents.org/2018/08/20/zinnophobia-the-battle-over-history-in-education-politics-and-scholarship-by-david-detmer/
Also worth checking out is Terry Copp, The Anatomy of Poverty (poverty in Montreal in the late nineteenth century up to 1929.)
_______________________________________________________________
.....a story not important enough for the irving press...
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-israeli-government-has-confiscated-medical-supplies-for-gaza/5651365
_______________________________________________________________
We get lots of news reports about the disaster that is the Venezuelan economy. Prices are wildly out of control. tens of thousands have had to flee the country. What we're not getting is any account of how this disaster has happened.
So here's how... And it happened just like the economic suffering of Cuba, of North Korea and anybody else American capitalists don't like.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-united-states-destroys-venezuelas-economy/5651054
________________________________________________________________
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50079.htm
______________________________________________________________
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50074.htm
______________________________________________________________
New Brunswickers aren't worried about the glyphosate being sprayed on them. And the Liberals and Conservatives aren't worried. After all, Mr. Irving who demands the spraying, is a man who owns his own Christian church. So there.
(Somehow, though, I don't think this is what Jesus had in mind.)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50065.htm
______________________________________________________________
https://off-guardian.org/2018/08/20/they-lied-to-you-about-iran/
__________________________________________________________
We are living through what appears to be a realignment of the world's nations. China and Russia, for example, are now both prominent in the middle east. Europe is showing signs of moving closer to Russia. American influence is on the slide. The U.S. goal from 1945 was world conquest. But it lost China almost from the start. The U.S. appears to have lost its chance to rule the world. - But it still has the chance to destroy it.
https://theantimedia.com/china-defies-us-pressure-iran-sanctions/
_________________________________________________________________
Despite the boastful sign "Mission Accomplished" that hung from the bridge of a ship bringing American troops home from Iraq, the reality is that the US did not win the Iraq War - just as it didn't win in Afghanistan, Yemen, Vietnam, North Korea....
https://theantimedia.com/pentagon-us-forces-stay-iraq/
________________________________________________________________
It can be done. It won't be done by either Conservatives or Liberals in the province of New Brunswick.
https://truthout.org/articles/if-ireland-can-get-out-of-fossil-fuels-your-town-can-too/
_________________________________________________________________
The New Brunswick corner.
I didn't blog on Saturday. I was down at the shore (without my computer) enjoying an almost tropical rain after all the heat of this summer.
Too bad, because Saturday's paper had an opinion column worth studying for its many signs of feeble-mindedness.
It was written by Blaine Higgs, leader of the 'Progressive' Conservative party in this province. (I wish they would drop that word 'progressive'. Despite the conservative claims that it has meaning, the reality is that in this context it means nothing at all. This goes back to the 1930s when the Conservative Party was looking for a new leader. The man it wanted was already the leader of a party called the Progressive Party. But he would not accept the leadership of the conservatives unless they added 'progressive' to its title. The Conservatives were happy to do that since the so-called progressive party had nothing progressive about it. It was really just a conservative party in drag. And so the Progressive Conservative Party was born. And the words don't mean a damn thing because the party has never been either progressive or conservative.)
It is a stunningly shallow and ignorant column.
For a start, Blaine Higgs gives us not hint of what political parties are (or should be.) That's not surprising. But they should be about a political philosophy, a belief in some general purpose of politics. It's no like a business. Not at all. A real politician does not start with just a simple 'fix it' idea. That is how business works. But politics start, or should start, with a sense of human values, of social needs. But nowhere in his column does Blaine Higgs show the slightest awareness of that.
You can see a sense of these values in the Greens and the NDP. These values are there starting point. But Mr. Higgs sees the world as a sort of fast-food outlet whose only purpose is to make profits. There is more, much more, to human life than that.
We need to deal with fossil fuels? With the destructiveness of fossil fuels? We have - with luck - ten years to deal with it? Well, that's no problem for the Hick's insight. It's just like keeping an office tidy, keeping costs down. So first, says Mr. Higgs, oh, first and above all, we need to make big business in this province richer. Yes. Then it will fix things. Yes.
I mean, we need rich people to solve our problem. I mean, they know how to fix things. It does not occurs to the Higgs of this world that it is the rich people who have created the problem and who have, for almost 40 years, refused to act on it, and who have made it worse.
In an insight into he priorities, he attacks people who look forward to electric cars. That's not for Mr. Higgs. No. Before he would consider an electric car, he would insist on knowing what its acceleration is like.
So he's against a carbon tax to work on the development of climate change. No. he prefers our old system of letting the rich deal with these problems. (And he prefers the rich who got rich selling oil to also be left alone to solve poverty, crime, elder care..... It does not occur to this former executive for rich people that it is the greed of the rich which creates poverty, crime, the need for elder care - and they've been doing that for thousands of years of world history.)
And says, Mr. Higgs, he will cut off government gifts to people like the bosses of Sears or TD Bank. Funny thing, though, he doesn't mention cutting government gifts to companies like, say, Irving - though he surely knows our biggest recipient of gifts is Irving enterprises which, just for a start, pays no income tax.
Then, in one sentence, he shows that he has no intention of doing anything. He say, "We rely our our cars to get around." How's that for a stirring call to deal with the problem?
This is a crashingly ignorant column by a man with nothing that could be called a political philosophy, with no sense of the need for a social philosophy in operating a society. The only concern I could detect was to save his former boss at Irving enterprises from any inconvenience.
Let the rich keep their money - and they will save us? That is a crashingly ignorant statement that only a fool could make. The reality is that we have historically been poor BECAUSE of the greed of our rich. In the years after 1945, we made a start of putting a lie on that greed and diverting more money to the Canadian people. But that didn't last. For the last fifty years or so, we have suffered a declining standard of living - and it's the rich who have been laughing. That is heading us to a disaster - and disaster is the only possibility that Blaine Higgs will achieve.
No. This is a man ignorant of even the basic principles of political leadership. His only policy is the one that New Brunswick has followed for over 150 years - give the rich whatever they want. And to hell with the rest of the population.
Send him back to his desk at irving enterprises, counting paper clips.
_______________________________________________________________
The Monday issue of The Moncton Times and Transcript was better with a long story "More heat, drought and longer fire season in future". And a major story on the very dangerous fires in BC. These are both stories that just a short time ago, the irving press would not have carried.
Also on Monday, note two columns on Canada's first prime minister, John A. Macdonald.
Many years ago, I was given a highly acclaimed biography of John A. It was by a very distinguished professor named Donald Creighton. Like Winston Churchill, he was a captivating writer. Certainly, both of them were what induced me to quit teaching, and go back to school to study history.
And, over those years and much, much more reading, I learned that both Creighton and Churchill wrote pure bunk.
John A. was a drunk. He was a clever drunk, though. He could work out deals in parliament. He was good at managing politics. But he was a front man for wealthy British investors (as railways) and, in Canada, for the business leaders of Montreal. Well, not just a front man. He was on the take. Big time. (If you're ever in Ottawa, take a look at his house there. It's now, I think, the British embassy. He didn't buy that on his political salary.) In fact, being on the take was a feature of his Conservative party. His right hand man, Cartier, lived well. So did one of his successors, Sir Charles Tupper of Amherst, Nova Scotia. Sir Charles, especially, was BIG time. (Sir Charles was also an admirer of women. He admired them so much, he was commonly known as The Cumberland Ram.)
As well as being on the take, John A. was also a ruthless, even murderous man. That's was particularly true of his murders of the aboriginal people of the west, and the French/aboriginal mixed bloods of the region. There's an excellent column on this on the Commentary page of August 20. It's by Robert Alexander Innes of University of Saskatchewan.
Alas! It is accompanied by a column from Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a so-called "independent" think tank. (That means it churns out propaganda for the billionaires who finance it - a system that irving editors are fond of.) This column looks nice in saying we should see the good as well as the bad in all people. That certainly sounds nice.
I look forward to a column about the good part of Hitler and Stalin. (And George Bush Jr.)
________________________________________________________________
The Monday (August 20) addition also had a letter to the editor which I found startling. Called 'Better Targets than Saudi Arabia', it attacked Fidel Castro as one of the most horrible killers of our time - a despot who murdered anyone who disagreed with him, and who made all his family into millionaires, and who suppressed human rights. He was according to the letter a far worse offender of human rights than is the government of Saudi Arabia.
Now, a good newspaper will allow some letters to the editor despite errors and omissions. But in any GOOD newspaper there are limits - really. And this one is really off the wall.
The country that imposed dictators, murderers, fortune builders, torturers to rule Cuba was not Castro. It was God Bless America that did it from 1920 or so to 1959. The U.S. installed dictators, notably the ruthless murderer General Batista who troops murdered Cubans at random, who tortured, who made Cuba a happy base for American criminal bosses. His troops happily roamed the streets to murder, rob, torture, rape as they felt like it. It was one of the most brutal regimes in world history. It made education virtually impossible for most Cubans, forced Cubans into permanent poverty to please American corporation bosses.....
When Castor overthrew Batista, most Cubans happily embraced him. Some Cubans did flee to Florida, though. And guess which side they had been on.
The mighty U.S. responded to his insolence by sponsoring an invasion, and by bombing Cuba. (I flew over Cuba about 1960 on the way to Jamaica, and saw the American bomb craters and ruined buildings below.)
The 'evil' Castro then, for the first time in history, established free public education in Cuba. He even made university free, something the U.S. and Canada still haven't done. And to this day, the doctors produced by Castro's education system serve in Cuba, Latin America, and all over the world. And Cuba, unlike the rich United States, offers its people universal medical care.
The U.S. has never let up on Cuba. It hired Batista thugs to blow up tourist buildings and, once, to blow up a Cuban civil airliner killing all aboard. It also imposed trade sanctions to keep Cuba poor and, to this day, the U.S. keeps Cubans in poverty.
But in all these years, Cubans have been happy to continue the Castro revolution. They suffer for it; they suffer heavily; - but not as much as they did under the U.S. and Castro.
The U.S. has been treating Haiti even worse for a century. Indeed, it has been a massive killer, plunderer, torturer all over Latin America. But that, too, I guess, is unknown to the editors of the irving press.
None of this bears any resemblance to the raving letter to the editor in Monday's paper.
A responsible and intelligent newspaper editor would never have run that letter. Either the editors have no brains at all - or they deliberately encourage lying to the public.
_________________________________________________________________
It's been a depressing day reading the news. And, most strikingly, I am astonished at the utter failure of our Christian churches to even try to bring Christian principles to bear. Indeed, I can no longer distinguish Christians from Liberals and Conservatives.
________________________________________________________________
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/21/arctics-strongest-sea-ice-breaks-up-for-first-time-on-record
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/16/british-columbia-wildfires-state-of-emergency-declared
https://lfpress.com/opinion/columnists/dyer-scientific-word-is-out-on-coming-hothouse-earth
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/08/20/we-are-climbing-rapidly-out-humankinds-safe-zone-new-report-warns-dire-climate
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/08/20/former-koch-industries-lawyer-turned-top-trump-epa-official-set-deliver-major-win
Contrary to the not very intelligent opinion of New Brunswick Conservative leader Blaine Higgs, capitalism is very, very unlikely to deal with climate change. Indeed, it's whole pattern for the past forty years has been to pretend it's not happening.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/20/capitalism-alone-cannot-reverse-climate-change
Indeed, one could change that headline to read "capitalism creates climate change".
_______________________________________________________________
Perhaps Blaine Higgs will tell us again how capitalism allowed to run free benefits all of us.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/21/greece-europe-eu-austerity
The reality is that capitalism has done nothing to deal with climate change and, in fact, has been making it worse for at least 30 years.
________________________________________________________________
This opinion piece has some sensible things to say about the war in Afghanistan. Alas! It also is quite false on a major point.....
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/19/its-time-to-end-americas-war-in-afghanistan
Afghanistan did NOT promote the attack of 9/11 on New York. Some people who happened to be on Afghanistan soil at the time were among the planners. But in no way did the government of Afghanistan help them. In fact, it offered to send them for trial by an international court - which is the correct way to handle these things. But the U.S. refused the offer because the U.S. wanted a war in Afghanistan. As many an empire in the past has, the U.S. wanted control of Afghanistan for its mineral wealth and geographic location.
(And, in fact, the 9/11 attackers on the U.S. were NOT Afghanis. Most were our good friends from Saudi Arabia. Others were living in Europe.) The war on Afghanistan was not caused by the people of Afghanistan. It was caused by the greed of U.S. capitalists with the cooperation of their British (and, for a time, Canadian) puppets.
________________________________________________________________
The U.S. has Trump. Ontario has Ford. In that same category - but with less sense of how to even pretend to mean anything - New Brunswick has Blaine Higgs.
http://rabble.ca/news/2018/08/doug-fords-strong-start-appeals-his-new-fans
______________________________________________________________
And some sobering thoughts for Canadians.
http://rabble.ca/news/2016/08/six-pervasive-myths-about-canada-we-must-stop-believing#at_pco=smlrebv-1.0&at_si=5b7c44fa8927015f&at_ab=per-2&at_pos=1&at_tot=5
________________________________________________________________
Capitalism is based on self-interest and greed. That's it.
Socialism is based on the social principles of Christianity and most other religions.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/08/19/its-time-reclaim-socialism-dirty-word-category
______________________________________________________________
Perhaps the outstanding feature of the world since 1945 has been the inability of the world's most agressive country, the one with the most expensive military, to win wars.
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/08/20/fifteen-years-of-forever-wars/
______________________________________________________________
Disastrous flooding in Asia has killed thousands, and made over a million homeless. What it has not done is to attract attention from the western press. But this does have meaning for us. This is part of the process of climate change.
https://countercurrents.org/2018/08/21/kerala-flood-disaster-is-not-natural-but-man-made-warning-for-india-world/
________________________________________________________________
http://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/saudi-arabia-canada-1.4781002
_____________________________________________________________
I spent much of my life as a history professor. So I know that much of the history taught in our public schools is lies. The best general and popular history of the U.S. is by Howard Zinn. But even in American universities there is a fear of using Zinn's book. In fact, some American universities forbid it.
Check your local library for it. Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States.
https://countercurrents.org/2018/08/20/zinnophobia-the-battle-over-history-in-education-politics-and-scholarship-by-david-detmer/
Also worth checking out is Terry Copp, The Anatomy of Poverty (poverty in Montreal in the late nineteenth century up to 1929.)
_______________________________________________________________
.....a story not important enough for the irving press...
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-israeli-government-has-confiscated-medical-supplies-for-gaza/5651365
_______________________________________________________________
We get lots of news reports about the disaster that is the Venezuelan economy. Prices are wildly out of control. tens of thousands have had to flee the country. What we're not getting is any account of how this disaster has happened.
So here's how... And it happened just like the economic suffering of Cuba, of North Korea and anybody else American capitalists don't like.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-united-states-destroys-venezuelas-economy/5651054
________________________________________________________________
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50079.htm
______________________________________________________________
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50074.htm
______________________________________________________________
New Brunswickers aren't worried about the glyphosate being sprayed on them. And the Liberals and Conservatives aren't worried. After all, Mr. Irving who demands the spraying, is a man who owns his own Christian church. So there.
(Somehow, though, I don't think this is what Jesus had in mind.)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50065.htm
______________________________________________________________
https://off-guardian.org/2018/08/20/they-lied-to-you-about-iran/
__________________________________________________________
We are living through what appears to be a realignment of the world's nations. China and Russia, for example, are now both prominent in the middle east. Europe is showing signs of moving closer to Russia. American influence is on the slide. The U.S. goal from 1945 was world conquest. But it lost China almost from the start. The U.S. appears to have lost its chance to rule the world. - But it still has the chance to destroy it.
https://theantimedia.com/china-defies-us-pressure-iran-sanctions/
_________________________________________________________________
Despite the boastful sign "Mission Accomplished" that hung from the bridge of a ship bringing American troops home from Iraq, the reality is that the US did not win the Iraq War - just as it didn't win in Afghanistan, Yemen, Vietnam, North Korea....
https://theantimedia.com/pentagon-us-forces-stay-iraq/
________________________________________________________________
It can be done. It won't be done by either Conservatives or Liberals in the province of New Brunswick.
https://truthout.org/articles/if-ireland-can-get-out-of-fossil-fuels-your-town-can-too/
_________________________________________________________________
The New Brunswick corner.
I didn't blog on Saturday. I was down at the shore (without my computer) enjoying an almost tropical rain after all the heat of this summer.
Too bad, because Saturday's paper had an opinion column worth studying for its many signs of feeble-mindedness.
It was written by Blaine Higgs, leader of the 'Progressive' Conservative party in this province. (I wish they would drop that word 'progressive'. Despite the conservative claims that it has meaning, the reality is that in this context it means nothing at all. This goes back to the 1930s when the Conservative Party was looking for a new leader. The man it wanted was already the leader of a party called the Progressive Party. But he would not accept the leadership of the conservatives unless they added 'progressive' to its title. The Conservatives were happy to do that since the so-called progressive party had nothing progressive about it. It was really just a conservative party in drag. And so the Progressive Conservative Party was born. And the words don't mean a damn thing because the party has never been either progressive or conservative.)
It is a stunningly shallow and ignorant column.
For a start, Blaine Higgs gives us not hint of what political parties are (or should be.) That's not surprising. But they should be about a political philosophy, a belief in some general purpose of politics. It's no like a business. Not at all. A real politician does not start with just a simple 'fix it' idea. That is how business works. But politics start, or should start, with a sense of human values, of social needs. But nowhere in his column does Blaine Higgs show the slightest awareness of that.
You can see a sense of these values in the Greens and the NDP. These values are there starting point. But Mr. Higgs sees the world as a sort of fast-food outlet whose only purpose is to make profits. There is more, much more, to human life than that.
We need to deal with fossil fuels? With the destructiveness of fossil fuels? We have - with luck - ten years to deal with it? Well, that's no problem for the Hick's insight. It's just like keeping an office tidy, keeping costs down. So first, says Mr. Higgs, oh, first and above all, we need to make big business in this province richer. Yes. Then it will fix things. Yes.
I mean, we need rich people to solve our problem. I mean, they know how to fix things. It does not occurs to the Higgs of this world that it is the rich people who have created the problem and who have, for almost 40 years, refused to act on it, and who have made it worse.
In an insight into he priorities, he attacks people who look forward to electric cars. That's not for Mr. Higgs. No. Before he would consider an electric car, he would insist on knowing what its acceleration is like.
So he's against a carbon tax to work on the development of climate change. No. he prefers our old system of letting the rich deal with these problems. (And he prefers the rich who got rich selling oil to also be left alone to solve poverty, crime, elder care..... It does not occur to this former executive for rich people that it is the greed of the rich which creates poverty, crime, the need for elder care - and they've been doing that for thousands of years of world history.)
And says, Mr. Higgs, he will cut off government gifts to people like the bosses of Sears or TD Bank. Funny thing, though, he doesn't mention cutting government gifts to companies like, say, Irving - though he surely knows our biggest recipient of gifts is Irving enterprises which, just for a start, pays no income tax.
Then, in one sentence, he shows that he has no intention of doing anything. He say, "We rely our our cars to get around." How's that for a stirring call to deal with the problem?
This is a crashingly ignorant column by a man with nothing that could be called a political philosophy, with no sense of the need for a social philosophy in operating a society. The only concern I could detect was to save his former boss at Irving enterprises from any inconvenience.
Let the rich keep their money - and they will save us? That is a crashingly ignorant statement that only a fool could make. The reality is that we have historically been poor BECAUSE of the greed of our rich. In the years after 1945, we made a start of putting a lie on that greed and diverting more money to the Canadian people. But that didn't last. For the last fifty years or so, we have suffered a declining standard of living - and it's the rich who have been laughing. That is heading us to a disaster - and disaster is the only possibility that Blaine Higgs will achieve.
No. This is a man ignorant of even the basic principles of political leadership. His only policy is the one that New Brunswick has followed for over 150 years - give the rich whatever they want. And to hell with the rest of the population.
Send him back to his desk at irving enterprises, counting paper clips.
_______________________________________________________________
The Monday issue of The Moncton Times and Transcript was better with a long story "More heat, drought and longer fire season in future". And a major story on the very dangerous fires in BC. These are both stories that just a short time ago, the irving press would not have carried.
Also on Monday, note two columns on Canada's first prime minister, John A. Macdonald.
Many years ago, I was given a highly acclaimed biography of John A. It was by a very distinguished professor named Donald Creighton. Like Winston Churchill, he was a captivating writer. Certainly, both of them were what induced me to quit teaching, and go back to school to study history.
And, over those years and much, much more reading, I learned that both Creighton and Churchill wrote pure bunk.
John A. was a drunk. He was a clever drunk, though. He could work out deals in parliament. He was good at managing politics. But he was a front man for wealthy British investors (as railways) and, in Canada, for the business leaders of Montreal. Well, not just a front man. He was on the take. Big time. (If you're ever in Ottawa, take a look at his house there. It's now, I think, the British embassy. He didn't buy that on his political salary.) In fact, being on the take was a feature of his Conservative party. His right hand man, Cartier, lived well. So did one of his successors, Sir Charles Tupper of Amherst, Nova Scotia. Sir Charles, especially, was BIG time. (Sir Charles was also an admirer of women. He admired them so much, he was commonly known as The Cumberland Ram.)
As well as being on the take, John A. was also a ruthless, even murderous man. That's was particularly true of his murders of the aboriginal people of the west, and the French/aboriginal mixed bloods of the region. There's an excellent column on this on the Commentary page of August 20. It's by Robert Alexander Innes of University of Saskatchewan.
Alas! It is accompanied by a column from Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a so-called "independent" think tank. (That means it churns out propaganda for the billionaires who finance it - a system that irving editors are fond of.) This column looks nice in saying we should see the good as well as the bad in all people. That certainly sounds nice.
I look forward to a column about the good part of Hitler and Stalin. (And George Bush Jr.)
________________________________________________________________
The Monday (August 20) addition also had a letter to the editor which I found startling. Called 'Better Targets than Saudi Arabia', it attacked Fidel Castro as one of the most horrible killers of our time - a despot who murdered anyone who disagreed with him, and who made all his family into millionaires, and who suppressed human rights. He was according to the letter a far worse offender of human rights than is the government of Saudi Arabia.
Now, a good newspaper will allow some letters to the editor despite errors and omissions. But in any GOOD newspaper there are limits - really. And this one is really off the wall.
The country that imposed dictators, murderers, fortune builders, torturers to rule Cuba was not Castro. It was God Bless America that did it from 1920 or so to 1959. The U.S. installed dictators, notably the ruthless murderer General Batista who troops murdered Cubans at random, who tortured, who made Cuba a happy base for American criminal bosses. His troops happily roamed the streets to murder, rob, torture, rape as they felt like it. It was one of the most brutal regimes in world history. It made education virtually impossible for most Cubans, forced Cubans into permanent poverty to please American corporation bosses.....
When Castor overthrew Batista, most Cubans happily embraced him. Some Cubans did flee to Florida, though. And guess which side they had been on.
The mighty U.S. responded to his insolence by sponsoring an invasion, and by bombing Cuba. (I flew over Cuba about 1960 on the way to Jamaica, and saw the American bomb craters and ruined buildings below.)
The 'evil' Castro then, for the first time in history, established free public education in Cuba. He even made university free, something the U.S. and Canada still haven't done. And to this day, the doctors produced by Castro's education system serve in Cuba, Latin America, and all over the world. And Cuba, unlike the rich United States, offers its people universal medical care.
The U.S. has never let up on Cuba. It hired Batista thugs to blow up tourist buildings and, once, to blow up a Cuban civil airliner killing all aboard. It also imposed trade sanctions to keep Cuba poor and, to this day, the U.S. keeps Cubans in poverty.
But in all these years, Cubans have been happy to continue the Castro revolution. They suffer for it; they suffer heavily; - but not as much as they did under the U.S. and Castro.
The U.S. has been treating Haiti even worse for a century. Indeed, it has been a massive killer, plunderer, torturer all over Latin America. But that, too, I guess, is unknown to the editors of the irving press.
None of this bears any resemblance to the raving letter to the editor in Monday's paper.
A responsible and intelligent newspaper editor would never have run that letter. Either the editors have no brains at all - or they deliberately encourage lying to the public.
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It's been a depressing day reading the news. And, most strikingly, I am astonished at the utter failure of our Christian churches to even try to bring Christian principles to bear. Indeed, I can no longer distinguish Christians from Liberals and Conservatives.
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