February 20: Where are we going?

I haven't proofread this day's blog because I started a bit late, and it's now time for this child to go to bed.
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https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgxwGDNWQqqmsdDjxTkKBjbZkTTDx
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/19/oil-gas-industry-far-worse-climate-impact-than-thought-fossil-fuels-methane
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https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/feb/20/julian-assange-case-is-the-dreyfus-of-our-age-says-john-mcdonnell

We didn't defeat Hitler. We copied him.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/20/hindu-supremacists-nationalism-tearing-india-apart-modi-bjp-rss-jnu-attacks

India has fallen a long way since the days of Ghandi. A good site for coverage of this is   countercurrents.agitate      (Do not confuse it with countercurrents which is an American white racist site.)
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/20/fates-humans-insects-intertwined-scientists-population-collapse
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When I was teaching in The Netherlands,  I once decided to take a walk along a neighbouring street. To my suprise, many of the houses featured women in bras and panty-hose standing in windows.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/19/amsterdam-is-considering-moving-red-light-district-indoors#img-1
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https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/rcmp-withdraw-bc-1.5469669

There's still a long way to go.  There's a question the government is not answering and that our news media are pretty silent about on the greater issue of native peoples across Canada, the theft of their land by murder.

Canadians live on stolen land. Yes, the native peoples who lived here were actually real people who died of our neglect to help them survive the diseases we brought them. We killed their children, taking them from their parents to suffer in "residential" schools were large numbers died. And yes, we murdered them in wars our history books seldom mention. We destroyed societies that in many ways were superior to ours. Women, for example, were much more important in native societies than women are even in the Canada of today.

Not long ago, we made a big noise about our need to help them recover from the damage we have done.  It sounded good. But we did virtually nothing.
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https://rabble.ca/news/2020/02/politics-wetsuweten-crisis-are-thorny-and-dangerous
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https://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/judy-rebicks-blog/2020/02/somethings-happening-here

I  hate to say it, but rabble.ca is often a better source of news than CBC. That's because CBC has to deal with interference from people who don't want the truth to be told. I had experience of that in my days at CBC.
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https://rabble.ca/news/2020/02/isnt-just-union-fight-its-working-class-fight-ontario-federation-labour
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https://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/alberta-diary/2020/02/canadas-conservative-movement-threatens-country-more-non

Ontario? Alberta? It's the Canadian people who voted their leaders. The biggest problem Canada faces is not railway blockades. The biggest problem is the corrupt and thieving Liberals and Conservative candidates the Canadian people have always voted for.
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https://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/david-suzuki/2020/02/beyond-climate-ventures-heart-rapidly-heating-bc
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https://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/brent-patterson/2020/02/billions-earmarked-fighter-jets-another-strike-against
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https://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/journalism-doctor/2020/02/legacy-medias-shameful-whitesplaining-wetsuweten-land
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https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/michael-bloomberg-debate-democrats/
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https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/canada-pharmacare-single-payer/

In the eyes of the very wealthy, the purpose of health care is to make themselves wealthier. Canada is not as bad as the U.S. in this. But the pressure is on to make it as bad as the U.S.
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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/los-angeles-olympics-trump/
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https://lfpress.com/opinion/columnists/dyer-japan-germanys-anti-nuke-pro-coal-power-policies-defy-reason
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https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/20/sanders-hits-bloomberg-grotesque-statistic-billionaire-owns-more-wealth-bottom-125
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https://consortiumnews.com/2020/02/20/bloombergs-rising-polls-show-power-of-billionaire-narrative-control/
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https://countercurrents.org/2020/02/river-in-flood-ravaged-uk-town-reaches-highest-level-in-200-years-following-storm-dennis

Three devastating storms, and with signs of more to come. I wonder what this means. So far, nobody has addressed that question.
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https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/20/shut-down-canada-until-it-solves-its-war-oil-and-genocide-problem/
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https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/20/canada-trapped-by-its-own-folly/

To Canadians - betcha you won't see this story in your local newspapers.
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Or this one.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/19/canada-get-out-of-the-lima-group-core-group-and-oas/
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https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2020/02/18/Hiding-Behind-One-Rule-Of-Law-Myth-Wetsuweten/
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/netanyahu-dock-set-march-17/5704139

 Netanyahoo's corruption and thievery has long ago been made known by the excellent Israeli paper, Haaretz. Too bad so few of our western journalists read Haaretz.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/trumps-budget-more-warfare-slightly-less-welfare/5703985
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/53003.htm
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/53005.htm
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https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/02/20/news/tensions-mount-pipeline-protests-continue-across-canada
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https://off-guardian.org/2020/02/20/michael-bloomberg-the-democrats-billionaire-strawman/
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https://truthout.org/articles/mick-mulvaney-says-gop-wont-act-on-climate-because-they-dont-want-higher-taxes/
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https://truthout.org/articles/six-key-questions-we-should-be-asking-about-the-uss-never-ending-wars/
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As I wrote this, I thought of the British Empire. Just as Hitler did, it plundered huge areas and not only used the conquered people as something close to slave labour and deliberately starved millions to death. It also used the bulk of the British people as soldiers to be sent to war for almost no pay at all. And, when they were no longer useful, they were dumped in the streets.

Nor did any profits of the Empire reach the pockets of the British people. They starved and died in the streets of British cities that were notorious for having some of the worst slums in Europe.

And the children? Well, the children of the rich, like Winston Churchill, could grow up in palaces with servants. (Churchill's wealthy parents paid no sttention to him, of course. Both were two busy with sexual adventures.) But the children of the poor were sent into factories as early as age 5 to work as much as fifteen hours a day, six days a week.. And their salaries were in pennies. All the benefit of the Empire went to the very wealthy.

And we resemble that more than one might think.

The U.S. Empire, like the British one, plunders it's victims, reduces them to poverty - and treats the poor of its own nation much, really, as the British aristocracy treated theirs. it treated very large numbers of people into low, low paid jobs, often dangerous jobs. This improved slightly in the early twentieth century as unions entered the picture. But by the 1950s, as unions weakened,   the poor were simply dumped in the streets. That's why, now, most Americans have no access to medical care, many live in the streets, children go hungry - all to make a handful of the very rich even richer. Higher education (much like Canada) has become impossible for the poor who are thus condemned to stay poor.

And, as in the days of the British Empire, monstrous profits go into the pockets of the super rich. So it is that a not very intelligent man like Donald Trump can rise to billions. Alas! Things are not much different in Canada.

Oh, and a rising American candidate for president is Bloomberg, a Democrat just as vicious as any Republican. And he is campaigning on a platform to make the poor poorer and the rich richer. (Bloomberg has more money than all of the 150,000,000 Americans on the low scale put together.)

We are seeing a world which is not what we fought for in 1939. Hitler, too, ruled to serve the interests of the German wealthy. And we, immediately after the war, started to plunder the world's and our own poor.

If anything, the U.S. has been even worse with it's mass murder of innocent people, especially civilians and children, all over the world.

The U.S. has been constantly at war starting in 1950. Officially, it has fought some 70 wars in that time. In reality, the undeclared  number of wars is even higher.  Ever since it's early Pilgrim days, the U.S. saw itself as doing God's will in the mass murder of native peoples. That concept became even worse when the U.S. invaded Cuba in 1900, the beginning of the mass murder and starvation of millions of Latin Americans.  Theodore Roosevelt was quite clear about the American mission. They were (as the British had been) destined to conquer and rule.

So it is that American agents can murder people all over the world - like an Iranian general - without bothering to declare war. So it is that the U.S. is allowed, again without declaring war,  to starve children to death in Venezuela. (And Trudeau obediently claps hands.)

We allow our wealthy to get wealthier by using our tax money to fight wars for the profit of the very wealthy. That's what we did in Afghanistan.

We've acted that way for over 2,000 years. But it's now on a much bigger scale than the world has ever seen and with far, far more powerful weapons. And that can only end in total destruction - probably soon.

But Canadians blindly follow the Liberals and Conservatives - the two of them really the same party.  And Americans blindly follow the Republicans and Democrats - both of whom are pretty much the same party.

The U.S. never really had a revolution. It simply replaced British plunderers with American ones. And Canada has never really had a democracy.

We have very little time to catch up. Meanwhile, our national leaders are plundering us to match the American plundering of both Canada and the U.S.

It's going to crash. (Unless we wake up.)
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