https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/19/climate-crisis-leaders-greta-thunberg
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/20/gas-industry-waging-war-against-climate-action#img
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2020/aug/20/california-fires-heatwave-wildfires-newsom
Each year the fires get worse. This year's is far the biggest.
So who are you going to believe - a young girl? Or real men who are so smart that they have enormous wealth and own governments?
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/18/justin-trudeau-scandal-prorogue-parliament
Of course Trudeau has accepted money from the super-rich. That's been true of every prime minister of Canada, Liberal or Conservative, from the start. That's why the NDP and the CCF before it had a hard time at elections. The Liberals and Conservatives had piles of money from the super rich at election time. The CCF and NDP never had the heaps of election money or the personal gifts the Liberals and Conservatives have always had.
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https://www.thetelegram.com/opinion/local-perspectives/gwynne-dyer-last-days-of-the-old-middle-east-486489
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https://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/david-suzuki/2020/08/true-recovery-means-looking-future-not-past
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https://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/views-expressed/2020/08/canada-should-withdraw-us-interest-serving-organization
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https://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/alberta-diary/2020/08/ucp-subject-matter-expert-appointee-likely-selected-insert
People commonly think of history as being the truth. Very often, it is not the truth at all. As public school child, I was taught about the glories of the British Empire. Only later, as I studied history to become an historian, did I learn that most of what I had been taught was a lie. There was nothing glorious about the British Empire. Indeed, it very closely resembled the 'glory' of Hitler's Germany.
I also came to realize that versions of history taught by professors were very much influenced by the political views, whether capitalist, socialist, communist - or whatever - of the professor. Canada's best known military historian, for example, is a fountain of praise for Canada's military. That makes it a big hit with the Canadian Legion. But it ignores some incidents in our military history - such as the Boer War, the Korean war, and Afghanistan. It's also light on how Canadian capitalists have used our military for their own advantage, and how we have a long history of fighting wars for other countries - as in Afghanistan and as in our servility to American billionaire interests in Latin America and the Middle East.
(None of what I wrote above has anything to do with criticism of those who served. It is about how we abused those who served. History should not be about "facts" - though that is what we have made it from grade one to PhD. I still remember vividly a professor from my grad school days who was attached to Britain in almost a religious sense and who went into ecstasies about it.)
History should be about learning how to make judgements of what we are told and what we read. Alas! Much of what we get is propaganda - and that goes all the way from grade 1 to Ph.D.
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https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/obama-dnc-speech-biden/
Alas! Despite his excellent speechifying, Obama is a part of the old and corrupt America that has made itself the victim of the very wealthy who have plundered that country for centuries. That's been true for both Democrats and Republicans. Some day, Americans might realize that. Maybe.
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_https://www.thenation.com/article/society/schools-teachers-covid2/
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https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/19/how-hide-fortune-during-pandemic
note - a reader whose name I have lost sent me a note critical of Common Dreams.
Alas! It came at a time when I was erasing the 20 or so posts I get every day from a pervert looking for wild sex. By accident I also erased the serious post. Could this reader send me his post again?
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https://consortiumnews.com/2020/08/19/whose-century-is-it-dont-ask-trump/
I don't much like the government of China - but this part of it is quite true.
_________________________________________________________________ https://countercurrents.org/2020/08/greenland-succumbs/
You prefer to take the word of oil executives that there ain't nuthin' happening?
Wake up. Listen to the little girl who knows what it is she's seeing.
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https://countercurrents.org/2020/08/israel-uae-bonhomie-the-dangers-ahead/
Netanyahu has accomplished what Hitler could not - a major destruction of Judaism.
_________________________________________________________________ https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/20/torturing-assange-an-interview-with-andrew-fowler/
Yes. It's true. Both the U.S. and Britain have a long history of torture.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/america-never-experienced-heatwave-like-this/5721487
________________________________________________________________ http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55476.htm
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55473.htm
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55474.htm
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55472.htm
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https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/08/20/news/greenbelt-council-environmental-advocates-urge-ford-government-reconsider-highway
The premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, loves to create an impression that he is working hard on the covid crisis - and he does that with frequent, formal and long TV appearances in which he seems very concerned. Indeed, that TV bit is so frequent and so long I don't see how he could possibly be dealing with the province's crisis at all.
As well, he has a long record of environmental destruction for the sake of the capitalists who own him. Thus his support for a plan to destroy a huge area of protected land.
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https://truthout.org/articles/the-democratic-convention-aims-for-the-center-and-spurns-progressives/
Of course. In the 'democratic' U.S. both parties are owned by the super wealthy. So there is no possibility of the American public getting any help from their government no matter who wins the election.
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Those of us who are old enough to remember the Pogo comic strip will remember Pogo's cry - "We have met the enemy. And he is us."
Gorillas might get angry sometimes. But they don't band together to kill other gorillas. Lions kill -to eat. (For that matter, we kill animals to eat.) But Lions kill only to eat. We kill for the fun of it as in hunting. I don't know of any other creature that does that. And we kill other humans in the millions, certainly not out of hunger but out of a desire for control.
I don't know of any other creature that does that. The desire to conquer and kill is the unique quality brought to us by the earliest humans. We are, by any definition I can think of, evil and destructive. And, to the best of my knowledge, no religion has ever made a dent in that. Christianity was an attempt,at the beginning, to change that. But in 2,000 years we are simply more destructive. Christians have not only continued to murder and plunder, but they have almost always done so with the blessings of their churches. So it was in World War Two that Christians who were British, American, French, Canadians, Germans, Italians happily tortured and murdered each other.
Most people, I think, who engage in such murder are not really killers, but are drawn to killing by appeals from the lustiest of killers - the very, very rich. These appear to be inheritors of a powerful impulse to kill for their own profit. Thus over the years we have had the tribal chiefs, the kings, the emperors, the aristocracies and, most recently the super rich. These have not been our intelligent people. They simply have a lust for killing and control.
So it is that we are now very close to the final war, the one that nobody can win. So it is that were are crammed in, sharing space with the most destructive weapons this world has ever seen. There is, almost certainly, no possibility of any civilization surviving the next world war.
But just about every nation is preparing for it instead of dealing with the threat.
To add to that, we are destroying our own planet with climate change, drastic exposure to heat, fire, storms..... We've known this for over thirty years. And we haven't lifted a finger. We haven't lifted it because we obey the super rich who rule based on greed with no thought for consequences.
Our planet is on the edge of destruction. The super rich are too greedy to understand that. Even now, as our planet home turns into a huge graveyard, these people who control most of our societies can understand nothing but their own greed. Take a serious look at them. These, almost all males, have actually been profiting in the disaster of hunger, homelessness and fear that hundreds of millions are living in with no hope. No, not hundreds of millions - probably billions. For the super rich, we have suffered almost endless war, endless starvation, endless fear since 1945.
Let's get real. This is not the world that millions fought for. And, more important, this is not a world that can survive what we have allowed to happen. (I long for the Canadian Legion to wake up to that. Canadians of World War 2 surely did not suffer and die for a world ravaged by the super rich. And why the hell were Canadians sent to die in Afghanistan? And why did Canadians help the U.S. to destroy democracy in Haiti? Why do they now help American and Canadian super rich as they run wild over Latin America?)
Those who fought in our wars surely did not do so for the world that our super-rich have created. The Canadian Legion should not be a cheerleader for war. But that's all it has ever been.
We are living in the greatest danger this world has ever known. We are not going to deal with it by voting for that moral trash we call Conservatives, Liberals, Democrats and Republicans.
And we have little, very very little time to act.
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