Jan. 9: Yesterday was my lucky day.

I found a free copy of the St. John Telegraph at a Macdonald's which obviously draws a more intellectual clientele than the others. (the others had only the TandT.) So I turned to the editorial page. What a suprise!

The editor of the Telegraph chose the same topic for his editorial as his counterpart for the TandT. It was the book from a The Carlisle Institute, an organization that exists to serve the rich. In this case, the book urged lower taxes for the rich (already very low, indeed) as the solution to the world's economic problems.

And guess what? Both editors thought this was a wonderful idea. I mean, just think about it. There are over thirty newspapers in New Brunswick, all of them owned by Irving. That means a total of 60 lips all reaching to kiss the same rear end. My, it must get crowded in there.
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I presume that Rod Allen is not familiar with yiddish. That would explain why he did not delete the word schmuck in the last letter on the Letters to the Editor page. Commonly, the word is used simply to denote a person who is a jerk. But the real meaning is coarsely sexual. It is a word that would surely have been deleted if it had been written in English.

(I won't tell you the meaning here, because children might read it. But you and the kids could check out yiddish schmuck in Google. Hint - a schmuck is not a person, just a part of one. And a lady cannot be called a schmuck - even if she is.)

Also avoid the term shiksas when referring to the virtuous ladies of your local church.  And putz - no, no, never.
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The front has two items that are not news so much as they are propaganda to please the real bosses of that TandT. Both are written in a  highly fanciful style, aimed to build consent more than to encourage any thought.

Under "Development prospects excite Moncton native" and "Events centre a catalyst" are two stories that are short on information, and long on soppiness. One for example, dwells on how the purchaser of land at Highgate Square bought it because he's from Moncton, and wanted to renew his roots in the city.

(He now lives in Toronto. But I guess he misses the exciting cultural life of Moncton, and watching the tidal bore).

Heck, he already owns the Crown Plaza Hotel. I should have thought that would have given him enough motive to check in every year or so.

The other news story that isn't a news story has Brent Mazerolle at his web slinging best in saying this just proves what a great idea the hockey rink (sorry, Events Centre) is.

This is simply and simple-minded hype to suck us into debt at the worst time to go into debt since 1929.
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Concerning the Plaster Rock train derailment, there's a whole page of pictures on C3 that tell us nothing. However, it's safe to print lots about the Plaster Rock affair. There appears to be nobody important from New Brunswick involved in this one.

But I wonder how the police raid at Irving offices concerning the 47 killed at Lac Megantic went. I haven't seen anything about it.
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The biggest news is the editorial page. The editorial writer, Norbert, and Alec Bruce all write on climate change - and they all agree it's real. Norbert's column is a little tangled as he tries to find middle ground by admitting change is happening, but arguing against the politicization of climate change.

How on earth could one wake up the world to climate change without politicizing it? Politics is how we deal with these issues. It's what politics is for.

The climate change deniers have been heavily politicized from the start - handing out money to  "think tanks" and politicians (and newspapers) to play down the idea of climate change. One of their greatest conquests has been Stephen Harper and he has certainly politicized the issue by claiming it's not happening, and refusing to do anything about it.

Rod Allen reverts to type, and writes a column that trivializes the whole thing. Despite his title, I cannot believe he wrote the editorial that accepted the reality of climate change.  If he did, then he must suffer a dreadful personality disorder.

Then, in a bizarre touch, we have a final opinion column written by a former big-time exec who says all this talk of environmental problems created by resource development is nonsense. (Climate change IS an environmental problem, and it IS caused by resource development like, say, oil. And to say, as this retired exec does)  that oil spills don't happen is just absurd. There have been so many of them, I doubt whether anyone has an accurate count).

Is this CEO lying? Probably not. He's probably one of those people who believe - honestly, intently, and absolutely whatever they want to believe. I've know many of the type. They're called ideologues.
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And now, I must rush off to a medical appointment to find out how much of an environmental risk I am.

Jan. 8: The column I never expected to see....

....but let's start with the small stuff.

The cheap shot of the year  can be found among letters to the editor.  "Mrs. Crocker, hang your head in shame" (headline written by the editor) is a letter responding to a ranting editorial that attacked the cutback in the use of incandescent light bulbs.

The letter correctly points out several errors that not only refute the editorial, but also points out that the editorial writer doesn't even understand basic terms relating to light bulbs.

In a forty line letter, one line refers to the use of light bulbs in the Better Crocker Easy Bake Oven - an item to editorial had mentioned for some reason that is not clear to me.

At the bottom of the letter, the editor has added a note in bold print. In my years of following the TandT I have never seen such a editorial note used. Indeed, it is rare to see it in any newspaper. So I figured this has to be a major point.

In fact, it is a ten-line response made to the one line about the Betty Crocker Oven which, for all its virtues, is hardly a major factor in New Brunswick's power consumption. The editor's ungracious note says, "It turns out that the author is right that the editor is wrong about the Better Crocker Easy Bake Oven, but for the wrong reasons. The original version used two 100-Watt incandescent bulbs. but modern models use an actual heating element instead of bulbs."

What the editor has done is to ignore almost all of the letter's valid and important points in order to announce his error on a point that couldn't matter less. That is petty, misleading, and very bad journalism.
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As I suggested yesterday, the  story about the mayor of Fredericton's clownish and illegal behaviour with regard to the Occupy group didn't make it into today's paper. I guess they needed the space for a big story about plans to tear down a former strip club. (For those who get feelings of excitement at that, check out p. A3.)
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Those with a taste for the bizarre will love the lead story in Your Business. It's about the Canadian Federation of Independent Business having a meeting with the premier. (Anybody can meet with the premier any time. Just give him a call.) The federation is looking for tax breaks.  Well, of course. It's terrible the way those people suffer.

You can just see the suffering in the face of the big photo the article features of the president of the federation. It's obvious he needs a loving mother to take him home for a meal. Just looking at him makes one think of all those who live below the poverty line in this province.

By contrast, page A3 has an excellent report by reporter Allison Toogood. The headline is "Poverty reduction moving slowly: annual review".

The story is about the Common Front for Social Justice's annual review of what the provincial government has done to honour its pledges to help the poor. The bottom line is that it's doing as little as it can get away with. To quote the report, "David Alward's government is dealing with poverty at a snail's pace."

This is solid, non-partisan reporting. It should have been front-page. But they needed that space for a doggie story.
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The editorial ....sigh.....

It's a combination of ignorance and propaganda. It seems the editor read a book (always a danger signal) by a "researcher" for a propaganda outfit called The Fraser Institute. ( a leading light among big business sponsored "think-tanks".)

The theme is that as government grows, it hinders the economy by overtaxing business.

Right.

In the US, for example, government is so big with its spending (for weapons and wars and spies) that taxes on big business and the wealthy.....well....actually they don't exist.

And in both Canada (which is also pretty limp on taxing the rich) and the US, government is so big that poor little big business is making its biggest profits in history.

The biggest US government expense is for wars - wars which are fought to make the rich even richer. And why to you think we joined the US war on Afghanistan?

In fact, with our "big" government, big business taxes have never been lower. Only an Irving editor could take a book by the Fraser Institute seriously.

The rest of the opinion pages is the usual trivia and trash - except.......

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Alec Bruce has a column I never expected to see in an Irving paper, "A war for the wages:Canada's CEO greed". This is one you have to read for yourself. If you refuse to buy or steal one, you can usually find a free copy at your local Macdonald's.

In Canada, the upper level of CEOs in pay, bonuses, extra goodies, make 205 times the minimum wage. In the US, it's worse at 354 to 1. And the difference is growing at an accelerating pace. In the last four years, the average Canadian income rose 6%.  The average increase for the top dogs was 73%.

Where does this take us? In the short run, it takes us to where the US is with its extraordinary level of poverty, of hunger, of illness - and with its hordes of spies and militarized police to keep an eye on anybody who objects. And Canada is already far deeper into that than most Canadians realize.

In the longer run, it takes us to a complete collapse of the economy - and we're well on the way to that.

But won't that hurt the very rich, too?  Yes. It will. But they're so greedy - and made so immoral and unthinking by their greed - that they can't stop themselves.

They do know, though, that they are our enemies. Too bad so few of us realize that they are the enemies of all of us.

It also raises another issue. Does it make any sense to put price tags on people?

Our starting point in deciding that is the rich. They decide what price tags should be hung on all of us. They decide the highest price tags  should be on themselves. They decide there is no limit on what they are worth.

And so we create a society which destroys democracy and opportunity to most of the population, effectively creating a ruling class which considers itself an elite but more closely resembles a line of hogs at the trough.

An intelligent society would not begin with what the rich want. There is nothing especially intelligent about the rich.

An intelligent society would begin with what everybody needs. In that way, an intelligent society would not throw away the potential of so many of our children by raising them in the suffering and low opportunity that deny their fullest potential. And intelligent society would not throw its elderly on the scrap heap.

No society can possibly survive when the bulk of its wealth is handed over every year to a small class of the very rich. (Forget the crap about how their wealth trickles down. It doesn't. The proof of that is all over the world.)

It's quite clear that the Liberals and the Conservatives are both toadies for that small class of very rich. Vote for those parties - and they and their masters will destroy all of us. It's not their fault. They are too stupid and too greedy to do otherwise.

For a start, read Alec Bruce's column for today.

January 7: Step down, Rob Ford..

....New Brunswick has its own clown-mayor.

Two years ago, mayor Woodside of Fredericton expelled Occupy protesters from their demonstration site. Then he ordered the site demolished. But there was one, little glitch - well, two little glitches.There are no laws in Fredericton which permit the mayor to do any such things.

In Canada, people have a right to protest. And their possessions cannot be arbitrarily destroyed.

Didn't the mayor know that? Doesn't he have a lawyer at city hall? Doesn't the police chief know any lawyers? Didn't either of them consult with the premier first? I mean, the premier is right there.

So the protestors sued. The mayor, being a quick-minded man and all, realized after two years that he had better settle this out of court. So he did - along with a public apology.

Well, with sort of a public apology. Remember, we're dealing with a Rob Ford here.

When he met with the press yesterday to announce the settlement, he refused to read the apology to the press. But he did, graciously, say, "Legally, it was not the right thing to do. I accept that." (very gracious of him). "But the bottom line is, that mess is no longer there, that's what really I wanted to achieve."

Like Rob Ford, he apologizes for doing something wrong. Then he implies it was wasn't wrong. Not really.

Oh, yes, and he adds a personal slur. "The Occupy people were more interested in money than principle."

Even if that were true (and it is unlikely given the small sum involved), how could he possibly know it? To say that was contemptible.

He says it was wrong, then wipes that out by saying it was okay because it was what he wanted to do.

What a sleaze! What a clown! What an embarrassment! What an incompetent!

Our very own Rob Ford, only without being funny.

No doubt the law and order crowd will rush to his defence. That's because they have trouble grasping the idea of law and order. Those principles are supposed to apply whether you agree with the protesters or or not.

When native demonstrators were accused of breaking the law, hundreds of police and snipers were immediately on the spot.  Sounds to me as though they should have been surrounding Fredericton city hall.

Oh, don't look for this story in the TandT.  It needed most of its space to tell us we've had lots of snow and cold. And there's a big story about how you should be careful when shovelling snow off a roof. Gee! Never thought of that.

Anyway, I don't think it's nice to have stories about sleaze in the paper. Do you?
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Early in my university teaching career, I had a surprise visitor. It turned out he was a "flack", a public relations man for the oil industry. He wanted me to work on a project to improve the images of oil executives. Though, he admitted, the original ones  were hard-nosed and crude, the current lot are real sweethearts.

I said no.

Since then the pressure on universities has been stepped up. Business execs and wealthy individuals use their influence to dictate how the universities will develop, what their purposes will be.

In my later years, I was asked to be president of my university - so I got to go the full round of meeting all  the board members. I was astonished at their advances in getting control of the universities, and how they intended to convert them to their own uses.

So I said no to that one, too.

And now it's well-rooted here in New Brunswick. I realized that several years ago when the Irvings held their highly improper conference to redesign the economy of New Brunswick - and all the university heads in the province scampered at their master's voice.

And now it's on again with something called New Brunswick Social Policy Research Project.

I don't know whether this appeared in the papers while I was away. Anyway, I'm sure this version of the story has not. I discovered it thanks to a reader.

This is a typical public/private venture (which means private business nosing in where it has no business to be.) The board is steeped in university administrators (who are almost certainly decorative, the equivalent of potted plants). There are also flunkys from government, business execs and - most important - Chap Peters who works for the company that does PR for SWN. How's that for an impartial counsellor?  Then there's Peter Lindfield who works in a related field. He's head of one of those "think-tanks" that pump out propaganda for big business.  His is the Carlisle Institute.

I'm happy to say that very few professors are involved with this lot.

For their opening event, they will have the last weekend in January for a great meeting to  plan the economic future for New Brunswick - an echo of Mr. Irving's conference of a few years ago.

They are inviting students, profs, etc. for a weekend of brainstorming to solve all our problems.

There are more than a few absurdities in this.

1. No significant research or thinking happens at a weekend of gab fest.
2. Though it is called an organization of social research, society has nothing to do with it. This is all about making money for those who already have loads of it. People don't matter a damn.
3.It's interfering with university education to use the students and the university for propaganda.
4. It's ad has the jargon you would expect of a gang of poseurs. My favourite invented word in there is "impactful". They also disapprove of serious research by saying it just sits on shelves.
Their aim is clear. All university research should be to serve big business only. There are no people,  not real ones, no society, no community. There are only profit margins.

Will something useful come out of this? Only a fool could think so. All that will come out is simple-minded propaganda. (But it will get almost as much coverage from the Irving Press as it's really important stories - like how to shovel snow off a roof.)

The universities have sunk a long, long way.And it's mostly the administrators who have let the water in.
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There's nothing here about today's TandT because it has nothing in it.

Jan.6: When the going gets tough...

...the powerful pick on the weak...

Some months ago, Harper announced a general get tough policy on Native Peoples. You may have read of it through fliers distributed through his flunky mps. And I'm sure it had nothing to do with native people protesting against his oil and mining industry plans. Now, the great man has made his move.

A Cree group, the O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi First Nation, is being audited for its spending. Read all (or a bit) about it on C1, "Manitoba First Nation audited for loans and staff payments". (Actually, the audit has been going on for a  couple of years. Odd the government never mentioned it. Odd the press never even knew about it.)

Our Aboriginal Affairs minister says "We will not tolerate the abuse of tax dollars."

Right. We could play games and lie and stall when the abuse was carried out by senators and Conservative party insiders. We could slap Mulroney on the wrist for his corruption. We could ignore 47 dead at Lac Megantic. But, hey, the core group of righteous Conservatives will not tolerate that behaviour from native peoples.

And who are these desperadoes we're tracking down at great expense? (and will we get a report on the connection between the federal Conservatives and this auditing firm? And on the fees for the audit?)

The story doesn't mention it; but O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi number some 475 people. None of them is over 79.Of those 475 people, only 65 have full-time, year-long jobs. Of the 285 families,115 had a total income per year of less than $5,000. Another 45 had 5,000 to 10,000.

Few had post-secondary school training of any sort.

Of the 130 dwellings, 95 needed major repairs.

None of this was in the news story - though it was a simple matter of looking it up in the census. In the same way, it would have been a simple matter to track any connection between the auditing firm and the Conservative party. Reporters really should learn that they are not simply stenographers. They're also supposed to question, to do just a little bit of research. That makes a big difference in our ability to get meaning out of the news.

This story also illustrates another point. The reserve system as it is was intended to segregate native peoples until they integrated with us. It's not working. It's not going to work. And every time we try to inflict more of being like us on them, the worse the situation gets.

What happened to native peoples is that they were colonialized. Their traditions and values were shattered. That is a process that conquering peoples have spread over the whole world. Their justification, usually, has been that they are spreading civilization. You can read about it in the Kipling poem "Take up the White Man's burden".

To get the poem, just Google Take up the White Man's Burden. Kipling wrote it in praise of the US invasion of The Phillipines just over a century ago. That's where the US helped the people by killing half to two-thirds of them, and introduced the torture of water-boarding.

It's also racist. The assumption is that the conquerors are racially superior, so they have a right to do whatever they like to inferior peoples - and are justified in killing large numbers of them in order to civilize the survivors. That's a message that pours (unconciously) out of history books like Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples. (Churchill was as racist as they come.)

The result is almost always the same. The conquered people are shattered, and take centuries to adjust to the new situation. Slavery and its racism are still forces to be dealt within the US though slavery was abolished about a hundred and fifty years ago. The chaos we now see in Africa and most of Asia is the result of our shattering of those societies  for two centuries and more.

That is what created what we call "extreme" Islam. That is what created - and still creates - terrorism.

It also creates poverty. Poverty is not the result of stupidity, and is only rarely the result of laziness. There is no evidence that the rich have higher intelligence than the rest of us.

The Irvings are born into families in which excellent education is a normal expectation. Result, they get more education than the average person. But I know of no evidence they have superior - or even average - brains. It's simply the world they grow up in.

That's why a low-grade intelligence combined with alcoholism and drug use did not prevent George Bush from getting a master's degree in business administration, and then becoming president - even though he was close to illiterate.

The child growing up in poverty usually grows up with no expectations of success and, as a result, continues to be poor for life.

The conquest and the reserve system that followed it shattered lives that had been, and replaced them with separation, isolation, and poverty. The results should have been foreseeable.

The reserve system doesn't work. For a start, most reserves are far too small to permit native pride and conciousness to recover. And Native power is far too limited for them to set their destinies - and they do have to set them. We have over two centuries of proof that we can't do it.

But Mr. Harper's not going to do that. He's going to get tough. And that way,  he'll continue to get the vote of every moron (including the rich ones) in Canada.
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The editorial is the  usual, half-wit idea about how to make Moncton big and rich in just one move. Steve Malloy's column is a useful corrective to that sort of nonsense.

Alec Bruce's column is well worth reading, too.  And Malloy and Bruce are the only two items in the whole paper worth reading.

P.S. For Malloy and others - the new Disney film, The Snow Princess, is the film I knew was coming for a long time - but never expected to see. The makers were well aware they were breaking new ground. that's why it starts with Disney's original Mickey Mouse flick - Steamboat Willie.

The Snow Princess is not a great film - despite some superior 3D work.  It's the scenery and the actors who are the breakthrough. The scenery is stunning - and all in animation - and it beats the real thing. Some of the characters are simply the usual cartoon figures - and deliberately so.

But others are more real that real ones in their clothing, facial features, expressions, clothing texture.

We are very close to the film that doesn't need real people or real scenery on screen.

Jan. 4, 2014: If people want to know how cold it is.......

....you don't hold up a picture of cold. In fact, there is not such thing as a picture of cold. So you tell them the temperature.

Unless you work for the Irving press.

It seems to have a tradition of wasting space in Section A with a regular page of pictures  that tell us nothing. Today, it's page A5, with pictures of cold. Enjoy.

Almost all the rest of Section is a waste of time - police station news (which costs little to get), trivia...
But two stories looked as though they had possibilities.

A2 has a story on the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Alas! Like most political news stories it has no meaning for anyone who lacks a a basic understanding of how this all happened. Why is there such friction between most (not all) Israelis and most (not all) Moslems?

The answer is us - you and me. I"ll  return to this if I have space at the end of this post.

Then there was a story on changes in the high school curriculum. It's a long article, consisting heavily of statements by Education Minister Jody Carr. Unfortunately, she seems to speak only bafflegab, and the reporter, like most Irving reporters, made not the slightest attempt to convert it into any useful meaning at all.

So passeth Section A.
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NewsToday has a big story on an American senator who has dual (American/Canadian) citizenship. He wants to get rid of his Canadian citizenship.

So?

Who cares?

And that pretty well skims the cream of NewsToday.
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The editorial is about - wait for it - light bulbs.

Bill Beliveau assures us that if he were a political leader, he would lead with facts. Gee! Does that mean most of our leaders lead with lies? If so, could be please name them - and tell us what the lies are?

As it is, his column simply tells us things we already know, and have already been told by the politicians. And, like them, he completely ignores the role of the rich who avoid taxes and who also hit us for special deals like loans, grants, etc.

Norbert tells us the world is the most peaceful it has ever been. And I think I know where he got that crock. A Montrealer, now teaching in the US, wrote a book that, like more than a few academic books, was written to make him famous. In it, he claimed the world is actually getting more and more peaceful than it has ever been.

There are just two problems with that.

1. There are no reliable statistics of how many wars the world has had throughout history, or of how many have been killed. Even for a recent war like Vietnam, I've seen figures between 2 million and nine million. What are the real figures for World War 1? Who knows? We have a pretty good idea of how many soldiers died in that war. But only the vaguest idea how many civilians died because of the war. Ditto for the century of chaos and starvation we caused in China.

And the older the war gets, the less reliable our figures.

2. There isn't even agreement about what a war death is. If a person dies because the hospital that could have saved him was bombed out a few weeks earlier, is he a war death? Many official figures say no. When US drones and assassination squads kill people, are these war deaths? No - because no war has been declared. When people die because US sanctions have cut off food and essential medicines for them, are these war deaths? No.When babies, even today, die because of horrible defects still caused by Agent Orange, are they war deaths? No.

When masses of native peoples were deliberately allowed to starve to death in the 1880s, were those war deaths? I've never seen them recorded as such.

Oh - and our wars now carry the high probability of leading to nuclear war. I don't think that's a sign things are getting better and better.

I know you like reading books, Norbert. Now, learn to use your own head, too.

Norbert goes on to trivialize the damage caused by espionage. He says - yawn - everybody does it. Oh, well, that makes it okay.

Oh, as for the Pope, big news for you Norbert. Despite your scorn, the Pope DID say something different during the holiday season that his predecessors didn't say. For the first time, he singled out the US for its aggression and brutality. That's different from anything you or your paper (or your Faith page) have ever said. It's a hell of a lot more than I have heard from the Protestant churches.

(Today's faith page has a gem of silliness. Heaven, it seems, is a place where we will be laughing and playing all the time. I have no idea where that information comes from. Neither, I bet, does the minister who wrote it.)

Brent Mazerolle is, as  usual, trivial. It's all about how cold weather is - you know - cold.

The only item in the whole paper worth reading is the final opinion column which comes from the Dean of the school of Public Health at University of the city of Los Angeles. (UCLA). This is intelligent, informed and well written.
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Okay - our role in creating hatred between Jews and Moslems.

When Hitler came to power, Canada was already one of the most racist and anti-semitic countries in the world. We were right up there with the US. Indeed, there were leading businessmen in both Canada and the US who were willing and even eager to support Hitler with money and propaganda in his hatred of Jews.  (And we shall politely forget New Brunswick's and Nova Scotia's (especially Nova Scotia's) shameful history of anti-African behaviour - Canada's equivalent of the deep south.)

Anti-semitism in Canada began with the large immigration of Jews that began about 1890. Earlier, the Jews in Canada had been tolerated because they were too few to hate, and they were of the gentlemanly class.

But from 1890 on, they were poor and prominently so as they packed the slums of Canadian cities. And this also came at a time when Darwin's theory of evolution was encouraging the notion that some people (especially us white ones who spoke English) had evolved into a higher type than others. Similar thinking spread across Europe, through France, The Netherlands, Germany, Eastern Europe, Russia. Winston Churchill, a young man in the 1890s was, like most British of his time and class, a raving racist. That's why he wrote his history series (that captivated me when I was fourteen), The History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

In Canada, the finest and best-educated people became anti-foreigner in general, and anti-Jewish in particular. In Canada, the most socially-concerned and even saintly politician ever produced in this country wrote a book about the threat of immigration of inferior types - especially the immigration of Jews. It is titled "Strangers Within our Gates" (1909).

Its anti-semitism caught the popular mood in Canada as businessmen who had once accepted at least      wealthy Jews now shunned them. Yacht clubs and other sporting clubs, well into recent times, refused to accept them. Landlords refused to rent to Jews of any income level. Rental signs, again well into the 1960s, commonly specified "Select clientele only". That meant no Jews, no Africans, no orientals.

In Quebec, where all public schools were either Catholic or Protestant, Catholic schools refused to accept Jewish children. Protestant schools accepted them, though with no great enthusiasm. However, it was slower to accept Jewish teachers. (It also refused to accept African teachers until about 1960.)

Things got tougher in the 1930s. Even before the rise of Hitler, Canada's department of immigration (with the full support of the prime minister and both the Liberal and Conservative parties) effectively banned Jewish immigration to Canada.

Some, by paying hefty bribes, could come here. I knew such a family; and the cost was the equivalent of several years' pay. But most were turned back.

Just before the war, a boatload of German Jews managed to get out, and appeared in Canadian waters seeking refuge. The Canadian government ordered them out though, by then, it was well known what Hitler was doing. President Roosevelt also denied them entry. And so they were returned, to be met by police who would take them to the camps.

During the war, some 200 Jewish children were spirited out of Germany to Spain. The Spanish government would not accept them, but would allow them to go to another country if one would accept them. By then, both Canadian and American governments knew what the fate of those children would be in Germany. And both said no.

When Canada agreed to take in British children to escape the bombing, it specified that it would not accept any Jewish children, not even if they were British born.

For an excellent book on Canada's treatment of Jews in the Nazi era,  read Irving Abella and Harold Troper, "None is too Many".

At the end of the war, when everybody knew about the horror of the death camps, Canada still refused to accept Jews.  The only difference  between us and Hitler is that Hitler actively murdered Jews. We let Hitler do it for us.

Nor were Jews welcome anywhere in Europe. When Dutch Jews returned home, they were presented with tax bills for missed payments during the years they were in death camps. So what to do with them?

Some Jews who had advocated Zionism, a return to what they considered the Jewish homeland, were already active in slipping into what it now Israel, and pioneering terrorist warfare, directed mostly at the British who were in control of it by conquest in World War 1.

It's not likely that many European Jews had any great desire to go to Israel. Jews were already living in the region, and  had been for millenia, living on good terms with Moslems. But the Jews who had been living in peace all those years with their Moslem neighbours were Sephardic Jews. They had never lived in Europe except in small numbers. They were very different from the Ashkenazi Jews who lived in Europe, had few to no roots in the Middle East, and who even looked markedly different from the Sephardics.

World leaders had decades earlier promised European Jews a land of their own. But neither they nor most of the Jews had thought of modern Israel as that land.  (There were much more attractive places to go.) In any case, the world's political powers had no right to give what is now Israel to anybody. It wasn't theirs. It belonged to the Sephardic Jews and the Moslems who lived there.

But there were a lot of Jewish refugees. And they had to go somewhere. And that somewhere could not, absolutely not, be in Canada or the US - despite the huge areas available in both.

So we forced them on Israel.  Moslems saw this as the western powers creating a state made up of what were really Europeans, and one that would serve as a base to restore western power in the middle east. And the Moslems were right.

That's where the anger and hatred and violence came from. We in the western world did it. And we did it for the same reason Hitler murdered Jews - because we would not accept them.

There are columnists who will babble about how Islam is a naturally hating and murderous faith. That's part of the campaign to make us hate Moslems so government can justify spying on us, destroying democracy, and invading Moslem states that have oil.

Moslems and Jews lived together for many, many years. It was us who made them hate each other. We fought World War Two for several reasons. But saving Jews was not one of them.

Jan 3, 2014: About the Bangladesh story that didn't make the Irving press.

I mentioned yesterday some of the companies that use use extremely cheap labour and barbaric conditions to produce goods cheaply in Bangladesh. The workers are mostly women who work seven days a week, ten hours and more a day, have no holidays, get paid only a few dollars a month, and die in rickety factories. This is  where (and why) over a thousand women were killed in a fire in 2013.

International intervention induced 74 of the companies to sign the Bangladesh Safety Accord which requires better and safer conditions. It is administered by an independent authority.

17 companies refused to sign. Instead, they set up their own (and much less satisfactory) deal. It's called the Bangladesh Worker Safety Initiative. It offers a good deal less protection than the safety accord - and it doesn't have none of them there independent authorities to administer it. No siree.  The companies themselves do the administering - jes' because they's nice folks.

I just unpacked my full list of the companies that set up their own accord rather than sign the real one. Monctonians  will recognize some of those companies - notably Walmart, Gap, Canadian Tire, L.L.Bean. Sears, and Target.

Funny it didn't make the Times and Transcript.

But don't feel left out. The companies that overworked, underpaid and killed those women in Bangladesh would be quite as happy to do it to you. And they already are doing it to some of you.

The information comes from a magazine called This, and it can be contacted at THIS.ORG   (The magazine has lots of interesting material; though it's not always written as clearly as it should be.)

It also has a very informative article on who is paying big money to spread the idea that our climate in not changing   (despite what most scientists think). It's not a big surprise. The money comes largely from the oil industry. It's handed out to those propaganda  whores we call think tanks - C.D.Howe Institute, Atlantic Institute of Market Studies, etc.

The "studies" conducted by these groups then get picked up by cooperative news media like the Irving press. That's why we get regular letters to the editor from the gullible who assure us they have seen proof that climate change is not happening.

Oh, I should add another story that (isn't) in the TandT. Large numbers of people are fleeing US-controlled dictatorships in Latin America. They are crowding into a Mexico which scarcely has the resources to deal with them. Why are they fleeing?

They come from countries like Guatemala which are rich in mining resources. And there are virtually no regulations. The companies employ "security guards" (armed thugs) who kick native peoples off their lands to take them for the company, who kill those who get in the way, who force brutal working conditions on the miners (both men and women), and who enjoy frequent gang rape and murder of the women.

They have also so polluted the land and the waters that much of the region will never be productive again.

Oh, and Canadian mining companies are prominent in all this. Perhaps the TandT could give us a series on who these companies are, and who the big shareholders are. After all, Mr. Harper seems determined that we are next on the list.
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I spent the above time on what isn't in the paper because there is so much in the paper that isn't worth reading. There's a big story in section 1 about a British family moving to Moncton because Canada offers more opportunity than Europe does.

Hey! Big flash! That's why almost all our families came to Canada. But it won't work any more.

Europe has no opportunities to offer because Europe's capitalists did what Stalin and Mao could not do. They destroyed capitalism. American capitalism has done much the same - and Canada's capitalists are well advanced in self-destruction.

Nor will blaming the poor, and cutting their services and raising their taxes. In fact, that will have the effect of destroying us all, and more quickly.  That much has been proven many times in history. But our economic bosses don't read - or think - much. In New Brunswick, as in Canada as a whole, the lunatics are in charge of the asylum.

Anyway, there's nothing to read in section A.
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There is, however, an important report on C1. The Guardian Newspaper and The New York Times are calling for clemency for Edward Snowden, the man who released the story about how the NSA was spying on the whole world, from national leaders down to people just using their cell phones.

The American government wants Snowden badly to put him in solitary for the rest of his life. The Times and the Guardian say he should be praised for what he's done. I agree; but that that's not why the story is important.

What's important is that this is one of those very rare occasions on which the The New York Times has broken step with the obediently plodding news media of North America. This is no small matter. This is an act of revolt - and the NSA will certainly treat it in that way - as will the Canadian government.
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The editorial pretends to be about the revival of forestry products in NB when it's really about shale gas. It also says the US market is on the rebound when, in fact, the only part that's bounding is the very rich part - and it's been doing that for the last 35 years without doing the rest of us any good.

Norbert continues his series on prostitution. Really, it would be more useful to  hear what must be his expert opinion on presstitution.

Cole Hobson has a piece on making resolutions. Like the thousands of opinion pieces on that subject written every New Year for every newspaper in the world, it says nothing of any originality or use.

Gwynne Dyer has the only piece in the paper worth reading. It's about how the money wasted on espionage in the US could save far more lives by being switched to such things as infant care and road maintenance. And, quite seriously, he makes a very compelling case.

But it won't matter, of course, because most espionage has nothing to do with saving lives. It has to do with stealing industrial secrets, with murder, with mass killing, and with scaring us into keeping our mouths shut.

And don't believe for a minute that it doesn't happen in Canada. Our government is not only doing the same thing; it is doing it in close collaboration with the NSA, and with the bosses of the corporate world.

Jan. 2, 2014: A feast for the mind...

I came home  to see a mouth watering pile of TandTs waiting for me. And I was intellectually starved after a week of seeing nothing but the Toronto Globe and Mail. (Actually, the GandM was not impressive. It had a bit more foreign news than the Irving papers do; but not much more.  The best opinion columnists in the Irving press would not at all suffer by comparison with the those at the Globe. The Globe was far the stronger of the two for business news, book reviews, general interest pieces.)

As always, major news stories were missing in the Irving Press over the holidays. And one story the the TandT did get was a quite disgraceful one to publish. Generally, though, the TandT was stunningly trivial and boring over the holidays, just like the rest of the year. And, wow! a page of people mostly undressed out in the cold on New Year's day - the news YOU need to know. These are keepers - but only for those most desperate for a little lust in their lives.

well - let's deal with one thing at a time.
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1. The silly

Newsmaker of the year - David Alward.

Why?

Well, he was mentioned in the TandT more than anybody else.

Oh..uh....So that means the Irvings don't really matter that much of a damn? I mean, you don't often see them mentioned, do you? Not in the shale gas controversy, not in the Lac Megantic disaster, not in how much income tax they (don't) pay, not in what their profits are......

Indeed, there are local hockey players who get mentioned more the papers than the Irvings do. So I guess that really shows who makes things move in this province - Mr. Alward and the hockey teams.

Actually, I should have thought anything Mr. Alward might have said in the year was quite outclassed by the courage and steadiness shown by New Brunswick's native peoples in their resistance to SWN.

I also thought the Lac Megantic disaster was far more important than anything Mr. Alward said.
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2. missed stories

a) A world-wide Gallup poll, one which is held each year at this time, showed that the US  is considered around the world as the greatest threat to world peace.

That, of course, is to be expected among enemies of the US. But the distrust of the US also led among friends like Germany, Greece, Spain, virtually all of Latin America,  and Britain. Even in the US, the US ranked in the top three threats to world peace  (in a tie for third with North Korea.)

b) In other news that didn't make the TandT, the wealthiest 1% in the US have increased their wealth over the past five years by 6.1 trillion dollars. But they need even more. That's why the US is cutting food stamps for the starving.

c) And remember how over a thousand women burned to death in Bangladesh just months ago in just one, huge fire?  They worked seven days a week for long, long hours and lousy pay in dangerous conditions. And that's why they died - so we could get cheap clothes.

Anger at this exploitation of women led to a world wide agreement to improve conditions in the sweatshops. It was signed by companies operating in Bangladesh.

Well, it was signed by some of them. Others felt the terms of the accord were a little strict. So they drew up their own accord which was, you know, less demanding. And guess who refused the world accord, but signed the easier one.

Well, two of the prominent names were Walmart and Target.

But that never made the Irving Press. Nope. Their newsmaker of the year was Mr.Alward.
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3. A column I disagreed with. (Oh, I know. People are allowed to disagree with me - but I have to put this somewhere.)

Alec Bruce attacks Obama for  his failure to deal with economic hardships among a majority of Americans.

I am no admirer of Obama, never have been. Like Justin Trudeau, he's a person of no substance whatever. But we can't blame him for the state of affairs any more than we can blame Alward for it. We all know that Alward doesn't run New Brunswick. Isn't it time to recognize that Obama does not run the US?

Obama, like Bush before him, is a war criminal, a killer of civilians on a grand scale, a worthy successor to Bush as the world's greatest torturer. Like Bush he has privatized much of the already vile and ineffective and grossly oversized American prison system to make it a vast field of brutality, neglect, exploitation..... And very, very profitable for the top 1 %.

But Obama's not really responsible because, like Alward and Bush, he's just a sock puppet for the very rich.

Mr. Bruce says the poor should be better off because the economy's improving. In reality, of course,  their position is worsening as, even among those who are employed, the majority earn less than 30,000 a year. The other reality is that the only part of the economy that's improving is the economy of the very rich - the stock market.

That's largely the case in Canada, too. And it's been going on for generations. It is the same pattern (only worse) that we saw in the great depression of the 1930s. The rich use the helplessness of the poor to make them ever more miserable, and the rich even richer. Go to a library. See if you can find a book named Report of the Royal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying. That tells what happened in the 1930s. It is what is happening now. It is what has happened most of the time for several hundreds of years. In Britain, for example, the wage gap is now bigger than it was in the days of Ebenezer Scrooge.

There are now more poor and starving and sickly and hopeless in most of the western world than there has been in many, many generations. That's why we're seeing what Mr. Bruce calls an "economic recovery".

But we aren't having it. The very rich are in a recovery - and it's based on our poverty.And it's not likely to get better. Why should it? The rich are having their best times ever. Why on earth  should they tell the Alwards and the Obamas to change anything?

Well, they do want a few more changes. The destruction of medicare would be nice. Privatization of the public schools would be nice. More propaganda in the schools would be nice. And severe cuts to social programmes would leave that much more money for the very rich.

And we now have every possibility of producing children socially acclimatized to living in poverty and ignorance forever.

No. The very rich aren't cruel. They just don't give a damn. And they're too greedy to understand that they're destroying the capitalist system itself by the perverse, undemocratic and abusive way they are using it.
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4. Then there was something disgraceful. It's a story that appeared on Jan. 1, and it's about the professor Lapierre incident.

Actually, it's almost the same as the original story when it broke. Prof. Lapierre is a brilliant man of world repuation who, sadly, "misrepresented" his credentials.  ( Misrepresenting isn't at all the same as lying.) Indeed, the whole thing reads as if the professor were the sad victim, rather than the perpetrator.

Once again, Environment Minister Craig Leonard pleads that Lapierre was never, in any case, hired as an expert biologist. He was hired as a man good at organizing people.

 Mr. Leonard must be growing a very, very long nose. Or maybe he just isn't very bright.

Not only did Leonard and the government talk of nothing but his professional expertise when they appointed him, but they used his report on the "safety" of shale gas to discredit the report of Dr. Cleary. Professor Lapierre lied about his credentials. Then he lied in pretending to have the expertise to issue a professional report on a subject in which he had no expertise. He may have been used to organize people. But he was also used in a major way by this government as an environmental expert.

That was done even though that report, however pleasing it might have been to the oil industry and the intellectual and moral midgets in the government, might well have put the health and/or lives of hundreds of thousands of people at risk. Professor Lapierre must have known that.

He is not a victim. We are the victims, his victims.

There is a much bigger story behind this that we're not getting a hint of. It is full of incidents that make no sense.

1. In some fifty years in universities, I  have never heard of a professor being hired without some check of  his credentials.
2. I have never heard of a professor being hired without letters of reference from his graduate school professors. Even in the confusion of a university's early years, it is impossible to imagine such a thing happening. Did professor Lapierre write his own letters?
3.I do not understand how an unqualified person could have worked in a department of scientists without anybody having caught on to something being strange.
4. And he held an Irving Chair. How did that happen? That's pretty prestigious (and expensive). Being granted a chair usually means extensive review at several levels. Did that review happen? Did it go through the department? the arts and science faculty? the Board of Governors?
A chair also (usually) demands a very serious examination of the candidate's record of publication in refereed journals. Did that happen? If not, why not? (Winning honours from industry boards doesn't count.)

Prof. Lapierre says he worked for decades in responsible positions in order to protect the environment. Oh? He held many reponsible positions-----and nobody ever thought to check his credentials? Nobody bothered to look at his scientific record?

I don't believe that for a moment.

There is a much, much bigger story behind this.
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Today's paper? Well, it has all those suitable-for-framing colour photos of people you don't know swimming and/or walking in the cold.

The editorial page takes a strong position. It says we should insist on strong, pragmatic government.

Damn right.  I hate those people who say we need a weak and thoughtless government. Way to tell it the way it is, Mr. editorial writer.

The paper is saved - as much as it can be - but a couple of good opinion columns. Rod Allan has a very nicely written memoir of the importance of Canada Post in his rural childhood. It's very well written, indeed.

Beth Lyons does her usual, excellent job on her column.

Alas! those two opinion columns have to carry the whole weight of the paper for the day.
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In late-breaking news, I just received my New Year's card from Liberal leader Gallant. (He's a sort of Justin Trudeau, but with his shirt on.)