June 12: Enough

A newspaper should reveal the extent of a society's sorrow. And it should express its own - in opinion columns. But there is a point at which working on emotions is no longer sorrow, but exploitation of sorrow.
In the old days, that was called "sob sister" reporting. It's an abuse of readers. And it's disgusting. And it has characterized all the TandT reporting on the murders of three police.

Check the page 1 headline. "Danny to work with another Mountie". And so we have yet another picture and a long story about Danny the dog.

Does that help us in any way to understand what has happened? Does it throw any light on what happened? It simply indulges those, the sort of people who also read every article they can find about Kate and how lovely her baby is and how Camilla hates them all.

From the start, the only item I have seen in this paper that makes some attempt to find a context for what has happened is today's column by Norbert who wonders if there is a connection with such shootings in the US - and doesn't find one.

He may be right. I expect,  though, we are just slower than the US. Across North America, we are taught early - particularly by our media and politicians - to hate and fear. Then they use the hate and fear to impose spies on us and to kill other people.

It can get confusing. Moslems, we are told, are murderous. (Well, except for Saudi Arabia and the terrorists fighting on our side in Syria.) Listen to Harper and Obama. We are now learning to hate and fear Russians who are slyly linked to communism though it never was -and, anyway, Russia has been capitalist for over twenty years now.

You can see the building  hysteria and emotionalism in letters to the editor. "Our souls shaken, yet we will rise". Come off it. When did Moncton fall?  "City's soul imbued with will of iron." That's another come off it. Three police were killed. Police and government promptly and efficiently found the accused and arrested him. That's what most cities do, unless they're in the middle of a war. It's not a will of iron. It's normal practice.

"Moncton is strong?" I have no idea what that even means.

Then we have a demand for executing the accused. Of course. Pandering to sorrow and fear produces a desire to get even, to kill. It works the same way when we see reporting on those evil Moslems or Syrians or Russians.

To take a look at how it works, let's take a look at the word "terrorist". It usually means a person who kills innocent people, and who does it to create terror. But in our news media it is commonly used as a name for Moslem militant.

In fact, the killing of civilians to create terror has been common in wars for thousands of years. But it grew rapidly with the invention of the airplane and the bomb. Pioneers were Italy, then Britain and Germany. In the 1930s, German dive-bombers targeted civilians in Guernica, Spain. But in World War 2, the deliberate killing of civilians to terrorize had come into standard use by all the powers.

We seldom hear of the fire-bombing of Tokyo. That city was picked because it was mostly civilian and mostly wooden. American heavy bombers flew low, dropping tons of incendiaries. At least 100,000 civilians were killed. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasake were carried out for several reason. But one reason was to test the effect of the bomb on large, civilian targets.

The CIA and Guatemalan army killings in Guatemala amounted to some 300,000 people, almost all of them civilians. They were terrorized to become more willing workers for mining companies - with Canadian ownership prominent among them.

Since World War Two, the deliberate slaughter of civilians has become the major US means of conducting war.  Funny thing, though. I cannot recall any news medium ever referring to our side as terrorists.

The US air force killed millions And it was heroic. Moslems shot back with an attack on New York that killed some 3,000. Now, that was terrorism. And there were special services in the churches. It is still referred to as one of the darkest moments of brutality when, in fact, it pales beside the mass murder of civilians in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Iran. But there were no special services for those foreigners.

And, to be honest, we don't give a damn. Killing foreigners is okay. Let's be realistic about that because that's one of the twisted ways the mind acts.
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Speaking of Iraq, the TandT was so busy writing sob stories about Danny the dog that it missed what could well be a turning point in history.

The US and Britain killed one and a half million Iraqis. We know now that Blair and Bush lied about the reason for that war. We know there was no justification for it. Most of those dead were civilians - and they were deliberately killed. But they were foreigners - so what the hell.....

The what the hell is that the war, which was one of the most expensive in history due to the stunning levels of corruption in politics and business in the US, didn't work.

Iraq has been in civil war ever since Bush swaggered across a carrier deck to declare victory. As of yesterday, Al Quaeda occupies over half the country and maybe be taking the oil fields as I write this.

Is this a big deal?

It's about as big as they get.

An Al Quaeda conquest of Iraq will destabilize the whole middle east. Israel always feared the existence of Iraq when it was quite secular. The new Iraq will be a rigidly Moslem country. Israel could very well decide to attack. And Israel has nuclear weapons.

Iraq will now also provide a staging and training area for those Moslems that the US is paying to fight in Syria. (These are all Al Quaeda, the ones the US calls terrorists - and it actually has thousands of them on the payroll. Go figure.)

The turmoil in the middle east and Africa may become so great, the US will have to give up its Russian/Chinese adventure.

More than anything, this is a symbol of the collapse of the American empire. They lose the oil. Expecting to stay there forever, the US built the biggest embassy in the world in Iraq. And they killed a hell of a lot of innocent people. And it's all now in ruins.

US foreign policy has been a disaster at least since Vietnam. Much of the reason the world is in economic turmoil is because of the money the US has wasted on losing wars.

It's impossible to tell how widely the effect of this will spread around the world with various players rethinking who it is they had better be friends with.

But don't worry about it. Read the TandT for more stories about how Moncton will rise.

In Guatemala, a young women was shot by two armed men. She was a militant who worked for a mining company and who organized other workers to get rights. Gee! I wonder why those two men killed her. The company involved, incidentally, is a Canadian one - Goldcorp.

The latter piece of news came from a community paper worth looking at. It's The Brief, published by  NB Media Co-Op. Both it and the Moncton Free Press beat the pants off the TandT. Check them out on the web.

Harper is going to get tougher on immigration. Big surprise. Ever notice that his sympathy for the suffering in other countries never extends to letting them come here? There's more than touch of bigotry and racism in Harper. He's particularly tough on the Roma, a people the Naziis hunted down as they hunted down Jews.)
Mind you, that fits in with Canadian tradition. When the the Jews were being killed, Canada shut them out and declined to lift a finger for them.

The editorial is, as commonly, a display of kissing Mr. Irving's rear end.

Opinion columns by Alec Bruce, Norbert Cunningham, and Jody Dallaire are all well worth a read.

Rod Allan still hasn't figured out what an opinion column is.

I had more to say. But I lost my notes. Honest.

June 10: The paper took only a few minutes to read today.

Again, TandT reporting on the killings is almost pure sensationalism and emotionalism. We know nothing about how the killer got rifle designed specifically for killing people - and for no other purpose. Where did he make the connection? Are there other such guns in Moncton?

Why don't the police have access to weapons adequate to deal with such a case?

The stories of mourning and sympathy are there - as they should be. But a newspaper is not intended simply to stir emotions. It is there to explain events to us, to raise questions, to see what has to be done in future.
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So, instead of talking about the TandT,  let's see if I can get through the connection between Ukraine and New Brunswick's budget problems. And yes, there is a connection.

Back in the days of President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, all the  enthusiasm was for less regulation of business. Let the money fairy fly free, we were told. Let it wave it's magic wand over all of us.

Coupled with that was free trade. Companies could now get away from any regulations at all simply by shifting their work to countries that had no regulations - often, as in Latin America, these were countries under dictators appointed by the US.

One result was the wage gap. Of course. Company profits went wild. Executive salaries went up hundreds of percentage points. Vast amounts of money were shifted from us to the very, very rich. The very, very rich  also gained the benefits of much reduced taxes - and easier access to  hide their profits in foreign banks.

And, of course, they continued their access to corporate welfare payments and gifts from our taxes. Many  financial institutions also broke whatever regulations were left. That's what got not just the US economy into trouble as it borrowed to bail the banks out of their criminal and irresponsible behaviour.  So it's not surprising that our governments ran up deficits.

This is not just North America. The governments and the economies of Canada, the US, China, Russia, Britain, Spain...are all much the same.  That's why the press has to emphasize the natural  (and racist) idea that Russians are born evil. In fact, Russian capitalists are exactly like ours.

Small groups of very wealthy people own most of the "democratic governments". That's as true of Russia as it is of the US. And, oh, it's corrupt.

So now we have a crisis of government finances. It's not because of frills like public education or health care. It's because the very wealthy have been plundering us for generations.

Indeed, that's what empires were and are about. We don't get much of that story in our hero-worshiping history books.

The British Empire (God bless the royal family) was as murderous, enslaving and thieving   as any empire. It killed and tortured millions. And the wealth of the empire poured into only a few pockets. Very little reached the common people of Britain who suffered squalor and dreadful living conditions until the advent of social services ended some of the pain. (Land of hope and glory, Mother of the free.)

The same is true of the US empire which murdered its way across South America, then leaped to Asia, and is now active bringing  suffering and murder to Africa and the Middle East.

It's paid for by taxes, of course. The economic benefits go mostly the the very rich. We supply the cannon fodder and the money.

But what does this have to do with Ukraine?

It's not an accident that the coup in Ukraine produced an appointed president who is an international banker, then an elected billionaire. Ukraine is marked down for "austerity" - the severe cutting of services and salaries and pensions so the poor can pay for bills the rich ran up.

At the same time, services like schools, medical care will probably be privatized. The result will be massive poverty, suffering, low incomes, and high unemployment. That's not the whole story of Ukraine. But it's an important part of it.

"Austerity" has already happened to Spain, Ireland, Greece. British governments have been flirting with it for years, with schools and police early targets for privatization. In the US, "austerity" has meant cutting off food to the poor in order to offer scandalously corrupt contracts to the very rich, semi-privatizing education (with disastrous results), privatized jails which are much less effective than state ones -and much more expensive to operate.

In these privatizations, the very rich not only get more money into their pockets. They also get low (if any) taxes. This is the rule of plunder taken to its logical conclusion.

Despite what the Times and Transcript says, balancing the provincial budget is not what this is all about. If it were, it would be nonsense. You don't bring prosperity or any measure of security to a society by firing people, lowering wages, cutting pensions and social assistance.

A society is not a business enterprise; and you cannot run it as if it were.

In any case, unregulated business does NOT create wealth. All you need to figure that is common sense and eyes. China was under the control of European big business for a century. It did not become wealthy. On the contrary, the China was not only impoverished; it was forcibly addicted to opium, and the society was shattered.

Take a long at the Congo after more than a century of western capitalism. Untold millions have been killed or died of starvation and disease. Oh, the wealth is there. It's still being extracted. But none of it gets to the people of Congo.

New Brunswick has been plundered from the start. Now, we are entering a new phase so the very rich can get whatever wealth we have left.

Would they kill to get it? Do you have to ask? They've been killing by uncountable millions for centuries to get rich. They happily kill, starve, humiliate and steal. They'll do it to us as happily to us as to foreigners.

Business is not designed to run a society. It's designed to feed off it. So when business becomes the government, we're in serious trouble.

A government is what is designed to run a society. Alas, governments at all levels in New Brunswick can think only as if they were running a factory.

The polls show that the Liberals and Conservatives lead in the polls. Remember the Liberals? They're the ones we voted against because they were so treacherous. So now, we'll  vote for them because the Conservatives have been treacherous.

Grow up! For the sake of your children, for your own sake, grow up! Neither party has a policy that even resembles what we want a society to be. And both parties kiss the feet of big business.

If not?

Then the world is facing its final violence as very big business consolidates its political and economic power for the last push to dominance.

Oh, are we intervening in Ukraine to save democracy? Come off it. Canada has never gone to war to protect democracy. The last time the US did so was in 1776. In both world wars, our democracy was not threatened. It was not the issue. That's why the US didn't join either war for some time. And, in fact, since World War Two, the world's greatest destroyer of democracies has been the US.

A vote for either the Liberals or the Conservatives would be disaster. Any further expansion of business into the public sector would be a disaster.
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A reader suggested that my references to morality in business and government reflect a perhaps fanatical Christianity. In fact, though I do have religious beliefs, I am quite out of step with Christian churches. I have no interest whatever in whether Jesus was the son of God or whether Mary was a virgin. In fact, I rather think the stress on that virginity so often in the Bible leads me to suspect that mysogyny has an even longer history than we might think.  I leave Hell to Biblical literalists, and hope they enjoy it.

I  have no interest in worship or in prayer or people rising from the dead or having a father who can produce a child in a woman without sex.

I am interested in the moral advice of Jesus, and its meaning for our daily lives. Similar ideas can be found in most major religions from Islam to Confucianism. They are common sense ideas; but we live in a world without much common sense.

Morality, with or without a god, virgins and all the rest, is essential to create and maintain a human society. Our country, our world, is now in danger because so many of the very, very rich have no morality of any sort. Their only purpose in life is to make more money - and for themselves.

They have thoroughly corrupted politics all over the world. It can be very hard to find a political party that represents any form of morality at all.

That has brought us to a crisis which could be the final crisis.

Voting against the Liberals or Conservatives in New Brunswick won't solve the world's problems. But it would give the world some reason to hope.

June 8: Too much.....

I curse myself for writing this on a Sunday evening when I could be doing something more useful like dozing in the sun on the balcony. It's just that I have too much on my  mind.

Saturday's edition of the Times and Transcript was appalling. It was written with the style and empty-headed sensationalism of one of the magazines at the supermarket that has headlines like "Advisers shocked as Obama and Putin embrace, kiss on meeting".

We were given a picture of a city in terror - and were reassured by the mayor and business leaders that it would survive. Come off it! That sort of gush was not only the news; it was most of the opinion columns. The editorial was probably the worst of  all for mindless gush. Moncton will rise again!

1. We had one rifleman. Lots of cities around the world suffer (often at the hands of the west) from thousands of crazy riflemen. bombers, poison gas, machine guns and rockets - and they suffer it for years. After the mess we made of Iraq, dozens in that country are killed almost every day. In world war 2, London suffered massive attacks by bombers and rockets. Thousands died. But London was still a pretty lively place last time I saw it.

Contrary to the Tand T image of a city in terror, Monctonians acted well. Some institutions were closed - and very sensibly so. Some people, I'm sure, were in fear - and with good reason if they lived in the search zone. Most stayed indoors - very sensible - but there was scarcely the hysteria and imminent collapse of the city as suggested in the TandT.

The people of Moncton are a lot tougher than that.

The strongest display of emotion I saw was the grief at the RCMP station where flowers and candles had been placed. These were not frightened people. The grief was for those who had been shot and their families.

And the grief was undoubtedly genuine - and something one be be proud of about Moncton. I know plenty of cities where the reaction would be either rioting or indifference.

2. The job of a reporter is to observe and to listen - yes. But even that was done without thought. A reporter also has to have a mind that asks questions, that gets to the information we need. In this, the paper utterly failed. It was so bad, I'm astonished professional editors would allow that mindless babble to go to print.

To get any information, I h ad to go to The Fifth Estate on CBC. (Get a look at it, Norbert. See what real reporting looks like.)

The gun, I am sure, is a rifle designed only for combat.  It has a large magazine capacity, and automatic operation. That's why he could kill so quickly. As well, I thought it had rather a large magazine - suggesting if might fire a bigger cartridge than the regular combat issue  - something that could penetrate light armour or a flak jacket.

CBC reporters were the only ones to ask how and where he got such a gun - and got at least some hint of where to start looking.

They also raised the question of why those police were sent out without a rifle. Pistols have a short range, are less accurate and, in any case, difficult to fire with any accuracy. (As a long time target shooter, I've had many any embarrassment with my pistol scores.)

CBC discovered that the police cars are not equipped with rifles. Now, that is news. And that is problem we have to address. Now.

The Irving papers are sloppy, at best, with propaganda, outright lies, and reporting and editing that are beneath contempt.

That's when it's good. Saturday was not a good day for journalism in this province - except for CBC.

As a footnote, the city officials, the police and other agencies seem to have handled the situation very well, with effectiveness but without panic.
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While browsing through various papers, I came across a statement by Harper (and many others have said)  that Russia is responsible  for the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s. (Russians evil so Putin evil, etc.) This was certainly a terrible period. The death toll, commonly wildly over-estimated, was still probably about  four or five million.

In fact, scholars don't know whether Stalin ordered it - though he was certainly capable of it. He killed a lot of Russians, too. So to blame Russia for something that might have been done by a dictator seems a little broad. But it's good for creating the hatreds that send people to war.

Meanwhile.......

There was a very similar famine at the same time, and reaching into the 1940s. It was Bengal, India. It, too, killed about five million - and there is no question who ordered it. It was British governments under Chamberlain and and then Winston Churchill. And it was deliberate. In fact, India had a food surplus - but the British ordered it be exported to Britain though it was well known that Bengal was starving.

I"m sure it didn't bother Churchill at all. For all  his talents, he was a racist with a particular loathing for India.

Similarly, both Canada and the US forced starvation on native peoples as a form of genocide. Nobody knows the numbers who died.

Funny how you never hear western politicians talk about the butchery in India, Canada or the US.
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The press of North America - and this is terribly noticeable over the past 40 years or so is dreadfully biased and hate mongering.

Ever notice that Moslems fighting against the West (often defending their own countries) are routinely called "extremists'?  The American government, which killed not only millions in Vietnam and Iraq is never called extremist. It also has killed unknown millions around the world - all over Africa, South America, Pakistan...mostly using "special forces"

Nope. Nuthin' extreme there.

Yesterday, Google news had a story it took from a wire service about how the new president of Ukraine was the hero of  the people of Ukraine.

Hey. The guy had just been sworn into office.    He hadn't done anything yet. And he can't be the hero of all the Ukraine. I mean, somebody is shooting at him.
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Oh, it  has been revealed (though not much) that the British army has routinely practiced torture since 1939 - and probably long before that. It offers instruction in torture methods - but nothing is in writing.

God bless the Queen.
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Okay. Now I can sleep.                                

June 7: Sensationalism vs. news

Much of today's news is about the killing of three police officers, about public sympathy, and the arrest of a man charged with the killings. But for all those pages of print, it tells us almost nothing.

Most of it is just sensationalism. People want to read anything they can get on a story like this, so journalists churn out page after page of irrelevant information - and even of invention. On A2, the mayor says Moncton's  spirit is not broken. Is it really possible anyone thought it would be? Terrible as this was, cities all over the world experience this on a a regular basis.

We have sent troops to other countries to kill - and locking the doors doesn't help against them. And the trauma is not for a couple of days but for months and even years. Our closest Allies kill millions and want us to join in. Imagine what it is to live in Syria these days with American paid 'rebels' raining death.

There, they cannot hide in their homes. They have to flee by the millions, leaving behind the elderly, the sick, and the injured.

On A9, a wildly overwritten story tells us that Moncton business and health communities have revived. Come off it. They were closed or limited for a day and half. Compare that to business and health communities in Vietnam, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan that got bombed out of existence.

There are stories expressing sympathy for the police and their families - as there most certainly should be. but must of the stories are just empty sensationalism - excitement for the sake of excitement.

It does not seem to have occurred to any reporter to ask the obvious questions. For example - none seemed to notice that the accused's reasoning on Facebook was drawn heavily from US sources. The idea of a right to keep and bear arms is a concept in the US constitution, not in ours. The idea of a militia, in the sense of being voluntary groups of independent citizens, is also American.  Both ideas are peddled by the National Rifle Association in the US - along with generous doses of hatred and fear.

Canadian gun groups are somewhat more reticent - though a leading one managed to blend bad logic with bad taste in timing when it said the Moncton shootings proved that gun regulation doesn't work.

It was, of course, a hell of time to make such a pronouncement. As for logic, one could as well say that the existence of drunk driving accidents is proof that laws against drunk driving don't work, and should all be repealed.

Incidentally, did no-one ask where the killer got that combat rifle he was waving?

The one story that has real news rather than sensationalism in it is by Chris Morris on D3, "Analysts concerned over media impact".  This one is well worth reading for its profile of the typical rampage killer. He's white, young, a failure, and possibly inspired by the media attention that rampage killers get.

I think we might also consider the roles of our politicians and news media in spreading rampage hatreds.
We have all our lives been trained by propaganda. We used to hate Germans and Japanese and Italians. But now they're all good. Then it was Malayans and Vietnamese and Algerians, and anybody else who tried to break away from the old empires.

Then Moslems became evil, with an evil that came straight from their religion. So it became okay to kill them by the million - but terribly evil for them to shoot back.

Listen to the speeches by Obama, Kerry, and little Stephen on Ukraine. They are pure hatred and threats - and all that reflected in the tone of reporting in most of our news media.

At the local level, read the editorials, some of the columnists and the news reporting, and you'll see hatred - of shale gas protestors, of a provincial health officer who is personally attacked, hatred of anything the Irvings do not approve of.

We live in hatred and fear. We see everything in the world through glasses that see only hatred and fear. The man who killed those police officers was created by our politicians and our news media - and us.



On the op ed page, Brent Mazerolle says nothing at all.

Below him, Gwynne Dyer writes about D-Day. It is the best column I have ever read in the irving press - and one of the best in any press. And it's all based on common sense - and without a trace of fear or hatred or propaganda. You must read this one for yourself.

The student columnists do their usual, good job. I'll just add a piece to Mike Elliott who talks about the transition from high school to university.  When you get to university you will meet people who (deliberately) give you the feeling that they are very,  very clever  - and you aren't. Some will be students. Some will be professors.

Pay no attention to them. They are suffering from a common university disease. They were always there, from my first class in night school to my last year as a teacher. Their arrogance can really hurt you. Ignore them.
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The lesson of recent days in Moncton? We live in a world shaped by fear, hatred, propaganda, self-interest and greed. This has become stronger in the past century though the control of mass news media by a small number of monopolists who represent the world of big business. They, and their media flunkies, are the ones who have made this an increasingly dangerous world.

Oh, and for over a century, the Christian churches haven't said poop about it.

June 5: A day of silence in Moncton....

After killing three policemen and wounding two, a gunman escaped into heavy woods that press into Moncton, often almost into the downtown area. And those woods are connected to the even heavier forest beyond the city.  But the police seem to have done a very good job of containing him.

I have no doubt the city should and will organize memorial service for the victims of the shooting. I would urge it also  to go to great lengths to offer comfort and practical help to the families of the victims.
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I don't have much to say about  today's Times and Transcript because there was no delivery   (presumably because of the danger of exposure.) The only news item I know of - besides the shootings - is that selected New Brunswick teachers  will be going to China this summer to establish contacts with education professionals in China. They're in for some big surprises.

I taught university in China for  three summers. In that time, no student missed a class. Not one. Nobody was ever late. No assignment was ever late. If I mentioned an article was interesting, everyone would have read it by the next day - even though I had not required reading it.

Many of them followed me back to Montreal to complete their degrees. There, they studied as hard as they had in China. One boy was even took pills to stay awake all night so he could study. I got him to stop only by threatening to hospitalize him if it continued. (He is now an extremely wealthy man - so what do I know.)

It's not the school system that does that to the children. It's the society. There is enormous respect for parents and relatives in China. To do badly in school would be to disgrace the whole family.

There is also enormous respect for books and learning. When I told the class they had to write a criticism of a certain article, they were aghast.  "Oh, no, sir. This is an article by a wise man. We must read it carefully and memorize it. We cannot criticize it."

It was all quite a lesson in how the attitudes of a society shape learning. And no amount of business methods or statistical analysis will change that. It's also a lesson in why our occasional bursts of activity have produced virtually no improvements in literacy.

It's not the fault of the schools we have to change. It's us. All of us.
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Finally, I'll add a little to what I said about war with Russia and China.

1. It's not the American people who are looking for a war. Most wars are economic. This one would be exception - a war to make the very rich even richer. (Yes, that was a motive on both sides in World Wars One and Two.)

2. The rest of the people can be propagandized to favour war - with propaganda heavily loaded to produce hatred. Ever notice that Moselms became hateful only AFTER they began to resist western intrusions into their societies. That's when we began to see newpaper columns about how Islam was hate-filled and backward and how murder was built into the faith.

(There was no mention of how, if Islam was so murderous, that the biggest killers on the world stage were commonly Christians. Nor was their mention of how, if Islam was so terrible, our greatest friend was the strictest Islamic state in the world - Saudi Arabia.)

Is their a campaign to spread hatred of Russians? Just read the speeches by Kerry or Obama or, by the king of Russia haters, Stephen Harper. In the US, especially over the last 40 years, virtually all news media have become controlled by a handful of billionaires. That even includes the "quality" press.

For a sample of this at its worst, try Fox or CNN TV.

Much the same has happened in Canada.That's why we have propaganda papers like the Irving press.

Americans have shown signs of having enough of hate and propaganda as their "news". But the big money boys, their bought politicians, and their propaganda sheets will probably run over them. Ditto in Canada.

3. The US strategy for years has been to surround Russia and China and anti-missile sites - thousands of rockets designed to shoot down Russian and Chinese nuclear missiles aimed at the US. These have been set up progressively closer to Russian and Chinese borders  They have now been moved into Poland - and you can expect Ukraine to be on the list. (I'm not sure I'd care to live in any of those countries. It might not be a really good idea to have nuclear missiles getting hit and exploding over your country.)

These anti-missile missiles are what now make it possible (if insane) for the nuclear missiles of American billionaires (let's not kid ourselves about who owns them) to attack Russia and China, and then to (mostly) block any Russian-Chinese response.

What would be the effect of all these nuclear explosions in mid-air? Nobody knows. But, hey, I'm sure we can invent something to fix it.

4. Why would American big business want to do such a risky thing?
Because it's earlier moves, like free trade and deregulation, have put the US in a serious decline that is not going to get better.

But big business wants to dominate world trade. (That's where this "American exceptionalism" comes from - the belief that the US has the power and the right to ignore international law - but other countries don't.)
But it doesn't have much time to do it. The US, like Britain and France and Spain, is about to become a failed empire. It  has to make its move now or never.

The move is extremely dangerous (in addition to being vastly murderous).

It doesn't matter. The people behind this are at least as immoral as any in history,and greedier than any in
history. This is where the system we wrongly call capitalism  has taken us.

If this works, it will make some hundreds of super-rich even richer. It will kill Russians and Chinese by the millions. It will make the rest of us poorer.

But it probably won't work. And nobody knows what the effect of that will be.







  

June 3: Walking on the edge of insanity....

(I had not intended to write today, but there have been developments....)

..You would never guess it from a reading of the Irving press, but we are close to war with Russia - which would now be also war with China and war with Iran - at least. No, it's not Russian aggression or a Russian threat to world peace. I looks as though Obama is the one who wants a war.

The coup in Ukraine was financed, organized and equipped by the US government. The coup was well-financed, highly organized, and the western powers, contrary to all, normal diplomatic behaviour immediately recognized a new government- which just happened to be led by an international (western) banker, and to include neo-Naziis.

There is no possible reason why Russia would encourage such a coup. On the contrary, US asst. secty. of State Nuland has been openly taking credit for staging the coup.

So it was an American aggression that staged the coup, not a Russian one.

 Ukrainians who speak Russian are resisting the coup - not because they are being helped by Russia but because Ukraine has a long history of intolerance, brutal treatment, and mass murder of Jews and Russian speakers.

And we are now seeing the insanity part.

Secty. of State Kerry has given a speech in which he said the world could no longer allow nations to invade others at the point of a gun.

Wha?  Russia didn't invade Ukraine. It's the US that's been invading and killing all over the world.

Obama says we must create a world in which little girls will not be murdered. Putin hasn't murdered any little girls. Obama has. In fact, he's currently the world champ at murdering little girls.

He also stated his belief in American exceptionalism - the belief that the US is above the the law, it answers to no-one; it is entitled to invade countries. In short, he believes the US should rule the world.

Harper has been particularly vicious, and says Putin has been worse than the communists - which is a neat way of stirring up hatred  and fear of Putin by linking him with communism. In fact,  Putin is president of a Russia that is not only capitalist - but the same form of perverted capitalism as ours. And to suggest that he is worse than Stalin is not only absurd, but an obvious attempt to stir up unreasoning hatred.

As the crisis has developed, the European Union, the US, and Canada have deliberately made the crisis worse with nothing but accusations and threats Putin, in fact, is the one who has been avoiding provocative statements, and has worked for a peaceful settlement.

Meanwhile, the new Kyev government has been doing the dirty work for international money-lenders - privatizing social services, cutting pensions in half, and generally condemning Ukrainians to poverty so their money can be exported to the bankers.  Ukraine is in for one hell of a time.

Why would the US want a war with Russia and China? Because time is running out. American big business needs the US to rule the world so it can control all the world's trade terms - to the benefit of American big business.

Will this run the risk of nuclear war? Damn right it will. And there will be a  high butcher's bill even without nuclear weapons. But big business is utterly without morality. It's only moral rule is that it doesn't have any moral rules. The wars in Vietnam and Iraq and the massacres in Guatemala - and many others - killed millions for big business.

And big business owns Obama and Kerry, and even yapping puppy Harper.

Either US business gets control of the world in the next decade or so - or it never will. That's what this is really all about.

Take a look at those recent statements by Kerry and Obama. ....only the US is entitled to invade countries...we have to make the world safe for little girls (when did Putin threaten little girls?)/....Putin is a communist and so is evil (unlike the US which just gave out candies in Vietnam, Guatemala, Iraq, Syria,....)

These comments by Obama, Kerry and Harper are so absurd, so aimed at building an ignorant hatred that they are walking on the edge of insanity.

Is it possible that North Americans have been kept so ignorant by their news media that they believe this nonsense? And are they so conditioned to hate on command that their hatred can be turned on like a light switch?

If so, our leaders are walking on the edge of insanity, and we are over it.

June 2 oilpipelines are perfectly safe...

So don't you even bother looking up the recent one in Alberta which broke, spilling a half million liters into a nearby river.  But it was a human error. So it doesn't count. Anyway, the owner of the pipeline got a heavy fine. Oilmen also say the follow "the highest standards in the world". So everything is okay.

That's the problem, though, with those who discount the hazards of oil (and shale gas). They point to two or three articles they've read, and call themselves experts. They quote some oil executive who says, "We have the highest safety standards in the world."  And, anyway, climate change isn't happening.

Gee. Obama says it's happening. And he's taking that seriously enough to embark on some pretty expensive initiatives to slow it down. (Note - to slow it down, not to stop it. He can't stop it. It's gone too far to be stopped.)

Then the nay-sayers tell us it's still a long way off. The long way off, however, which usually means about 2100, means the time by which the full blow comes down. That doesn't mean we can wait until then to start changes. Even with changes now, we can only slow it, not stop it.

In fact, it is quite possible, even likely, that we are seeing those changes across California and Texas, where drought conditions are appalling. That means a disastrous harvest season - and that means higher food prices - and it also means serious food shortages.

Some forecasters suggest Canadian farming will benefit from the change. Maybe so, but....

Picture a situation in which Canadian agriculture is doing great, but the US farmland is running short; and the US cannot feed itself. What would happen?

Think War of 1812 that we celebrated just over a year ago - because farmland is much of what it was about. (Of course, Harper would defend us. Good luck on that one.)

Yesterday, the Irving press reported on a speech by Archbishop Tutu in which he referred to the Alberta oil sands as filth, and warned of spills from pipelines. Oil executives responded with the usual citing of "toughest regulations in the world" (But we dealt with that at the start of this column.)

Some newspapers attacked the archbishop as someone who knows little about the technical aspects of oil and shale gas drilling. Very true. He's a theologian. That means he does know something about morality. Oil executives, like executives of most sorts, don't.  In fact, the fundamental beliefs of modern capitalism denies any moral code whatever.

All that counts is profit.

That's why people of the Congo have been murdered and abused in the their millions for over a century. That's why millions were killed in Vietnam, Guatemala, and Iraq. That's why Obama provoked a civil war in Syria. That's why Africa is crawling with American and French troops, operating to destabilize countries for yet more killing. The same thing, minus the French, is happening all over South America. (Funny how the Irving press never reports some things.)

Forget the debate over climate change. It's over. Climate change is happening. Anyway, the debate from the start was fueled largely by the amoral propagandists of the oil and shale gas business. It's over. Obama says the change is happening, and Obama, despite absurd stories I have heard is no socialist. In fact, he has remarkable similarities to the George Bushes.He also has access to the opinions of the best scientists in the world.

More important, Obama absolutely depends on the financial support of big business. When a man in that position decides that climate change is a serious threat, when a man of archbishop Tutu's background   says that further development is immoral, that it will do immense damage to he planet and all those who live on it, this has to be taken seriously.

In New Brunswick, incidentally, our provincial government seems to lack any concept of moral behaviour. Instead, it operates on the most vicious principals of business management. Nor have the churches in the province taken up the slack.
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As to world news, what can I say about a paper that has only 2 1/2 pages of it?

Harper is going to a summit meeting to give tough speeches about Putin. That should do a lot to ease tensions. He set the stage before leaving with a speech that compared Putin to communism. (Hint, Steve baby), Putin isn't a communist. In fact, he's just like you. He runs a government dominated by multibillionaires
of no moral principles whatever. Anyway, we know these speeches are the get the Ukrainian vote in the next election.

I wonder whether he'll say a few words of criticism of the most aggressive nation on earth - the US. And perhaps he might say a few words about Obama's recent statement of belief in 'American exceptionalism'. That means that the US is the only country in the world to have the right to ignore international law, and to 'police' the whole world.  It's the only country allowed to murder on a scale of millions, to torture, to spy on the whole world, and to decide who's allowed to pretend to be the ruler of each country.

Great. So why do we need a UN?

NB announces it has a (vague) climate change plan.  Shale gas and deforestation will be kept as things that are good for us.
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Alec Bruce has an excellent column on the need for early childhood education. The second to last paragraph is a gem.
".....Canada...chooses to spend the money it hasn't promised to return to taxpayers on prisons, military aircraft that don't fly and staged commemorations of wars it may or may not have won two centuries ago."

On op ed, Alan Cochrane has a pretty meager list of MHS traditions that should live on in the new school. Alan, schools are not good preservers of traditions. Not their fault. They just aren't. I went to a school where I sat in the very same room as Christopher Plummer had in his school days. Down the hall, was the former classroom of Oscar Peterson.

It certainly had no effect on my life - or on anybody else's that I ever heard of.

Then there's "Why universities shouldn't function like the private sector" - by Geoff Martin who teaches politics, international relations and Canadian Studies at Mount Allison U. Everyone in this province should read this one. And someone should explain it to our government and business leaders.

Capitalism - or whatever this system we live under is called - is not a religion. It is not ordained by God. It does not bring universal benefits. And, except for making money out of them, it doesn't give a damn for people.

A university is largely about people - about human behaviour, about stimulating independent thought and understanding. It's an entirely different game.

There was a time when university administrators recognized and encouraged that. But it has changed. Businessmen on university boards have inserted business methods into institutions that are not businesses. So, where once we had educators, we now have have administrations (especially at the top) packed with careerists and opportunists.

That's why we have university presidents who jump up like trained poodles when Mr. Irving 'invites' them to serve on one of his conferences on how the province should be run.

Some years ago, I was offered the job of university president. The previous president had been fired. He had been fired because he was the sort of careerist so interested in his own welfare that he really didn't give much of a damn for the university. He had been the first of our super-paid presidents. (We'd had some excellent ones before we switched to the corporation model of highly paid incompetents.)

In the course of discussions, I did not meet with faculty at all. The interviewing was done entirely by businessmen from the board and by lawyers. Nobody asked me a single question about education.

The terms were stunning - not only very high pay, but lavish benefits for the rest of my life.

I refused it. It was obvious that the real bosses would be the wealthier members of the board. It was equally obvious they were not interested in the only aspect of the job that interested me - the improvement of our education methods.

Big business is destroying our universities. In the case of presidents, you get careerists largely ignorant of anything to do with education, but are willing to be lap dogs for big business if the price is right. Meanwhile, the quality of university teaching, never up to kindergarten teacher standards (which are, in truth, quite high), deteriorates.

The interference of big business in education at any level, in hospitals, in social services does not work. These are not businesses. Not only are they quite different from business, they are also - as business is not - dedicated to the service of people - and service to the people requires a morality. Business doesn't have that.

This is an excellent column, the sort of column we should see on on op ed page.