August 14: At last, we catch up...

The Thursday paper is easy. It has only one item in it worth reading - on p. D7. Brian Cormier has a column on depression, and it's a good one. As usual, it's a personal story rather than an opinion. But in this case, it works. And it's well-written.

The editorial writer attacks the party leaders for not having a policy entirely meeting the wishes of the TandT (and its boss). ---I notice the editorials are almost always on matters of interest to the boss, and always support his views.. This suggests, obviously, that the editors are hired shills. And it also suggests they aren't bright enough to write about anything else.

But they offer a brilliant idea concerning government grants to companies in order to create jobs. Instead of grants, we would just lower corporate taxes. Yeah. It's terrible the way we handicap those hard-working job creators with crushing taxes. Just lower corporate taxes. We can do it easily by closing all the hospitals. (However, how any of that is an improvement on our loans-to-billionaires policy isn't clear to me.)

Norbert's headline  is simply wrong. "All five leaders fail to answer hospital closure question". That is simply not true. What Norbert means is that they didn't do what he said they should do. I would agree that only one leader gave a clear and intelligent answer. That was Dominic Cardy who said that you don't start by cutting budgets; you start by determining what it is the people need.

Eric Lewis writes about bicycles on the streets. It's an issue on which Moncton is 50 years behind the rest of the developed world - and Eric Lewis adds nothing to it.

In summary - a bloody awful edition - except for Brian Cormier.
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For Friday, the most interesting page of Section A is the obituary page.


NewsToday has an intriguing story on  it first page: "Role in Iraq plan possible for Canada". This concerns the attempt to get thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Yazidis, Christians and other groups threatened by starvation and slaughter out of Iraq. Almost half a million displaced Iraqis have fled into Turkey.

Harper has given no clear response yet. (It seems normal for him to talk big on issues like this - and then do nothing.) Will he allow some of these people to enter Canada? I should hope so. But I think it unlikely.

Almost all other world trouble spots are on hold for a few days, at least. The first one to heat up will probably come when  a Russian truck convoy of humanitarian aid reaches the Ukraine border. Ukraine has vowed to block it.

For foreign news, this week of relative quiet should have been a chance for the paper to publish stories that give us deeper insight to the Russia-Ukraine, Israeli-Palestinian issues. Instead, it ran stories that told us nothing.

Page C 12 has an interesting article on two native groups which have ordered the closure of two mines in B.C., both on environmental grounds. It will be interesting to see which side the provincial and federal governments will take. This could set important precedents, one way or the other, for the role of native peoples in Canada.

The editorial is the usual hymn to Mr. Irving's opinions. And even Alec Bruce picks up that theme in his column which advocates making the the rest of us pay for the excesses of the very rich few.

Rod Allen tells an utterly pointless story about how he saw the red moon,  then adds other personal items about his daily life - as if anybody could care a damn.

Beth Lyons' column pretty much saves the paper for thursday. She urges us all to support LGBT Pride week. And that sounds fine to me. But, to the shock of my virginal mind, she refers to LGBT's as "queer".
Presumably, that is now socially acceptable. I just can't keep up with all these changes.

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Sorry. There is just nothing else in these two, miserable editions. And this when a potentially big crisis is coming to a boil.

In Missouri, an eighteen-year old African-American boy was shot to death by a policeman. That has provoked days and nights of rioting - and of police patrols in armoured cars stocked with military combat weapons. -oh, and of police wearing camouflage outfits - camouflage in a battlefield of paved streets and sidewalks, and block after block of stores and apartments.

CBC drew attention to this in a new report. It's something we should have noticed here in New Brunswick a year ago.

I remember the lineup of riot police as they faced a crowd, largely of native peoples, blockading shale gas trucks. And I remember the men behind them, wearing army combat camouflage and carrying combat rifles.
1. Why were they wearing camouflage clothing? They weren't crawling through underbrush. They were standing in the open.
2. Why the combat rifles with their very large magazines? These rifles are designed for the rapid fire of battle against a  heavily -armed enemy. They're designed for mass killing. That's why they have large magazines. They were never designed for sniping at individuals in a civilian gathering. So why did they have them?
3. And they didn't look like police. They all looked as if they came from the same cookie-cutter, the same standard of military conditioning that you see in men who do physical conditioning every day.

(No, I don't mean police are fat and sloppy. They were certainly a husky bunch. But they have a job to do. They can't spend all day, every day in training. Soldiers can.)

I'm not surprised that no Irving reporter seems to have noticed this. But the difference in appearance between the riot squad and the snipers was remarkable. They didn't look like police. They looked and acted like a foreign military come to defeat us.

Were they army? Or were they a new branch of police trained as soldiers? That would explain their bizarre use of camouflage and their combat rifles. And there is, or should be, a big difference between police and soldiers. Police exist to protect people. Men who wear camouflage and carry combat rifles exist to kill whoever they are  told to kill.

For some years now, police in the US have been militarizing in their training, weapons, and clothes. Some of the police in Missouri, as I said, were wearing military camouflage outfits - in the middle of a town where they would have had a searcg to find a leaf to hide behind.

In other cities in the US, police on duty checking people on the streets in daytime for their ID cards wear  camouflage outfits. They also wear them for (unauthorized) raids on people's homes. The message is clear.
This isn't policing. This is war. And the police aren't there to protect us. They're there to make us do what the boss wants.

This process is in quite an advanced condition in the US -  which is one reason many people call the US a police state. I have no reason to doubt that the same process is happening in Canada. And that process may be what we were watching in last summer's shale gas blockade.

It poses special and immediate problems in the US. It is a country which has done almost nothing about its racial tensions since 1865. The hatreds and resentments run deep on both sides. And this September, for the first time, the majority of children registering for kindergarten will be non-white.

What's happening in Missouri may be just a start on the final blow to the empire.

Watch, too, for the gun nuts, the ones who say they must have guns to defend the constitution. The constitution has been in shreds for years. And they did nothing. But if the rioting spreads, they'll join with the government people who destroyed the constitution, and they'll shoot the rioters.

Meanwhile, it would be nice if an editor who is bright enough could order a reporter who is a real reporter - if there is one - to find out exactly who were those men in camouflage outfits last summer - and why they wore camouflage outfits.

August 14, part two: (actually posted on July 15 and catching up with the Tand T of August 12))

Readers who check other sites I mention might have been trying to get Information Clearing House a few days ago - to find it closed. This has been a regular occurrence for some years. Unidentified hackers break in to put it out of service. Of course,  we know the hackers can't possible be government agencies.

I should also mention that if you scroll down a bit on the site, you will find, on the right margin a long list "alternative news and opinion sources".  I am not familiar enough with most of them to make any recommendations. Something else to catch up on.

The only big news on the front page is the death of Robin Williams. (The story is actually in News Today.) Somehow, this is one of those stories that, for reasons I feel rather than understand, seems to mark the passage of an age - and emphasizes the loss of it.

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A3 has a story about about awarding grants to preserve and to encourage buyers for "heritage" buildings.  Their definition of heritage seems to be anything that's old -which could make me worth a pretty penny. The story featured a photo of Castle Manor.

What does Castle Manor have to do with any heritage? How does it figure in the history of Moncton?

Architecturally, it's a tasteless imitation of castle architecture of a thousand years ago with obviously phony ramparts. The style was (unwisely) revived for churches in the nineteenth century. But Castle Manor is a double stinker. With the general shape and function of a working class apartment building of the 1940s, it is simply a bad taste copy of a bad taste copy. Why one earth should an apartment be built to look (sort of) like a castle? Only with none of a real castle's sense of purpose and history?

And in this province, where we are going to lose essential services  to balance t he budget, we have lots of money to preserve that grotesque pile of rock, and lots to give millionaires so they can buy it.
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A7 has the daily quiz of provincial party leaders on the question of the public service. Most jumped on the band wagon to reduce it because we have proportionately more civil servants than most other provinces.

Well, of course we do, you twits. Whatever the size of the population, each branch of the public service requires the same number of people ( 1) to head the various departments. A committee to plan education will need the same number of people no matter what the size of the province. The work to be done does not get all that much smaller no matter what the size of the province.

The first issue is not the size of the civil service. It's the size of the job to be done. If we want to bring our civil service in line with other provinces, then the logical response is to unite the Atlantic provinces into one, big one.

The only party with an intelligent answer to the question was the NDP. (Note - I am not an automatic supporter of the NDP. I have been very disappointed with how it has gone from being a social democratic party to being just another Liberal party.)

Dominic Cardy, NDP leader, said, "It's a question of what do we need to deliver the public services people want." That's not only an intelligent answer; it's the only one that suggests a philosophy of what government is.  You start with the people and what they need, not with what some billionaire wants.
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The death of Robin Williams dominates the news in NewsToday. That's not surprising. The rest of the world is marking time. What we should be looking for will happen within days.
1. Israel and Hamas will have decided for or against a peace deal. My guess is they will decide against. Israel has no intention of giving up its dominance of Palestine. And if Palestine cannot get freedom from Israel, then it might as well go down fighting.
2. A large Russian truck convoy of humanitarian aid is heading for the Ukraine border with food and medicine for those caught in the fighting. Putin has to do this - or he becomes a straw man leader in the eyes of Russians and, indeed, of the world.
The Kiev government says it will stall the convoy at the border for a week or more. Of course. The Kiev government needs a war that will suck in NATO. And that might do it.
3.Iraq? Anybody's guess. Isis is the middle east response to all those years in which they were killed, pauperized, looted for the benefit of western empires - most recently, the American empire. This could trigger one hell of an explosion throughout Africa and the Middle East. The fall of an empire is not a pretty thing to watch.
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For the Tuesday edition, Norbert took off on British historian, Dominic Hardy, who teaches at Oxford. But Norbert knows more about history than Hardy does.

Hardy wrote an article suggesting that the world would be a better place if Britain and Canada had not joined into the war. But he's not up to Norbert's standards. No, says Norbert, good historians don't speculate "...what if..."

It's coming out of  your ears Norbert. I worked in universities for 40 years. I've know a lot of historians (I am one), including a few of world reputation. We often speculated on the what ifs of history. As long as people know that what  you're offering is an opinion - and it was clear with Hardy - there is nothing wrong with it. In fact, training in history provides the skills to examine the what ifs.

And one can even project the what ifs into the future. What if the US water shortage continues  (as a result of climate change)? The only place to get more is Canada. What if Canada limits the water it sells because of the effect will it have on us?  Would the US invade? (Answer, if Harper is still PM, the US won't have to invade. He always says yes to US presidents.)

When Hardy says politicians often rush into war without any care for their citizens who will be killed, Norbert really gets his petticoats all messed up. He points to Neville Chamberlain, and his reluctance to go to war with Hitler. Well, yes, he was reluctant, but with good reason. He knew that Britain was nowhere close to being ready for a  major war. Later, it would prove how unready it was at Dunkirk.

 And the US did. as Norbert says, enter late - but that had nothing to do with opposing war. It had to do with not caring a damn what happened to Britain; and hoping to pick up the pieces of its empire when Britain collapsed. It was Hitler's invasion of Russia - as much as the bombing of Pearl Harbour - that saved Britain's butt. Until then, it was beaten and hopeless.

Then he says World War 1 gave us the League of Nations. Big deal. It didn't do anything. But then - after World War Two - there were no more wars between major powers. So that shows war can make good changes. Gee, Norbert, ya think that might have something to do with both sides having nuclear weapons? And if the US prevents wars, how come we've have nothing but wars for over fifty years? Is war okay if it's just big countries slaughtering small ones?

And if the UN is the great, beneficial result of World War One, how come we have the possiblities of war with Russia and China looming? Not to  mention most of the Middle East and Africa.

It seems Hardy's real sin in Norbert's eyes is that he's anti-war. Oh, naughty baby.
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Speaking of war, I do hope we get a sketch of General Currie in the series on Canadians in World War 1. He commanded Canadian troops in the last half of the war. As a real estate dealer with almost no military experience, he seemed an odd choice to be the senior commander in the field. And he did make mistakes at first. But Currie was a fast learner. He turned out to be a brilliant general, one of the best on either side, so good that the British prime minister once suggested he should be commander of all the British and Commonwealth armies. (Of course, his success made him enemies in Canada who hounded him for the rest of his life. There were a lot of Norberts around.)
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Two letters to the editor are worth reading - one bad and one good.

The good one is "Are you ready for the future?" The writer talks about the huge problems, especially relating to environment, around us. Is our province ready? In fact, our province hasn't even started to think about it.

Then "'Giving back' is poor choice of words." because it implies money given by businessmen is not really their money, their property. Hey. They worked for it. It's theirs. They don't have to give anything back.

I have the feeling the writer is a regular church-goer, primarily because going to church is respectable.

Look. We live in a civilization - you know, an organized society. Nobody, NOBODY, makes money all by himself or herself. We need the educaton that ALL of us provide. We need the justice system and the roads and the forests and the mines that ALL of us provide. We need large numbers poor people so that Walmart can get them at minimum wage, and make its owners rich. NOBODY gets money without lifetime help from all of society.

And please don't tell me the rich work hard for their money. I've shaken hands with many of them, and I've never felt a single callous. There are single mothers with children who work a  hell of a lot harder than any Irving, and they do it for a starvation wage.

We  fight wars and the poor die to make money for the rich. (The first to volunteer in a war are the unemployed.) We all create wealth. And it belongs to all of us. And certainly, we should all get the benefit of it.

I would advise the letter writer to talk to Norbert. I think she'd like him.

August 14: Sorry to be late with this one....

real life keeps getting in the way.
Monday's paper, section A, p. 1.  Big story of the day, "Metro cyclists, drivers have room to grow..." I have no idea what the point of this story is, why it is the lead headline, or why it should be in a newspaper at all.

At the bottom of p. 1 is an even bigger story. A new barber shop has opened in Moncton.

Moving right along to p. A3, there's a real story. A company in New Brunswick has asked for permission to dump fracking waste water to holding tanks in Dieppe, from there to be dumped in Dieppe's sewage system, then Moncton's, then Riverview's., then into the Petitcodiac River.

But not to worry, the plan has to be approved by the New Brunswick government which, as we know, has high standards.

Apparently, it never occurred tot he reporter to ask questions - such as - Why can't they get permission to dump it in Nova Scotia?

And that's pretty much it for section A.
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Newstoday covers a few, very few, international stories. It has a long story on Iraq which does not include the rather important information that the Isis movement which is raging through Iraq, killing people of other religious groups in the the thousands, was organized, paid for, trained, and equipped by the US government. That's the same United States government which is now arming the Kurds to attack Isis, and sending aircraft to kill Isis militants.

Isis is also moving in to fight against Syrians on both sides of the Syrian civil war - which was begun, financed, and equipped by Saudi Arabia and the US. It really makes  you wonder who's in charge in the US.  Quite seriously - American foreign policy moves are often so self-contradictory that one wonders how one person could be in control.  The answer may well be that one person isn't.  The US has so many power groups in its police-state, assassination, espionage domestic and foreign, drone bombing, its monster military all with huge budgets and almost no oversight over them or their budgets that any number of people could be running their own shows.

We think of democracy ending with a clear-cut dictatorship. But that's not always true. It can end, perhaps it has, with a swarm of uncontrolled agencies which tax payers pay for - but know nothing about.
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B4 has an important story on protests against the shooting of an eighteen-year-old boy (who was not armed) by police. Since then, it has developed into more than a protest. If violent protests spread across the US, as I think they will, this might well be how they begin. The causes will be distrust of government, severe suffering as the US economy declines and as the rich continue to eat up most of what money is available. But the spark may well be fired by racism.

Racism runs deep in the US. (And often in Canada. But we prefer not to notice it.) African-Americans have a dismal history. Kidnapped from their native lands for hundreds of years, dying in transit in their millions, thrust into a completely alien society as slaves, and given no help in adapting to a new environment that took away all the values and beliefs they had.

And they were not really freed in 1865. In practical terms, most had no vote, were publicly subordinated to white people (even stepping off the sidewalk as a white man passed), frequently hanged and terrorized almost as a sport, and, in the northern US, sent into slums by the low salaries that were the only ones  they could get, living in poverty, with schools that were far inferior, so that they grew up in an environment that militated against any advance through education. Now, in recession, it is African-Americans who suffer the most. The US is on the edge of serious and widespread violence - and it could well be sparked by centuries of a people cut off from their cultural roots, and with no chance to find any other.

Oh,  yeah - and also written off in American history. For example, how many African-American cowboys have you seen in western films? Despite a life saturated with cowboy films, I can think on only one. In reality, a large number of cowboys were African-Americans. Of course. Cowboys were just cheap labour.
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B5, bottom of the page, has the story that should have been on p.1. "Keystone climate impacts could be higher than previous studies: estimate"  The Stockholm Institute, a quite respected environmental organization says US State Department studies on the feasibility of a pipeline to carry crude oil from Alberta to Texas was faulty.  It left out a standard examination in such tests of the effect of putting more oil on the market. But the State Department didn't do it. As a result, it is likely the project will cause a far, far greater impact on world climate than the State Department estimated. The only industry answer, as reported, is gobbledy-gook.

And running a pipeline from Alberta to New Brunswick would have the same effect.

So why are we so eager to pump even more greenhouses gasses into the air when we know they will destroy us? Well, it's because  pumping out more greenhouse gasses makes some people very rich. And, where money is concerned, they don't give a damn how many die. They intend to keep pumping until world catastrophe stops them, and keep raising the supply before that catastrophe hits.

Forgive me for suggesting these people are stupid, and utterly without any moral standards....and then you have the ones who say, "Duh. We need the jobs."
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We have no fewer that two columns on the burning issue of whether soccer should be played on grass or on artificial turf.

Norbert Cunningham is more than usually ignorant and even despicable in his propaganda.

This time, he pours out his venom on the unemployed, the poor, pensioners. We've got to make cuts in all that spending to balance the budget. Yes,  all them there poor and elderly people who feel entitled. They're the ones who caused the recession.. Make them pay for it.

There's not a word about the super rich and the damage they did with reduced taxes, government favours, hidden piggy banks, exploitation of the world's really poor (that's what free trade is largely about.) What the hell is that, Norbert, if not a sense of entitlement?

It was not that long ago that Mr. Irving pronounced himself a member of the government - despite the fact that nobody had elected him.  He also got the power to place his own hacks as advisors in the Finance ministry. What the hell do you call that if not a sense of entitlement? And that's the gang that sent the budget through the roof.

But Norbert says the poor and the elderly and the sick are the ones who have to pay.

Then he rattles on about how the hospitals have to face severe economies. It's obvious  he knows nothing whatever about the structures or economics of a medical system. But he rants, anyway.

That's because he knows the boots he licks every day are worn by a man who would love to see private medical care re-established.

This is not just ignorant journalism. It's disgusting, crawling, ass-kissing irresponsibility.

Oh - I notice this province always discusses things starting with cost.  (Unless it's a new hockey rink. Then we're told it really won't cost anything.) So here's a hint to the news media and the politicians of this province. Government and news are about people. So any issue should being with a discussion of human needs. Then you go to costs. Not the other way around.

Then, when we discuss costs, let's remember to include what we expect in taxes and self-dependence from the people we all have made very, very rich.
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Two letters to the editor worth looking at. One is "Letter distorted history of conflict". It's a good example of a common mistake in studying foreign affairs - to start the story in the middle.  In this case, the letter writer argues a case for Israel in its wars starting with Hamas rockets, and then starting again with the 1967 war.

The trouble with that is that the struggle began much earlier. Some would say 1948. I would say it began in the 1930s with our failure to react to Hitler's treatment of Jews.

In any case, pointing the blame finger will get nobody anywhere. To think of this as a world in which they are bad and we are good is a waste of time. There's lots of good and bad on both sides of many issues.

Then there's "Computer upgrades needed in N.B. schools"  It's by Joseph Caswell of Sackville who is just about to enter grade 8. You should especially read it if you are a person who gripes about the schools. This boy can write - I mean really well. And he's intelligent. This is first rate.
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It's late. I'm going to publish this August 14 edition having completed just the Monday half of it. I'll deal with
the Tuesday paper later tonight.

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Aug. 9: The Blame Game...

First, something that didn't make the news in the Irving press. There's been something of a revolt at the New York Times. Reporters and editors demanded of the owners that they be allowed to use the word 'torture' in connection with the CIA. Until then, they had been forced to use terms like 'enhanced interrogation techniques'. Of course. Torture sounds crude and cruel , while enhanced 'interrogation techniques' sounds scientific and sophisticated. And that helps to brainwash the public into thinking there's nothing wrong with it.

And brainwashing is what most of the news media are about. It's always been like that going back the the press barons of the 1890s - and, often, before that. But it was become much, much worse as our news media have fallen under the control of fewer and fewer very wealthy people, and usually people with other interests to encourage. Irving ownership of much of the news media in New Brunswick springs to mind.

The staff of the New York Times has struck a blow for honesty in the news media but, ooh, it's awfully small blow at a North American media world that has become almost pure propaganda and very sophisticated mind control.

Still, it's too bad we've never seen a similar stirring of integrity and courage among reporters and editors of the Irving press.

This is one reason why I get quite annoyed by the Faith Page with its sermonettes and church activities.
This Saturday's sermonette is better than usual - though it still falls short of a need people have. We don't need clergy to tell us we should love our neighbours. That stuff is all written down in clear language.

What we need to know is how to apply those standards in the daily life of this world we live in. This is a world that economically and militarily acts in direct contradiction to virtually all Christian and Judaic teaching. But our churches, for the most part, refuse to make any connection between their teaching and the world we live in.

On the contrary, they support whatever convention demands they support. War? Yessir. The church will bless it all.

But it is often quite different in synagogues because they have a long history of the place of worship as also being a place of debate and discussion. That's illustrated in a story of the childhood of Jesus when he argued in the temple. When in Montreal, I would be invited to give talks on current events some fifty or sixty times a year. Almost all were at synagogues or other, Jewish institutions.

Audiences were normally one  hundred to several hundred. Participation was high. I was sometimes critical of Israel and that, too, encouraged debate rather than recriminations. I  couldn't help noticing, though, that when I spoke in Christian churches, it was best to avoid any serious topic at all. I think of that whenever I read that another church down here is having a strawberry tea this week.

People don't learn about events in our world from listening to the news media. It happens through regular and open discussion. In most churches (and in all aspects of New Brunswick life), no such discussion happens. I don't know whether there is village mentality that still hangs over the whole province - a fear of being noticed by neighbours as different - or whether the Irving press' practice of trivializing everything including its readers is at work.  But we all know what the result will be. In the coming provincial election, we will elect another flock of turkeys.
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And now the blame game. This happens whenever, as with Israel and Palestine, there is violence. Everybody points a finger. But you would think Canadians, of all people, would know better.

When our first ancestors arrived here, they shattered the economies, religions, social and political structures of the native peoples. Sometimes it was deliberate; sometimes not. By the mid-nineteenth century, the damage was done across Canada. And the damage is still being done.

When a society is destroyed, it is a long and painful road to adapt to the change, to preserve what can be preserved while still operating in vastly changed world. It takes centuries to make the change, and with lots of pain and suffering on the way.

And when the damage shows among native peoples in crime figures, in violence, in educational figures, we point the finger of blame at them - when it should be at us. We caused the damage. And, to make it worse, there's not a whole lot we can do to fix it. It has to be done by native people, themselves. (We've already proven that with out horrible creation of residential schools.)

Our western empires have done a similar job around the world. Because of our interference, China was a basket case for over a century. Nobody knows how many Chinese died as a result of our activities. The whole social and political structure of the country was destroyed. And it would have been even worse if the American government's puppet, Chiang Kai Shek, had been able to take over after World War Two.

Africa? Tens of millions murdered, millions enslaved, and the rest to work at starvation wages or simply to starve. Ditto in Central America.

Then there has been over a century of intrusion, killing, disrupting throughout Moslem societies, breaking down political and social life. The result, as so often in these cases, is that the religion becomes stronger than ever, and more extreme. That's what we're watching in Iraq.

Oh, are they murdering Christians? Yes, but not nearly so many as Christians do. The Germans that we bombed in World War Two were Christians. So are the Russians we are now threatening.

As for Israel, we neglected the Jews of Europe when they needed us. We knew what was going on. And we didn't lift a finger - not even after the war was over. What we did, eventually, was to give them land that wasn't ours to give. Not surprisingly, the Palestinians were annoyed at that.

Meanwhile, the Israelis, having learned they can expect nothing from anybody, treat the Palestinians with brutality, hoping to get rid of them all and take the rest of their land.

To make matters worse, the American government is encouraging the breakdown of societies, figuring it will make them easier to exploit. That's why it is encouraging Al Quaeda to fight as "rebels' against the Syrian government (and, incidentally, kill Syrian Christians). That's why the US has paid, equipped and trained the very extreme Isis movement that is destroying Iraq.

We are creating a world catastrophe which, like the one we created for native peoples, takes generations to overcome.

And the almost sole reason is so that multi-billionaires can get richer. This is stupidity and greed on a scale the world has never seen.

And we're doing it to ourselves. For more than a quarter of a century we have known of the threat of climate change. But there was a massive propaganda campaign (still going) to say it isn't happening or, if it does, we'll invent something.

Who financed this propaganda campaign? The oil industry, of course; notably the Koch brothers. The oil industry makes huge profits for some very rich people. And they intend to keep going as long as there is oil in the ground. That's why so much of the world has been so slow to take necessary measures and research. (Billionaires show a remarkable talent for ignoring the future. That's because excessive greed destroys logic - and morality..)
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So what's in the TandT for yesterday and today? Not much. Not much at all.

For Friday, the most  (only) important column is Gwynne Dyer on climate change. It's on the op ed page.

For Saturday, Bill Belliveau has a contemptible column on our budget deficits. He doesn't even mention who it it that really sets our budget. He doesn't mention the stunning tax breaks we give the very rich - or the favours and gifts we give them out of our tax money.

Nope. You know who caused this recession? It's them poor people. "The not-so-obvious causes are found in public attitudes, government dependency and a deeply entrenched sense of entitlement."

The same things were being said in the great depression of the 1930s, and were being published in scruffy   papers like the TandT. In fact, the people more dependent on government than any others are the rich. They depend on it for their tax breaks, their grants, many of their overpriced contracts and, of course, they depend on us to pay for their wars (and most wars are for them) - thought their enlistment rate is not high.

A sense of entitlement. Damn right we have one. We're entitled to have a government that governs for us, one that ensures we get a fair share of the money our work produces. (No wage gap.) Nobody writing for the TandT has even had the courage (or maybe the intelligence) to mention the very rich, and their role in our economic problems.

Brent Mazerolle has the best opinion column I've ever seen him produce. It's a very human and very effectively told story of changes he's gone through in how he sees the world. This is well worth a read.

Gwynne Dyer is the other must read for Saturday. He takes the spread of Ebola, and explains why it's going to take so long to supply medication for it.  In brief - it's going to take a long time because the big drug companies don't see enough profit in it.

Now, I'm not talking here of your local pharmacists. I'm talking of another breed, the corporation bosses who control the big drug companies. These have a long history of being the greediest and least moral species in creation. When we or the US send drugs as foreign aid to countries ravaged by disease, these big drug companies make deals to sell the drugs to the government as such exorbitant prices that the actual  shipments are much smaller than might have been expected - and people die. This is one of Dyer's best columns.
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In Saturday's letters is "Israel is protecting its citizens". Mark David of Centre for Israel and Jewish affairs has a couple of pretty serious mistakes.
1. The story of a well-financed Israeli lobby operating among American and Canadian politicians has been well-known for years. In the US, it undoubtedly has the power to make the difference in elections. They're also trying it  here - and Stephen Harper  is deeply involved. It is quite possible, and well known to any political pundit I have ever met. Indeed, I was in conversation with a leading figure of the Israeli lobby just a few days ago. He defined me, as I recall it, as failure as a teacher (he knew nothing about my teaching) and a tragedy as a human being.
2. Then David goes on to say that criticizing Israel is "anti-semitic".  Talk to your bosses, David, they've dropped the use of anti-semitic in favour of - "anti-Jewish". That's because most Jews in Israel are not semites.  The word semite refers to a language group with its history in the middle east. However, it seems that European Jews are largely descended from European converts of a very long time ago.

The Jews who are semites, most of them, are the ones who stayed in the middle east. Many of them were Palestinians who live quite peacefully with their arab neighbours.

All arabs ARE semites. So if you're accusing someone of being anti-semitic, you're saying he's anti-arab. And I think that makes you, Mark, an anti-semite.

Oh, you must know some Jews. Note their complexions. Some, few in Canada. have an olive (Mediterranean) complexion. Those are semites. Most have the complexion of - well - of the Europeans they are.
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Sorry to take so long. There was so little in the TandT that I thought it better to speak in general terms. And, oh my, it did run on.

I should add I had a couple letters that I didn't publish. This is a person I've heard from before, I'm sure, though he never has the courage to give his name. He writes to ridicule me - and that's okay. (I'd be more worried if he approved of me.) But he was also very coarse and vulgar. So I thought I really couldn't publish that.

August 7:A pause to revisit August 5

I had a lot to cover in the last blog - so an important topic got lost. It's Tuesday's paper, p. A1 (NB's natural resources debate rages). It's on the development on shale gas, etc. It shows both sides - BUT - one side comes first and takes up half of a long article.  Any journalist knows that not many readers will be sticking around after the first half.

The first half is a cheer for development, and the cheerleader is Dr. Savoie of U de Moncton. (Have you ever heard Dr. Savoie make any criticism of anything the Irvings want?) There is also ample reference to Prof. Saillant's  book "Over the Cliff", which seems to be required reading for all editors and columnists at the Irving press.

Dr. Savoie opens with the scholarly observation that that the airport parking lot is jammed with cars whose owners have gone to Alberta. duh - gee, doc,I've seldom seen an airport in the world which was not jammed with parked cars. And how can you tell the owners have gone to Alberta? Obviously, you must be a man who can see around corners. And --- well---you're saying that people who have gone to Alberta for months or years or forever just leave their cars at the airport parking lot? At those prices? Wanna think about that doc?

I amazed the reporter would not pick up on that.  (No, I'm not really amazed.

He also makes the inane suggestion (and one that is both corny and old) in saying people should vote for the candidate that promises the least. Then they won't be disappointed.

Then the reporter slobbers all over Dr. Savoie calling him 'savvy' and something of an "eminence grise" in New Brunswick. That judgement is beyond the capacity of the reporter, and should not appear. This whole story looks like a kiss-up for Irving and friends.

There are, I believe, four universities in New Brunswick. But we seem, on topics like this, only to hear from one. Why? This is also the university with a senior professor who was in thick with Irving interests, and who was discovered as having faked his credentials. Now, this sort of person does not seem to be common at U de M. In fact, I have never met a U de M professor who, it seemed to me, was anybody's apologist. But the apologists and propagandists we do have come from U de M, and it takes very few such people to ruin the reputation of even the finest university. U de M really should look at this.

Briefly, what has happened is this. The rich have been bleeding the province dry through the so-called wage gap. through getting endless favours from government, and through tax cuts. And that was controlled by the rich from the start. Don't ever kid yourself that the the government  made up those budgets.  J.D.Irving himself announced he was (illegally) a member of the government, and he stacked the Ministry of Finance with his choices for advisors. We are in financial trouble, all right. But what Irving and friends don't admit is that they caused the crisis - and now they want us to pay for it.

This is a phenomenon being repeated all over the western world. But you will never hear a Dr. Savoie or a Saillant say that.

Incidentally, what are the Irving qualifications to tell us how to run a province? Oh, I know they're rich. But that's inherited - and once you've inherited enough of the good stuff, you can  hire people to run your business. But what training do the Irvings have to run anything? What were their university studies? What degrees do they have? They must be awfully shy about it because I can't find anything on the web.

Being born rich doesn't mean informed leadership any more that owning one's own chapel makes one a saint.
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There's almost no news in the Wednesday and Thursday papers. To take up the slack, I googled "Information Clearing House" a collection of news stories and opinion from around the world. Some will claim that it's biased - and that is a reasonable complaint, so I treat its news with caution. But, at its worst, it never reaches the depths of bias and outright lying that one finds in the North American press - or the stunning incompetence ones sees in the Irving press.

A similar story also appears in The East Asian Times.

The story is that the Malaysian airliner shot down in Ukraine was shot down by fighter planes, not by rockets. A picture of the fuselage shows what are unquestionably holes punched by machine guns in multiple mountings as those in a fighter plane. They are all round, all the same size, and in straight lines. No rocket did that. And no machine gun  ever built could shoot from the ground to that height. This, as some witnesses said at the time, was done by a fighter plane.

The rebels don't have any aircraft. The Russians do - but had no motive to shoot it down. (Unless you believe are Russians are just naturally evil killers.) That leaves us with the Ukraine air force - which did have a motive - to pull the west into its civil war. (a pulling that Obama was quite receptive to.)

Within hours of the crash, the US government blamed rebel ground troops though, even if it were true, could not possibly be known so quickly to the US. Since then, the US has done nothing but issue threats and punishments. Significantly, it has released no evidence whatever.

Obama wants a war with Russia. We are not entering a return to the Cold War. I wish we were. We're moving toward a hot war.

Oh, and today's big news, even in the TandT - is that Russia has massed 20,000 troops on its border with Ukraine.  O-o-o-o. treacherous Russians. Except -

20,000 is by no means an invasion army in this situation. And there is nothing  unusual about massing 20,000 troops on a border with a country in civil war.

On, yes, the North American papers also refer to them as "combat" troops. Very precise and dramatic - as opposed to cooking troops or tailor troops or flower-arranging troops."Combat" is added to make it sound more evil and threatening.

Why a war? Because the defeat of Russia would give American business effective control of the Russian government, reduce the Russian influence in Africa and Asia to give American business control over those markets. None of this will do the least good to most of the people of the  US (or Canada), but it will make a handful of the very, very rich into a handful of the very, very, very rich.

And it will be nuclear g

Obama wants a war. And Harper has committed us to it. So, perhaps this Nov. 11, our chaplains will be able to dust off their usual speeches on how Canadians soldiers are sacrificing their lives to defend democracy, or help little girls go to school - whatever.
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There's really nothing of substance in either Wednesday's or Thursday's paper. For Wednesday, Norbert has length his lead for "Most columns on the provincial finances without mentioning a single rich person."

The only column worth reading is Jody Dallaire, who stepped well beyond her usual beat to talk about income disparity, and how it affects the economy. This is the only column in the paper worth reading, and out-distances any column I have read anywhere on this topic.
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There is really nothing to read about the election because the issues that count aren't being mentioned.
1. New Brunswick is run by big business. How do we restore democracy?
2. You cannot hope for a democracy with a population that is so illiterate as this one. This is not the fault of the schools. This is the product of a society that has never been its own master, shows no great interest in intellectual life or learning and is, I suspect, afraid to have opinions. I can't even pretend to have the answer to this. It's a sort of primitive, village mentality. But until that is dealt with, ain't nothing going to change in this province. People don't learn to read because they have no great desire to read or to think.
3. You cannot have a democracy when the only print medium is manipulative, lying, biased, and at the service of its master. People have to KNOW in order to know who to vote for. They don't. You cannot have a democracy when the only print medium is owned by people with the purpose of making sure their readers don't ever know anything. This sickness has attacked almost all the privately owned news media in Canada and the US, with private TV as perhaps the most brainless example.
This is precisely what the CBC was founded to counter. And it has done well. But governments (owned by big business) have been hostile to it - none more so than the fiercely anti-democratic Stephen Harper. Much damage as been done by budget cuts to reduce to CBC effectiveness - and to create an atmosphere of fear in the CBC. And, if Harper gets another term, he'll finish the job.

We are living through a period of rapid and enormous change, a period of putting billions into poverty so a few can be very rich, of every effective attacks by big business to take over control of all governments all over the world.

These are the issues that count. But they aren't being mentioned.

As for big business coming in to spread wealth through developing our resources, forget. Big business exists to take wealth, not to spread it. It has, for example, taken uncountable trillions out of Latin America, Africa, Asia. - leaving behind it vast poverty and sickness.

Yes might get a bit of money for letting them take what you have. But it won't be as much as they say. And it won't last for very long. It never has. You can't create a livable world or even a province on the base of rule by the greedy.

August 5: Politicians, news media, and the glorification of war.....

It begins with Brent Mazerolle writing the headline story on the centenary of World War 1. I'll skip the small errors. (Such as - Canada was at war when Britain was. True enough. But it was not required to take any active role unless Canada, itself, were attacked.)  There was, as Mazerolle says, a rush to enlist, just as there would be in World War 2. But both rushes had a lot to do with high unemployment. As war factories opened, enlistment dried up. As well, much of the early enlistment came from the West which still had a high proportion of British-born immigrants. In areas weaker in recent immigrants, (like the Maritimes), enlistment  was lower.

It is true, as Mazerolle says, that there were fears of out of control inflation and shortages. And those fears were well-founded. In fact, the Canadian economy was a mess throughout World War 1, with dreadful profiteering, lack of controls, and inefficient production.

That's because it was left to private business to manage the economy. The world learned from it, though, and World War Two economies were controlled by governments - with excellent results. Funny the TandT wouldn't mention that.

But - and here we come to the glorification of war theme, it did great good for Canada because we felt we had stood up on our own. No-one has ever measured that "great good" - because it's impossible to do so. No-one has shown how that was worth 60,000 dead, thousands more handicapped for life, and uncounted thousands more with mental illness.

Ever heard the term "basket cases"? These were the ones who came back in baskets because they had lost their arms and legs.

The NewsToday section has a similar story. Again, it never says what caused the war. but it repeats the bunkum that we emerged from it with a new national identity - whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. And that we were recognized as a new nation. In fact, the only sense in which we were recognized as a new nation is that we declared war for ourselves. Considering our previous arrangement that we didn't have to join the fight when Britain declared war, that was no great gain - and certainly not one worth 60,000 dead.

In fact, the "new nation"  attitude was happening ten years BEFORE the war with the formation of Canadian Club to agitate for national status And, in Britain it began over fifty years before the war. Britain didn't want Canada. It desperately needed an alliance with the US to maintain its position in the world. Canada was in the way because it was vulnerable to attack from the US. (The last American threat had been just ten years before World War 1.) Britain was not holding onto us. It wanted us to go.

In Tuesday's edition, in NewsToday, Harper invents a history that never happened. Almost every word is pure propaganda written by some hack - that the war created a desire for independence, that it changed the nature of Canada....  It seems we fought for justice and democracy , to defend countries we share values with. He even fits Israel and Ukraine into this in a dreadful political exploitation of the centenary.

We share values with Ukraine? Like what? Fascism? Hatred of Jews? For that matter, we share some values  with all people on the face of the earth. What's the breaking point? Tell me a war - any war - we have fought to protect shared values. And as I read that, I thought of all the big kids I knew who went off to war. At best, they were ordinary teens, many of who had left school as early as grade four.. None had the faintest idea of what a value was or what the enemy's values were. Poor Bertie, underage (he stole his brother's draft papers), illiterate....he was killed in his first action.

In World War 1, how did our values significantly differ from those we fought? The Russians were then under a rigid emperor who denied all rights and freedom.  They were our ally. And it was close to the same with World War Two. In world war one, how were German values different from ours?  Harper's speech was pure propaganda, designed to politically benefit himself, and a glorification of war. That is NOT what 60,000 Canadians died for.

Section B4, at last, has a story on the causes of the war. Too bad it just says it doesn't know. Come off it. Almost all the points it raised have to do with incidents in the weeks before the war. But the war wasn't caused in the weeks leading up to it.

Britain and Germany had been building their navies to fight each for for twenty years. Almost all those countries had been preparing for war against each other for years. And it's no mystery why.

Britain and France both feared the rising economic power of Germany, and that it would be looking for an empire to exploit as Britain and France were doing. In that area (exploitation of others) the values of France, Britain and Germany were not different but exactly the same.  Similarly, Germany was worried about the threat of a Russian attack to get the industrial wealth of Germany. Turkey feared that the British and French empires might want to swallow the Turkish empire in the middle east (and they did want to do exactly that.)

In this story by Canadian Press, they consult only three historians (none a Canadian)   - and nobody even defines the question with any clarity. The causes of a war are not usually to be found in just the weeks leading up to it.

Yes, there was a heightened sense of nationalism all over Europe. Of course, there was. The news media were already well into the game of using propaganda to build hatred. But what caused the war was a shifting in power of the economic elites, a shift that created fears that some of them stood to lose a great deal of money. And some things never seem to change.

World War One, for the most part, was caused by the same motive that caused the US murder of 300,000 Guatemalans, largely to serve the purposes of American and Canadian mining companies - an obsession to amass wealth and power, and unlimited by social values or morality.

Maybe its time for us to get off the glorification of war on occasions like this centenary and November 11, and do what the occasion is supposed to be for - mourning our terrible losses.

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There really isn't much point to reading the rest of the paper. It's mostly just photos of no particular interest and ads.

The only pieces worth reading for Monday are Alec Bruce and Gwynne Dyer (though I think Gwynne is dead wrong in his conclusion.)

For Tuesday, Alec Bruce is solid again. Norbert would be if he weren't so vague and general.

Patricia Graham. the ombudswoman,  has an excellent column on op ed. And so does David Suzuki on the last page.
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I am puzzled by one omission. British Columbia is suffering the biggest and worst forest fires in recorded history. It's been getting worse, and it's linked to global warming. The smoke rises for kilometres, then flattens in clouds that travel around the world. Some of the smoke pillars are so big they have been seen in Portugal.

And these huge clouds of smoke last for very long periods. And these are greenhouse gas emissions at least as bad as those from oil. They significantly speed up global warming with every rise is increasing the number of fires.

I understand that New Brunswick has forests - and they are getting warmer, too. Funny the Irving Press would miss a story like that.

August 2: As my father would say,...

"....it's enough to make a saint swear."

The Friday edition of the TandT has a page one story on the party leaders of New Brunswick,and their views on job creation. It's not a very bright question as the opener of a series. I would certainly prefer a story telling us what their sense is of what a society should be, what we should be striving for, what the role of government should be....

There was a time when we were told that sort of thing. The Liberals stood for individual rights above all. That's what led them down the path to individual rights for corporations - as if each corporation were a real person.

The Conservatives saw society as a whole, with individual rights to be limited in order to focus on the whole society. That's what led them to maintain power for the House of Lords, and it was very much the message of the Anglican church - and it's why the Anglican church was the 'established' church of England. But that was all a century and a half ago.

The NDP came out of the churches,too. It originated as the CCF, whose first leader was a Methodist clergyman, and whose most famous leader was a Baptist clergyman, Tommy Douglas. Though often called a socialist party, it never was. It was certainly opposed to private ownership of fields like health, national transportation,  and perhaps even of banking. But it never even considered government ownership of all business.

But it costs money to get a party elected - and the big money went to the Liberals and Conservatives because they could be bought with it. So the CCF toned down to get the support of the only large group it could get election-winning money from - the unions.(Unions are much, much less radical than most people think they are.) Out of this came a new party, the NDP, with a programme that looks increasingly like what the Liberals pretend to be.

So here we are with much of the world in economic crisis - and here are the proposals.

Conservatives - develop shale gas and pipelines. Brilliant and, clearly, what Mr. Irving wants. We know that because the TandT has been pushing it for years with propaganda, outright lies, and withheld information.  But there are catches. Authorities in both environment and health say this could be extremely damaging. As well, the jobs and the pay to be created sound wildly exaggerated. And, anyway, most of the wealth created will go out of the province. Oh, and it could also be explosively disruptive for our lives in this province.

But SWN doesn't give a damn. It's going to go ahead whatever damage it may do to us.

Liberals - They're going to do good things. They don't have any plan, yet. But good things. (And, once in power, they'll almost certainly commission a study to prove that shale gas and oil pipelines are good for us).

 By the way, isn't the world supposed to be cutting back on fossil fuels? I mean, everybody now except for the most dedicated crackpots knows it causes climate change which will destroy most of us - and perhaps the whole planet. So why do we want to play a hand in making it worse?

And the NDP? Well, with a world in economic turmoil, the important thing is to cut the small business tax.  And, hearing that from the great beyond, Tommy Douglas wept.

The Green Party and the People's Alliance are much like the NDP, but even more vague.

But none of this matters. The fundamental political and economic problem of New Brunswick is one shared by most of the world. We are not run by our elected governments. We are run by a handful of corporate bosses. The set our economic agenda. They determine our budgets and our prioritiesThey control most of our news, and so control the information we have to work on. We don't have a democracy.

This is happening in much of the world - in the US, Russia, China, much of Europe, South America. Our government IS big business, and big business has no objective but greed, and no plans for dealing with the future at all because there is no future, only a now. This is one of the great revolutions of history and, oh, it's going to hurt us. We can't solve any problem until we come to grips with that one.

And that, obviously, ain't going to happen in this election campaign.
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The only, real news story in NewsToday is on C3, as the medical profession wants political parties to address a question that actually deals with helping people. It wants a serious approach to make it possible for ALL New Brunswickers to get a family doctor. (Fifty thousand don't have one, and can't get one.)

In foreign news, there is no sense of how deeply we are in trouble. The decline of US influence in the Middle East and North Africa, for example, is stunning. After 13 years of war, the US has lost control and even influence in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan. And we still don't know why it fought wars against those countries in the first place.

As for Palestine, we get no sense of the chaos in that country. People in the hundreds of thousands are fleeing their homes in the face of Israeli attacks. And most of those getting killed are civilians, including children, lots of children blown apart by weapons made in the good, old USA.

What's notable is that our news stories tell us close to nothing about why Hamas is putting up such a fight in the face of being so outnumbered and outgunned. Gee! Is it possible that Israel has been doing bad things to them all these years? Can we be told about them?

Oh, you won't find it in the TandT, but a lengthy research study has concluded that American drones have killed 700 people in Pakistan. Of these, 350 were civilians, including large numbers of children. God bless America.
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On the editorial page, Alec Bruce chides the city for lack of public washrooms in public areas like the riverfront parks. Sounds trivial? Just wait till you have children. There's nothing trivial about it. And then you learn about the seriousness of it all over again as you get older.

Norbert has another remarkably silly and ignorant column on the standards expected of journalism. I don't know how a person with his career record can have the nerve to write on such a subject.
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The front page of the Saturday edition continues the series on economic policy. Saturday's question deals with the provincial deficit.Liberal leader Gallant is vague. So is Alward. So is Coon of the Green Party, and so is People's Alliance leader Austin.The one leader with some, rational idea of how to do it is Cardy of the NDP.

Buy, again, nobody mentioned the key to the problem - the extent to which big business routinely interferes in government and effectively controls it. We can't do anything about the economy - or anything else - until we establish democracy, and take control of our own province.

A prime example of this is on p.A9 where we once again get the story of how the Business Council wants us to go on an austerity plan of cutting services -  a plan that has introduced terrible hardship (and no benefits) wherever it has been tried. But the Business council just loves it because it maintains big profits at the expense of all of us.

Oh, the article describes The Business Council as non-partisan. I guess that's true. The Business Council doesn't give a damn which party is in power so long as it does what they tell it to do.
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In this world of wars and hunger and illness and terrified refugees and poverty, the big news story in NewsToday is that the president and CEO of Corridor Resources has stepped down.

On op ed, Gwynne Dyer has an article about how Christians are fleeing Iraq. They have lived there for thousands of years - just as they have been living in Syria and Palestine for thousands of years - they and some Jews and Arab Moslems are really the same people. They are semites in the correct sense of the word, and they have lived together, usually in peace, for these thousands of years.

They are killing each other now because of well over a century of cruel and greedy and degrading interference from Europe and the US. (And the Jews of Israel are disliked not so much because they are Jews as because they are yet more of those vicious and exploiting Europeans.)

This is what created what we call extreme Islamic groups. And these extreme groups are now the ones killing both Christians and Moslems in Iraq and Syria and, soon, in Lebanon. And they are being recruited, paid and equipped and trained largely by Saudi Arabia and the US.

Dyer doesn't mention all this. I added it because it might help to understand his column.
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I always enjoy the student columnists in the Whatever section.Aurelie Pare's column on health always humbles me. And they're all usually insightful, and worth a read. Today, it was Mike Elliott's column that caught my eye. "Why is the world always hungry for conflict?'

Well, Mike, throughout history, it has usually been the same - because there's money in it. Rome built an Empire to tax it in food and cash. The British built an empire so that wealthy British could get cheap agricultural land, cheap labour, and minerals like gold from South Africa. The US fought its many wars in South America (which it never talks about) for the same reasons. World War 1 was fought largely to prevent a rapidly industrializing and united Germany from becoming a threat to British business.

There's money in winning wars and, for some, money in just fighting them. Wars mean contracts. And the US, now, is living on those war contracts.

The money spent on war could end world hunger and poverty. But ending hunger and poverty would do nothing for the wealthy and powerful. So we kill to feed the rich.

On F8, Sabrina Space has a column that wouldn't even be thought of in most cities - the importance of smiling at people and being polite. It makes sense in Moncton. This is the smilingest and politest city I have ever seen.

But, oh, it can be very dangerous in other cities.
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The sermonette for the day, E7, is the usual vague advice of use only to the self-obsessed and self righteous - we should be good, yep. Okay. Was it good to send troops to Afghanistan for kill people we knew nothing about and were no threat to us? If so, what was good about it? If not, -well, if not, where the hell were the churches when this was going on?