Jan. 9: Irvings, McCains and Ganongs return from courageous mission.....

....to save lives in Ebola plague.....

Wow! Wow! Wow!

I can see it all now - a front page in full colour, banner headline, and the whole first section dedicated to the  courage and selflessness  of our business leaders. And a big editorial that the new civic centre will be named after all of them making the sign for it the biggest hockey rink sign in the world. And it will also house a new and special hall of fame just for them.

And, of course, there would be a column by Norbert saying their travels prove that shale gas prevents Ebola, plus other columns from the usual nothing-sayers about the uniqueness of the spirit of Moncton....

Too bad it never happened. Only one person showed the courage and selflessness to go on the expedition to fight Ebola. And she, always frivolous and unthinking, was silly enough to be born with the name McLeary. So this province's chief medical officer came back from ten weeks of mortal danger. And the Irving press has nothing to say about it. Nada.

Mind you, I'm sure it has nothing to do with the time she delivered an honest report on the dangers of fracking - or with the urge of the upper business class to get control of medical care in this province. Could all you editors, reporters and columnists for the Irving press please line up? I'd like to see how many of you it takes to make a worm.

Thursday's paper has a front page picture of the gymn in the new Moncton High. Very interesting. The name for the school teams is on the floor.   Knights. Very interesting. Knights were strong and warlike and brave - and men....  Check out other schools. You'll find the same sort of thing. Beatrice McNaughton School was named after a woman. (And I've asked dozens of people in the education system who she was - and they don't know.) Anyway, the school symbol for its teams is a hairy, Scots warrior - and a man.  Are there no girls in our high schools?

It all reminds me of the good old days when sports were only for upper class males because sports were thought to produce the qualities needed by rich males to get ahead in business and to be leaders.. As a result, women and the poor were excluded from most, organized sport. After all, women and the poor would only get spoiled by trying to be as good as rich men. Women could golf, it's true - but only one day a year. And they had to wear full dresses and corsets, and boots, and wide, feathery hats. Women were permitted to play tennis more often- but still in full, nineteenth century rig, and they were expected only to lob the ball gently into the air - and giggle.

It's nice to see our high schools carrying on old traditions.

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The big foreign news is the shooting in Paris of twelve people who worked for a magazine. The shooting,  by two men, was retaliation for the magazine running cartoons of Mohammed. I've been on the computer all day, talking to friends in journalism about it. And I am left sickened by a day of reading racism, bigotry, and the peddling of hatred. Worse, I know it can't be changed. A bigot has a head like the Rock of Gibraltar - and we all of us, all, have our bigotries.

To start, the killers were in the wrong. Of course, they were. A cartoon, no matter how offensive it may be to some people, does not justify killing anybody. Understand, too, that I am not moralizing here. Peronally, I do  think it is immoral to kill. But that's not my point right now. My point is about cause and effect. When anything happens, it has a cause that made it happen. And its effect on all the rest of us is important because   the nature of that effect will be the cause of what we do. And so it goes. Cause and effect. Got that?

The killings were immoral. They were wrong by any standard I can think of. There can be no doubt of that.

Now, read all the statements by world leaders  on p. B5 of the January 8 Times and Transcript.

French president Hollande "this is an act of exceptional barbarism" "Time after time we  have defended the values for which we stand...."  One after the other, they all condemn it as an act of terrorism.  Not one of them suggests a possible cause except in the characters of the killers. All say, or imply, that their countries have always opposed such terrorism. Harper says something, too,  on another page. I can't find it, now, but it's pure Harper. He says much the same as the others but, being Harper, is pretty vague on what he'll do.

All of them are being more than a little untruthful because all of them have either carried out or smiled on terrorism. The US led in the killing of more than a quarter million Guatemalan civilians. What was that if not terrorism? Then it killed millions of Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghanis, Libyans; and it now  is sponsoring a "civil war" in Syria that has killed hundreds of thousands and made refugees of millions.  France, far from opposing terrorism, has a long history of carrying it out. Did you seriously think all those foreign legionnaires just walked in the desert and sang? They were hired thugs who raped, looted, murdered civilians, tortured wherever they went. A standard trophy for them was tobacco pouch made from the breast of a murdered woman. Many years ago, I worked with a former French soldier who used to show off pictures of people  he had tortured. The US army today is heavily made up of similar hired (contracted) thugs from all over the world.  The British, God bless the Queen were terrorists on a grand scale for what some people fondly recall as the British Empire. It was the biggest venture in history to pillage the world, using slavery, starvation, addiction, murder and torture. Perhaps the most vicious was freedom-loving Belgium which killed (and still kills) tens of millions in Congo. And we Canadians join in the fun by owning mines that make stockholders rich off the poverty and misery one can inflict when children as young as five are sent into the mines. Oh, and us Canadians were also up to our ears in the US torture scandal (which Harper, of course, has never criticized).  Prisoners being sent to overseas prisons for torture were assembled in Canada, to be flown out of Canadian airports to the overseas prisons. That was to help keep the operation secret. Canadian government officials were also known to sit in on torture sessions, and to be useful to our American neighbours in their work.

None of that, course, justifies or explains the Paris shootings. Nothing ever will. But it does raise questions about the self-righteousness of the leaders on "our side". And the tone of what they say strongly implies that terrorists are, by definition, Muslims. And, if that's truth, it must be genetic, something built into Muslims. They are born evil. And that slips into our racist and bigoted minds so smoothly that few even notice it.

Result? There's only one solution. Kill more Muslims. Kill all of them. That's the solution to Jews that Hitler sold to the German people. And he did it by making the same statements that you can read in the TandT. And what will happen? We don't even have to guess. We will kill more Muslims - and that will create more 'extremists' and 'terrorists'. We've been there, done that. So let's forget the self-righteous moralizing.

Let's talk cause and effect. Not revenge. Getting even means nothing if the trouble goes on. And it will go on. So let's look for a solution. And to do that we have to look at the cause.

Let's see, what could have caused so many Muslims to dislike us? Is it because we have oil, and they want it? No. They have oil.  Could it be something we have done?

Well, none of our leaders mention it. But we have been pretty intensely invading and looting Muslim countries for over a century. And that might kind of worry them because, though we haven't noticed it, Christians are the most murderous religious group in world history. It was our side that took a family of desert bandits, and made them the Royal family of Saudi Arabia, the most brutal and reactionary dictatorship in the world. (Yes. That's really what Lawrence of Arabia was all about.) It was also our side, Britain and the US, that overthrew democracy in Iran, and installed a brutal and avaricious dictator, the Shah. And we got very angry when Iranians kicked him out to elect their own government. The US has never forgiven Iran for that. That's why the US paid Saddam to invade Iran in a dreadfully bloody war. That's also why the US still hates Iran.

Then our side invaded Iraq killing well over a million people, the majority civilians, Of course, it was necessary because Saddam was a "bad man". Yes, he was - though most of the bad things were things the US paid him to do. But we wisely hanged him before that part could come out.

So let's consider the possibility that this sort of constant intrusion and looting has made some Muslims into terrorists. It certainly makes more sense than the ides that it's in their genes. And if that's the cause, what should we do?

Well, we don't let those two killers off. Nothing justifies what they did. But what shall we do to Muslims in general?  We could kill them all. We might. But, frankly, most of the world already fears and that hates "our side"  so much that such a slaughter might make the world more dangerous, not less.

I won't pretend to have an answer right now. I won't because it's all far more complicated than I could say in a blog. For example, intruding on a society frequently destroys what we vaguely call its culture. In effect, the people lose their values, their faith, their ability to function as a society. That's what happened to American Blacks who were kidnapped, enslaved, forced into a world that had no relation to them. To this day, centuries later, they still have not recovered,  have not discovered who they really are as a society. A very similar thing happened to our native societies. We didn't just kill them or shove them onto reserves. We destroyed the very fabric of their societies. Many of them are trying to rediscover what they were, what they believed in. But it's a hard struggle. And even if they succeed in it, they still have to figure how to adapt it to the world we have forced them to live in.

There are no quick and easy answers. But one thing is sure. What we are hearing from our leaders, self-righteousness, vengefulness, bigotry and racism, is the sure path to disaster.

Jan. 8: Why reading the news tells us nothing...

For a break, I thought Iid like to write about something broader and more useful than the Irving press. That occurred to me as I read the story about the shooting of twelve people at a Paris tabloid that had run cartoons of Mohammed. Now, that's a typical news story. It sounds sensational - but it really says nothing.

We often think we get meaning out of it when, in fact, we understand only what our biases and prejudices want us to  understand. A Muslim Jihadist might read it and say, "Allah is great."   But for a Christian reading it, the message is likely to be "Those Muslims are all evil."  Americans lead in the slaughter of 300,000 civilians in Guatemala and Canadians read it and say --well, actually they don't read it because no Canadian newspaper has ever printed that story. But even if they did read it, they probably wouldn't care. After all, Guatemalans are not people like us.

Even with honest reporting (which is rare), the news feeds us just little bites. So we usually react by understanding only what our prejudices tell us to understand. And that means we understand nothing at all from it.

I guess I first realized that (or should have) on a day early in 1942 when I heard the news about how the Japanese had captured Singapore from the British.  Well, I knew what that meant. After all, every morning in school we stood, said "I pledge allegiance to this flag" (pointing to the British flag at the front of the room) "and to the Empire for which it stands."  And we all knew that the British were the best and toughest people in the world, and the Japanese were an inferior race. So the news of the fall of Singapore excited me.

When I went to school, I walked up to the principal, Miss Simpson, and said with a big and confident grin, "The Japanese took Singapore. Now the British will get really mad, and they'll show the Japanese."

Miss Simpson stared blankly at me. She didn't say anything. She just looked at me with a stare I now realize was terror. She had already heard the news. But she didn't hear what I heard.

Miss Simpson was real old, over forty. She had grown up in a world ruled by a few western nations that were able to use quite small armies to defeat huge armies in Africa and Asia - to exploit the people and their land in order to make western billionaires even richer.

She listened to the same newscast I did. But what she heard was that the days of western empire were over, that the world was entering a change as big as the fall of the Roman Empire.

Actually, the change isn't quite over yet though it actually began 105 years ago, in 1905, when a Japanese fleet destroyed a Russian fleet in the battle of Tsushima Strait. American President Theodore Roosevelt called it  "...the greatest phenomenon the world has ever seen." So it was. For the first time in over 500 years, a non-European country had defeated a European military force. And Japan had done it with a navy that was barely thirty years old. Japan's conquest of Singapore, the greatest fortress in the British Empire, in 1942, rubbed the lesson home  Europe's days of imperialism and living off the work and resources of Asia were over.

Now, China as emerged as a world-class military and economic power, with India on the rise, too. In fact, there has been a general rise in defiance of European and North American power. Indeed, the real meaning of the shootings in Paris has little to do with Moslems being evil, and little to do with Moslems in general. The real message, the message that goes all the way back to Tsushima Strait, is that the years of world dominance by western power are over. And now not only Asia but Africa and much the Middle East will no longer accept western dominance. Coupled with the enormous destructive power of modern weapons, that means we have to change the whole way we look at the world, and deal with it.  That truth seems to be dawning for some of the European powers. Unfortunately, it has not dawned on the economic elite who are the real controllers of  American policy.

While I was still a kid, I thought we had come to grips with necessary changes by setting up the United Nations as the world authority for law and order and security. So it seemed, at least, when the US took the case of Korea to the UN, and got its approval for an international force to support the southern part of Korea from an invasion by the north.  But that was really the end of the road for the UN.

American big business had much earlier decided what it wanted out of World War Two. It wanted to replace the European empires with a vast, American empire. Indeed, the word "empire" pretty well sums up the whole history of the US.

The whole country, before and after the American revolution, was built on land stolen from the native peoples who were pushed aside or, commonly, simply murdered. What is now Texas, Nevada, Arizona, southern California were stolen from Mexico by war. Canada almost met the same fate. Then, attention turned to spreading the empire to include Latin America, a feat usually accomplished by sending invasion forces to "protect American citizens" from rumoured threats. And, commonly, the invading army would install a very brutal dictator - as  happened with, for example, Guatemala, Haiti, Cuba.... And it was understood that American investors like Dole fruit and mining companies were to have free rein to do whatever they liked. (These were later joined by the sweethearts who own Canadian mining companies).

As the nineteenth century closed, American business raised its horizons by getting the government to take over Hawaii, and then, in an extraordinarily brutal war including free use of torture, The Phillipines. But their eyes were really on the great prize, China.  So there, as World War Two approached, they paid and supplied a vicious gangster/warlord (and Christian) named Chiang Kai-Shek. Stalin and Mao would certainly prove to be mass murderers. But Chiang, the American capitalist hero, took a back seat to nobody as a killer.

The US government entered the World War 2 largely to stop Japan from taking control of the China that US big business wanted. (Yes, I know about Pearl Harbour and how treacherous and evil those terrible Japanese were. But have you ever wondered why they attacked Pearl Harbour? Could it have had anything to do with Roosevelt's cutting off of all oil for Japan? And is it possible Roosevelt knew, though without specifics, that Japan would have to respond with some act that would justify a declaration of war? And ever notice he did not declare war against Germany?  That was because he didn't give a damn about what happened to Britain. His war was to get Japan out of China so US business could muscle in.)

The US beat Japan - but it lost the prize, China - which went to Mao. That produced an even bigger problem because the Korean War showed that China could now do what Japan did in 1905 - fight on at least equal terms with western armies.

It came as an added blow when Cuba showed Latin America that it was possible to stand up to the US empire - and win.

But American big business did not give up on its plans for empire.The Vietnam War was fought to give the US another Asian base by grabbing an old French colony, French IndoChina.  And it lost. Another defeat of the west by an Oriental nation. The US also continued its operations to take over former European colonies in Africa and the Middle East. Thus the wars in Libya, Iraq, and the drone bombings all over that are rarely reported.

In none of those cases did the US approach our only agencies of international law and order, the UN and the international court. How could it? It had no legal justification for any of those wars. It is now possible, according to the British government, that Tony Blair who was Bush's hired hand in the Iraq war may very well face war criminal charges based on a report by a British parliamentary committee. But not to worry.

No American government can afford to allow that to happen because it would also expose criminal behaviour by Bush and Obama.

Similarly, the UN is scheduled to hear war criminal charges against Israel in its treatment of Palestine. But that ain't going to happen. Netanyahu has already said he will ignore the UN court - and any American president is sure to protect Netanyahu. Oh, and Harper will promise to support Israel no matter what. (That might cause a few giggles. The Canadian armed forces are so neglected and poorly equipped that the Israeli defence force alone could beat them, spank the survivors, and send them home. Just about any Muslim army could do the same.)

A world of law and order based on the UN  is not going to happen. It will not be allowed to happen. US big business made that clear in the mid-1990s when it released its Project for the New American Century. The US (meaning American big business) will impose its own law and order as a sort of Lone Ranger with Britain or Canada playing Tonto. It will decide what the rules are, and it will decide who gets punished. That's what they call American exceptionalism. And it's a disaster for all of us.

The world changed in 1905. The age of western empires is over. Those parts of the world that suffered centuries of imperialism are now on the rise both economically and militarily. The European imperial powers are now dead meat. The US is in relative economic decline, largely as a result of a capitalism allowed to run wild. Worse, the US, socially, is coming apart. We can't pretend that it's still 1904.

But that's exactly what US big business is doing. It is going all out for world domination, the ultimate insanity of greed and hubris. And it is doing so just as the balance of world power is clearing moving away from it. (Notice that I refer to US big business, not to the American people. They are victims of big business just as much as the rest of the world is.)

We have a choice or, rather, we don't have a choice. An old world has gone. It's not coming back. Any attempt to make it come back will result in war on a scale of  horror we have never before seen. And everyone will lose. Meanwhile, we aren't dealing with all the other problems we have to deal with soon - climate change, massive poverty, the crumbling of the values on which western democracies were founded.....

A lesson of the shootings in Paris is that most of the world has risen against the empire of American big business. (Yes, I know it was terrible to shoot those people. It was also terrible to murder millions of Vietnamese peasants, a million Iraqi civilians.... Funny how we can get so upset at the killing of a dozen, and ignore the killing of millions. But that's just the way us humans think.)

The US - and the rest of the world - desperately needs a functioning UN to bring law and order to the world, and to focus on the enormous problems that face us. The west is no longer the military god of this world. Those days are gone forever. Nor can the west any longer support keeping its own millions in poverty so that the very rich can spend trillions on wars they cannot win.

So if Harper is looking for a historical event to spend our money on in this election year, he might consider the 110th anniversary of the year the world changed at Tsushima Strait.

Jan. 6: The Irving press actually gets worse....

Section A, on a quick read, seems its usual, ghastly self, though it has an important headline for a start. "Report fails province on poverty reduction". The report comes from the Common Front for Social Justice. And it condemns both the Liberals and the Conservatives. Well, of course. Both parties are owned by big business. And big business loves poverty. Letting the poor stay poor cuts down on taxes for the rich. It also provides the rich with a pool of cheap labour. That's why big business just loves free trade because that lets it get away with, among other things, making people in poor countries even poorer - and keeping Canadians poor at the same time.

The story is also typical of the Irving press standard of journalism. Though the story had two reporters assigned to it, they seem to have done no research at all. They interviewed two people - and that was it.

On op ed, Craig Babstock did his usual thing, a column on the killing of the mounties here in town. I certainly have no disagreement with his opinion. But it's been said many, many,many, many times in this paper. I don't know of anyone who would disagree with what Babstock says. But he adds nothing whatever to what we already know. And that's a typical column.

Steve Malloy has a much more useful column.

But the great disappointment is Alec Bruce on the editorial page. It's a disappointment because it's so cleverly written that it's obviously written to fool us. To make it clearer, that means it does not tell what he knows to be the truth.

He starts by condemning people who have what they call a 'world view'. And, yes, lots of people who claim a world view are annoying. That's because they really don't know what it means. But every religion, every civilization in history has been based on a world view. And they've all been destroyed by world views gone wrong.

Then he paints himself as occupying a moderate position, almost middle-of-the-road one. I don't know whether he's being honest about that. He may just be fooling himself.

Then he claims that there is no case of any problem with shale gas in the history of New Brunswick. Well - he attributes that to the careful supervision of New Brunswick governments. Oh? And could he please tell us more about this careful supervision? This is the province that has set up lying committees to study the issue, and that has hired incompetent frauds to report to it. Alec Bruce writes for a newspaper chain that has openly sided with shale gas companies from the start. Of course, there are no reports of problems. That's because there are no reports.  Period.

If Bruce is right and honest and knowedgeable on this, then New Brunswick must be the only place in the world in which fracking does not release huge quantities the greenhouse gas, methane, thus speeding up climate change.

He also says using examples of damage caused in other places around the world just creates paranoia. Oh? We should ignore all scientific evidence unless it's created in New Brunswick? Then there's not a whole lot of evidence we'll ever see. After all, New Brunswick is in no position to be a world leader in scientific research. By the same reasoning, we should welcome Ebola in New Brunswick until local research proves it's a problem

Then he ends with cutely clever but absurd arguments.. Let's assume, he writes, that fossil fuels are really seed capital for sustainable energy research. Let us imagine that the engines and factories that use fossil fuels are actually generating new ways to radically curtail their use.  Let us hope that the judicious, reasonable use of oil will change the our attitudes about how we treat the planet we share........go to sleep my baby....

His closing paragraphs are such utter illogic and simple-mindedness that they are utter crap - and I would be insulting Bruce if I said I believed he actually thought that. But he is insulting the whole province  by putting this forward as an argument.

And he doesn't even consider three points.
1. Making a commitment to shale gas means making a commitment to fossil fuel for many years to come.
But how many years do we have before it's too late to change? And the answer is - nobody knows. It could be very soon.
2. Where is the evidence that any government in Canada, past, present or future, has any intention of studying the problem of climate change and taking action?
3. This is a column that is written, quite deliberately, to sell false arguments and to present logic so false that it is asinine.

Call me paranoid. But I think this is a contemptible column from both a logical and an ethical point of view.
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NewsToday is four pages. Talk about covering the world!

Most of those pages have nothing much on them. But two items are frightening. One is the story of how New York police assigned to public events are deliberately turning their backs on the mayor. That may not seem terrible. But it's sign of growing social disorder in a country that already has a lot of it. We may well be approaching a breaking point.

The other one concerns the Sony Pictures hacking. Obama is taking very strong action against the hacking - even as the US is probably the world's leader in hacking destructiveness. And congress is showing strong signs of wanting war. any war, with anybody. It calls  North Korea brutal and dangerous. Well, it's certainly brutal. But dangerous? The US is far, far more dangerous, and takes a back seat to nobody on brutality. (Our newspapers, for example, have ignored the recent story that US torturers used to turn attack dogs on prisoners to "rape" them.)

The papers also do their bit to add to the hysteria. Their news stories routinely accuse North Korea of making a racial slur by calling Obama "a monkey in the tropics". The phrase would have such a racist meaning in the US where racism is the national sport. I'm not at all sure it would have the same meaning in North Korea. But the papers pointedly call it racism every time they report it. And that's called using the news as propaganda.
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For Tuesday, a big, front page story tells us it was cold yesterday. And it proves it with a real photo of a man holding a shovel. But the big, banner headline is a fast-breaking story that the Casino has a "Variety of concerts slated for 2015". It's a big, big story for the Irving press. Too bad most newspapers would call it a free ad.

The editorial is a "must read" about moose fences.  I didn't know that moose (meese?) ran pawn shops for stolen goods.)

Norbert has a column on "social license"; and I largely agree with it.

Alec Bruce was a huge surprise. Based on my earlier experience, I read it with caution. But this one was quite different. He talks about how oil has many uses besides being a fuel. Quite true And some of those uses are not harmful. Quite true.

But I don't see how that is connected with global warming. At issue is that oil and gas used as fuel make the earth a far more dangerous place for all forms of life.And even if we use some of it to power essential energy devices, that still burns far, far less of it, and creates far less damage to our atmosphere.

But he does take up that point and, very reasonably, says we should focus on innovation to get away from our excessive dependence on oil. That sounds eminently reasonable. But that takes us back to the original problem.

Oil companies are immensely powerful in our governments (and our news media). And oil companies have shown no interest whatever in any innovation that would reduce their steady profits. They have shown themselves quite willing to risk the survival of life on this planet. Oil companies are not abstract entities. They are people. They are people who have lied to us for decades, telling us that climate change wasn't happening. They spent billion lying to us long after it was obvious - surely even to them - that they were lying.

They are people who have shown that they are unspeakably greedy, shallow, and indifferent to any needs except their own. So it's not just a matter of starting research for innovation. It's a matter of getting past the opposition of those extremely unpleasant and amoral people.

All the grand and worthy theories of what we should do depend on putting these real people with real faces into their place in a democratic society. They have blocked change for decades. They will continue to block until even they and their closest kin die of what we are doing. Research for innovation is good. But before we can get it, we need to block these greedy and self-serving people.

On op ed, Alan Cochrane is his usual, irrelevant self. He's all wetting his pants with excitement that a new sign saying "Riverview" is going up. And we're going to have a motorcycle festival. And a Ribfest - and it just goes on, and on, and on, and o....

Below that (even below that) is a column from yet another "think-tank" propaganda house financed by billionaires. This time it's the C.D.Howe Institute - The writer talks about Cuba's problems - and either knows nothing about the subject or is a liar. I suspect the latter.

For example, he says that Castro set up a communist system. I know Castro said that. I know all of North America thinks that. But Cuba has never been any more communist than North America has been capitalist. Words have meanings. I wish these propagandists would learn that.

He should also know that Castro set up his system (whatever you want to call it) because the US forced him to. Cuba had been pillaged, impoverished and brutalized for decades by American companies protected by American-supported dictators of quite extraordinary cruelty. That's why there was a revolution.

But the first country Castro turned to for help and cooperation was the US. And the US not only turned him down flat, but imposed sanctions. The only way Cuba could survive was by turning to the Soviet union. (The US puppets in Europe certainly weren't going to help him.)

At this point the writer graciously admits that the mafia - US branch - was a huge problem that Castro had to contend with.

But he says it was just terrible the way Castro confiscated American-owned land. I mean, when the US set up a torturing murdering dictator who forced Cubans into poverty to work cheap for American business, that was understandable. But to confiscate American-owned property? That was sinful.

And how did American big business come to own that property? The writer doesn't say.  But they stole it by force. It was called the Spanish-American War.

Oh, and Castro wasn't democratic like the US. And we all know that democracy controlled by the people is the only system that works.  Uh, the American people have never had such a democratic system. The US is and always has been controlled by big money. And the world's fastest growing country right now is not a democracy.  It's China. As for the American"capitalist" and "democratic" society, it is busy spreading poverty and dictatorship all over the world - including in the US itself.  Anyway, to point the finger at Castro for not making a democracy is a stunning statement to come from a man who much know that the US NEVER permitted democracy in Cuba.

And, oh, incomes are low in Cuba. If only Cuba would allow an open and "free" market, it would be rich. Right.  The reason Cuba doesn't have an open market is because the US closed it. As well, the writer seems to forget that Cuba's worst poverty was before Castro, when it was run by the US. But even as it is, the tiny and poor country can do what the rich and large US cannot. It can educate all its children - free - from kindergarten to graduate schools. That's why it can send more doctors to fight Ebola than the US can.

The education system also ranks among the best in the world (and ahead of the US and Canada). Over 99% of Cubans are literate!!!!  Eat that, New Brunswick.

As for health, Cubans get medicare that far outclasses the US. Not bad for a tiny and poor country that has been invaded, bombed, harassed, economically starved by the US for the last fifty years.

The US has impoverished and exploited Cuba for over a century. And Cuba has responded with a courage and skill that is unmatched in the history of very tiny countries with big, rich and aggressive neighbours.

The writer graciously agrees that good relations will probably require some change in Washington - but also in Cuba.  The whole message of this idiot piece is that Cuba really caused all its own problems. And if they would just accept American "democracy" and "capitalism", Cuba would be fine - just like it was when it had US-appointed dictators, US mafia, and US corporations looting it.

That column of utter crap and lies is typical of what the Irving press considers as serving the people. It's follow by a NewsToday section that really has nothing in its 4 pages (count them).

Oh, there's a story about bigotry in France where, as in the rest of Europe,  the Roma (gypsies) have been discriminated against for centuries. In France, a cemetery refused to bury a Roma girl who died at the age of two months. The reason they refused is because he was a Roma.

Though the story doesn't mention it, that could never happen in Canada. Nosirree. Never. Not since Stephen Harper, years ago, put a blanket ban on the immigration of any Roma to Canada. Canadians must approve of it because I haven't heard of any protests.

Given that Canada has a worse record of bigotry against the Roma than even France has, I'm surprised that the news editor published the story. (Actually, I'm not surprised. The news editor probably doesn't even know what a Roma is.)

Sorry to go on so long. I felt driven. It's such a really, stinking newspaper.

Jan. 5: Catch-up time....

I had promised a review of Gwynne Dyer's book, Climate Wars; and though I have certainly been critical of Israel, I think I can understand how it got that way, and whose fault it is. So this blog is on those two topics.

I'll do the regular blog right after - I hope.

Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars.

This is a brilliant book. And you needn't take my word for it. I mean, we haven't yet heard the official word from the Canadian Institute on Public Research and Public Policy or from AIMS or the C.D.Howe Institute or any of those other phony think tank propaganda outfits. But the chief scientist at NASA thinks it's pretty hot stuff. And I'll take him over some "think tank" financed by oil billionaires any day..

Long ago, when I knew Gwynne Dyer, it was obvious this was a very, very bright guy. But that did not prepare me for the stunning breath and depth of this book. (It can also be a tough read when it gets into sophisticated scientific terminology to outline the causes of climate change.)

It can also be a frightening read when Dyer looks at the political and economic implications of climate change with millions of peoples - perhaps billions - forced out of their homelands as crops fail, especially in the region of the equator. Couple that with massive destruction of farmland (due to sea level rise), and you have, in China alone, at least hundreds of millions pressing into newly attractive areas - like Siberia. But Siberia is Russian - so what will follow is nuclear war between two major nuclear powers.

Canada may be the least hurt by Global warming (at first). But that will make it a target for billions of the displaced - and for a water-starved western US. That will mean US diversion of Canadian waters to states like California which are rapidly turning into deserts.  But Canada needs those same waters to survive and, if we object, the waters will be taken by military force.  Never kid yourself about how we're all friends.

In addition, the melting of the Arctic ice cap is releasing mega tons of greenhouse gasses that are speeding up climate change.

In the latter part of the book, just as this reader was becoming suicidal, he looks at those things I have rarely seen mentioned in our news - some promising research on how we can take action to stop - and even to reverse - climate change.

How much time do we have to stop it? Nobody knows. The news media often put it at half a century and more. In his very large range of conversations with top scientists in the field, Dyer found the they were more likely to look at 15 to 25 years.

The trouble is that the oil industry has spent billions of dollars to lie to us, to convince us there is no climate change, and then to convince us that it's okay because we really need oil. The truth is shown in the behaviour of political leaders like those of Canada, the US, and China who simply refuse even to discuss the problem.

Meanwhile, we are on the edge of seeing nations and even whole civilizations self-destruct. Far from exaggerating the danger, environmentalists are actually understating the danger we are in.

The oil industry and its toadies are setting us up for destruction that can happen even sooner, much sooner, than we expect.  Are the people in our oil industries and our governments evil? No.

I'm afraid it's much worse that that. They are human, and fully equipped with human greed and human indifference to suffering. And too absorbed in their own greed to realize that they too will be destroyed.

Climate Wars is a superb book. That's why you will never see any reference to it in an Irving press editorial or a Norbert column. And that, I suspect, is why we no longer see Gwynne Dyer, the only world class columnist from Canada, in the Irving press.

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Israelis - the reason why.

Moslems are deep in violence against westerners. And political leaders like Harper say it's because their religion is evil. Right. I mean, you don't see Christians running around and killing people. Heaven forbid.

The reality is that most people are what we make them. Most Europeans and North Americans have no idea of the misery and suffering and death they have inflicted on the rest of the world. Some of it, like the slave trade, goes back centuries in which tens of millions of Africans died just in transit, then spent generations working under brutality and torture, then were freed only to be treated as the lowest form of human life. Many Canadians don't even know it happened here -and still  happens.

Next time you see a news video of racial violence and hatreds in the US, bear in mind that us white folks created that fear and hatred. And we're still creating it. Some of the most respectable families in Canada, for example, hold stocks in Canadian mining companies in places like Congo and Guatemala.

While our best families get even better on the stock returns, Congo and Guatemalan children are sent into the mines as youmg as five or six. Pay is so low, it's worse than slavery. Slave owners didn't pay - but they at least provided food and housing that was adequate (if vile). Mine owners don't.

The goon squads that mine owners call security guards rape workers, steal from them, beat them, sometimes kill them. In Guatemala, it was the companies that were behind the mass murder of 300,000 men, women and children who objected to their work conditions and to the massive destruction of their lands and waters. This isn't unusual. It's routine. Funny how it's never reported in most of our news media, and never taught in our public schools.

In Haiti it was American fruit companies that got the US government to overthrow the elected government which was spoiling the people with things like public education.

And even those who do have some idea of what's going on in this world usually don't give a damn because we are really still profoundly racist. And so it is that we create our enemies.

That is what happened to Israel.

Jews did not have a friend in the world for centuries. In Europe and North America, in particular, Jews were routinely abused, villified, attacked, murdered.  Canada quietly accepted Jews after the British conquest, but only because they were from England, were well off, and there weren't very many. But the European Jews who came after 1890 or so, weren't well off, and there weren't just a few of them. Canadians of all social classes met them with such bigotry and hatred (and violence) that Canada cut off virtually all Jewish immigration by 1930. The US was just as bad.

There were, however, at least two regions where they were accepted. China was one. Another was the Muslim Middle East. Yes, Confucists  and Muslims had the the tolerance and acceptance that Christians were entirely lacking.

Through the 1930s, everyone knew what Hitler was doing to the Jews. Not one western country lifted a finger. Indeed, Wealthy Americans actively supported and financed Hitler. The Prime Minister of Canada thought him both a spiritual and earthly hero - "like Joan of Arc." Most Hollywood movie studios came to an agreement with Hitler not to make movies critical of him or of Naziism. Anyone who broke that rule, as Charlie Chaplin did, suffered for it for  years after the war.

During the war, most of us didn't know about the holocaust. But our leaders did - and they did nothing about it. They (we) wouldn't even let those Jews who escaped from the camps come here. In fact, Canada's rules on immigration effectively banned Jews for years AFTER the war.

In desperation, surviving European Jews fled to Palestine, then controlled by Britain. The British blocked them at first. But the European Jews had changed. Nobody had helped them. Now, they would help themselves, and to hell with everybody else. They surged past the British defences, established terrorist groups, slaughtered both British and Palestinians until Britain and the world gave them the Palestinian land that they renamed Israel.

The major support for Israel came from the US, not because of any love for Israel but because the US saw Israel as an American foothold to take over the old, European empires in the region. The Israelis, no fools, realized what the US was about. The US didn't love them. It never had. But it needed them - and Israel ever since has taken full advantage of that.

I knew the Jewish community of Montreal very well. From my early teens, I often hung out in the shabby, working-class district that was the old Jewish Ghetto. Many of them, maybe most,  in those days were Communists - not because they were sneaky or evil - but because they wanted a better world where there would be no poverty or discrimination. The disillusionment came in 1957 when they learned what Stalin was really about. And the communist party of Montreal disappeared within hours.

But the community remained committed to social justice, to improving social services, to the anti-nuclear movement. They were, as I thought at the time, the most Christian people I had ever met, certainly more Christian than any Christians I knew.

Not so those European Jews who migrated to Israel. The bitterness at the way the world had abandoned them ran deep. Never again!. They would not allow that to happen to them. So the new Israel focused on building its military, and treating Palestinians as Hitler had once treated Jews. I came to know quite a few Israelis, and was always struck by their intense racism toward just about everybody, but especially toward the Palestinians who had never done anything to them.

In the last 30 or 40 years, that racism was transmitted to North American Jews as the Israeli propagada machine reached out to the them. Community organizations I had always admired, like B'Nai Brith, were taken over by the propaganda machine - as were community newspapers, libraries... Indeed, I became a minor victim of it.

For fifteen years, I have given monthly talks on current events at a major, Jewish library in Montreal. The average audience was 200 to 300.  Then I told the new librarian I was retiring, and would be moving to Moncton. (I didn't know at the time that she was fully under the control of the Israeli propaganda machine.)

As I was about to start, she said to me that she just wanted to say a few words to the audience first. I thought "isn't this nice. She wants to thank me for coming here for 15 years, and to wish me a happy retirement."

She took the microphone, "Okay, everybody, Wait till I tell you who your new speaker is. You're going to forget all about Graeme Decarie."

(The new speaker, a publisher I knew to be a puppet of Israeli propaganda, lasted for only a short time.)

It's a sad truth but still a truth that Israel has become a society remarkably similar to Hitler's Germany. But that is not because Jews are evil. We made the people of Israel what they are. We did it with centuries of abuse, discrimination, murder.... When Hitler began his 'final solution" and we did nothing but to remain as bigoted as ever, we created an Israel that we had taught to find its own "final solution."

Like so many things such as militant Islam that we brush off as "evil", we created the Israel that is racist, aggressive, and destructive.

Jan. 4: Prince Edward likes girls....

Quelle surprise...I guess that's why it made page A2 of the ever-alert Irving press. But surely this has been public knowledge for years. I knew one of the Prince's teachers at his very expensive private school in Ontario. He told me the Prince was of very low intelligence, and incapable of learning beyond grade 9. He was also very openly obsessed with sex from the age of 12 or so. - two traits that have been common in the royal family. Even Queen Victoria had her raunchy side.  But the British taxpayers, who yearly lose more desperately needed social services, still ante up for the lavish homes, clothes, servants, travels of people whose only function is to smile and look interested in the people they shake hands with.

It's no secret that Prince Charles, whose lips move as he slowly reads the comics, is not a great thinker. But taxes pay the salaries of some 150 personal servants for him. And here we North Americans are building a very similar class of aristocrats by birth. This has been going on around the world for thousands of years, producing uncountable numbers of Neros and Caligulas and Windsors whose only talent has been to get born to the right people - and who think themselves wonderfully superior for having done it.

The biggest story in lenght is under the banner headline "Federal election looms this year". Those five words, though, are really the whole story. But the report fluffs that out to fill a whole page. Yep, it rambles. They's guuna be an election. The Conservatives is goin' to win, they think. But the Liberalc think they's goin' to win. and on and on.

Norbert, as he so often does, starts with one topic, then shifts to another without really saying anything about the first one. Luckily, his second topic is a better one on the abysmal treatment of waiters and waitresses in the US - a treatment that might be coming to Canada.

Bill Belliveau joins the Irving press stampede  to tell us that fracking is good for us. In doing so, he is sometimes either ill-informed or dishonest - as when he says there is no evidence of serious incidents of shale gas damage anywhere in the world.  In fairness, I don't think  he's dishonest. I think he prefers not to see any evidence that contradicts the party line.

So here's the newspaper that claims it has always presented both sides of the story to give us the information we need to make a choice But not a single editor or columnist has given us anything but the oil industry side.
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The columns written by students (Section C) again are the only quality columns in the paper. I was particularly struck by the one by Jana Giles, who says she loves learning, but hates studying at university. That's not at all a silly point. There can be a big difference between learning and studying.

University professors usually have no training as teachers.  As well, teaching  has virtually no status in universities. I learned that in nine years of being a university student. Almost all that I "learned" was stuff I had to memorize for exams. It wasn't learning. It was stuffing me with information I had little use for except in the exam. In consequence, I forgot almost all of it as soon as the exam was over.

All I really learned was how to know what the teacher wanted to hear, and how to develop that phony veneer of arrogant wisdom that so many professors think is a sign of intellectual activity.

Learning is something different. It isn't about memorizing. It's about the processes of thought. It's about reading with organized understanding. It's about making judgements. It's about identifying those things that hamper our ability to understand, to analyze, to make judgements - and it's about understanding the human  limitations in doing these things..

In all my student years at universities, I can remember only one, good teacher. Just one. Out of some 50 or more.  But, hey, I can act the arrogant academic with the best of them.. That's what my professors taught me.

 The Faith Page has withered from two pages to one - and that one with very little on it. A quarter of it is devoted to worship services in Moncton. But, apparently, only two churches now exist in Moncton. Church activities are sharply down to four.

But there is no sermonette. God is kind to His servant.
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Foreign news is pretty limited. The biggest story is that Obama is imposing sanctions on North Korea in retaliation for what he says was criminal hacking of Sony Pictures. There are some problems with that.
1. Obama blamed North Korea for the hacking as soon as it happened. It's not possible he had any significant evidence at that time. (And he did the same in blaming Russia when the government of Ukraine was overthrown, and when an airliner was shot down over Ukraine. He still has no evidence of any of those claims - and the North American news media are, for the most part, still taking his word for it.)

2. Many experts have warned that it was not North Korea that did the hacking, that it was almost certainly the work of former employees at Sony. The news media sometimes mention that, but only as a very, very small part of the story.

3. If it was North Korean sabotage, Obama could take it to the international court.
er ---no---he couldn't. That would just draw attention to the much, much bigger and more damaging hacking that the US and Israel have been carrying out for years against Iran and others - not to mention its illegal wars on Vietnam, Guatemala, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and its illegal involvement in the Syrian wars. We might also remember it's illegal overthrow of the democratically elected government of Haiti (with the assistance of Canadian and other "peacemakers".)

Anyway, Obama is not a believer in international courts. As he has said publicly, he believes in American Exceptionalism. And that means the US is permitted by God to ignore any law and to do whatever it wants to.

In any case, he is the president of a country in deep trouble based on class and race, and made worse, far worse,  by the capitalist destruction of the American economy, a country now held together largely by the news media's creation of artificial fears and hatreds And he has a congress screaming for war - with just about anybody.  He has to look tough and decisive - even if that risks a war that would become world wide and nuclear.  It's all pretty insane.

Then there's the news the Irving Press doesn't have.

Both Canada and the US praise themselves for their generosity in foreign aid. But generosity is not quite le mot exacte.
1. Foreign aid is usually given on terms which require the recipients to do very big favours for Canadian and American business - like suspending all environmental restrictions and/or charging them no taxes. It is also commonly given directly to Canadian and American corporations on very generous terms. Indeed, much of the "aid" never reaches the needy country at all. It goes straight in the overseas bank account of the corporate contractor, who then reports it was all spent conducting studies. That's how it was when the US supposedly spend billions on rebuilding an Iraq destroyed in war - but nothing got rebuilt.

Harper has recently added a wrinkle to that by ordering investigations of volunteer aid groups. (He doesn't like groups he doesn't control.) The investigations are lengthy, costly for the volunteer organizations, and specialize in looking for loopholes which might enable Harper to cut their tax-free status. Harper is a real sweetheart. Think of that the next time you see a Goguen smirk.

As well, Harper will not accept any significant number of refugees. He can't. That would cost him the bigot and racist vote in the coming federal election.

2. As a result of the recent US elections, the U.S. congress is dominated by people who want war with Russia. They want it because Russia is a stumbling block to getting control of all world economies through control of trade by American corporations. It's all about money - and getting all of it. That's why Russia suddenly became evil in the North American news media. That's why so many people believe that Russia is still Communist when, in fact, it isn't - and really never was. Nor is China, whatever it calls iitself. And neither are Canada and the US capitalist in any accurate meaning of that word.

The issue with Russia is that it stands in the way of dominance of the world by North American "capitalists".

3. The move has to come soon. After all, China knows that it's next on the list after Russia. And there are other targets - maybe India, Venezuela (in fact, all of Latin America), Africa...and maybe our "good friends" of the European union. (Corporations are voracious eaters that will happily eat their own children, and each other.)

The move to break Russia has to come soon because all those other countries aren't dumb. They know that the defeat of Russia would be a defeat for them.  That's why China, which has no reason to love Russia, is forming closer links with Russia - and with India and Iran and Venezuela. Every day, the unity of those who fear the US is getting stronger. Every day, the economic power of the US gets smaller.  Every day, the US loses people who used to admire it. Every day, the US circle shrinks so that it will soon be just its more submissive toadies - Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, all that is left, the shreds of  a broken empire. This is all that is left of Churchill's racist dream of the dominance of the world by the English-speaking peoples.

The corporations have to move now or never. And the corporations pull the strings on the US  Congress.

Meanwhile, the middle east and Africa continue their descent into hell. Our news media lay the blame on religion - especially what they call extreme Islam. And that's bunk.

Jews, Muslims and Christians lived together and largely in peace in that region for 2000 years. So how come religious slaughter is just happening now? Similarly, Hindus and Moslems lived together in peace for thousands of years in what we now call India and Pakistan. Now they are two countries who hate each other with war a constant possiblity. What caused that?

The British caused it. The invaded India, divided the people by favouring Moslems at the cost of the needs of Hindus, and that caused the hatreds that tear that region apart.

In the same way, various European countries invaded and exploited Africa and the Middle East for two centuries, dividing, destabilizing, brutalizing, looting. So the victims turned to their religions as all that was really theirs. Wars cause fears and hatreds. Fears and hatreds become religious, and cause more wars so that, in the final analysis wars cause wars.  World War Two was caused by World War One. And World War Three will have been caused by World War Two.

And the news media, instead of telling us what is happening, simply teach us to fear and hate so we will kill when it is convenient for those who control  us.

Oh, a closing item. It has been revealed that top Canadian CEOs now make 195 times as much money as the average Canadian does.  The reason,  so I heard on a radio newscast, is because their jobs require enormous ability, so they have to be very clever and highly trained. Gee!

If all our CEOS are clever and highly trained, how come they drove the whole world into such a terrible recession? And how come us stupid and useless people are the ones who had to bail them out so they could give each other billions in bonuses?

And if they are so clever at creating prosperity, how come most of us are still getting poorer while they are getting richer?

And if they are so clever, it must be genetic because a high proportion of them are people who inherited their wealth from their parents in the first place.

And if they are so damn clever, how come we rarely hear one of them say anything that is clever?

The response of a 'think tank" has been that if their salaries were distributed among all Canadians, the average person would get 93 cents a day. But that's just playing games with numbers. Yes, perhaps if you took just the TOP CEOs, and ignored their bonuses and stock deals and hidden bank accounts, and insider information, and their outright thefts (like Brian Mulroney's) it might only be a 93 cent difference. But if you distributed it to the malnourished it would mean a lot more. And if you took more from those who are CEOs, but not just at the very top level, and if you took more from the other highly paid, and if you could find out how much the very, very rich have hidden away, then we could decently, house and educate just about everybody.

I see no evidence that the top CEOs make anybody better off except themselves and their own social set. On the contrary, they operate a business to get everything out of us, and give back as little as possible. And I would dearly love to meet the sneering lout who came up with the idea of trivializing the fact that some people in this world have the power to pull so much of this world's money into their pockets while billions work much harder than they do, and starve.

Jan. 3: Pope Francis is an environmental-terrorist threat to New Brunswick

The Irving press seems to be ignoring the story; but the pope has announced at a recent environmental council that he is declaring climate change his issue of the year. Now, as we all know, there is no climate change. If there were, the oil barons would never soil their good names and lie about it just to make huge profits.

Maybe we should send a real expert to straighten out the Pope. Perhaps somebody from the Atlantic Institute of Market Studies - or maybe even Irving Columnist Norbert Cunningham.
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The big, big story for Jan.2 is A3. Our Downtown Moncton Centreville Inc is optimistic about the future of our downtown.   Alas! Though the story takes up a half page, it never tells us why he's optimistic - or anything else.

But even at that, it's better that A5, a whole page of photos of people that few have ever heard of who attended a New Year's reception at city hall. The only one  I recognized was our member of parliament, "Smirky" Goguen, whose only political achievement so far is doing what he's told to do, and getting his picture taken.

The editorial is about a news story that the paper had a few days ago. A South Korean family which has been in Moncton for almost fifteen years was ordered deported from Canada because -----they were terrorists? no. Because one of their sons has epilepsy, and the immigration department thought that might be a terrible strain on our health system.

Now, that's a story that has three times appeared - and now four times because as well as being in the editorial, it also appears this day in an op ed column. And all four are the same story - mostly a tribute to the spirit of Moncton.
1. We don't need the same story four times.
2. The spirit of Moncton is NOT what this is all about. The real story is why immigration Canada is getting so tough on immigrants.

No government has ever been so negative about immigration as the Harper government. In some countries we even  put up signs telling people not to apply to come to Canada. Romas are absolutely forbidden. Our record in helping Syrian refugees is among the worst in the developed world. Applicants are commonly jailed for months or longer to wait for their appeals to be heard. These are the same, overcrowded and violent jails in which we keep murderers and rapists. This the real story which most of our news media have ignored.

Here's why.

Harper cannot get a majority vote for the Conservatives. But he can get a majority of mps by targeting key ridings where certain blocs can swing the vote for him.

That's why he kisses up to Israel. It gets him the Canadian Jewish vote. It's not big. But it's concentrated in certain ridings. That's why he talks big about Ukraine. That's why, when he met Putin, he said, "It's time for you to get out of Ukraine." (What an absurd picture that makes - the leader of a small country with a small military and outdated equipment saying to the leader of a big country, "Hey, you wanna punch inna mout'?")

But it gets him the Canadian Ukrainian vote which, in Canada, is far right wing and concentrated in certain ridings.

And he gets tough on all immigrants because there are large blocs of Canadians, very large blocs, who are bigots and racists. And he wants them to vote Harper.

Alec Bruce is back to skating a very fine line on fracking. This one piddles around the term "social licence", a term Gallant has used to define what frackers need to gain in order to carry on their drilling.

In practical terms, all the term means is general acceptance. So if frackers get majority approval, they have social licence to operate.  Bruce spends so much time analyzing this simple idea (even quoting, God help us, the authority of a far, right wing propaganda think tank, The Fraser Institute) that he makes it incomprehensible.

The tone of the article seems to suggest he supports shale gas, but doesn't really want to say so out loud.

Actually, I'm not a big admirer of social license. Hitler had social licence to murder Jews. The German people supported him. That's social licence. (At the same time, Ukrainians gave social licence to kill Jews. So, for that matter, did big money in Canada and the US.)

In this case, social licence for fracking means putting our climate and putting lives all over the world at severe risk to make a handful of very rich people even richer. We, even if a majority, have no right to issue such a licence. And I find it profoundly disturbing that premier Gallant can even suggest such a thing.

There are times, Mr. Gallant, when decisions have to be made on principles, not on word games. And I very much expect that you are playing word games.  The oil industry is quite happy to play games. With the price of gas so low, there's no point in rushing the development of shale gas. So we play the game of having a moratorium, and then coming up with a social licence. The players are the oil industry, the Irving press, and the politicians - and we are the ball they kick around the field.
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In what the Irving press refers to (humorously, I hope) as NewsToday, there are, for a change, three items worth looking at.

One is that Jeb Bush is clearly making his move to run for U.S. president. This is the third member of the family that has, in very recent years, controlled the White House. (Though, admittedly, George Bush Jr. was there only as the village idiot to take orders from Dick Cheney.)

Just think. In a nation of hundreds of millions, just one family could produce three presidents in a row. What a coincidence!

No. I don't think it is a coincidence.  What we are watching has happened many times before in history. An old system of government is dying; and rule is passing into the hands of an aristocracy of wealth and inheritance. It's also a very, very warlike aristocracy. And cheering for Hilary Clinton is foolish because she represents the same forces.

On the same page is a story critical of Israel.  A former member of the government says that the money Netanyahu has been spending on "settlements" on seized territory has been largely for corruption. (There's also a case to made explaining Israel's behaviour, a case that makes it understandable if not commendable.  I might try that tomorrow.)

There's also a headline on another story, "Canadian military bombs militants in Iraq".  Think about it.

If words mean anything at all, surely the Canadian army is made up of militants. So isn't that headline saying Canadian militants bomb militants in Iraq? Are  militants from Iraq different?

In the same way, aircraft have been used for terror bombing since Italy hired a few American mercenaries to bomb Ethiopian villages about 1912. All sides in World War Two practiced terror bombing. And the western world, in particular, has used it heavily since World War Two, using cluster bombs, napalm and agent orange which have - deliberately - killed far more civilians than soldiers. But I have never seen it referred to as terror bombing unless the other side does it.

It's the same with militants. Our side are never called militants. Only the other side is. The CIA led in the deliberate slaughter of almost 300,000 Guatemalans, all of them helpless civilians. But the word terrorist or militant was never applied to that. In Korea, an American officer led his soldiers to massacre a whole village of 800 or so, right down to babies. But he was never referred to as a militant or a terrorist. (In fairness, though, he was punished severely, and had to spend a whole night in jail.)

Words like militant and terrorist are deliberately used by our news media to paint the "other side" as evil, and so to take advantage of our natural bigotry and racism.
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And I haven't even touched today's (Jan 3) paper or my long list of notes. But this is already a bit long. So I'll do the rest for tomorrow.

Jan.1: Oh-my-God...

The front page, banner headline in the TandT is, "Spirit of Moncton is newsmaker of the year". That is surely an embarrassing reminder of the worst of the small-town boosterism of the 1920s. Yeah, greatest little city in the world. Yeah. Great new hockey rink that will bring the world to our doorstep, too.  And, hey, buy yer forests here - cheap.

Look, there are cities in this world that have suffered the deaths of  innocent people in the hundreds of thousands - and have survived.  Moncton is not unique. When policemen were murdered, what did the editors think would happen? That everybody in Moncton would flee into the woods?  Or jump into the tidal bore?

Yes, people mourned, and then went on with their lives. It happens every day all over the world. That's a big, news-maker? That's a sign that Moncton is the greatest little  town on earth?

I regularly read a Fredericton, one-sheet paper that has more intelligent news than that. It's the NB Media Co-op.  info@nbmediacoop.org   It currently has a story that would be the big newsmaker of the year if the Irving press had bothered to run it. In the last year, the percentage of children in New Brunswick living in poverty has risen to 25%. And such is the effect of poverty that most of them will never have a chance to  get out of it. And very, very few of them are named Irving or Ganong or McCain. And that  means they will never get their names and photos published in a New Year's edition of the Moncton Grimes and Dripdrain like the ones on today's B6 "Newsmakers who died in 2014".

In fact, this one sheet has more important news in it - the justified anger of native peoples, the brutality of our immigration system, the dramatic rise in poverty in New Brunswick.......  Gee. Why can't those poor people just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps like Mr. Irving did?

At that, the TandT gets one of them wrong. On July 9, David Azrieli died - not David Arieli as the TandT. He was a billionaire and, of course, a philanthopist. Any billionaire who gives away a half percent of his wealth (most of it made by avoiding taxes) is automatically a philanthropist. A poor person who gives away many times that percentage is still just poor.

In other section A news flashes, the Liberals won the last provincial election. Gee. I bet nobody knew that. In fact, just about the only big and fresh news in the section is that Wendy's in Sackville is closing. But I'm sure the spirit of Moncton will get us through that.

Norbert writes a column defending (surprise) shale gas. He says shale gas companies invested in New Brunswick in good faith; so we'll deserve it if they sue us for millions for banning fracking.  Really?

Norbert, you kindergarten dropout, you're saying that even if studies prove that fracking will destroy our land and water forever, and will contribute massively to global climate change with the catastrophe that will be for billions  and probably for all of us, we have a responsibility to let the frackers go ahead?

Norbert, can you understand how stupid and even immoral that statement is?

And the frackers invested in good faith --ah-ah-ah-ah-. Way to load your language kid. Yeah. Frackers are people of faith. In fact, I hear that they even have their very own chapels, and even poor people  (if decently dressed) are allowed to attend.

If Alward was ever so intellectually and morally corrupt as to sign an agreement that permits frackers to sue in such a case,  he should never be permitted to run for public office again. And if our courts were so immoral as to permit such suffering and dying for the sake of honouring a contract, even one signed by 'faithful' men - well, I don't give a damn if they are angels without sex organs, I would give up a life-long belief in non-violence.

Alec Bruce's column is a brief history of the last century - all in one column. As a result, it doesn't really say anything - and often gives a false impression. The sinking of the Lusitania with its 2000 passengers is NOT what caused the US to enter World War One. It was the excuse, over a year later, for the US to enter the war to ensure Europe would pay back the money American banks had loaned it.

He says the US was in the ascendance after World War Two. Oh? So how come it got its pants kicked off by tiny Vietnam? And how come tiny Cuba could kick out its American-sponsored dictator, suffer crippling sanctions, and still offer public education and public health care that is far superior to the American equivalents?  And if Lyndon Johnson did such a great job with his 'Great society' to eliminate poverty, how come poverty wasn't eliminated - or even reduced?

There is a letter of the day worth reading simply because it's so off the wall.   Apparently, the writer feels that fracking is the only way to go. He also feels that abortion is immoral. Tricky. So it's okay to kill or injure people, includiing the unborn, so long as its done by frackers. But it's bad if the abortion is done by doctors. I wonder if he'd compromise. Make abortion legal, but only it it's done by frackers.

Half of section B is lists of local people who died in 2014, most of whom you never heard of.

The only important story in what is grandly called "NewsToday" is that Palestine plans to charge Israel with war crimes at the international court level.  Well, that's what the court is for. But the US and Israel don't like it. Israel is quite likely to retaliate by stealing more Palestinian land. It will also ignore any judgement against it. And it will be supported in defying international law by Obama and the Canadian goy, Harper. (And before anybody gets all indignant, goy is not a derogatory word. It simply means a non-Jew and, usually, a Christian.  Shiksa, now, is different.
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Apart from Israel's decision to go to the international court, there really is no foreign news. Well, when you're the little city whose big news is that "spirit of Moncton is the news story of the year", who cares about foreigners? So there's not a word about how civil war is about to start again in Libya, how Russia and China are strengthening their ties in the face of American threats - and are also adding to their allies overseas -, not even a mention of how an American serviceman had to move his wedding so that Obama could get in a round of golf, no follow-up on anybody being accused of anything after that dreadful report  on US torture. And not the slightest  attempt to find any information on the Canadian role in torture.

Oh, a footnote for Alec Bruce. the Lusitania was only one of many ships carrying civilians that was sunk in both world wars. And it was one of the lesser ones. The worst was a ship carrying German refugees which was sunk by a Soviet submarine, drowning some 9,500, over half of them children, in 1945. As well, both British and US subs killed more civilians than did the sinking of the Lusitania.

Curiously, the only case I can find of a submarine captain being punished for it was the Soviet captain who  drowned 9500.

Beware of citing reasons why a country declares war. It is usually done strictly for business reasons. The reason that appears in the news is just there to create the necessary hatred. The invasions of Guatemala, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya had nothing to do with "bad men". The war in Syria has nothing to do with good guys and bad guys. Ditto for ISIS.  Israeli attacks on Palestine have nothing to do with protecting Israel. If Israel wanted to stop the attacks, it could have done so years ago by letting Palestine be a free state, and by giving back the land that Israel has stolen from Palestine.