Friday, November 20, 2015
Nov. 20: Brief explanation.
The real post for Nov. 20 is below this one.
In the real November 20 post, I apoplogize for errors and for the tiny print in the post. For the last month or so, my computer has been giving me problems I've never had before. In writing the Nov. post, it was astonished at the miniature print and the meanningless letters scattered through it. But when I tried to correct them, the screen just turned pink. Thus, I tried publishing without taking out the garbage letters. So I decided to make no corrections, even to my errors, and to publish it with an apology at the start.
To my amazement, the published form was perfectly normal (except for the spelling errors I had made but was afraid to correct.
That's why it looks odd. I hadn't quite finished it, either, but was afraid to finish it for fear of losing everything.
Graeme Decarie
p.s. please look at the post below this one, also dated Nov. 20.
`Nov. 20: Problems
Strange things have been happening to my computer in the last month. One of them is the tiny print on this page. All the problems are different, and all are problems I have never had before. I have no malware. This page has small print, and lots of garbage lettering. I am beginning to think I must be somebody's target.
The major part of this blog is a look at the origins and financing of ISIL. There are surprises in it.
On page A4, fearless Irving reporters dig deep to reveal the salaries of First Nations Chiefs, and how they're getting six-figure salaries. The story makes quite a fuss about that, also making the point that poor Mr. Gallant gets only a little more than the top-paid chiefs. In fact, only four of fifteen chiefs made six-figure salaries. As well, much of their salaries do not come from the tax-payers. This is a story with a misleading headline and with loaded writing.
However, It's nice to see Irving reporters really digging to get the truth. Now, could we have a story on the annual earnings of Mr. Irving and his friends? And can we know what taxes they pay on those earnings? And, of course, we need to know about how much of their earnings never appear on the record because they go straight into discreet, overseas banks?
And the rest of Section A news is of equally high journalistic standards.
______________________________________________________________
The editorial makes a sensible case for legislation against adults who carry imitation rifles while walking down the street. That's not one of the really great challenges facing our society. But it's better than the usual editorial.
Norbert has very interesting and well-written one about the 'invasive' species we so often hear about in our forests and waters. One of his best.
Murphy's column is small-town boosterism. The guest column is a piece of propaganda from The Fraser Institute, the favourite reading of billionaires.
Alec Bruce's column looks like cheerleading for the Energy East pipeline. Somehow, he still cannot grasp the point. Climate change is real. We don't know how much time we have to deal with it. Making a long term investment in oil from Alberta will speed up climate change. And it will speed it up whether that oil is burned in New Brunswick or Maine or China.
To make an investment in something that we know could destroy us is insane. And it takes money away from the renewable energy sources that we need to develop as soon as possible. That's not a tree-hugging statement. That's just trying to keep us alive. We've know this for decades. Washington was first warned about this fifty years ago, and almost nothing has been done.
___________________________________________________________
We are being set up.
U.S. politicians are now demanding that no refugees be allowed into the U.S. Expect them to put heat on Canada to keep them out, too. And expect Trudeau to cooperate.
By the way, where did this jihadist uprising come from? Well, it came from the U.S.
We have to go back to the Clinton years, and even a bit earlier. Russia had invaded Afghanistan. The CIA saw the chance here to inflict a defeat on Russia.
The most warlike Afghanis were the very religious ones who had a narrow view of what Islam was - something like Protestant fundamentalists in that respect. So the CIA armed, supplied and trained those Afghanis to fight the Russians. And those Afghanis one.
And that was the origin of jihadism as a military force. Later, the CIA would seek its cooperation in the form, for example, of al Quaeda and then of ISIS, to destroy Syria. (All of these groups are closely linked, to such a degree that they're really all the same.) That may help to explain why the U.S. has not said a word to Saudi Arabia about its funding of jihadists. The U.S. has been using jihadists for years for its own purposes. That probably explains why the U.S. did not block ISIS oil shipments. It wanted Syria destroyed and Assad out so that American oil companies could control the middle east, a plan that seems to have gone off the tracks.
Similar approaches have been used in other countries. The U.S. has, for example, created similar crises in Latin America, arming and supplying local dissidents. That's how it got rid of Aristide, the democratically elected president of Haiti. That's what it tried to do with Cuba.
The western press is doing what it always does. It's building hysteria all over the western world. I suspect Obama would like to cool it. But it's the multi-billionaires who own most of the news media.
Meanwhile, millions of refugees are still on their way to Europe. The hysteria there is going to create a breakdown even of those countries willing to accept them (countries which are becoming fewer every day.)
We have are creating one of the biggest tragedies in history. And we're creating it because oil barons don't have enough money. (And they never will have enough
money.)
I can't erase all the inserts because, if I do, the screen turns pink.
And an apology. I refered to a "black flag" operation. I should have said "false flag".
I intended to write more today. But I'm afraid that if I true, I'll erase all I have done. I'm even afraid to correct tht misspelling of try and of that.
However, It's nice to see Irving reporters really digging to get the truth. Now, could we have a story on the annual earnings of Mr. Irving and his friends? And can we know what taxes they pay on those earnings? And, of course, we need to know about how much of their earnings never appear on the record because they go straight into discreet, overseas banks?
And the rest of Section A news is of equally high journalistic standards.
______________________________________________________________
The editorial makes a sensible case for legislation against adults who carry imitation rifles while walking down the street. That's not one of the really great challenges facing our society. But it's better than the usual editorial.
Norbert has very interesting and well-written one about the 'invasive' species we so often hear about in our forests and waters. One of his best.
Murphy's column is small-town boosterism. The guest column is a piece of propaganda from The Fraser Institute, the favourite reading of billionaires.
Alec Bruce's column looks like cheerleading for the Energy East pipeline. Somehow, he still cannot grasp the point. Climate change is real. We don't know how much time we have to deal with it. Making a long term investment in oil from Alberta will speed up climate change. And it will speed it up whether that oil is burned in New Brunswick or Maine or China.
To make an investment in something that we know could destroy us is insane. And it takes money away from the renewable energy sources that we need to develop as soon as possible. That's not a tree-hugging statement. That's just trying to keep us alive. We've know this for decades. Washington was first warned about this fifty years ago, and almost nothing has been done.
___________________________________________________________
Again, about a third of Canada&World News is devoted to Paris. And I haven't yet seen any stories about France's history of slaughter and looting (especially of Muslims), or their flirtation with Naziism, or the fact they've been bombing Syria for over a year, or the fact that it was France that illegally supplied ISIS with weapons. Nor have our two-fisted, probing journalists made any mention of Saudi Arabia's long-known financial support of ISIS, and there seems no interest in tracking the story that G20 nations have been giving ISIS money, and none on why the U.S. and Turkey allowed ISIS to export oil for so long. No, it's all flag-waving and sympathy, and tears for the French who are being picked on by those evil Jihadists. In general, the media have been profoundly racist in covering this.
We are being set up.
U.S. politicians are now demanding that no refugees be allowed into the U.S. Expect them to put heat on Canada to keep them out, too. And expect Trudeau to cooperate.
By the way, where did this jihadist uprising come from? Well, it came from the U.S.
We have to go back to the Clinton years, and even a bit earlier. Russia had invaded Afghanistan. The CIA saw the chance here to inflict a defeat on Russia.
The most warlike Afghanis were the very religious ones who had a narrow view of what Islam was - something like Protestant fundamentalists in that respect. So the CIA armed, supplied and trained those Afghanis to fight the Russians. And those Afghanis one.
And that was the origin of jihadism as a military force. Later, the CIA would seek its cooperation in the form, for example, of al Quaeda and then of ISIS, to destroy Syria. (All of these groups are closely linked, to such a degree that they're really all the same.) That may help to explain why the U.S. has not said a word to Saudi Arabia about its funding of jihadists. The U.S. has been using jihadists for years for its own purposes. That probably explains why the U.S. did not block ISIS oil shipments. It wanted Syria destroyed and Assad out so that American oil companies could control the middle east, a plan that seems to have gone off the tracks.
Similar approaches have been used in other countries. The U.S. has, for example, created similar crises in Latin America, arming and supplying local dissidents. That's how it got rid of Aristide, the democratically elected president of Haiti. That's what it tried to do with Cuba.
The western press is doing what it always does. It's building hysteria all over the western world. I suspect Obama would like to cool it. But it's the multi-billionaires who own most of the news media.
Meanwhile, millions of refugees are still on their way to Europe. The hysteria there is going to create a breakdown even of those countries willing to accept them (countries which are becoming fewer every day.)
We have are creating one of the biggest tragedies in history. And we're creating it because oil barons don't have enough money. (And they never will have enough
money.)
Thursday, November 19, 2015
Nov. 19: In Remembrance
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/surveillance-state-neil-macdonald-1.3325327
During World War Two, Canadians were daily reminded they were fighting for the Five Freedoms. (Actually, these freedoms were from the US constitution, but we were assured they were for all of us.)
They were freedom of religion, of speech, of the press, of the right to assemble peaceably, freedom to petition for redress of grievances.
In the U.S., these freedoms came under attack immediately after the war when U.S. senator McCarthy destroyed lives and careers of at least hundreds by attacking some of these freedoms as "unAmerican". Stephen Harper did the same when he said that it was a "Canadian value" for women to have naked faces.
Freedom of the press? Almost all of it is used by billionaire owners to spin propaganda.
Freedom of religion? Depends on your religion. Oh, you're free to practice it. But that can also automatically set you up for spying by our secret police.
Freedom of speech? Sure. Just watch what you say. If you're an environmentalist, for example, you're probably on a government spying list - and you get reported both to the government and to big business. Ditto for socialists. Ditto for anybody critical of big business.
And I shall never forget the day when I (and others) had to appear before a parliamentary witch hunt because some people had dared to make a film in which they said Canada did some bad things during the war. (The hearing was on Nov. 11, and the walls were covered with thousands of poppies - just to remind us that The Legion (which had demanded these hearings) and the mps and senators (all Conservatives) were the good guys.
Nobody saw the irony of The Legion taking part in an attack on freedom of speech.
We defeated Nazi Germany. And we are becoming Nazi Germany.
Lest We Forget.
Mind you, Britain is worse. It has one surveillance camera for every ten people of population. The British are spied on many, many times a day, all of them, every day.
Hitler was an amateur.
_____________________________________________________________
The Irving press is its usual self. Section A news has a front page story that our restaurants and bars had over a 100 million dollars in sales this summer. I needed to know that.
The dynamite story is hidden on A9. Our government has told us that it will approve shale gas as soon as it determines the regulations needed to protect the land and the groundwater.
Well, it seems not only do they not know of any such regulations, they don't even know how to measure the safety. Science hasn't yet discovered a method to do it. No science. Not anywhere in the world. And the reason they haven't done it is that government will not put up the money for the research.
Funny how Mr. Gallant never mentioned that. But I do congratulate the Irving press for printing this story.
______________________________________________________________
Editorial and opinion pages can be skipped without loss. Even Alec Bruce has a pretty limp column about the events centre. Apparently, this is were we share a moment and shake hands. I have been to many an "events" centre many times. I can't remember ever shaking hands with anybody, or sharing with anybody except the person I was with. And it means "culture". Yeah. First, nobody knows what a culture is. Secondly, Naziis just loved expressing their "culture" in their 'events centres". This is just blather.
_________________________________________________________
Section B is still heavy on the Paris shootings. Apparently, the killings in Beirut and Baghdad at the same time really won't matter a damn in comparison to Paris. The American destruction of the whole Middle East doesn't matter. The death of 224 people in a Russian airliner doesn't matter. It's Paris, Paris, Paris - the world centre of culture where the guillotine was invented and was used into the 1970s, the city that happily rounded up Jews for Hitler, and that supplied the torturers and killers in Indo-China and Algeria.
There is not, and never has been any story about the American terrorism of drones that happens every day all over the world. killing nobody knows how many innocent people. Even the American butchering of over a million Iraqis got this intensity of coverage.
We are being set up.
In fairness, B1 has a big story about how Richard Oland's cell phone is still missing. I've been worried about that.
The one story worth reading is on B4. Bombardier, which just got 1.3 billion from Quebec, is now asking Ottawa for money. The amount isn't public - but I have heard it's one to two billion. Will Ottawa come through? You bet. Just look at how many Liberal votes came from Quebec.
That's what I love about capitalism. Daring entrepreneurs of vision and foresight don't just sit on the lawn waiting for their EI payments. No. They risk their own money and work every hour of the day to bring us their best products. And they still have the charity to give some of it to us poor, lazy slobs. God bless them, as we honour them in our Philanthropic Hall of Fame.
____________________________________________________________
Now, getting back to the real world.....
The New York Times has run a devastating article about how Paris is being used to set us up.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/18/opinion/mass-surveillance-isnt-the-answer-to-fighting-terrorism.html
At that, it doesn't tell half the story. We have become fully and more of the police state that Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia were. We are worse because we have no idea where our information is going to besides the government. This is not the Canada our military died for. When the hell is The Legion going to recognize that - and say so? When is it going to demand to know why Canadians were sent to die in Afghanistan?
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Go to google. Type LA Times homeless.
There are 26,000 homeless in Los Angeles City. In the county of Los Angeles, the number rises by 13,000 a month. And those numbers are rapidly being multiplied - not added to - multiplied. Here is story after story of the horror Los Angeles is living through. People were killed in Paris? More are dying every day of exposure, hunger, violence in Los Angeles. They range from the elderly to babies. And it's daily getting worse.
The growth of poverty in the U.S. is astonishing (though it doesn't show in government statistics.) That's what wage gap means. That's what happens when a nation spends its money on a corrupt "defence" industry, one that makes politicians very, very wealthy, politicians whose wealth from corruption makes it impossible to defeat them. That's why the U.S. spends more on "defence" than any other country in the world. That's why its foreign aid consists mostly of weapons.
(A third of all Israelis live in poverty. The U.S. will give Israel five billion in aid in the coming year - all of it in the form of weapons.)
So why has Paris become the only place we hear about? And why don't we hear about Syria, and how a U.S. funded war has killed hundreds of thousands of people, and displaced almost 12 million into a world that doesn't want them.
And why don't we hear about where ISIS is getting its money? It costs a lot of money to equip an army (with weapons illegally sold to ISIS by French billionaires). It costs a lot to keep and army in the field, and well-supplied. Some of that money comes from the ability of ISIS to sell oil. It is carried to Turkey by huge convoys of trucks. Lately, and at Russian urging, the U.S. has done some bombing of those convoys.
Why did it take so long? And, obviously, Turkey has been receiving the oil and allowing it to pass through. Gee. Isn't Turkey on our side?
And who's buying it?
It's also well known that Saudi Arabia, another good friend of ours, has been a major donor of money to ISIS. Putin says some G20 members, also our friends, have been donating big money.
As for Paris, we now know that French intelligence knew well in advance of the attacks that they were coming. So how come it didn't act? And was it only a coincidence that the military and emergency services were carrying out excercises that day in the district of the attacks?
Putin says he believes the bombing of a Russian airliner was done by personnel working at the aiport in Egypt. Maybe. And maybe those personnel were helped along by Russian agents posing as jihadists. Maybe this serves Putin's interests by ramping up popular support for his war.
I know this all sounds both brutal and far-fetched. But it's quite common in war. It's called a black flag operation. You create a horror, making it look as though somebody else did it. Or you help them along to do it. In fact, this has become standard proedure, especially since 1900 or so. Sometimes you kill your own people. But that might be a cheap price to set up the resulting war.
Iraq was a simple sort of black flag. Blair and Bush simply lied about terrible weapons that Hussein had. And they killed over million people and destroyed a nation.
Syria is black flag. The U.S. set it up by creating, financing and training a 'rebel' group. The resulting war has killed hundreds of thousands and pretty much destroyed a nation but, hey, that's cheap price to pay so American oil barons can get control.
There were even elements of black flag leading to Pearl Harbour. Roosevelt wanted a war with Japan. He wanted it because the European empires were collapsing, and American capitalists ( sorry, enterpreneurs) wanted to get their turn at looting China - and now China was looting it. But he couldn't say that. He needed an excuse.
So he cut off Japan's supply of oil by imposing an international embargo. Japan had to get that oil. So it bombed Pearl Harbor - not because it intended to invade the U.S. (It knew it couldn't manage that). It bombed Pearl Harbour to cripple the U.S. navy so it wouldn't be able to enforce the embargo.
I'm sure Roosevelt never saw the possibility that Pearl Harbor would be the Japanese response. But his purpose was to create an incident to excuse a war with Japan. And he got it.
Almost everybody in the middle east is fighting for different reasons. And none of them care to admit what their real reasons are. Watch for lots of black flags.
In the word's of Pogo, an old comic strip character, "We have met the enemy. And he is us."
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Nov. 18:I don't know where to start.....
Aha! I'm not the only crazy one. So is Pope Francis. Read his statement below.
http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/pope-francis-a-pope-who-sees-a-wwiii-and-pleas-for-it-to-stop
I could wish that the clowns who write sermonettes for the Irving press Faith Page had the intelligence and courage to say what Pope Francis has said.
And, below, is an article I copied because it deals with Canadian-owned mining operations in Africa. (About a week or more ago, a mining engineer I knew as a student at Acadia wrote to the blog about how good and generous Canadian mining companies are around the world. In fact, they are among the worst for health conditions, pollution, and low, low pay. ( Women get $5.00 a day in Congo.) The Canadian mine bosses are also notoriously racist. The site below is a sample of reality.
http://www.womenundersiegeproject.org/blog/entry/congo-women-raped-underreported-violence-conflict-minerals
By the way, there's also a good book on the mining lobby in Canada - how it is very powerful in the government, how it uses the Canadian government to help it get away with pollution in Canada and in foreign countries, how it makes deals to avoid taxes and to pay starvation wages in places like Africa and Latin America. The book is ....
Paula Butler, "Colonial Extractions:Race and Canadian Mining in Contemporary Africa", UofT Press.
One of Trudeau's first jobs will be to schmooze with the mining lobby to see what it wants - and how much it's willing to give to the Liberal party in order to get it.
Then there's the stuff we are hearing about the civilization and general goodness of France. It reminds me of my childhood days. When I was a kid in Montreal, kids weren't allowed in movie theaters. So we went down the street to the local French, Catholic church that showed movies for just ten cents. One day, the movie was Beau Geste. It was about the French Foreign Legion in North Africa, and we were all excited by the square bits of cloth that hung from the backs of their heads to protect them from the sun. After, we poured into the street, handerchiefs hanging from our caps - and pointing our fingers and saying, "Pow. Pow." (Because that's the way French kids said it.) Oh, we loved the Foreign Legion.
Actually, most of it isn't French. It has always been foreigners who are hired killers for the French Empire. They murdered lavishly in the middle east and Africa - a history of slaughter that they carried to Indo-China after 1945, and then to Algeria where they tortured and killed a people who wanted to be free.
On the side, they commonly beheaded prisoners - both men and women. There was also a thriving business in dead women because Legionnaires cut off their breasts to make tobacco pouches.
_______________________________________________________________
A couple of things got me started on this rage. The first was a dancer on TV who opened his act to cheers with a shout of "kill 'em all", then danced a waltz to the tune of God Bless America - a neat trick, since God Bless America was not written in waltz time.
Then there was Norbert's column. I agreed with the point that he eventually made. This province should accept all the refugees it can get. We need them as much as they need us. And I grew up with refugees just like them. It was good for all of us.
But, oh, the tortured bigotry, racism, and ignorance of history that Norbert left in his track. He says New Brunswick has a long history with France going back to Champlain. Actually, New Brunswick native peoples have a much longer history with New Brunswick. But I've never seen us get all sentimental about that. Nor does he mention that a prime effect of the French connection was the theft of the land of those native peoples who lived here.
Then he fails to mention how the American English settlers drove the Acadians off their land. Kinda hard to get sentimental about that.
And our roots with France and Scotland and Ireland and England remain strong?
Oh? Most people have not the slightest idea how their 'roots' lived. Yes, we get all weepy and sentimental about something like a Robert Burns night. But such nights are pure invention and romanticizing. As for the Acadians, most left France when it was a kingdom, and their ancestors, like mine, were peasants. I can't even imagine that world, much less feel attached to it.
Anway, the French, English, Scottish and Irish were long ago mixed and blended so they are all mostly the same people. William the Conqueror was French (of Viking descent). The English aristocracy he appointed was almost all French. Much of northern France is or was Celtic. (They still play the bagpipes there.) Richard Lion Heart was French. He was rarely in England, and he couldn't speak English. The Irish and Scots have almost identical bloodlines - and these extend into England, France, and western Germany.
Our talk about sentiment and roots is just that - sentiment, and it's pure blather.
He says France was hit hard by jihadist terrorism, and it hit home for many New Brunswickers. Really? Anyone who was hit hard by that must be a prize bigot.
Where was there sorrow when French terrorists murdered and tortured and looted in Africa and the middle east? Where were they when they slaughtered the people of French Indo-China? Does one have to be white to deserve tears?
It shocked the civilized world? Oh? Norbert, could you please name the countries of the civilized world? And are the other countries just savages? Are Muslims savages? And have you never heard of the Muslims who developed mathematics and philosophy and the arts that spread to create the enlightement among us 'civilized' westerners?
The U.S.invented and is, so far, the only 'civilization' to use the nuclear bomb. It murdered millions in Vietnam, over a million more in Iraq, and more in Latin America and Afghanistan and the middle east. It murdered men, women and children. It created the civil war in Syria.
Is this our definition of civilized?
Of course, all those other people looked different from us. So I guess that makes them savages. Norbert, your column is soaked in racism and bigotry. And if the people of this province like it, then we have to consider that we are racists and bigots.
"Hundreds of New Brunswick men landed on the beaches of Normandy to begin the liberation of France"?
Drivel.
The purpose of landing in France was to get to Germany - and that was the only way to get there. In fact, half of France didn't particularly want to be liberated. The Germans left southern France under Marshall Petain who ruled what was called Vichy France. Vichy France also had troops along most of the North African coast.
French officials in both occupied and Vichy France were ardent helpers in ferreting out Jews. Much was said of the French "resistance" to Germany. In fact, it was never all that strong - except in movies. After the terrible bloodbath of World War One, a great many French were happy when the fighting ended. (We can't even imagine the heavy French losses in that war.)
Many French - like many, many Europeans were enthusiastic Naziis - as were a lot of Canadians and Americans. Funny how we forget these things.
Hitler even left the French fleet under French command. The British fleet attacked it in harbour because the British knew it would fight for Germany. When they Americans landed in North Africa, they had to face heavy fighting against - the French army.
Forget that scene in the film "Casablanca" in which German soldiers sing a Nazi song in a bar and the French customers rise with tears in their eyes to sing "La Marseillaise". Except for Humphrey Bogart, just about everybody in Casablanca was pro-Nazi.
(Later, of course, President deGaulle would thank Canada for D-Day when, at the height of separatist fever, he shouted to a crowd, "Vive Quebec Libre".)
And France gave the world democracy? Come on, Norbert. France was a good 1500 years to late for that. The Vikings beat France to it. In fact, France was a late-comer to democracy. The U.S. beat it. Britain beat it. Even Canada beat it. France didn't establish a democratic government until 1870 at the earliest.
Norbert gets to his point (a good one) only for the last seven paragraphs.
His point is we should cool it on our reaction to the Paris shootings. We should think rationally and realistically. And we really must accept all the refugees we can. All other reasons aside, we need them.
To think, we should remember that almost all the news we get is propaganda and, often, outright lies to make us think emotionally rather than rationally. Ditto for movies.
We are not good. And most of the people we have killed were not evil. We are, all of us, just people.
In a century of killing and looting and impoverishing in the middle east, we have created an enormous hatred for us. That's surely understandable. We have murdered quite innocent civilians in that region. We have killed babies. We have destroyed cities. We have deliberately starved whole nations. We have driven millions of terror-stricken people out of their homelands. We have created perhaps the world's most vicious government in the form of the royal family of Saudi Arabia.
Why are we doing this? Well, despite what the Faith Page of the Irving press might say, it's not for Jesus. And it's not to defend ourselves. We were killing them long, long before they shot back at us.
We are killing innocent people to make the oil industry even richer.
It doesn't even make economic sense except, of course, for the oil billionaires. To get mercenary about it, we in the west throw trillions of dollars into these wars, and thousands of our people are thrown in to die. The financial cost to us taxpayers doesn't come close to being worth it. And for our people who die, saying thank you next Remembrance Day won't make up for what we did in sending them.
And risking a nuclear war, as we are doing now, is simply insane.
Canada is going to be under tremendous pressure to take part in what will blow up to be a war against the whole, Muslim world and quite possibly Russia and China. There will be one hell of price to pay for no return at all. And I am not confident that the Canadian government will have the courage to say no to a neighbour which has been the most murderous country of the last fifty years.
So let's skip all the sentiment. Most of that sentiment is just fiction, anyway.
We have to settle this peaceably, and we have to come to some terms with ISIS on the way. No. I don't like ISIS. But, then, I don't much like Britain or France or Saudi Arabia or the U.S. Fighting ISIS will simply lead to worse confrontations.
And if we don't like ISIS, tough; we shouldn't have created it in the first place.
ISIS is simply a reaction to a century of killing and looting by us.
_______________________________________________________
There's really not much in the paper worth reading. Alec Bruce has a good column. But, in the sixth to last paragraph, he seems to blame social media for all our problems.
The reason people read social media, young Alec, is because most of the professional news meda either lie to us or drivel out trivia. The Irving press manages to do both.
The public needs to know what is happening. It needs full stories and analysis. The professional news media are supposed to be our major source of education.
Now, tell me with a straight face that the Irving press is doing that.
http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/pope-francis-a-pope-who-sees-a-wwiii-and-pleas-for-it-to-stop
I could wish that the clowns who write sermonettes for the Irving press Faith Page had the intelligence and courage to say what Pope Francis has said.
And, below, is an article I copied because it deals with Canadian-owned mining operations in Africa. (About a week or more ago, a mining engineer I knew as a student at Acadia wrote to the blog about how good and generous Canadian mining companies are around the world. In fact, they are among the worst for health conditions, pollution, and low, low pay. ( Women get $5.00 a day in Congo.) The Canadian mine bosses are also notoriously racist. The site below is a sample of reality.
http://www.womenundersiegeproject.org/blog/entry/congo-women-raped-underreported-violence-conflict-minerals
By the way, there's also a good book on the mining lobby in Canada - how it is very powerful in the government, how it uses the Canadian government to help it get away with pollution in Canada and in foreign countries, how it makes deals to avoid taxes and to pay starvation wages in places like Africa and Latin America. The book is ....
Paula Butler, "Colonial Extractions:Race and Canadian Mining in Contemporary Africa", UofT Press.
One of Trudeau's first jobs will be to schmooze with the mining lobby to see what it wants - and how much it's willing to give to the Liberal party in order to get it.
Then there's the stuff we are hearing about the civilization and general goodness of France. It reminds me of my childhood days. When I was a kid in Montreal, kids weren't allowed in movie theaters. So we went down the street to the local French, Catholic church that showed movies for just ten cents. One day, the movie was Beau Geste. It was about the French Foreign Legion in North Africa, and we were all excited by the square bits of cloth that hung from the backs of their heads to protect them from the sun. After, we poured into the street, handerchiefs hanging from our caps - and pointing our fingers and saying, "Pow. Pow." (Because that's the way French kids said it.) Oh, we loved the Foreign Legion.
Actually, most of it isn't French. It has always been foreigners who are hired killers for the French Empire. They murdered lavishly in the middle east and Africa - a history of slaughter that they carried to Indo-China after 1945, and then to Algeria where they tortured and killed a people who wanted to be free.
On the side, they commonly beheaded prisoners - both men and women. There was also a thriving business in dead women because Legionnaires cut off their breasts to make tobacco pouches.
_______________________________________________________________
A couple of things got me started on this rage. The first was a dancer on TV who opened his act to cheers with a shout of "kill 'em all", then danced a waltz to the tune of God Bless America - a neat trick, since God Bless America was not written in waltz time.
Then there was Norbert's column. I agreed with the point that he eventually made. This province should accept all the refugees it can get. We need them as much as they need us. And I grew up with refugees just like them. It was good for all of us.
But, oh, the tortured bigotry, racism, and ignorance of history that Norbert left in his track. He says New Brunswick has a long history with France going back to Champlain. Actually, New Brunswick native peoples have a much longer history with New Brunswick. But I've never seen us get all sentimental about that. Nor does he mention that a prime effect of the French connection was the theft of the land of those native peoples who lived here.
Then he fails to mention how the American English settlers drove the Acadians off their land. Kinda hard to get sentimental about that.
And our roots with France and Scotland and Ireland and England remain strong?
Oh? Most people have not the slightest idea how their 'roots' lived. Yes, we get all weepy and sentimental about something like a Robert Burns night. But such nights are pure invention and romanticizing. As for the Acadians, most left France when it was a kingdom, and their ancestors, like mine, were peasants. I can't even imagine that world, much less feel attached to it.
Anway, the French, English, Scottish and Irish were long ago mixed and blended so they are all mostly the same people. William the Conqueror was French (of Viking descent). The English aristocracy he appointed was almost all French. Much of northern France is or was Celtic. (They still play the bagpipes there.) Richard Lion Heart was French. He was rarely in England, and he couldn't speak English. The Irish and Scots have almost identical bloodlines - and these extend into England, France, and western Germany.
Our talk about sentiment and roots is just that - sentiment, and it's pure blather.
He says France was hit hard by jihadist terrorism, and it hit home for many New Brunswickers. Really? Anyone who was hit hard by that must be a prize bigot.
Where was there sorrow when French terrorists murdered and tortured and looted in Africa and the middle east? Where were they when they slaughtered the people of French Indo-China? Does one have to be white to deserve tears?
It shocked the civilized world? Oh? Norbert, could you please name the countries of the civilized world? And are the other countries just savages? Are Muslims savages? And have you never heard of the Muslims who developed mathematics and philosophy and the arts that spread to create the enlightement among us 'civilized' westerners?
The U.S.invented and is, so far, the only 'civilization' to use the nuclear bomb. It murdered millions in Vietnam, over a million more in Iraq, and more in Latin America and Afghanistan and the middle east. It murdered men, women and children. It created the civil war in Syria.
Is this our definition of civilized?
Of course, all those other people looked different from us. So I guess that makes them savages. Norbert, your column is soaked in racism and bigotry. And if the people of this province like it, then we have to consider that we are racists and bigots.
"Hundreds of New Brunswick men landed on the beaches of Normandy to begin the liberation of France"?
Drivel.
The purpose of landing in France was to get to Germany - and that was the only way to get there. In fact, half of France didn't particularly want to be liberated. The Germans left southern France under Marshall Petain who ruled what was called Vichy France. Vichy France also had troops along most of the North African coast.
French officials in both occupied and Vichy France were ardent helpers in ferreting out Jews. Much was said of the French "resistance" to Germany. In fact, it was never all that strong - except in movies. After the terrible bloodbath of World War One, a great many French were happy when the fighting ended. (We can't even imagine the heavy French losses in that war.)
Many French - like many, many Europeans were enthusiastic Naziis - as were a lot of Canadians and Americans. Funny how we forget these things.
Hitler even left the French fleet under French command. The British fleet attacked it in harbour because the British knew it would fight for Germany. When they Americans landed in North Africa, they had to face heavy fighting against - the French army.
Forget that scene in the film "Casablanca" in which German soldiers sing a Nazi song in a bar and the French customers rise with tears in their eyes to sing "La Marseillaise". Except for Humphrey Bogart, just about everybody in Casablanca was pro-Nazi.
(Later, of course, President deGaulle would thank Canada for D-Day when, at the height of separatist fever, he shouted to a crowd, "Vive Quebec Libre".)
And France gave the world democracy? Come on, Norbert. France was a good 1500 years to late for that. The Vikings beat France to it. In fact, France was a late-comer to democracy. The U.S. beat it. Britain beat it. Even Canada beat it. France didn't establish a democratic government until 1870 at the earliest.
Norbert gets to his point (a good one) only for the last seven paragraphs.
His point is we should cool it on our reaction to the Paris shootings. We should think rationally and realistically. And we really must accept all the refugees we can. All other reasons aside, we need them.
To think, we should remember that almost all the news we get is propaganda and, often, outright lies to make us think emotionally rather than rationally. Ditto for movies.
We are not good. And most of the people we have killed were not evil. We are, all of us, just people.
In a century of killing and looting and impoverishing in the middle east, we have created an enormous hatred for us. That's surely understandable. We have murdered quite innocent civilians in that region. We have killed babies. We have destroyed cities. We have deliberately starved whole nations. We have driven millions of terror-stricken people out of their homelands. We have created perhaps the world's most vicious government in the form of the royal family of Saudi Arabia.
Why are we doing this? Well, despite what the Faith Page of the Irving press might say, it's not for Jesus. And it's not to defend ourselves. We were killing them long, long before they shot back at us.
We are killing innocent people to make the oil industry even richer.
It doesn't even make economic sense except, of course, for the oil billionaires. To get mercenary about it, we in the west throw trillions of dollars into these wars, and thousands of our people are thrown in to die. The financial cost to us taxpayers doesn't come close to being worth it. And for our people who die, saying thank you next Remembrance Day won't make up for what we did in sending them.
And risking a nuclear war, as we are doing now, is simply insane.
Canada is going to be under tremendous pressure to take part in what will blow up to be a war against the whole, Muslim world and quite possibly Russia and China. There will be one hell of price to pay for no return at all. And I am not confident that the Canadian government will have the courage to say no to a neighbour which has been the most murderous country of the last fifty years.
So let's skip all the sentiment. Most of that sentiment is just fiction, anyway.
We have to settle this peaceably, and we have to come to some terms with ISIS on the way. No. I don't like ISIS. But, then, I don't much like Britain or France or Saudi Arabia or the U.S. Fighting ISIS will simply lead to worse confrontations.
And if we don't like ISIS, tough; we shouldn't have created it in the first place.
ISIS is simply a reaction to a century of killing and looting by us.
_______________________________________________________
There's really not much in the paper worth reading. Alec Bruce has a good column. But, in the sixth to last paragraph, he seems to blame social media for all our problems.
The reason people read social media, young Alec, is because most of the professional news meda either lie to us or drivel out trivia. The Irving press manages to do both.
The public needs to know what is happening. It needs full stories and analysis. The professional news media are supposed to be our major source of education.
Now, tell me with a straight face that the Irving press is doing that.
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Nov. 17: We are being set up.
It began with the biggest foreign policy disaster of recent times - the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq. We have never been told the truth about why this was done. The story that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction has long been proven a lie. Then we were told it was because Saddam was a bad man.
No doubt he was. But this world has lots of bad men, many of whom are on our side. In any case, even if he was bad, that scarcely explains why we found it necessary to kill over a million Iraqis who were, so far as we know, not bad.
We hanged Hussein for being a bad man. So why don't we hang Bush and Blair for murdering over a million, innocent people?
What was the real reason for mass murder in Iraq?
Western oil capitalists wanted fuller control of Iraq oil so they could increase profits. British and American taxpayers paid the bill in money and lives. God bless our oil billionaires.
That was a never-justified war that brought benefits nowhere near its cost in money and lives. In fact, it brought no benefits at all. Worse, it laid the groundwork for the present crisis in the Middle East, groundwork that could well take us into the final world war.
Perhaps we shouldn't blame Bush. Perhaps we should forgive him on grounds of mental disability. Anyway, he was just a puppet of the U.S. oil industry. But Blair was a willing whore for the oil industry. And both are now very wealthy men.
Putin is there for reasons similar to those of Britain and the U.S. - except that he represents Russian oil capitalists. The only difference is that Putin seems to be a more skilful leader than anybody on our side.
It began with Iraq. And it spread. The whole middle east unravelled. And now the world is unravelling. Greedy ambitions have taken us to this point. And almost all the news media are busy setting us up.
We are to cry for France. We are all now French. Yes. Innocent French people were killed. Within my lifetime, France has killed, tortured, starved innocent people by the million in Indo-China, Algeria, much of Africa. But we shed no tears for those. It has been daily bombing and killing innocent people in Syria for over a year. But our news media don't mention that. It also shares responsibility for the millions fleeing the horror it has helped to create. But not a word about that.
France (illegally) sold weapons to ISIS. In fact, it is quite possible that some of the weapons used in the Paris attack were of French origin. Western capitalists have been supplying money to ISIS. How else could it raise the money to buy weapons from France?
A terrorist attack on Paris is, well, terrible. But, apparently, it's okay if the terrorists are us wearing proper uniforms and dropping cluster bombs and napalm and depleted uranium, and attacking with drone bombers that have killed thousands, including (mostly) innocent people and women and children and babies born and unborn.
(How come none of our local Baptists demonstrate against this by holding up signs saying it's wrong to kill babies - like they do now outside our hospitals? Perhaps it's not wrong to kill babies. Not if they're Muslim babies, and if they look different from us Christians.)
We are watching a world collapse of moral standards. We are watching the rise of a savagery we call heroism. We are on a path to a level of destruction this world has never seen. And our news media are leading the cheering with reporting that is shamefully biased, and that ignores all the evidence that we have caused this tragedy. This is greed gone mad. Greed, stupidity and ignorance.
Add to that - in a world in which we know climate change is happening and that it is caused by burning fossil fuels, we are fighting a war get control of more oil so our oil billionaires can make higher profits.
How many trillions has this world spent in the last 15 years on wars? How much has it spent on developing renewable energy? Who do you think is responsible for making this choice?
Section B of the Irving press has nothing in it but propaganda and utter crap. The last page has the big brainless crap story with a headline that begins "As world grieves after Paris attacks...." Come off it. It's a big world. And most of it doesn't give a damn about the Paris attacks. Certainly, the old colonies of France are not grieving (unless they're the ones that killed off native peoples so French - and then English - could be the majority). South America has its own grieving to do under attacks and pressures from the U.S. (And when 300,000 Guatemalans, including a local man, were murdered, the Irving press never even mentioned it. It still hasn't.) And the U.S. is shocked? The country that has killed and starved and tortured millionsin the last 15 years is shocked? I'm sure it is. But it's one, very selective sort of shock.
The quality of reporting on this is so consistent in the private news media, especially, that I am convinced we are being set up. This may be the big, final push for world economic dominance by the U.S. And Britain will play along because it has been sucking up to the U.S. for over a century as it saw it needed American help to save its empire. (And the U.S. used that need to play a major role in the destruction of the British Empire. The news media never noticed that, either.)
__________________________________________________________
Section A of Irving press is, as usual, mostly trivia. Two stories are worth a look.
Page A1 has a storty that three invasive species of fish have been found in our river. That has the potential to destroy the eco-system of the river, and to kill off native species.
On A7. our ever alert city council has discovered a way to save $35.000 by not ploughing snow off one side of selected streets for some 22 kilometres.
Brilliant.
This will solidify Moncton's reputation for the worst sidewalk ploughing I have even seen in a city, and the most dangerous city for drivers coming to intersections. (With those heaps of snow at corners, drivers can't tell what's coming.) Then there are all those people who can't afford plough service and who are elderly who now will face shovelling mountains of snow to get out of their houses.
But first things first. We gotta save money to build a new hockey rink.
_____________________________________________________________
The editorial is, I suppose, a worthy attempt to encourage people to apply for jobs at contact centres. Too bad the writer seems unaware that there are predictions the industrial world will, in the near future, replace over half of all human employees with robots. Perhaps the Irving press can tell us what plans our leaders are making for that situation.
Norbert has a column about the general concern that we have a dysfunctional political system. He does not mention the part played by the province's wealthy and by his newspaper and by him in keeping it dysfunctional.
He also says the schools should teach more about civics and government than they do. Get real Norbert. Any teacher who told a class about the realities of civics and government would get fired on the spot. I've been a teacher, and I've learned that if you tell the truth you can expect trouble from everyone from relgious nuts to oil bosses. I still remember the school principal's warning after such an incident in my first year of teaching. "Now, Mr. Decarie, we really don't want to cause a fuss, do we?" Yup. That's what parents want school to do - produce tame bozos just like them. Perhaps not surprisingly, that principal was the son of a clergyman.
Then there's a letter to the editor which says Canada is a world leader in cutting down pollution because it creates only 1.5% of world emissions. I would suggest the writer consult google for 'world population' and 'Canada population'. Then figure out what percentage of the world's population we are.
Alan Cochrane has a column on a military display at the arena, a display that was linked to Remembrance Day. Now, I'm as interested in military equipment and history as the next person,usually more than the next person. But that's not what Remembrance Day is about.
It's not about getting thrills or hearing about glory. It's a remembrance of those who paid the price. That's not thrilling or exciting or glorious, and it certainly isn't a wonderful day for the family or a sort of tourist draw to look at the weapons.
Some day, I hope, Remembrance Day will become a remembrance of all the dead on both sides - and the millions of civilian dead.
Maybe we'll even remember the native people and the metis we killed.
(The story also has a photo of Alphonse Vautour, a veteran who is 96 years old. I can only wish I had looked half as good as him when I was thirty.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Page C6 has a very professional column by Jana Giles on a student discussion with the minister of education. Ms. Giles is a high school student. She already has the mark of a real pro. This is first rate journalism.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I spent a long time on today's blog expressing rage at what I am quite sure is a coordinated attempt to create a major war - or at least to risk it - for the sake of fattening oil barons.I think we're at a major turning point in world history; and our actions are being directed by the most greedy and irresponsible people among us.
So I'll give you a break. I'll list items sent by readers or that I spotted in the world press, and thought interesting. But I won't take up your time by saying anything about them.
____________________________________________________________
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/paris-attacks-only-2-equally-bad-options-for-taking-on-isis-1.3320226
http://commondreams.org/news/2015/11/13/tides-are-turning-portland-passes-landmark-resolution-against-fossil-fuel
http://davidstockmanscontracor
http://commondreams.org/news/2015/11/13/tides-are-turning-portland-passes-landmark-resolution-against-fossil-fuel
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/11/16/grasping-the-motives-for-terror/
(The writer below is a very credible source, with an excellent background. I have often found his statements to prove true.)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43442.htm
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/05/wikileaks-cables-saudi-terrorist-funding
__________________________________________________________
It's hard to fight back the rage at the lying of our news media, and the murderous behaviour of our wealthy.
This all started with the U.S. financing a rebellion in Syria in order to change the government. It said Assad is a "bad man". Maybe he his. Does this make it reasonable to destroy Syria, to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent people? I think Bush was a very bad man, indeed. Would Canadian think it reasonable to kill millions of Americans to get rid of him.
Syria was, and is, no bloody business of the U.S. The same was true of Egypt (where it destroyed an elected government to replace it with a military dictator).
The same was true of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Cuba, Vietnam... The U.S. arranged the murder of the president of Chile, and replaced him with a military dictator. (Even Wikkipedia now supports that view.) It has routinely interfered and murdered throughout Latin America.
People have a right to choose the kind of government they want. They have a right to decide not to have democracy at all. It's none of the business of U.S. what those people choose. But the U.S. has killed millions all over the world to tell people who they are allowed to have as ruler. The U.S. set up a rebellion in Syria not to bring democracy but to get rid of Assad because he wasn't obedient enought to American oil capitalists. What has prevented this war from ending is that the U.S. stands by its original purpose of getting rid of Assad. If an election were held, and Assad won, the bombs would fall again. This war is solely about giving control of Syria to American capitalists.
There are certainly bad and evil people in this world. Among them, I would include almost every American president since 1900, the current governments of Britain and France, vitually all of the world's major capitalists - including those in Russia and China.
The have created such a mess in the middle east that it threatens the survival of the whole world. And killing every member of ISIS will not change that. The hatred will simply create another and bigger ISIS (which, like the current one, will be financially supported and armed by leading capitalists.)
This cannot go on. It is evil. It is beyond evil. And it is monstrously destructive. Perhaps totally destructive. We have to become more active than we are, much more active to stop this insanity.
I'm afraid I could write on forever about this, and still not cover the evil of it.
Oh, I just found this in Time, a news source that is usually pure propaganda. But this makes sense, more sense than anything I have ever seen in Time.
http://time.com/4116371/paris-attacks-fighting-isis/
And, oh, good night.
No doubt he was. But this world has lots of bad men, many of whom are on our side. In any case, even if he was bad, that scarcely explains why we found it necessary to kill over a million Iraqis who were, so far as we know, not bad.
We hanged Hussein for being a bad man. So why don't we hang Bush and Blair for murdering over a million, innocent people?
What was the real reason for mass murder in Iraq?
Western oil capitalists wanted fuller control of Iraq oil so they could increase profits. British and American taxpayers paid the bill in money and lives. God bless our oil billionaires.
That was a never-justified war that brought benefits nowhere near its cost in money and lives. In fact, it brought no benefits at all. Worse, it laid the groundwork for the present crisis in the Middle East, groundwork that could well take us into the final world war.
Perhaps we shouldn't blame Bush. Perhaps we should forgive him on grounds of mental disability. Anyway, he was just a puppet of the U.S. oil industry. But Blair was a willing whore for the oil industry. And both are now very wealthy men.
Putin is there for reasons similar to those of Britain and the U.S. - except that he represents Russian oil capitalists. The only difference is that Putin seems to be a more skilful leader than anybody on our side.
It began with Iraq. And it spread. The whole middle east unravelled. And now the world is unravelling. Greedy ambitions have taken us to this point. And almost all the news media are busy setting us up.
We are to cry for France. We are all now French. Yes. Innocent French people were killed. Within my lifetime, France has killed, tortured, starved innocent people by the million in Indo-China, Algeria, much of Africa. But we shed no tears for those. It has been daily bombing and killing innocent people in Syria for over a year. But our news media don't mention that. It also shares responsibility for the millions fleeing the horror it has helped to create. But not a word about that.
France (illegally) sold weapons to ISIS. In fact, it is quite possible that some of the weapons used in the Paris attack were of French origin. Western capitalists have been supplying money to ISIS. How else could it raise the money to buy weapons from France?
A terrorist attack on Paris is, well, terrible. But, apparently, it's okay if the terrorists are us wearing proper uniforms and dropping cluster bombs and napalm and depleted uranium, and attacking with drone bombers that have killed thousands, including (mostly) innocent people and women and children and babies born and unborn.
(How come none of our local Baptists demonstrate against this by holding up signs saying it's wrong to kill babies - like they do now outside our hospitals? Perhaps it's not wrong to kill babies. Not if they're Muslim babies, and if they look different from us Christians.)
We are watching a world collapse of moral standards. We are watching the rise of a savagery we call heroism. We are on a path to a level of destruction this world has never seen. And our news media are leading the cheering with reporting that is shamefully biased, and that ignores all the evidence that we have caused this tragedy. This is greed gone mad. Greed, stupidity and ignorance.
Add to that - in a world in which we know climate change is happening and that it is caused by burning fossil fuels, we are fighting a war get control of more oil so our oil billionaires can make higher profits.
How many trillions has this world spent in the last 15 years on wars? How much has it spent on developing renewable energy? Who do you think is responsible for making this choice?
Section B of the Irving press has nothing in it but propaganda and utter crap. The last page has the big brainless crap story with a headline that begins "As world grieves after Paris attacks...." Come off it. It's a big world. And most of it doesn't give a damn about the Paris attacks. Certainly, the old colonies of France are not grieving (unless they're the ones that killed off native peoples so French - and then English - could be the majority). South America has its own grieving to do under attacks and pressures from the U.S. (And when 300,000 Guatemalans, including a local man, were murdered, the Irving press never even mentioned it. It still hasn't.) And the U.S. is shocked? The country that has killed and starved and tortured millionsin the last 15 years is shocked? I'm sure it is. But it's one, very selective sort of shock.
The quality of reporting on this is so consistent in the private news media, especially, that I am convinced we are being set up. This may be the big, final push for world economic dominance by the U.S. And Britain will play along because it has been sucking up to the U.S. for over a century as it saw it needed American help to save its empire. (And the U.S. used that need to play a major role in the destruction of the British Empire. The news media never noticed that, either.)
__________________________________________________________
Section A of Irving press is, as usual, mostly trivia. Two stories are worth a look.
Page A1 has a storty that three invasive species of fish have been found in our river. That has the potential to destroy the eco-system of the river, and to kill off native species.
On A7. our ever alert city council has discovered a way to save $35.000 by not ploughing snow off one side of selected streets for some 22 kilometres.
Brilliant.
This will solidify Moncton's reputation for the worst sidewalk ploughing I have even seen in a city, and the most dangerous city for drivers coming to intersections. (With those heaps of snow at corners, drivers can't tell what's coming.) Then there are all those people who can't afford plough service and who are elderly who now will face shovelling mountains of snow to get out of their houses.
But first things first. We gotta save money to build a new hockey rink.
_____________________________________________________________
The editorial is, I suppose, a worthy attempt to encourage people to apply for jobs at contact centres. Too bad the writer seems unaware that there are predictions the industrial world will, in the near future, replace over half of all human employees with robots. Perhaps the Irving press can tell us what plans our leaders are making for that situation.
Norbert has a column about the general concern that we have a dysfunctional political system. He does not mention the part played by the province's wealthy and by his newspaper and by him in keeping it dysfunctional.
He also says the schools should teach more about civics and government than they do. Get real Norbert. Any teacher who told a class about the realities of civics and government would get fired on the spot. I've been a teacher, and I've learned that if you tell the truth you can expect trouble from everyone from relgious nuts to oil bosses. I still remember the school principal's warning after such an incident in my first year of teaching. "Now, Mr. Decarie, we really don't want to cause a fuss, do we?" Yup. That's what parents want school to do - produce tame bozos just like them. Perhaps not surprisingly, that principal was the son of a clergyman.
Then there's a letter to the editor which says Canada is a world leader in cutting down pollution because it creates only 1.5% of world emissions. I would suggest the writer consult google for 'world population' and 'Canada population'. Then figure out what percentage of the world's population we are.
Alan Cochrane has a column on a military display at the arena, a display that was linked to Remembrance Day. Now, I'm as interested in military equipment and history as the next person,usually more than the next person. But that's not what Remembrance Day is about.
It's not about getting thrills or hearing about glory. It's a remembrance of those who paid the price. That's not thrilling or exciting or glorious, and it certainly isn't a wonderful day for the family or a sort of tourist draw to look at the weapons.
Some day, I hope, Remembrance Day will become a remembrance of all the dead on both sides - and the millions of civilian dead.
Maybe we'll even remember the native people and the metis we killed.
(The story also has a photo of Alphonse Vautour, a veteran who is 96 years old. I can only wish I had looked half as good as him when I was thirty.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Page C6 has a very professional column by Jana Giles on a student discussion with the minister of education. Ms. Giles is a high school student. She already has the mark of a real pro. This is first rate journalism.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I spent a long time on today's blog expressing rage at what I am quite sure is a coordinated attempt to create a major war - or at least to risk it - for the sake of fattening oil barons.I think we're at a major turning point in world history; and our actions are being directed by the most greedy and irresponsible people among us.
So I'll give you a break. I'll list items sent by readers or that I spotted in the world press, and thought interesting. But I won't take up your time by saying anything about them.
____________________________________________________________
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/paris-attacks-only-2-equally-bad-options-for-taking-on-isis-1.3320226
http://commondreams.org/news/2015/11/13/tides-are-turning-portland-passes-landmark-resolution-against-fossil-fuel
http://davidstockmanscontracor
http://commondreams.org/news/2015/11/13/tides-are-turning-portland-passes-landmark-resolution-against-fossil-fuel
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/11/16/grasping-the-motives-for-terror/
(The writer below is a very credible source, with an excellent background. I have often found his statements to prove true.)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43442.htm
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/05/wikileaks-cables-saudi-terrorist-funding
__________________________________________________________
It's hard to fight back the rage at the lying of our news media, and the murderous behaviour of our wealthy.
This all started with the U.S. financing a rebellion in Syria in order to change the government. It said Assad is a "bad man". Maybe he his. Does this make it reasonable to destroy Syria, to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent people? I think Bush was a very bad man, indeed. Would Canadian think it reasonable to kill millions of Americans to get rid of him.
Syria was, and is, no bloody business of the U.S. The same was true of Egypt (where it destroyed an elected government to replace it with a military dictator).
The same was true of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Cuba, Vietnam... The U.S. arranged the murder of the president of Chile, and replaced him with a military dictator. (Even Wikkipedia now supports that view.) It has routinely interfered and murdered throughout Latin America.
People have a right to choose the kind of government they want. They have a right to decide not to have democracy at all. It's none of the business of U.S. what those people choose. But the U.S. has killed millions all over the world to tell people who they are allowed to have as ruler. The U.S. set up a rebellion in Syria not to bring democracy but to get rid of Assad because he wasn't obedient enought to American oil capitalists. What has prevented this war from ending is that the U.S. stands by its original purpose of getting rid of Assad. If an election were held, and Assad won, the bombs would fall again. This war is solely about giving control of Syria to American capitalists.
There are certainly bad and evil people in this world. Among them, I would include almost every American president since 1900, the current governments of Britain and France, vitually all of the world's major capitalists - including those in Russia and China.
The have created such a mess in the middle east that it threatens the survival of the whole world. And killing every member of ISIS will not change that. The hatred will simply create another and bigger ISIS (which, like the current one, will be financially supported and armed by leading capitalists.)
This cannot go on. It is evil. It is beyond evil. And it is monstrously destructive. Perhaps totally destructive. We have to become more active than we are, much more active to stop this insanity.
I'm afraid I could write on forever about this, and still not cover the evil of it.
Oh, I just found this in Time, a news source that is usually pure propaganda. But this makes sense, more sense than anything I have ever seen in Time.
http://time.com/4116371/paris-attacks-fighting-isis/
And, oh, good night.
Monday, November 16, 2015
Nov. 16: only the Irving press could....
...put out a trivial and boring newspaper today. So let's save it until the end.
I was quite shocked by CBC TV coverage of news of the Paris killings. It was almost as unprofessional as Irving press always is. One news cast ended with a sad and mournful scene of people setting candles and flowers on a Paris sidewalk in mourning. Now, it is sad. But where were all those mourners when France was torturing and murdering the people of Algeria and Indo-China? And how come we never saw that on TV news?
Where were the news stories when France, leading up to that terrible day in Paris, was bombing ISIS in Syria? In fact, how come almost no news story has mentioned that? How come we didn't see pictures of mourners lighting candles then? Is killing bad only when the other side shoots back?
In fact, France has been bombing Syria, full-time, for over a year.Where are the candles on sidewalks for all the Syrians killed by France. And how come none of the news media seem to have mentioned that bombing? France has has also been selling weapons to the rebels - and to ISIS, despite an embargo on such supplies. It happily supplies anybody who can pay. (And, by the way, where did ISIS get the cash to buy those weapons? Think Saudi Arabia which is also France's major weapons customer.) France is the world's fourth largest arms exporter. And its arms industry recently announced its best year ever. War has been good to French war industry capitalists.
The purpose of journalism is to tell us what is happening. It is not to take sides. But CBC coverage of the Paris shootings is heavily devoted to expressing sorrow for France. It is, certainly, terrible that those innocent civilians were killed. (Our side kills innocent civilians every day. Where are the candles on our sidewalks?) But I didn't see any sympathy in our news media when the U.S. invaded Iraq,killing almost a million innocent civilians in an invasion preceded by lies about the reason for it.
The world has been killing civilians as a major and deliberate target for decades.
That's what bombing was about in World War Two. Civilians were the major targets for both sides. Killing civilians began because bombs really couldn't be aimed. Anything within five miles of the target was considered a hit - not very helpful when bombing a factory. The switch to deliberately bombing civilians continued even after bombing accuracy improved. It continued because killing civilians killed workers and destroyed morale. That's why the U.S. fire-bombed Tokyo, and then nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's why it bombed Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.
Everybody does it. All the time. We could call it terrorism because terrorism is what it is. But we only call it that when the other side does it. Actually, Canada always says it never bombed civilians deliberately. That's a lie. Everbody bombed civilians in World War Two.
B4 has the charming story that Obama wants to end the civil war in Syria. This isn't reporting. This is propaganda.
There is no civil war in Syria. What we have is hired mercenaries paid for and supplied by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. This "civil war" was started by Obama. Who can even guess how many civilians it has killed? Where are the candles for them on our sidewalks?
At no point did Syria attack the U.S. Nor could it. It was the other way around. And it wasn't to bring peace to Syria. Syria had peace. The U.S. destroyed it. The purpose of the war is to let American oil barons get control of the Syrians.
CBC also had the news (which the Irving press didn't, though it was available yesterday) that Canada has commandos (special ops) entering the fighting in Iraq.
Oh? When you send troops to fight, that's called going to war. Now, every Nov. 11 of my life I have heard speeches that our soldiers in World War One died to give us the right to declare war on our own. (That was never true, by the way. We got the right to declare war on our own after WW1 because Britain didn't expect to need us any more - and it was afraid to have any commitment to Canada because it feared this could create conflict with the U.S. And Britain needed the U.S. more than it needed Canada.)
So, when did parliament meet to declare this war? So much for democracy.
CBC news also referred to Syrian "rebels" as the 'moderate' opposition. What the hell is moderate about rebelling and killing people? This is the sort of propaganda language we're accustomed to hearing in the private news media.
It also said that the soft targets (civilians) that were killed in Paris were a "jihadist's dream". Hey! That's a nice touch of hate-smearing But the world's biggest killers of soft targets have been nations of the Christian west.
To add to the insanity, Donald Tump has advanced in the polls by promising to bomb the 's--t' out of ISIS - just about guaranteeing the Christian vote. Watch for Britain to join the U.S., the Syrian rebels, France, Russia, possibly Turkey and Canada and Denmark in fighting ISIS - all of them tangled in the same space, and each or them fighting for a different reason.
That's an excellent way to start a world war. And then we'll have a chance to burn lots and lots of candles on our sidewalks - if we have any sidewalks left.
Oh, yeah, Obama has also been quoted re the Paris killings - "...an attack on the civilized world." That's so true. Us civilized nations only attack the savage world. You know - people who look different from us or whose religions are different.
I found no news service that mentioned how all of this killing started - it began, and continues, because western and Russian super-capitalists all want to control the middle east.
The site below sums up my views pretty well, though I would add some questions like - Why did we send Canadians to die in Afghanistan? And, if it was important, why did we pull them out? Why did we send aircraft to bomb Libya? In what way did that help Libya? (Actually, it's quite possible that the chaos we created in Libya might soon make it an ISIS nation.) Why is the U.S. helping Saudi Arabia to bomb and starve the people of Yemen? Why is the U.S. the only nation to have over a thousand military bases all over the world?
However - here's the site.....
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43421.htm
In other news which flew under the Irving press' radar, here's something that will make you think of who the real bastards are in this world. It's about a pharmaceutical company which makes a drug essential for the survival of babies who are struck by spasms. The drug was selling profitably at $750 for a three- week treatment. Then the company suddenly raised the charge to $17,000. That's 2.000%. We can't just let infants die, so it will have to met by medicare.
When it comes to pure evil and greed, they are few who can match the bosses of the pharmaceutical industry. Expect more of this,- and much more if the Trans-Pacific trade deal goes through.
Gee, Norbert, tell us another story about how business people should run our hospitals and schools because business people are so much more efficient.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43421.htm
_________________________________________________________
There's a term that hasn't made the news; but it's worth knowing it, and what it means. The term is false flag. It means to cause a war while making it seem someone else started it.
The Iraq war as a false flag war. George Bush and Tony Blair told the world that Saddam Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction". Now, Saddam Hussein was a murderous dictator. That's why the U.S. supported him for years, and supplied him in his war against Iran. But he was showing signs of acting with more independence. So Bush needed an excuse to kill him - a false flag.
When Japan, in the 1930s, needed an excuse to invade Manchuria, it blew up a train, and blamed it on Manchuria. It has become known as the Manchurian incident. And it worked. Japan invaded.
When the U.S. wanted a change of regime in Syria in order for American capitalists to control it, it created a 'rebel' force to set off a war in Syria. That was a false flag.
When the U.S. needed an excuse to invade Canada in 1812, its false flag was that it was protecting American shipping against the British. (Actually, the coastal states opposed the war and, anyway, it's not clear how attacking Niagara Falls did anything to protect American shipping.)
How many false flags are we seeing now? I don't know. And most of our press doesn't even ask. There are possibilities in the downing of an airliner in Ukraine, the Russian airliner in Sinai, even in the Paris attack. False flags are really so common as to be almost the rule.
_________________________________________________________
The Irving press has close to nothing. A1 has a good story about attracting refugees as immigrants. I quite agree with it. I've seen at close hand the difference that immigrants - European, African, Asian, Middle East - can do.
They made Montreal richer, more varied in cultural tastes (as in getting beyond the musical top ten in sales), in restaurant life...It was a golden age.
But that's it for Section A news.
The editorial is the usual bozo job. This one is about how good the Energy East Pipeline will be for all of us. It's just a coincidence that the major beneficiary will be the man who owns the newspaper - and the editor. I'll comment further on this at the end of this blog.
The opinion columns are all worth reading. I'll just add a few lines about Alec Bruce's topic of learning a second language.
People learn a second language because they need to. Where they feel they don't (or shouldn't) need it, they resist learning. In Quebec, the English resistance to learning French was potent. Life was sad and lonely for French teachers.
Working class French kids had much the same problem. It was possible for them to live in a unilingual, French world. So they didn't learn English. But the better-off French received intense English training in private schools. They needed it for the more international world of big business. That's why a Justin Trudeau speaks excellent English.
The exception to this was the film world. The French kids I grew up with would boo if a French movie came on at the local church/cinema. They wanted Hollywood, and with no translation.
At the height of separatism, when some separatist leaders wanted to ban English-language movies, their followers told them to back off. They wanted English movies.
In New Brunswick, Acadians who live in relatively cut off areas are, I suspect, less likely to learn English because they don't feel they need it. But most want to learn English because it's necessary in order to make a living - and there's lots of English TV.
English will resist learning French because they know they can get good jobs without it. And some will reject it because they've been brought up to think of French as undesirable.
The result is that Acadians can be much more flexible in their job choices, and much broader in their view of the world. Some English will resent that but, hey, if I'm a basketball coach, I'm going for the kid who's seven feet tall, not the one who's five feet.
Section B has nothing you don't already know.
And that takes us back to the editorial.
Yes, it says, we need more oil and way into the future. I mean, it creates jobs. And we need oil for heating - and it will be needed for a long time. So let's be sensible about this.
Okay. Let's be sensible because this is the fiftieth year since the climate change debate began.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/nov/05/scientists-warned-the-president-about-global-warming-50-years-ago-today.
In that fifty years, almost nothing has been done. Why not? Is it possible that the oil industry doesn't want anything to be done? (Yes, I know that holding up essential change for fifty years is both greedy and stupid. But greed and stupidity are not unknown among the "better sort" in our society.)
So, Mr. or Ms. editorialist, how much time is left after fifty years? Can we even guess at it? And do you ever have a clue of what you're taking about?
I was quite shocked by CBC TV coverage of news of the Paris killings. It was almost as unprofessional as Irving press always is. One news cast ended with a sad and mournful scene of people setting candles and flowers on a Paris sidewalk in mourning. Now, it is sad. But where were all those mourners when France was torturing and murdering the people of Algeria and Indo-China? And how come we never saw that on TV news?
Where were the news stories when France, leading up to that terrible day in Paris, was bombing ISIS in Syria? In fact, how come almost no news story has mentioned that? How come we didn't see pictures of mourners lighting candles then? Is killing bad only when the other side shoots back?
In fact, France has been bombing Syria, full-time, for over a year.Where are the candles on sidewalks for all the Syrians killed by France. And how come none of the news media seem to have mentioned that bombing? France has has also been selling weapons to the rebels - and to ISIS, despite an embargo on such supplies. It happily supplies anybody who can pay. (And, by the way, where did ISIS get the cash to buy those weapons? Think Saudi Arabia which is also France's major weapons customer.) France is the world's fourth largest arms exporter. And its arms industry recently announced its best year ever. War has been good to French war industry capitalists.
The purpose of journalism is to tell us what is happening. It is not to take sides. But CBC coverage of the Paris shootings is heavily devoted to expressing sorrow for France. It is, certainly, terrible that those innocent civilians were killed. (Our side kills innocent civilians every day. Where are the candles on our sidewalks?) But I didn't see any sympathy in our news media when the U.S. invaded Iraq,killing almost a million innocent civilians in an invasion preceded by lies about the reason for it.
The world has been killing civilians as a major and deliberate target for decades.
That's what bombing was about in World War Two. Civilians were the major targets for both sides. Killing civilians began because bombs really couldn't be aimed. Anything within five miles of the target was considered a hit - not very helpful when bombing a factory. The switch to deliberately bombing civilians continued even after bombing accuracy improved. It continued because killing civilians killed workers and destroyed morale. That's why the U.S. fire-bombed Tokyo, and then nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's why it bombed Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.
Everybody does it. All the time. We could call it terrorism because terrorism is what it is. But we only call it that when the other side does it. Actually, Canada always says it never bombed civilians deliberately. That's a lie. Everbody bombed civilians in World War Two.
B4 has the charming story that Obama wants to end the civil war in Syria. This isn't reporting. This is propaganda.
There is no civil war in Syria. What we have is hired mercenaries paid for and supplied by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. This "civil war" was started by Obama. Who can even guess how many civilians it has killed? Where are the candles for them on our sidewalks?
At no point did Syria attack the U.S. Nor could it. It was the other way around. And it wasn't to bring peace to Syria. Syria had peace. The U.S. destroyed it. The purpose of the war is to let American oil barons get control of the Syrians.
CBC also had the news (which the Irving press didn't, though it was available yesterday) that Canada has commandos (special ops) entering the fighting in Iraq.
Oh? When you send troops to fight, that's called going to war. Now, every Nov. 11 of my life I have heard speeches that our soldiers in World War One died to give us the right to declare war on our own. (That was never true, by the way. We got the right to declare war on our own after WW1 because Britain didn't expect to need us any more - and it was afraid to have any commitment to Canada because it feared this could create conflict with the U.S. And Britain needed the U.S. more than it needed Canada.)
So, when did parliament meet to declare this war? So much for democracy.
CBC news also referred to Syrian "rebels" as the 'moderate' opposition. What the hell is moderate about rebelling and killing people? This is the sort of propaganda language we're accustomed to hearing in the private news media.
It also said that the soft targets (civilians) that were killed in Paris were a "jihadist's dream". Hey! That's a nice touch of hate-smearing But the world's biggest killers of soft targets have been nations of the Christian west.
To add to the insanity, Donald Tump has advanced in the polls by promising to bomb the 's--t' out of ISIS - just about guaranteeing the Christian vote. Watch for Britain to join the U.S., the Syrian rebels, France, Russia, possibly Turkey and Canada and Denmark in fighting ISIS - all of them tangled in the same space, and each or them fighting for a different reason.
That's an excellent way to start a world war. And then we'll have a chance to burn lots and lots of candles on our sidewalks - if we have any sidewalks left.
Oh, yeah, Obama has also been quoted re the Paris killings - "...an attack on the civilized world." That's so true. Us civilized nations only attack the savage world. You know - people who look different from us or whose religions are different.
I found no news service that mentioned how all of this killing started - it began, and continues, because western and Russian super-capitalists all want to control the middle east.
The site below sums up my views pretty well, though I would add some questions like - Why did we send Canadians to die in Afghanistan? And, if it was important, why did we pull them out? Why did we send aircraft to bomb Libya? In what way did that help Libya? (Actually, it's quite possible that the chaos we created in Libya might soon make it an ISIS nation.) Why is the U.S. helping Saudi Arabia to bomb and starve the people of Yemen? Why is the U.S. the only nation to have over a thousand military bases all over the world?
However - here's the site.....
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43421.htm
In other news which flew under the Irving press' radar, here's something that will make you think of who the real bastards are in this world. It's about a pharmaceutical company which makes a drug essential for the survival of babies who are struck by spasms. The drug was selling profitably at $750 for a three- week treatment. Then the company suddenly raised the charge to $17,000. That's 2.000%. We can't just let infants die, so it will have to met by medicare.
When it comes to pure evil and greed, they are few who can match the bosses of the pharmaceutical industry. Expect more of this,- and much more if the Trans-Pacific trade deal goes through.
Gee, Norbert, tell us another story about how business people should run our hospitals and schools because business people are so much more efficient.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43421.htm
_________________________________________________________
There's a term that hasn't made the news; but it's worth knowing it, and what it means. The term is false flag. It means to cause a war while making it seem someone else started it.
The Iraq war as a false flag war. George Bush and Tony Blair told the world that Saddam Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction". Now, Saddam Hussein was a murderous dictator. That's why the U.S. supported him for years, and supplied him in his war against Iran. But he was showing signs of acting with more independence. So Bush needed an excuse to kill him - a false flag.
When Japan, in the 1930s, needed an excuse to invade Manchuria, it blew up a train, and blamed it on Manchuria. It has become known as the Manchurian incident. And it worked. Japan invaded.
When the U.S. wanted a change of regime in Syria in order for American capitalists to control it, it created a 'rebel' force to set off a war in Syria. That was a false flag.
When the U.S. needed an excuse to invade Canada in 1812, its false flag was that it was protecting American shipping against the British. (Actually, the coastal states opposed the war and, anyway, it's not clear how attacking Niagara Falls did anything to protect American shipping.)
How many false flags are we seeing now? I don't know. And most of our press doesn't even ask. There are possibilities in the downing of an airliner in Ukraine, the Russian airliner in Sinai, even in the Paris attack. False flags are really so common as to be almost the rule.
_________________________________________________________
The Irving press has close to nothing. A1 has a good story about attracting refugees as immigrants. I quite agree with it. I've seen at close hand the difference that immigrants - European, African, Asian, Middle East - can do.
They made Montreal richer, more varied in cultural tastes (as in getting beyond the musical top ten in sales), in restaurant life...It was a golden age.
But that's it for Section A news.
The editorial is the usual bozo job. This one is about how good the Energy East Pipeline will be for all of us. It's just a coincidence that the major beneficiary will be the man who owns the newspaper - and the editor. I'll comment further on this at the end of this blog.
The opinion columns are all worth reading. I'll just add a few lines about Alec Bruce's topic of learning a second language.
People learn a second language because they need to. Where they feel they don't (or shouldn't) need it, they resist learning. In Quebec, the English resistance to learning French was potent. Life was sad and lonely for French teachers.
Working class French kids had much the same problem. It was possible for them to live in a unilingual, French world. So they didn't learn English. But the better-off French received intense English training in private schools. They needed it for the more international world of big business. That's why a Justin Trudeau speaks excellent English.
The exception to this was the film world. The French kids I grew up with would boo if a French movie came on at the local church/cinema. They wanted Hollywood, and with no translation.
At the height of separatism, when some separatist leaders wanted to ban English-language movies, their followers told them to back off. They wanted English movies.
In New Brunswick, Acadians who live in relatively cut off areas are, I suspect, less likely to learn English because they don't feel they need it. But most want to learn English because it's necessary in order to make a living - and there's lots of English TV.
English will resist learning French because they know they can get good jobs without it. And some will reject it because they've been brought up to think of French as undesirable.
The result is that Acadians can be much more flexible in their job choices, and much broader in their view of the world. Some English will resent that but, hey, if I'm a basketball coach, I'm going for the kid who's seven feet tall, not the one who's five feet.
Section B has nothing you don't already know.
And that takes us back to the editorial.
Yes, it says, we need more oil and way into the future. I mean, it creates jobs. And we need oil for heating - and it will be needed for a long time. So let's be sensible about this.
Okay. Let's be sensible because this is the fiftieth year since the climate change debate began.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/nov/05/scientists-warned-the-president-about-global-warming-50-years-ago-today.
In that fifty years, almost nothing has been done. Why not? Is it possible that the oil industry doesn't want anything to be done? (Yes, I know that holding up essential change for fifty years is both greedy and stupid. But greed and stupidity are not unknown among the "better sort" in our society.)
So, Mr. or Ms. editorialist, how much time is left after fifty years? Can we even guess at it? And do you ever have a clue of what you're taking about?
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Nov. 15: Yes...
....the killings in Paris were terrible....
I watched Obama on TV as he extended his deepest sympathy to the people of France for what they had suffered. And I thought...
"Isn't this the man who created, financed and supplied a war that has driven millions out of Syria? Isn't this the man who is supplying bombs to be dropped by the richest people on earth on Yemen and its people who are among the poorest on earth? Isn't this the man who sends out drones every day to kill thousands, most of them innocent?" Isn't it terrorizing for those on the receiving end of all that?
The use of bombs to terrorize civilians has been standard practice at least since 1920, when Churchill used it to bomb Kurdish villages. By World War 2, the deliberate killing of civilians by bombing had become a major purpose of all air forces.
And France - isn't that the country that murdered uncounted numbers of Algerians because they had the nerve to want to be free? And that murdered hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese (French Indo-China) for the same reason?
Which of our leaders extended sympathy to those victims?
I noticed the same thing in the news media. They were full of horror at what was happening in Paris, and routinely expressed sympathy for all the innocent victims. But you know, I can't think of a single instance over the last 80 years of any sympathy expressed for the millions of innocent people killed by our side. Is it, perhaps, because we think those people, being non-white or of a different religion, don't feel terror when they're bombed or machine-gunned?
What a pack of hypocrites we are! The history of the world is a history of terrorism and mass murder of innocents. All of us humans have done it. That's how empires were built. Even tiny Belgium built its wealth on the mass murder, torture and starvation of millions in the Congo. The U.S. and Canada, going back to their colonial days, built on a system of slavery that killed millions just in transit. They died in 'mailbox' slots in the hulls of sailing ships, slots just big enough so they could like down in them, chained, for the long voyage.
For over a century, most of the killing in war has been, quite deliberately, the killing and terrorizing of civilians. It happens every day, and most of it never even gets reported. But do it to white folks on our side, well, that's extremism.
The affect this has on our attitude is to drive us into hatred and revenge. In other words, extremism created extremism which creates extremism which creates....
and so on. And, on our side, the extremism will be encouraged by those who stand to make money, piles of money, out of it.
The cry is already out there. War! War against ISIS. Kill. That'll show them.
Actually, it won't. The reason ISIS exists is because we created it. We created it by our extremism, by our killing, our looting, our destruction of societies all over the world - and especially in the middle east. Al Quaeda and other terrorist groups were created by the U.S.,originally to fight the Russians who had invaded Afghanistan. It's not a coincidence that 'extremist' groups are often seen using American weapons. It's not a coincidence that Saudi Arabia is often the pipeline for these weapons.
When you destroy a society, something arises in its place. Usually, it's somethiing pretty evil. More destruction will make things worse. The destruction of Nazi Germany did not end Naziism. It still has a large following in much of Europe. And, thoughout the western world, we are seeing essential features of it on the rise. Modern capitalism (as we mistakenly call our political and economic system) is very similar to Naziism. That's why Canadian and American capitalists were so supportive of Hitler for many years.
We killed over a million, mostly civilians, in Iraq. We have all but destroyed Syria as a nation. We killed millions in Vietnam. We're destroying Yemen - and nobody has even asked why -. These all sound pretty extreme to me.
And the one gain in all this could be that we will become allies of Russia because it has scores to settle with the Muslims of Chechen - the ones the U.S.once used to destabilize Russia.
No. For all the hysteria among the John McCains of this world, a war with ISIS will do nothing but create more enemies for us.
The reality is that in World War 2, we won the war, but lost the peace. Ever since 1945, we have almost constantly been at war. Can't help it. All those big bullies like Syria and Lebanon and Grenada and Cuba and Haiti and Guatemala have been picking on the poor, little U.S. And all the billionaires who own our news media have been very upset about that.
Oh, and depend on it - all the village idiots that we call Conservatives in Ottawa will be howling for us to keep our aircraft in Iraq. Doing that will make no notable change in events. But it will mean that we're all committed to take part if this develops into a world war. And there is a very strong possibility that it will.
So what to do?
The sensible thing would be to concentrate on saving and rebuilding as much as possible of Syria as we can. We desperately need to rebuild and stabilize the societies we have destroyed. Those also include Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine.. we need to put a lid on the ambitions of Israel and Turkey.
We need stability in the midde east, not more war. We should also recognize that Europe is not going to able to cope with the refugee crisis - and Canada and the U.S. are not going to help to any significant degree. That means we have to make the middle east stable again - so those refugees can return.
It also means we have to negotiate with ISIS.
At the same time, we have to recognize that all of this is the result of a travesty of capitalism that has been allowed to run wild. That's as true of Russia and China as it is of us. We have to bring that under control, and put power back into the hands of the people we elect.
We also have to get over the bigotry which seems to come with being a human. None of us is a member of a super race. None of us is without evil. And if there are those whose evil leads them to terrorize others, let's remember how our evil has led us to terrorize. Extremism is created by extremism.
I know that's a tall order.
But we don't have any choice. Or much time.
_______________________________________________________________
Readers have sent in some sites worth looking at. So I include them below. The first is a remarkable and touching piece of common sense.
https://instagram.com/p/-DmUOwJ0tC/
The is by an excellent scholar of current events who asks the questions no major news media have asked about the Paris attacks. What he says may sound bizarre. But the "false flag" attack is all too common in our world.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/
The next one is all too true.
http://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/assad-on-western-hypocrisy.jpg
Watch tomorrow's Irving press to see if it says that we now have to destroy the world in order to protect it.
___________________________________________________________
I watched Obama on TV as he extended his deepest sympathy to the people of France for what they had suffered. And I thought...
"Isn't this the man who created, financed and supplied a war that has driven millions out of Syria? Isn't this the man who is supplying bombs to be dropped by the richest people on earth on Yemen and its people who are among the poorest on earth? Isn't this the man who sends out drones every day to kill thousands, most of them innocent?" Isn't it terrorizing for those on the receiving end of all that?
The use of bombs to terrorize civilians has been standard practice at least since 1920, when Churchill used it to bomb Kurdish villages. By World War 2, the deliberate killing of civilians by bombing had become a major purpose of all air forces.
And France - isn't that the country that murdered uncounted numbers of Algerians because they had the nerve to want to be free? And that murdered hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese (French Indo-China) for the same reason?
Which of our leaders extended sympathy to those victims?
I noticed the same thing in the news media. They were full of horror at what was happening in Paris, and routinely expressed sympathy for all the innocent victims. But you know, I can't think of a single instance over the last 80 years of any sympathy expressed for the millions of innocent people killed by our side. Is it, perhaps, because we think those people, being non-white or of a different religion, don't feel terror when they're bombed or machine-gunned?
What a pack of hypocrites we are! The history of the world is a history of terrorism and mass murder of innocents. All of us humans have done it. That's how empires were built. Even tiny Belgium built its wealth on the mass murder, torture and starvation of millions in the Congo. The U.S. and Canada, going back to their colonial days, built on a system of slavery that killed millions just in transit. They died in 'mailbox' slots in the hulls of sailing ships, slots just big enough so they could like down in them, chained, for the long voyage.
For over a century, most of the killing in war has been, quite deliberately, the killing and terrorizing of civilians. It happens every day, and most of it never even gets reported. But do it to white folks on our side, well, that's extremism.
The affect this has on our attitude is to drive us into hatred and revenge. In other words, extremism created extremism which creates extremism which creates....
and so on. And, on our side, the extremism will be encouraged by those who stand to make money, piles of money, out of it.
The cry is already out there. War! War against ISIS. Kill. That'll show them.
Actually, it won't. The reason ISIS exists is because we created it. We created it by our extremism, by our killing, our looting, our destruction of societies all over the world - and especially in the middle east. Al Quaeda and other terrorist groups were created by the U.S.,originally to fight the Russians who had invaded Afghanistan. It's not a coincidence that 'extremist' groups are often seen using American weapons. It's not a coincidence that Saudi Arabia is often the pipeline for these weapons.
When you destroy a society, something arises in its place. Usually, it's somethiing pretty evil. More destruction will make things worse. The destruction of Nazi Germany did not end Naziism. It still has a large following in much of Europe. And, thoughout the western world, we are seeing essential features of it on the rise. Modern capitalism (as we mistakenly call our political and economic system) is very similar to Naziism. That's why Canadian and American capitalists were so supportive of Hitler for many years.
We killed over a million, mostly civilians, in Iraq. We have all but destroyed Syria as a nation. We killed millions in Vietnam. We're destroying Yemen - and nobody has even asked why -. These all sound pretty extreme to me.
And the one gain in all this could be that we will become allies of Russia because it has scores to settle with the Muslims of Chechen - the ones the U.S.once used to destabilize Russia.
No. For all the hysteria among the John McCains of this world, a war with ISIS will do nothing but create more enemies for us.
The reality is that in World War 2, we won the war, but lost the peace. Ever since 1945, we have almost constantly been at war. Can't help it. All those big bullies like Syria and Lebanon and Grenada and Cuba and Haiti and Guatemala have been picking on the poor, little U.S. And all the billionaires who own our news media have been very upset about that.
Oh, and depend on it - all the village idiots that we call Conservatives in Ottawa will be howling for us to keep our aircraft in Iraq. Doing that will make no notable change in events. But it will mean that we're all committed to take part if this develops into a world war. And there is a very strong possibility that it will.
So what to do?
The sensible thing would be to concentrate on saving and rebuilding as much as possible of Syria as we can. We desperately need to rebuild and stabilize the societies we have destroyed. Those also include Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine.. we need to put a lid on the ambitions of Israel and Turkey.
We need stability in the midde east, not more war. We should also recognize that Europe is not going to able to cope with the refugee crisis - and Canada and the U.S. are not going to help to any significant degree. That means we have to make the middle east stable again - so those refugees can return.
It also means we have to negotiate with ISIS.
At the same time, we have to recognize that all of this is the result of a travesty of capitalism that has been allowed to run wild. That's as true of Russia and China as it is of us. We have to bring that under control, and put power back into the hands of the people we elect.
We also have to get over the bigotry which seems to come with being a human. None of us is a member of a super race. None of us is without evil. And if there are those whose evil leads them to terrorize others, let's remember how our evil has led us to terrorize. Extremism is created by extremism.
I know that's a tall order.
But we don't have any choice. Or much time.
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Readers have sent in some sites worth looking at. So I include them below. The first is a remarkable and touching piece of common sense.
https://instagram.com/p/-DmUOwJ0tC/
The is by an excellent scholar of current events who asks the questions no major news media have asked about the Paris attacks. What he says may sound bizarre. But the "false flag" attack is all too common in our world.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/
The next one is all too true.
http://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/assad-on-western-hypocrisy.jpg
Watch tomorrow's Irving press to see if it says that we now have to destroy the world in order to protect it.
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