Climate Change the Military can believe in

If even the most reactionary, non-democratic force in the dying empire south of our border is starting to make plans for dealing with the instability caused by climate change, then even the most socially authoritarian RepubliCon is going to have to start believing in it much sooner than later. Of course, the smart ones already know it's happening that's why they and their friends are buying up so much land that will still be arable and contain drinking water in that dismal future, they don't want everyone believing in change's inevitability yet, at least not until it's too late and they own all the food and water resources on the planet. Which their military can then protect for them. Won't that be fun for the have nots who warned and warned and warned but the sheep were too self-satisfied to listen.

Bill Davis turned 80

Somebody say amen.

Lyin' Brian's Party

Lyin Brian Mulroney gets a party for the majority he won twice before the Canadian people shredded the PC Party to pieces in revenge for everything about him and his politics, while his arms dealer buddy and payola supplier Schrieber goes back to Germany and jail. Mulroney, who should be stuffed into prison here for his sins, was a PM who told more untruths than any PM before him, but has since been bested by Stephen Harper, a man couldn't discern truth if his life depended on it. Love him or hate him the last honest Conservative was Joe Clark, and Joe now laments that he has no party, at least not since the the Reformatories and the Lack of Common Sense Reactionaries took over the Right in the wake of Mulroney's hated government. My favourite Mulroney moment was the outrage that exploded across Canada when the President of the first Bush League tried to foist Lyin Brian on the world as head of the UN. Never was I more proud of Canadians than when we roared down that revisionist revival. Alas Alack however, poor creature Mack, the Con game goes on without men of integrity to pull the oil guzzling junkie party out of the ditch into which it's driving the nation.
Stephen Harper - too small for Canada.

Liberalism and Ethics

Thomas Axworthy makes a good case for a restoration of the liberalism that was the Gladstonian counterpart to Disraeli's conservative democracy (ie letting the servants vote because they'll always vote for what their masters want.)

Wafergate

The CBC coverage of the event is here, scroll down a few blog postings and you'll find it, if you haven't seen it, and think this story is some kind of liberal conspiracy, just look at the tape, the PM takes the host in his hand and walks away with it, he does not consume it. That's all, no conspiracy, no reason for Irving to fire the editor and publisher of the Telegraph Journal so Irving Inc. could please Harper and get the shipbuilding contract as a reward for helping Stephen with his vengeance just because that paper allegedly "broke the story", the story was captured on camera, no one broke it. Harper lied, again, he was being malicious, again. Stephen Harper, too small for Canada.

Wrong Again Stephen

Harper says Canadians don't want a fall election, and yet, in that poll last week that noted that the cons are the first choice of about 20% of Canadians, the poll also noted that they were the last choice - behind the Greens - of everyone else but 12%. Canadians don't like Harper, we don't trust him, and we seriously don't like his brand of conservatism. We want to get rid of him and his con game so badly we're happy to dump him out of the lifeboat in mid ocean. He's a creepy little man motivated largely by self-obsession and malice. Stephen Harper - too small for Canada.

Harper and Right Wing Protestantism

Nothing says contempt quite like Christian Conservativism.

Crime Wave PM

Despite Harper's blaming the opposition for his inability to fight crime the way he would like (my but Cons love police states as long as they're right wing) the fact is crime in Canada is at it's lowest rate in 30 years and has been falling for years. Hey, it's a repeat of last years scare the old voters tactic.

Some 'Star'

A Star was born said Ian MacDonald, except then Raitt turned into dying star, and O what will MacDonald say tomorrow ? Con apologists in the media watch the Pillsbury Dough-head PM deconstruct himself, tapes, tapes and more tapes eh Stephen ?

Mad Dog Baird

It would be perfect for Mad Dog Baird to be the one who torpedoed Harper for good with this little bit of throwing his thick-skulled weight around.

Minister Moore's bullshit

and then some.

more Seal Heart

It's all about the Arctic, Inuit voters and control of oil reserves. 13% of what's left on the planet.

Dion and CTV decision

CTV - Conservative Television in action - guilty as charged. No integrity, no ethics, and they cost Dion the momentum he had going into the last weekend, thus leaving us with Harper, Captain weasel, who couldn't define the nature of Canadian democracy if his life depended on it. And we got Mike Duffy as a Senator, Harper's way of thanking CTV.

Seal Heart Politics

The Governor General asked to eat - and then ate - raw seal heart at an Inuit celebration: a) because eating it - if offered - was the right pan-Canadian cultural thing to do because that would have been the essence of her protocol, b) she asked to eat it however - before it was actually offered - perhaps because she likes to eat fresh kill raw or c) because GG Jean became Stephen Harpers's tool when she prorogued parliament despite his lies about the nature of Westminster democracy and therefor asked because d) Harper - via the GG Council - told her to win the Inuit to the conservative cause because e) there will be an election sooner than later and Harper wants to win the north so that he can turn it into a corporatist enclave because f) Canada needs to unify the north against Russian claims to the Arctic and because g) Harper is the servant of the Canadian oilgarchy and it is for their future privateering benefit that he wants to secure the Arctic oil resources and because h) oil lease/tax revenues are the basis of his economic theory and the Inuit can be bought off with Tory largesse and i) because Harper hates Europeans for being a bunch of socialists (and therefor the GG eating seal meat would piss off the anti-seal hunt European Union - all the nations of which having already forced one another to give up all their own 'iffy' historical food pleasures and habits because they believe the biological future of humanity is serious in danger, so therefor, everyone else should be on the same self-sacrificing diet as they are and finally, because j) Harper denies climate change (and the human causation of same) not because he doesn't believe in it, but because as long as he denies it, Stephen's oil bosses stand a better chance of controlling the available land in our globally flooded future, and some of that higher land lies in the barely ice-covered rock outcroppings of the far north - the future temperate zone of the stricken planet.

Ridiculous Harper

Harper's new socialist-separatiste coalition is beginning to take form.
If anyone out there still thinks this PM is a man of principles, better look again, there is only one principle in Stephen's world, Stephen first, Stephen second, Stephen last, Stephen all the time. My guess is conservatism will not rear it's small-minded ugly little head in Canada again for another generation when this master hypocrite finally waddles off the national stage.

Mulroney should Not be lauded

Lyin' Brian was a big business tool who sold out Canada, a man who created a constitutional crisis in Quebec because he thought he could out think Trudeau but lacked the brains or imagination. He was an egotistical reactionary, no matter what Peter MacKay - the man whose word is worthless - thinks. Mulroney's corruption into a bagman for an arms dealer is the proof of his own pudding.

Somali Pirates and Canada Law

When a Canadian warship stops a boat used by Somali pirates but no arrests can be made because no Canadian Law was broken, surely the UN needs to become involved. We need an international code of the sea that allows national navies to intercept pirates, and turn them over to an international piracy tribunal or some equivalent.

MacKay loses Nato bid

Peter MacKay, the man whose word is worthless, has lost out in his manoeuvrings to become head of NATO, thank god. One less Tory embarrassment on the world stage: MacKay can now sink into the stink of his own choosing: like his father, he's just one more politician without integrity, whatever his feudal subjects in Nova Scotia think. Peter MacKay, the man who brought us the small-minded, mean-spirited, hard-hearted corportatist leadership of Stephen Harper, may they rot in history together.

Hudak for Ontario ?

If this is the man that uber-right wing Mike Harris wants in order to recreate his little fascist regime in Ontario then everybody who was pillaged and abused by Harris in the 1990's, everyone who was marginalized and made to feel like a second class citizen by the reactionary middle class who supported the kind of economic rapists who just brought down the world economy, should take note. Harris, the demagogue with the worst attendance record at the legislature in the history of Ontario premiers, who obsessed about law and order while ordering the murder of Dudley George, Harris fast tracked an agenda designed to create a conservative police state (it wasn't the fact that communist countries were police states that Cold War-era Conservatives opposed, it was the fact that the Warsaw Pact nations weren't corporatist police states. Pre-Hitler war alliance Mussolini was their model, him and Generalissimo Franco. George w. Bush made that clear. Harris divided the province into haves and have nots and then proceeded to kick the shit out of the have nots, leaving the province a much worse off, embittered place than it was before he took office. The key to the sociopathy that is Harrisite Conservativism was his parting shot: if he had to do over again, "I would consult less." More like Mugabe I would expect, just tell the people what to do, and then kill anyone who disagrees with you. That's where Mike Harris would have gone, if he could have.

Three years for protesting war crimes

The man who threw his shoes at George W Bush got three years for protesting against the most protected war criminal on the planet.

Harper looking for new pimp

The voice of hypocrisy speaks for Stephen.

Sorry Stephen,

but those are rose-coloured economic lenses you've got on. Unless of course you're just lying again.

Liberals going after religious voters

Contrary to this article's contentions, Catholic voters have not always voted Liberal at all. During the pre-second world war period fascism was actively preached by Catholic clergy across Canada. Mussolini's ideology of Corporatism, which was itself rooted in conservative Catholic theology, helped secure the already absolutist position of the Church in Quebec. In the rest of the Catholic congregations of the country - especialy in Italian Churches, Mussolini was a prophet of God: it was a conscious decision derived from the Lateran Agreement in Rome. Quebec was a jurisdiction of extreme right wing politics under clerical control until only after the Quiet Revolution of the early 1960's, when Liberalism deconstructed the facsist state created by the Union Nationale. The history of Liberalism in Canada - in Catholic parts of the country, was historically Rouge, an anti-clerical, Enlightenment-rooted view of individual liberty.
That view culminated in the particularly 'Canadian' funeral of Pierre Trudeau, which, while it was encased within the high pomp and circumstance of Cathedral orthodoxy, was riven through by Trudeau's own Catholic Personalism. Personalism, as a political theology, is the liberal side of Catholicism, in that it is more akin to Protestantism, with it's emphasis on an individual's existentially independent relationship with the divine. Generally speaking, Christianity is by definition personal, and only by practice, does it become conservative, ie hierarchical. The idea of 'once a Catholic, always a Catholic' is akin to those aspects of Judaism in which one is born into a community of believers, in conservative theology, the community as a people is what is in actual relationship with God. Once "relationship" has been abstracted into that belonging to a "people", rather than that of a person, almost every point of access to the divine can be controlled by those who control the community.
Liberalism's initial success with Protestant voters was rooted in Protestantism's reformed hierarchical structure: Pauline theology not only requires an individual to take responsibility for right and wrong, for making the world a better place, but it expressly posits the idea that a religious community is actually formed by individuals in relation with God, who can only then develop a spiritual relationship with one another. Protestantism has its ebbs and tides, and can become as extreme in its hierarchical control of individual believers as Catholicism, the method of control however, especially in modern times, has become increasingly more obvious. In contemporary fundamentalism, while individual responsibility remains a part of its theology, structurally, the whole basis of the personal religious experience has been twisted away from personalism towards status quo views of power,and the notion that the religious leader knows better than the individual. Thus, the community so formed, flows from the individual to the leader, and not from the individual to the divine. Thus, rather than a genuine spiritual relationship with ones' neighbours, one is left with a religious relationship with a boss.
That's why American evangelicalism is so right wing: the idea of liberty is still espoused, but Liberty actually belongs to the nation, to 'Americans' and not to individuals. The individual fundamentalist does not have to think or feel for themselves, they just have to do what they are told.
The fact that Ignatieff is trying to move Liberalism back into legitimacy as a political theology is not in itself troubling, since Canada was created as a nation designed to heal the fundamentalist religious divisions between Catholics and Protestants that had previously torn apart Europe. A path of personal spirituality is entirely in keeping with the principles of liberalism. What is questionable about Ignatieff however, is that he is essentially a CD Howe Liberal, the follower of an ideology that tried to liberalize conservative corporatism, and failed. Ignatieff has already started espousing a new orthodoxy, in which business, the state and the individual will 'deform' back into a giant pyramid scheme, his comments on the Tar sands make that clear. My guess is that Ignatieff is not after a spiritual renewal of Canadian personalism in order to create a Just Society founded on the Greatest Equal Liberty for all. My guess is that individual concepts of freedom will be reduced to an abstract 'internalism', so that Canadians will be encouraged to identify themselves with the new global heirarchy, and so do its bidding. In fact, it is becoming increasingly obvious from Iggy's management style, that he is in essence, a Fundamentalist Pastor, controlling both the medium and the message. And in that regard, he is not at all unlike Stephen Harper. You can have them both.

Anti-Climate Change "Science"

So the Czech president thinks that efforts to address climate change are really just assaults on freedom. Freedom ? What I want is freedom from an economy that has so completely enmeshed itself into global gangster-corporatism that its proponents have no compunction about lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, raping economies or pillaging the resources of vulnerable peoples. Conservatives really have to find some new ideas, because they are increasingly trapped defending the indefensible. Conserving the freedom of others to treat entire populations like indentured servants is no longer an option. Conserving the privilege of the few over the liberty of the many is no longer an option. There is no reason for Conservativism to be so reactionary. Conservative thought used to have dignity, now it's just the play thing of global thugs.

Yet another war looming

And this war, is going to hit the poor hardest, because the rich will come in and strip them bare: middle-class North America, inured to the misery of others by their own sense of entitlement, will allow it to happen. This will be the logical conclusion of gangster capitalism, the conscienceless pursuit of not just profit, but the grand theft of the planet's remaining resources. Maybe they'll let us die fighting the war for them. Just like a good pyramid scheme should.

Oh yes, with the tar sands Canada is nothing

Now here's a moronic POV from one more right wing 'economist' with his head firmly stuck in the muck. If this nation is so unimaginative, so singularly lacking in the ability to think beyond the corporatist bog, then we we will fail, but not because of an inability to let some big businesses profit off a sandy ooze pool.Can we never get beyond this duplicity and downright dumbness. If a person is what they eat, perhaps a nation is what it consumes: which is fossilized death in this case.

MacKay for Nato ?

Sure, let's give the job to a man whose word is worthless.

Give the money to municipalities

As far as I can tell Canadians live in towns, villages and cities, that's where they work, that's where they eat, sleep and shop. Provinces are abstractions. Even on islands like PEI and Newfoundland, everybody lives in a municipality. It's at the municipal level that you can act locally and think globally. So in order to solve a global economic meltdown created by the merger of gangster and corporate capitalism in America and abroad, the place to re-invest in non-corporatist society is at the local level. It's deeper representation than can be provided by federal ridings, which makes government expenditures less prone to the kind of partisan manipulation so loved by Stephen Harper. The three billion dollar slush fund he wants has only one purpose, because Harper has only one purpose, the destruction of the Liberal Party. What he wants to do with money is to make Conservative ridings healthier and to make everyone else suffer for not voting for him. This budget is such a waste of time, it was designed to do little, and to achieve nothing more than the appearance of doing something. It has no vision, no depth. Let the people we vote for at the local level have the money, they know what's needed where we live.

Mad Dog Baird wants our trust

Minister Baird, who strikes me as a thug more suited to organized crime circles than those of democracy (which may be why he lied so utterly and psychotically about the nature of Canadian democracy before Christmas) now wants us to trust him with 3 billion dollars. I'd rather trust Meyer Lanksy than Baird, because Lansky at least had a genius for money,while all Mad Dog has is a genius for deception and vitriol.

Drawn into the debate with Canadian Jewish leaders

As someone with Jewish blood in me who is not technically a Jew, and who is not a follower of Judaism, except as a Christian who thinks the heart of David is the best thing about the old testament, besides the depth of vision of prophets like Isaiah, I developed a romanticized notion of Jews from having guided canoe trips at a Jewish camp in Algonquin Park way back when and so still love a great many more Jews than I even know Muslims. However, I nonetheless find this whole issue of Israel's treatment of Palestinians both anti-Semitic, and a symptom of the hard-hearted, stiff-necked tendency of Jewish leaders to dam the rivers of justice. There should have been a Jubiliee in 1998-99, justice should have been done to the Palestinians, justice still needs to be done. The idea that conservative Jews can simply ignore the demands of Jubilee is highly offensive to me and to scriptural prophecy. No amount of propaganda can change that fact. And that doesn't make me an Islamist, it makes me just one more voice crying out in the wilderness for Jewish leaders to let justice flow like a river. As for Warren Kinsella, his position is always in opposition to conservative propagandists: the idea that he is somehow promoting anti-Jewish sentiment by railing against reactionary elements in Canadian Judaism is absurd. The idea that he may be a closet Islamist is equally absurd, he's on the same side of the denial of Israelis first, Palestinians last as much of the Jewish leadership is, left or right. By the Rivers of Babylon I sit down and weep when I remember Zion.

Harper to join Socialist Plot

Now that Stephen has someone to follow, he's ready to join what he used to refer to as the socialist plot of environmentalism, who needs ethics.

The Ostrich Effect

According to Niall Ferguson, an alleged financial guru from Harvard, there is the potential for a great darkness to cover the earth because most policy heads are in the sand, doing everything they can to pretend that everything is alright, when things so clearly aren't. He also believes strongly that "The lesson of the subprime crisis is that you shouldn't give mortgages to people who can't afford them. Duh …"
As someone who has spent most of my life paying other people's mortgages through rent, I take issue with the notion that the expansion of home ownership to those who allegedly can't afford to pay for their homes is the rootball of this crisis. If someone goes from being a renter, to being a mortgage payer, where is the imbalance of ability to pay ? We are paying the mortgages of the better off, month by month, year by year, increasing the value of the asset to the owner by paying off the owner's mortgage, and when we are done paying off the mortgage, the owner has profit and we have nothing. If there wasn't a need for a massive downpayment, and thus a need for loans in the first place, there would have been no subprime crisis. In a market economy, the owner wins and the renter loses because someone has to lose money for someone else to make it, an imbalance that is further degenerated in a corporate market economy, because the corporation is not only not required to act ethically, but they are expressly designed to profit from their lack of ethics. Corporate economics take an already flawed market system, and intensifies the flaws.
Granted, many new home owners get caught up in corporate media spun delusions about keeping up with consumptive ownership of stuff and more stuff to stuff into their homes, but the simple creating of owners out of renters is not the problem. Duh.
Perhaps a strike by hundreds of thousands or even millions of renters would make it abundantly clear whose money is being used for what profit purposes.

Beyond the Wealth of Nations and Back Again

Beyond Adam Smith came the creation of business charters governing the relation of capital to industry, in the late 19th century, governments created corporate crown charters and thus created corporate capitalism. It was designed from the beginning to be an economy run by legal entities that intentionally lacked 'a conscience to bind them' to statements such as citizens make in court affadavits. Capitalists, having divorced themselves from conscience through charter jurisprudence, were then obligated by government to make a profit above all other considerations. The creation of corporate capitalism led to development of the manageriat: management acted on behalf of shareholders following the directions of the board. The manageriat is not required to act out of conscience, only in pursuit of 'legal' profit. Technically corporate capitalism is not imperialist because an empire requires an actual emperor, or empress, and the manageriat is more Dilbert than Queen Victora. Corporate capitalism was not created to develop the wealth of empires or the wealth the nations, merely the wealth of shareholders, most of who nowadays don't even own voting shares. Corporate citizenship belongs to those who hold voting stock, they are the voters who elect those who govern our markets. Economy is never economy alone because markets are not all there is, therefor corporatism is not all there is in the real politik of power. Here in Canada, ever since the creation of the Charter of Rights snd Freedoms, The people who govern the political economy are us. We constitutionally wear the crown in common these days. We have the right and the freedom to remove corporate capitalism and its conscienceless pursuit of profit). To move beyond the post-Adam Smith globalizing corporate economy we Charter challenge the right of a conscienceless entity to be in court with a citizen, we challenge the existence of their charters, we prove in court that they have no right to be in court with us, and that they have no place in an ethical society.
Corporatism is the rationale for pillaging the wealth of nations by those who own charters which allow them to make money without necessity of conscience: it's Post Adam Smith capitalism.
We must come back from beyond the Wealth of Nations, we must uncharter global corporate capitalism, we must free enterprise from the consequence of the damages caused by businesses that act without conscience, domestically and internationally. We must restore ethics to business: the charter of citizenry must be more important than the charters of shareholders.The pursuit of commonwealth is more important than the wealth of corporatists. Doing so would lead to the the death of free enterprise., but its birth: free enterprise is not corporatist, it's rooted in ingenuity and personal responsibility. To come back from Beyond the Wealth of Nations would always to free enterprise for the first time.

McGuinty's Space

Normally I have a queasy easiness about Dalton, he doesn't impress me, but he doesn't depress me either, politically speaking, he's something of a Larry Grossman PC to me.
Fair enough, reasonably self-possessed, and occasionally quite effective, willing to surround himself with intelligent ministers who he then let's do what they have discussed doing with the public and cabinet and legislature, causing considerably less harm than did Mike Harris's Cromwellian cohort, Dalton is no better a Premier than Rae but then I like Rae. As for McGuinty's request that journalists stay out of what is essentially his intimate space, I think reporters should no more be stuffing a mic or a camera in the eyes of a store clerk who makes the news than they should be getting in the face of a Premier. "Scrum" is a metaphor, not an excuse for violating anything more than the distanced edge of personal space. Five feet seems sensible to me.

Flaherty sings from anti-populist hymn book

Alberta Reformatories and Ontario Lack of Common Sense Reactionaries refute their own populist origins and sing like Ernest Manning from the Big Business Liturgy I say buy and sell bio-regionally, save yourself, your neighbours and the environment, but think globally: cooperate with others to create the most stable and most dynamic international commonwealth possible.

Bob Rae's Last Laugh

How sweet it must feel.

Conservative Vision

As Tory bloggers and writers are themselves saying this budget does not fortell a viable conservative vision, and that's because puppets like Harper are incapable of articulating the only viable conservative vision there is: conservation: a green, sustainable, non-corporate, community-celebrating economy for non-statist anarchists.

Harpermania

Stephen will be Stephen, there are stones inside his snowballs, I see him and I see George W. Bush, I their strings, I see their puppeteers, I see the same dozy grins, hear the same self-delusions, hear the same public deceptions. From Lack of Common Sense Flaherty I see a man giddy with hysteria after projecting 85 billion dollar deficits and tax cuts to ensure there won't be money to pay down the debt without misery, I see them together in the glib banalities of a thumbs up for the upcoming feeding frenzy that always follows Bush League economics, I see good deals for wise stock shoppers. I see the poor out in the cold while the middle class fix their cottages. I see artists bought off, their silence paid for, I listen to journalists and hear spin. I see the Beast slouching towards Bethlehem.

Ignatieff: right wing liberalism, again.

Since Ignatieff believes the Alberta tar sands are the trump card up Canada's sleeve, it is quite evident that he is willing to undo everything Green that Dion attempted to achieve. The CD Howe side of the party has taken over: we're back to Paul Martin liberalism. There is no Just Society in the cards and certainly no green society. He is also so intent on selling out the Liberal Party to buy the favours of the oiligarchy that Canada will have no role to play in the green future that isn't dictated by corporatist ideology. And now the middle class has a second do nothing option. Political opportunism is depressing.

Our non leaders in our non-democracy

Nothing makes Stephen Harper's lack of leadership more evident than real leadership. Obama makes our Tar Sands eco-economist,anti-liberal, anti-labour, anti-civil service, anti-arts PM look like the last of the Bush League cheerleaders he is, and the more Obama acts, the more Harper's malice will become evident. Harper was in Bush's league, a narrow-minded hard-hearted demagogue, he is utterly out of Obama's league. Harper has betrayed every aspect of the reformist democrat he inherited from the old Social Credit, for the same reasons that Social Credit was betrayed way back in 1947, the extreme right wing learned how to turn Mussolini's corporatism into modern international neo-corporatism.
However much good Obama may or may not do in various spheres, there is no democracy in a corporate state, there is only the illusion of it, the pretense, made evident by the Dilbert manageriat that serves corporate power, the bumbling middle men have no real power, but are shackled instead by the banality of evil.
Obama's revolution may be a social revolution but politically it is going to fail because liberalism can only offer a kinder gentler version of Mussolini's state, it lacks the moral courage, and the vision, to dismantle the corporate economy and to free enterprise from the shackles of legal entities that have no conscience to bind their actions. Gangster capitalism and globalism capitalism are the same thing now. Obama will not change that, liberalism, if it returned to his political philosophical roots remains the only defense of individual freedom we have but corporations have more rights than citizens, because they have the right to profit without conscience: conservatives have abandoned the larger community good for the corporate good, because the manageriate dutifully votes corporate, they are a class devoted to their own self-satisfaction and security, they will do nothing for the common good because their work place teaches them there is only personal good, narrowly defined as keeping your job and your benefits, that is the biggest problem with corporate unions, they have the same Dilbert mentality. That is not freedom, but license. Our only hope is that biologically intelligent economic environmentalism will natural realign our society. The planet is a giant incubator for mutually beneficial lifeforms. That, and grace given and received, are our only hopes. Obama's leadership may take us part of the way, Harper's will take us nowhere near those goals.

Pro-Semitism

Only a sophist can rationalize the murders of nearly a thousand innocent Palestinians and blame Hamas while absolving Israel. In Canada, it's called partisan politics; there are more Jews than Muslims here, so it's alright to kill Muslims and not alright to blame Israel because there are more votes to be gained, that's why both Libs and Cons are falling over themselves to support Israel. Israel is NOT a liberal democracy, it is a reactionary democracy. Both Jews and Arabs are Semites, so it is NOT anti-Semitic to oppose the murder of Palestinians by Jews, it's pro-Semitism. I am a pro-Semite. I am not opposed to the existence of Israel. And yet I KNOW that Israel has committed 60 years of atrocities against Palestinians. This MUST STOP. This is NOT an eye for eye. This is a hundred eyes for one eye.

Military Police Make Arrest in Afghanistan

It is clear from this and from the comments that follow it in the online article that some people believe that the Taliban "hates our freedom" and other people believe that the majority of Arabs hate the West because of the licence we take with their economies and their politics and thus with their lives and the lives of their generations. I'm one of the latter believers, so I happen to agree in principle when the Military Police act against a soldier: of course, the MP's may have been ordered to find and make an example of a soldier as part of our new Afghan PR campaign, so that the arrested man may himself be no more or less than yet another casualty of war lost to a split-second response to dangers/paranoia while embattled in the ethical shades that haunt the killing of anyone on behalf of a nation.

Politiking

Stephen Geoffrey Harper-style.

Cap and Trade Fantasies

One of the foremost global warming scientists in the world is warning Obama that cap and trade won't help solve the problems he thinks it will. As for Canada's government and people, we're so deep in denial about the consequences of our lifestyle that we pretend to care about the environment and yet continue to support a prime minister who takes his orders from Big Oil. According to Gwynne Dyers new book, while people like Bush and the Harpercons 'fiddle' every powerhouse military in the world is planning its strategies for the future around the crisis that is going to inevitably destroy our delusions and the lives of our children and grand children.

The real problem with the economy

Canada's CEO's have allegedly already earned more this year than me or most people I know will earn all year. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class sells out the poor in the hopes of becoming rich. Corporate capitalism is a disease.