Of course, when George says "They hate "our" freedom", he may actually be telling what amounts to the truth, in the sneaky way the Madison Avenue Neocons have of twisting words, expecting people to believe one meaning while actually, fingers crossed behind their backs, they actually mean something quite different (their overall level of "human development", as observable, would certainly not preclude this type of behaviour - and they'd probably start giggling as soon as the curtain closed behind them at just how clever they were...) . In this case, for instance, although "our" as spoken would seem to imply all of the citizens of the US, if not "western civilisation" - but the crossed-finger meaning of "our" is more in the nature of "we the elite", who actually make the decisions that determine the policy and actions of the US government, and benefit therefrom - and whom anybody in the so-called developing world, and most of the rest of us, for that matter, do actually have good and sufficient reason to sure as hell dislike a whole lot, even if hatred is something we try to avoid. For sure as the sun is gonna rise tomorrow, I, or you (I don't think many elite read this site) do NOT most assuredly have any kind of freedom at all to go dropping bombs on other countries, or causing them great financial distress through the World Bank, IMF and so on - and it would be, well, not dissembling, but outright simple-mindedness to suggest that because I vote in a Canadian election once every 4-5 years that I am therefore in some way influencing the policy decisions of "my" (haha) government in any way. Numerous letters to MPs, higher-ups, and newspapers (mostly unacknowledged) would be mute witness to that. But - George and his buds (I suppose it would be a bit more accurate to say George's masters, whoever they might actually be) now, they do have "the freedom" to go invading these other places, and dropping bombs on them, and financially crippling them, and so on - and as we have seen so often over the last lot of years, are not particularly inhibited about using it. And my Canadian PM seems to abrogate the "right" pretty much to himself to join such escapades or not at his personal whim - for some reason he kept out of the Iraq adventure, but he was right there with Clinton et al. in the previous activity to bomb Yugoslavia back to the stone age, and kill a lot of people, on "reasons" that were as much lies as the ones the current Bush put forward for Iraq. So he has a lot of freedom about deciding things like that - I don't, obviously. Nor do most of the rest of you, if you think about it. Probably for good reason (from their point of view) - it was and is pretty clear, at least from Canadian polls, there there would be considerably less Canadian bombing of other countries if the people actually had any say about it all.

You know - if someone had the freedom to bomb the fuck out of my house, and family, and country, just so they could steal things from me, and otherwise force me to act the way they wanted me to act (sort of like the schoolyard bully beating on people, without even the hope of a teacher stepping in) and used that freedom a lot, and on my neighbours and so on as well - yea, I can see the chance of hate developing. If I felt completely powerless to do anything about it, and on top of that the "press" of the "free world" - of the people whose government was getting ready to do all the bombing - was spreading all kinds of vicious lies about me and my family, accusing me of horrible things that there is just no fucking way I would do - and no chance to reply, and my choices being basically submit to the bully or get bombed - yeh, hate would definitely be in the bag of responses. And I'm a pretty laid back sort, all in all, believe it or not - but imagine using this kind of military power to go around beating on people in the mid-east to whom the idea of manly face and pride are very important, and rubbing their faces both figuratively and literally in the mud - well, yeah, you can see that hate might well get involved in the equation.

Now, that hate would primarily be for the people doing the bombing and stealing and face-rubbing - but then, you know, I can see it spreading - if, for instance, just to get to specifics, I could see George and his buds at the Pentagon (not to mention that little British poodle tagging along) and so on ordering the bombs dropped and stuff, the hate would get focused in that area - but if I looked around a bit, and saw (what seemed like) all the people in George's country cheering as the bombs fell and my children burned and died and suffered around me and he took my beautiful, old capital city and bombed the fuck out of all that too, and then his soldiers came and rubbed my face in the dirt in front of my family - well, I might just start to feel a bit of antipathy towards all those people doing the cheering as well. If I saw my home and my country being looted and forced into slavery and poverty by George and his soldiers - but all the people in George's country buying the shirts and shoes and stuff my family was making as slaves, and living a pretty good life all of them while MY family and neighbours were working as slaves and/or living in serious poverty to support their grand lifestyles - well, yea, I can see some antipathy developing.

And then - well, I don't know that I'd go so far as to want to actually kill any of those people myself, not actually believing that two wrongs make a right, or that killing or mutilating children at any time is something good to do - but hell, if somebody else planted a bomb somewhere that wound up killing a lot of those people who maybe didn't actually bomb and steal from me and mine themselves, but supported and cheered for the people who did - well, I don't know that I would be able to raise too many tears for them. George and his buds, after all, keep themselves pretty well protected - and hell, they don't seem to feel any particular concern for killing civilians in my country - why, really, should I be all that concerned about killing civilians in his? It's not like they're protesting or anything when George drops his bombs - cheering, really.

You know.

Sad, but true.

I wanted to be human, when I was born and growing up, and really tried, and still do - but I guess when you live in a barbaric world, you learn to be at least a bit barbaric yourself.

We really ought to be able to do better.

(Hey CSIS - back the fuck off (no point in talking to the warmongers and fascists in America) if you're getting all hot about coming after me and charging me with terrorism - this is NOT a call to bomb or kill anyone - I understand you may be too fucking stupid, not to put too fine a point on it, to understand that (smart people don't go after your kinds of jobs, guys - it is mainly hoods and goons who provide strongarm stuff for the fascist masters....) - it is merely trying to explain to a few other people who just might be starting to open their eyes that "those people" in "those other countries" may indeed dislike us here in the west, some of them may even go so far as to hate us, and that, coupled with a feeling of extreme helplessness in the face of the strongest bully the world has ever seen, may provoke aggression here - but they have good fucking reason!!!!!! - and if you, or we, want to feel a bit safer in our beds or in our tall office buildings - the way to do it is to quit following those fucking maniacs south of us around the world bombing and looting!!!! right - have another conversation with the fucking wall why dontcha?!?!?!)

And that kind of leads very naturally into something else (this is not a particularly organised ramble - yea, like the last ones were!!) - last time, in the education letter, I talked about how the high cost of education in Canada was not some natural market phenomenon or act of god or due to forces beyond the government's or anyone's control (any or all of which they sort of encourage people to believe) - but it is, in fact, and very simply, government policy - I know it is not direct government policy, but it is an inevitable offshoot of deliberate and direct government policy - kind of like blowing Ali's arms off might not be found in the policy books of the US government, but they fucking well KNEW that this kind of thing was going to happen to a lot of innocent kids and other people, and deemed it acceptable in the pursuit of their other goals (which, I do hope anyone at least reading this page understands, have and had absolutely fucking nothing to do with "freeing" or "bringing democracy to" the people of that poor country). Likewise education costs - I expect you would look long and hard without ever finding any policy that says "We will promote the raising of tuition fees at Canadian universities to an extent that only the rich will be able to afford to go because who really gives a fuck about the poor hahaha..." - no, they aren't that stupid (all of them, at any rate) - but nonetheless when they seriously cut taxes for the wealthier people and corporations, the fallout is pretty predictable and inevitable; when they borrow a lot of money from commercial lenders, after passing over the power to create money to those lenders, rather than creating the money debt-free as any responsible government would do - well, again, the results are entirely predictable and inevitable. You, as a citizen, know what happens when you go out and borrow a lot of money, especially to the point where simply paying the interest on that money eats up a significant (20-30% and more at times) of all your income - lots of other stuff has to be cut back. Now - what if it was legal for you to print a certain amount of money each year, but instead of printing that money you decided to go to a bank and borrow at high interest rates instead - well, obviously, anyone who knew what you were doing would call you fucking crazy (at least if they didn't know about the deal you had with the friends you were borrowing that money from) - yet that is what our government did for many years, to create this huge national debt.

But we know all that already, and it's not where I was getting to. Man I get sidetracked easy. But it is a big and complex thing, this society, and all things intertwine - the Gordian Knot, the tangled web of deceptions - but, on the other hand, if you follow the money, as some bright people figured out, it tends to point you in the right direction - this is certainly one of those times - nuff said, Watson.

The thing is - it's not only the fallout on education that is government policy, verbalised or not - it is pretty much everything else that is going on not only in our society, but in the world.

Most of the shit that is happening around the world today is the direct result of government policy - it could be a huge amount better for most of us, and most of the people who are suffering, but the powers-that-be in the world prefer things the way they are, and do not plan any serious changes in the near future, even though mitigating 99% of the serious suffering in the world is readily within their power. And mitigating a lot of it, certainly in our own country, is readily within the powers of the Canadian government - if they wanted, which they rather obviously do not.

(ALWAYS!!!??? GO WAY!!! - well, no, we western governments haven't always had this kind of power around the world - the power has grown with our presence, which has only become worldwide the last few hundred years - 400 years ago, for example, the American presence was, obviously nil in Africa or Asia- the Spaniards, however, were having a considerable detrimental effect on what we now call South and Latin America - today, I think quite obviously, the multi-national corporate government, mostly based in the US although some in Europe or elsewhere, has a world-wide influence, almost all of which is negative, regardless of their propaganda which tries to paint a rosier picture (naturally enough - nobody is going to go around telling the truth about what they are doing, when it is so based on greed and selfishness and exploitation!)

Anyway - that's a pretty big statement - really, in terms of eye-opening shit, it's right up there with finding out there is no Santa Claus (the guy lying to Virginia notwithstanding), or maybe the first time you actually got naked and had sex with someone, or (if you wanna go way overboard) the realisation you had one day when you had to say - Hey! - there ain't no god!!! no big sky being up there who created all this amazing planet, and runs some fancy resort called Heaven or whatever the other guys call it that will make me happy forever and ever when I die (or that big brute called Satan and an eternity of flames!! or whatever for those of us the big sky guy don't like for some reason) - all that stuff. A big eye opener. The biggest. Like being blind and someday opening your eyes. Like having been deaf and suddenly hearing. All that together and some more. (and I don't even want to start now about what it means for our planet and societies that so many people bow down and worship and obey the humans who claim to be the earthian envoys of this sky being in one of its supposed forms - that is just too much for today, although obviously very tied into this shit, and very important - but just, for now, put em in the same boat as the US in general - it works, since most Americans are ok people, it's only the leaders who are totally psychotically fucked - and just carry that analogy over to the others (man they're gonna start shooting for sure now! - but think of the hundreds of millions of people who were killed in wars in the name of one of these gods, wars and inquisitions and suchlike either directly for or with the support of the leaders of the religion here on earth - don't back off and make excuses - just acknowledge it, and think of it - and ask yourself if you care to try to rationalize things..... - if there is a god like they say, either s/he is one evil son of a bitch (no lightning bolt wow!) or s/he is going to be very, very pissed off - not at me!! - but at the people who have been abusing his name (no current major religion wants to call their god female - which says a lot too...) so much (I expect, if there were such a god, the people currently running the US government would be right at the very, very top of His/Her hit list - they are about as evil as humans can get, I think....)

Back sort of to where we were - the way things are in the world today - not all the little details, but the big picture - is, beyond the shadow of any doubt, the direct result of government policy, as developed over the last several hundred years, at least. It is, in other words, an acceptable way for things to be for our major governments - and if they really wanted things to be better for most people in the world, why - we could do it. Not overnight or anything - we (they, that is to say) spent a lot of time making things as bad as they are, and consolidating the current power regime, and it would take a few years to turn around - but the improvements would start to be felt almost immediately, if we actually tried to improve things. The main thing we could (and have to, actually) do is just to STOP MAKING THINGS SO FUCKING BAD!!!!! - it is intentional - the elite, the ruling class, are exploiting most of the people in the world, many ways, and by keeping most people in misery making for themselves a life of endless luxury - have you ever had the experience of rescuing a little puppy or kitten or something from an animal shelter, skinny and weak and diseased and obviously having been badly abused and looking like hell, but something you just can't resist in those big eyes? - take it home, feed it, clean it, give it some love - and, well, you know, within days it's looking and acting better, and a few weeks down the road - big healthy happy loving dog - and what is the main thing you have done for it? No magic drugs, or anything (most of the time) - just stop the abuse, give it a little food and love which should be normal for any living creature - and voila! Health and happiness. Yes, this is simplistic in the extreme, and the natural world tosses many tragedies our way - but the great majority of the suffering, of people and animals and the oceans and the environment and everything else - is directly, intentionally caused by that small group of elite who are running the world - and we can get everything to a pretty nice place for most of us if we can just get rid of them. A lot easier said than done, obviously - but we have no chance at all, if we do not take the first step of acknowledging the problem.

Our planet, our society, could be like that puppy or kitten. Problem is, the abuse ain't stopping - our personal puppy ain't made it out of the abusive situation even to the shelter yet, although some of the more alert people in the hood are starting to wonder what's happening. And the puppy - or the planet - ain't gonna start getting better until we take the first necessary step - stop beating on it and everyone in it!!

Really - think about it a bit - what are the problems that are forcing a great number of the world's people to live in misery, so that millions of children, for instance, are dying each year from starvation and preventable disease? And millions more die from violence of one sort and another? As with the education stuff - are these some decrees from god, that their lives will be like this? Some other law of nature, some inevitable result of the natural workings of human society? No fucking way - government policy - world bank policy, IMF policy - Canadian government policy!!! - famine in sub-Saharan Africa?!?!? - what you don't read in the papers much is that most of these countries produce quite a lot of food - but they have to export it all to get foreign currency exchange to pay the interest on their fucking IMF debts - which they (the IFIs (International Financial Institutions) are NOT going to forgive ever - until WE wake up and MAKE them (they are, after all, all staffed and run by consensus of the various governments of the world, Canada included - we support their policies!!) - likewise most other heavily indebted poor countries in the world - we could almost overnight give them a huge boost of HOPE simply by cancelling those debts, and saying that - HEY!!! This year you won't have to hand over 20-30-40% or MORE of your entire national fucking income to wealthy "investors" in the west!! (I wonder what that would do to the hate factor we talked about earlier - think it might reduce it a bit?!?!?!)

But what about all them horrible bad fucking dictator types all over the world - it's THEIR fault things are so miserable, not ours!!! - them fucking commie scum like Castro and Gadhaffi and all them fucking dictators that just fucking HATE democracy, like we really good people in the west stand for - democracy and freedom and all that good stuff, you know?!?!? And WE are really trying to make the whole world a really great place for everyone with wonderful things like free trade and consumerism and globalisation and deregulation and GREAT stuff like that, but it's all THEM horrible socialist people who just want the government to control EVERYthing that are making it so bad!!! - GEEZ You've gone too far this time!!! --- well, maybe a bit, and maybe not -believe it or not, most of these men were or are nowhere near as bad as American propaganda makes them out to be - the American MIC hates them for a reason - they are, among other things, some of the few leaders in the world who don't pay sufficient homage to American capitalism, and that really pisses them (the Americans) off - Castro's Cuba, for instance, is a FAR more democratic society than existed under the American puppet Batista whom he replaced - a far more democratic society, for that matter, than America itself has been for some time. And I don't think, for instance, that a single one of these so-called third-world dictatorship countries has an arms industry - and without lots and lots of guns and bullets and tanks and planes and all that shit - their individual power would be very limited - so where are they getting all these armaments?!?!?! - and why do we NEVER read about that in the papers when we read about the bad things that happen there? - a question very much worth thinking about. If the US really wanted to slow down the killing in the third world, for instance, it could singlehandedly halt a huge amount of it - simply by stopping selling (or giving!!!) so much armaments to these people - a perfect case is, for instance, Indonesia, when it invaded East Timor 20-odd years ago and slaughtered half the population - it was done with the full knowledge and permission of the American government - who provided most of the armaments as well. No bombs and bullets - no invasion, no massacre.

Odd that we never read about that kind of truth in the media. The Canadian government has a sizable arms trade as well - nowhere as big as the Americans or Brits (or French, for that matter) - but big. Try asking your MP a question about the Canadian arms trade next time you get a chance - or write a letter to the paper about it (and then copy us here at RM - we'll print it, your local paper won't - guaranteed).

But again - well, let's go with the most obvious, recent example - Iraq, where the US singlehandedly accomplished more death and destruction in a few weeks than Saddam managed in 20 years - and they did it by accusing him of being dangerous!!!! - what in the name of fuck are people in that country (who supported Bush) using for brains? - mush mush mush. What if the United Nations - making the US and all its war talk and guns and bombs and juvenile people in power completely irrelevant - said (a few years ago) - instead of forcing these people into ever greater suffering by these sanctions which are killing thousands of people a month - hey! we see there are a lot of people suffering and dying in that country - and we feel the solution would be to - GIVE THEM FOOD AND MEDICINE!!! - LOTS AND LOTS OF IT - FREE!!! - and just go to the nearest border, and start piling it up. Now, you can postulate any number of bad scenarios, as no doubt the Madison Avenue boys in the US MIC would do if ever forced to contemplate a scenario so directly opposed to their goals and tactics - but fuck them and their Dystopia - what do YOU think would happen? Saddam would take it all and hide it somewhere?!?!? - sure bud - but if he did - give them more!! and more!! - I guarantee, the people would get it sooner or later - and sooner would be my guess (just do a thought experiment - imagine if that same UN started piling food on the Canadian border, for the poor and homeless people here in Canada!!! - do you think the government would start to take it all and prevent the poor from getting it?!?!? They might try, for various reasons - but what if YOUR kids were starving, or needed that medicine, and somebody just kept putting more and more of it on the border, where you could get to it - well - I leave it up to you. Just imagine what the reaction, what the result, would be, if some of these great wealthy countries started spreading food and peace around instead of guns and bombs and killing. Two steps later - IF (very far out hypothesis, but to answer the American warmongers - the only people in the world, apparently, who have had any fear of Iraq the last few years - and a great fear it was) - imagine, then, IF Saddam said - Hey!! Now we're all healthy and stuff from all that food and medicine they gave us for free - let's show how grateful we are to everybody in the world by - GOING TO WAR WITH SOMEONE!!! - well, really - do you think the Iraqi mothers and daughters and academics and normal sort of people would go along?????? - think about it, be honest - and if the word "yes" even crept into a corner of your mind - ask yourself WHY you have such a stupid idea about those people? What kind of idiotic propaganda are you reading, and from where, that would lead you to believe that kind of horseshit about other people on this planet - your own kind, really - and don't panic at THAT fucking thought either - it's true.

And why, then, do you suppose they (we - the US, UN, Canada, etc) aren't doing that, and giving all that food and medicine away?!?!?!

Money??!?!?! well - we're too poor to do that!!! they say - we have this huge national debt (scam), through which the government still collects scads of money from the taxpayers, but hands over huge chunks of it to the banks. Just fucking imagine if the government OF THE FUCKING PEOPLE!!!! told the banks to go fuck themselves, politely or something, and got rid of all that debt, and had all that money left over to do GOOD stuff with (I mean, that is to say, what is the last good thing you can recall hearing about the rich investors who get all that "interest" from the government each year doing for people or the world in general?!?!? - yea, I thought so) - what if we put that money into health care and education for Canadians, and then took some of what was left over (remember - OUR government has handed over well over a TRILLION dollars to these "investors" over the last 20-odd years - that money would have gone a LONG fucking way here and elsewhere to alleviate problems - do you think all this violence would be happening in Toronto verily as we speak if there were not so many poor people, and if the Harrisites weren't making things even worse for them (that fucking Runciman is right out of US Herr Ashcroft's mold - STOMP THE POOR!!! - or out of turn of the (last) century Mississippi state prison philosophy - "Let the prisoners suffer! Who gives a fuck!!!??? - Who needs trials?!?!? - They're accused, so they must be guilty - let em suffer!!" geezus fucking christ.) - but imagine, if the Ontario PCs had been giving the welfare people MORE money!! and making education programs MORE available instead of cutting everything off, and saying that poor people were a blight and ought to be treated as badly as possible - really - would those poor people, if they had a decent place to live and food to eat and education available and a decent sort of job to move into - well, they wouldn't be running around shooting at each other and everyone else.

No, it wouldn't be perfect, there are always a few fuckups - but we wouldn't be creating more of them every day, and we wouldn't be giving a whole lot of people reason to sympathize with them - both here and abroad.

But as I started off saying, it is policy, that the so-called third world live in poverty and debt, and a significant number of Canadians - that is the kind of society these people (the "elite", as I and others refer to them - the decision makers, the people with the money behind the scenes, plus leading politicians, businesspeople, CEOs, that sort) want, really - and have created.

To be, as they say, continued.....