What a week. We live in truly crazy times - through the looking glass into wonderland we have passed. Long ago, I suppose. And most people don't seem to know or care.

Listen to Bush and Powell asking the UN to come and bail them out in Iraq - not a fucking mention of writing them off a few months ago as "irrelevant", or "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" or the "old" Europe or how their takeover of Iraq's oilfields has proved considerably more difficult than just throwing a few more billion dollars worth of bombs and bullets around, and killing a few more thousand people - just an arrogant pretension that they are making some sort of big gesture to include others - sickening. And the media lap up their vomit and dress it up and pass it on to the citizens of our countries, who apparently eat it all with relish, as they have all the lies of the neocons for the last 30 years. I guess the big caterpillar with the mushrooms won after all. In the story Alice made it back from rabbit hole land. In 2003 we languish there still - George at least makes a good Red Queen - The law is what I make it!! Off with their heads!! It gets depressing sometimes. And listening to the additional pious crap the last couple of days about 911, and our great loss, and them damned terrorists, to watch people like Bush and Rumsfield, pretending to grieve over that day, when they were among the very ones who engineered it, and to have the press and apparently most people believe them - one understands madness. One does.

Likewise in the so-called Ontario "election" - hardly a mention of the destruction that the neocons have wrought the last few years - with out even a fucking blink, most of the media (there is the odd exception, primarily in the Star, of course) "reports" the stories of Eves and the PCs and their "attack" adds against the Libs - after spending the last decade decimating the school system in Ontario, Eves as brazen as they fucking come standing up there saying "McGuinty will destroy our education system" or words to that effect - I don't have any great hopes for what the Libs would do in Ontario, I doubt it would be much different from what the PCs have been doing - but for this man, whose party has done such amazing damage to EVERYTHING in Ontario over the last decade, to be allowed to stand up and say shit like that with NO fucking challenges from the media about what THEY have done to education the last ten years is just beyond belief. To one who understands the rabbit hole but does not live there, anyway. (A story in the Star a day or two ago about the education system under the PCs - Cramped classes called 'insanity' - Teachers facing up to 50 students Provincial funding formula blamed - class sizes of 30+ students common, and over 40 in many cases - and Eves running around trying to tell people that the Libs will make it worse - scarily enough, of course, that may well be the truth - but the PCs obviously plan to make it worse as well, with their private school tax credits taking ever more money away from the public system - another one Wealthier students enter college, university: Survey about how more and more students of non-wealthy families are not willing or able to undertake the huge debts necessary to go to university - again PC policy the last ten years - and again, noone that I have seen yet is asking Eves about how these huge cutbacks in all public programs are directly related to his equally huge tax breaks for wealthy people - his buds, of course, and the owners of those newspapers that are rather selectively covering the "election")

Bush and Rumsfield and the rest are so brazen I cannot believe how they walk around unchallenged by the American public, who, by now, should be getting wise to the truth regardless of the ongoing media lies. Rumsfield especially seems to often have a look of unbelief on his face, like the guy who just bet all his money on something and, against all odds, that something came up a winner. And again and again. The look of a conman who has made some desperate play on some sucker who really should have known better - but has fallen for it, and the conman is walking off with all the mark's money, still not believing his luck, waiting for the shout at his back, ready to run like hell! Man oh man, is he going to be laughing tonight!!! - and I expect these guys - the Cheneys and Rumsfields, the Mulroneys and d'AQuinos and bankers and "investors" in Canada, etc all over the "modern" corporate world, do a fuck of a lot of laughing when they're behind closed doors at night or at their private meetings in exclusive resorts here and there around the world - what a fucking bunch of idiots they've been scamming for the last few decades!!! And no sign of any letting up - we just conned em for ANOTHER 100 billion!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And your average Canadian reading the above would immediately toss it in the garbage - another stupid conspiracy theory - it's GOOD to pay half our fucking income, personally and as a country, over to banks and wealthy "investors" - it's a natural as rainfall to let private banks create the money supply, and then to have the government borrow that money from them and collect taxes to pay the interest, and interest on the interest, etc and etc - I mean, they tell us that in the schools, and in the papers, and on the tv - and they wouldn't lie to us about something like that in Canada nosiree bobsyeruncle!!! - and anybody who says different must just be some sort of fucking whacko. End of story - where's the tv guide, alice, I think there's a real exciting tv show on tonight we just gotta watch. can't go outside anyway, all them fucking terraists around, with them nukular bomms. christ there was a segment on CNN (the only western news channel I get where I am, so I check it sometimes - know thine enemy, I think it was Sun Tzu who first recognised the wisdom of that idea - and for those of us on MY side of the battle for the universe, as enacted in this bit theatre we call the Earth, CNN lets you know quite a lot of what they're up to, and quite a lot more of what they want you to THINK they're up to - and if you have learned to think critically through whatever means, those two things can tell you quite a lot about what they are REALLY up to...) - anyways, on CNN a couple days ago, they were interviewing people in middle-America - Independence Missouri I think it was, with a statue of Harry Truman in the background (remember Harry? - "The Buck Stops Here!" - HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA - in modern corporate American government (which generally prevails in Canada also, see previous about Eves et al.) the buck stops "anywhere BUT here!" - it is outrageous and pathetic to see our modern "leaders" making endless excuses about their failures, and pointing their scummy fingers everywhere else to try to cover up their lies) - anyway, in Independence (BAWBL!!!) they were showing middle-American shop owners talking seriously about how they (the 'mericans) were doing God's Work in Iraq and them other places, stopping the heathen savage from destroying freedom in the world; some chubby middle aged lady in a bar somewhere saying they ought to damn well bomb France and Germany too, teach em all a damn lesson - it does make one reflect indeed that there is a battle on this planet between the forces of good and evil - and the bad guys are definitely winning.

It's a crazy crazy thing - wonderland looking glass indeed - we see the American movie-tv-popular fiction industries putting out all these heart-stirring stories about evil beings, be they aliens from another planet or just plain bad guys from Earth, trying to do bad stuff to we good people here ("here" usually being America), and how the forces of "good" rally round the flag or whatever and beat them all back rahrahrah - but in reality, the forces of evil are concentrated in governments like the current American one, supported by these blind, all-but-mindless puppets in middle-America (and middle-Canada, middle-Britain, middle-Australia, etc) to a growing extent) - and the "Luke Skywalker" forces of good are the few people in those countries and elsewhere trying to stop the fascists from taking over. The paradox, the perversity, the evil, is hard to believe. The banality of evil radiated from those small town faces in that CNN bit.

bang bang yer dead when tv rules yer head

- just reading some commentary from the bad dude Warren "never-met-a-Lib-I-didn't-like-or-PC-I-didn't-hate" Kinsella (good writer, obviously pretty good mind, dangerous because to him politics has never got beyond being a game - and OUR TEAM must win!!! - policies are totally irrelevant - actually, he's probably got his feet pretty close to the ground on that score, since policies are irrelevant - most of them change the minute the polling booths close anyway... - perhaps when he gets a bit older and wiser he will turn his talents to fighting for something good, rather than his buds... one of the great writers on Canadian politics started out in a similar way, Dalton Camp - started out as a PC team player, helped them win a lot of elections, but after a few years of Mulroney, and the "Free Trade" betrayal, he started to see a bit more clearly, and for the last several years of his life wrote for truth and justice) about how the NDP are still being dragged down by various things Bob Rae did 10 years ago - got a wheel spinning somewhere, connections connections - and of course early in the day the old Conspiracy Theory ideas are always alert after reading through the morning stuff about how more and more people are starting to wonder if 911 wasn't somehow a US government put-up job (couple of good stories on this this week - notably Confessions of a Reluctant Conspiracy Theorist) - anyway - imagine something like this - go back say 30 years to when the big money Bay St - BCNI (at the time) people are planning a big neocon push in Canada, of which Ontario is of course a central part politically - they KNOW that most people aren't going to be happy about neocon shit about making Canada like the US, and dismantling the social system built up over generations, especially the healthcare part of it, and are likely to turn to the one party of the people with a history of fighting for these programs, the NDP - so why not trash them real good, make their name mud for a long time - and there's Bob Rae - get elected - immediately starts trashing stuff and making the NDP look bad, starting with the dropping of the major campaign promise to implement public auto insurance - there is a fairly serious capital flight from Ontario during his years in office, creating no end of financial hardships for the government - yet not once, that I recall, does he say anything about it - his "social contract" idea put the final nail in the coffin for his government and the NDP - and (with the compliance of the corporate media of course, putting out the appropriate message day after day after fucking DAY!!!), ushered in the neocons under Mike Harris - and where is Bob Rae now? living a modest life in the NDP boonies somewhere?? well, not exactly - living pretty high on Bay St. actually - not the kind of story you'll find in the Pispot for some reason - but interesting - and tie that in with the way Broadbent and his people at the time totally fucked up the 1988 Free Trade election (for which he was rewarded with a pretty cushy job, where there's a whole hell of a lot of talk the talk, and pretty much zero on walk the walk, insofar as implementing needed change here or elsewhere goes - kind of the neocon story, actually, they talk a great democracy talk, but when the day is done, democracy has kind of got sent back to jail, rather than passing go and collecting $200 - all over the fucking world, if you haven't noticed.....), and the completely ineffectual leaders and policies they had after that, as neoconism was being shoved down the throats of the people of Canada when they were (and are, for that matter) desperate for a decent alternative to neoconism but have NEVER had one to vote for - well - a lot of fertile ground for conspiracy theories there (and damn good reason for the neocons to be alert to such things, and diss them as much as possible - heard any disparaging stories about "conspiracy theories" lately? HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAA - sorry - holding it in too long!! - of COURSE you have!!! - they're springing up like wildflowers in the April woods! - and with reason - so much fertile ground! - so long since the truth has been told there is a huge vacuum in the universe just sucking them out!! - as Saruman eventually found, even the fucking trees will only take so much before fighting back...). Like the last election, and this one federally coming up next year - something under 20% of Canadians actually support neocon policies, when asked in any kind of fair and balanced poll (not the sort of thing you would find coming from the Frasers, for instance), and do NOT want Canada regressing more and more and more towards a US-corporate MIC system - yet all major federal parties (the ones getting all the space in the media, that is to say), are supporting those policies - and for some strange fucking reason, the various parties supposedly pretty much in line with the values of most Canadians, as poll after poll again indicates, are, in the same polls, getting 10-15% support.

I mean, what the fuck is it with Canadians the last few years - YES We love Canada and our great health care system and the fact that we are better than the US and want to STAY that way!!! - BUT - we will NOT support the political parties that have the same vision, but will vote for parties that want to destroy our country and privatise the healthcare system and give all our money to the banks and join the US. Even though they have lied and lied and lied incessantly, when it comes time to vote, we will forget all about those lies, and with serious looks on our little faces ponder the latest batch of lies and choose between them, very carefully not acknowledging that we FUCKING KNOW THEY ARE ALL LYING AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!

psychotic man just psychotic- I think that was one of Einstein's lines (he had a lot of good ones) - a workable definition of psychosis is when you keep trying something you KNOW is not going to work

It really does baffle one sometimes, even when being aware of the great propaganda power of the media, here and elsewhere.

hahahahahahahahahahahahahaaa - wow - dangerously close to getting serious there!!! grumble grumble grumble

Oh but wait but wait cries Alice - the people of Canada have always rejected the socialist alternative - you know that!! - well, really, the people have Canada have done what they have been told to do by the press, which is "tolerate political freedom" - but when it comes time to vote, by golly, we'll have none of that damned socialism in this country!!! - which, when you think about it, is nonsense - the current Ontario election is a perfect example - both the Libs and the PCs are going around the province telling the people that they are going to continue pushing the "free trade" policies that have resulted in closed hospitals and schools, greatly reduced services, higher user fees, Walkerton, the hospital crisis caused by SARS, etc and etc - NOBODY wants that stuff - yet only the NDP is talking realistic policies to stop it - yet only the fringe vote is destined for the NDP. What kind of rational (i.e. non-brainwashed) person walks around complaining about the punishment of the last 10 years - and by fuck promising to vote for some more of it!!!

The NDP aren't credible because of Rae et al.? Well, maybe that is so - but how fucking credible are Eves and his bunch after the last ten fucking years of taking apart the province?

Fuck it is to despair.

Just for me, the negative campaign adds once again flowing out of the PC headquarters are pretty sickening. As a voter or citizen or anything, my first reaction on seeing stuff like this is - great, now I know the party I will NOT be voting for - whoever the fuck thinks this kind of SHIT is appropriate in an election campaign, for starters. Put it on a personal level - how much do you listen to people who go around spending their time bad-mouthing other people while saying how wonderful they themselves are in contrast??? - fuck, I suppose I'm exposing myself again! - it just occurs to me, I think probably a LOT of people seem to spend their time doing that!! - one of the reasons I don't have many friends or participate in many lunch-room chats is because I have no interest in doing that - but what a pathetic sort of society we are, when that kind of thing not only happens, but apparently even influences a lot of people - what bitter, sad twisted warped tiny little minds people must have, who participate in that sort of shit!!

If I did live in Ontario, all I'd want to hear is how Eves and his party, who have been in power for 10 years, explaining how giving big tax cuts to their buddies, while laying off tens of thousands of government employees resulting in situations like Walkerton and now the Aylmer story has been good for the province, or how closing schools and hospitals, and squeezing them for funding so there are no after school activities for the kids or something like SARS immediately stresses the hospital system to the breaking point because there is no flexibility whatsoever in the system, is good for anyone, or how privatising the hydro system so that people wind up paying huge prices for an unreliable source of power (California, New Zealand, Alberta, etc) is going to help average people - lots of shit like that.

As noted the odd time before (one wonders at times if there isn't a tide in the universe, tending to throw like-minded things together at times - especially when those things are fighting for truth and life and good stuff like that, against the forces of lies and anti-life - just wonders, of course....) - anyway, came across this Left Gatekeepers" this week - talking about how many of the so-called "left" in the US appear to be somewhat compromised by receiving money from right-wing sources - well-disguised largesse, of course - and these mainstream "lefties" seem to not only avoid talking about the bigger issues like whether or not the US government was actively involved with 911 or how the entire debt-based money system is a scam, but denigrate, often seriously, those who should be their compatriots in opposition to most of the right-wing neocon agenda, but also believe the US government was complicit in the 911 crime.

well, as predicted, it didn't take long - some commentaries in various degrees of outrage on the Fraser story last week about how public auto insurance would cause more deaths - apparently the Consumer's Association of Canada has been on this for awhile - a bunch of stuff here here if you want a look (insurance ripoffs are nothing new - I recall the first accident I had quite some years ago now, and collected a thousand bucks or so (that was big money at the time I am talking about - new cars could be had for 3-4,000) - and the premiums I had to pay to drive collected ALL of that payout back in three years); and also Car insurers in hype overdrive By HOWARD PAWLEY - Pawley was the premier of Manitoba a few years back when they brought the system in to that province. The thing about it all is, of course, that private companies have to build in big (BBBBIIIGGGG!!!!) amounts for "investor" or shareholder profit, and big administration expenses for dozens if not hundreds of companies, which also leads to efforts to cut costs (i.e. payouts) as much as possible. Private profit is fine - but there's something a bit fishy, to say the least, about the government forcing people to do something (like insure their vehicles) - and then throwing them on the mercy of capitalists whose only goal is maximum profit. A decent society understands that there are things people need, ALL people, and thus some sort of government program is required. I suppose this gets a bit personal as well - as one who has been basically poor for most of my life, I do not much care for things that discriminate against me on the basis of poverty - and insurance most surely does that.

The Philosophical Ramble Thing - Vision Anyone?? Read something yesterday somewhere, saying that fighting the bad guys is good, but we need to be sure we have something to replace it with - we need a vision. I think I have always believed that, and had one, one way or another, changing somewhat over time as one learns new things, gets a bit more mature in the sense of seeing and understanding that other people are NOT necessarily the same as you are, but have a right to their own ideas and lives and so on - but I suppose I have not done much about talking about it here - not enough time in the day for fuck's sake!! - just trying to point out some of the worse absurdities of what "they" are up to seems to fill a lot of fucking space - and were there more hours in the fucking day, there would be a lot more fucking words on this site, believe it! - so often I feel I am doing nothing more than scratching the surface - an ant on some crease of some huge elephant's skin, screaming out for it to stop!!!! - as it charges madly off in all directions or something. (Leacock, if you're wondering - great Canadian humorist and philosopher)

I guess my vision is kind of utopic. On the face of it, that sounds pretty ridiculous, I know, since a bit of a look around the world. and throughout history, indicates that we would seem to be a LOONGG way from anything remotely describable as a utopia. Yet maybe that is what they just want you to think, for one reason or another - I mean I mean I mean - have you ever wondered why our newspapers and tvs are full of stories of death and danger and (lately) terrorist warnings and murder and oh just all kinds of bad shit, rather than stories from around the world of GOOD stuff - where people are living together peacefully, where they have systems in place or in development that HELP everyone in their communities live good lives, where there is a minimum of crime of any sort, stuff like that (yes, there is the odd thing - but it is presented as an anomaly of some sort, don't even think about denying it!)??? And if you think about it, you quickly realise that MOST places are not that bad - and with a bit of help could get a lot better - but do we get that help??? No, we get stories about problems, both locally and around the world, and how we have to spend more money on the police to protect us, or the military, or give more money to banks and rich people so they will invest that money and create jobs for us (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA - man that was the best one all day!!!!!!! - I'm sure if anybody in the Neocon World Order read that they would be passing it around at the nightly laugh fest)

Phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny, or something like that, is one of the basic biological sayings - it just means that the big picture is reflected in the small, comparing the development of an individual human being from egg to adult with the development, or evolution, of human beings from single-celled organisms in the hot and murky sea some 3 billion years ago (don't hold me to that - I could be off a few millennia) - but the idea remains strong - the whole concept of holism is something that I think we will eventually understand as central to all life, and thought. Likewise the health of a human being - you know how totally fucking miserable you can feel if there is an untreated infection or something in your body, putting bad stuff in your blood and generally making you feel like shit - and you know how fast that feeling of misery and hopelessness can evaporate when you take a magical drug or otherwise the infection is removed. And why couldn't that analogy hold true for our society as well?

It seems to me that it can.

Imagine if the people we currently have as "leaders" - not only politicians, but the wealthy people in the society who, whether you care to admit it or not, exercise great influence (dominance would not be too strong a word, particularly the last 20-30 years) on the policies our government follows - decided some day that they were actually going to try to allow a truly good society for us all as so many people have tried to create throughout history, and still do so, and allow us all to work and study and learn and become "all that we could be" in the true sense of the term - that is, fully alive, thinking, intelligent, caring, alert, healthy human beings, participating in the operation of our society, free to travel and to learn as we wished, with only minimal requirements to spend our time working at the maintenance of that society, because, with modern technology, most of the necessary work was automated in one way or another, and the necessary maintenance work that required human labour was fairly shared among ALL of us. I'll leave further explication of what that utopia would be for later, there are an endless number of possibilities - the point being, the current ruling class in our society is like the infection in the human body, causing massive misery everywhere it is found, in this case, by actively PREVENTING us from creating that great society for ALL of us - but we could start feeling better, as a society, everywhere, if we just removed that infection - that ruling class, whose primary means of maintaining THEIR exalted position is by ensuring that the rest of us remain in OUR positions - which is to labour for them ceaselessly, so they can have endless leisure. (Which is, of course, absolutely wonderful for them - but much less so for the rest of us.)

Ah yes, it has ever been so, at least since we crawled out of the sea and started living in groups in caves or whatever - but some of us think there is a higher purpose to the existence of the human species than to for the many to serve as slaves for a small group of elite who thus live lives of luxury, expropriating the labour of the many to their personal use. Hard to figure - it's evolution in action, I guess, and nobody has any answers yet - but either we are nothing more than random chance all the way around, in which case the elite are proving their right to be where they are simply by the fact that that is where they are, like the alpha-males in any wolf band or herd of water buffaloes, and these ideas of morality and decency and something better that some of us have are nothing more than stupid dreams - or there is in truth a higher potential for these amazing brains we have been gifted with - the potential of becoming something truly intelligent in the universe, of joining a universal group of intelligent species, of following a path that leads to someplace we are not yet sure of, but requires that we grow beyond the primitive animal instincts of herd and leader, to a state of equality, of egalitarianism, of helping one another rather than leaving the weak and ill in body behind. In truth, a Ghandian vision, a Martin Luther Kingian vision, an Arthurian vision - as opposed to some Hitlerian vision of a superior race on earth, or a Bushian-Orwellian-1984ian "vision" of total war, total slavery, total lies, totally dysfunctional for the many, totally utopian for the few.

The vision I fight for is Utopia for MOST of us, rather than the other way around, as we have now, where there is something very close to utopia for the elite, but something very far from it for most of us. There are any number of actualities that would see this - it is a wide-open, inclusive vision, with truly the greatest happiness and good for the greatest number (I do not think we could provide utopia for all - there are always going to be your Bushes and Napoleons and Mulroneys whose happiness depends on being emperor over great masses who will find the idea of egalitarianism less-than-utopian for themselves, personally, or your fuckups who, for whatever reason, find happiness from hurting or abusing or taking advantage of others in one way or another, who will find an egalitarian society less than all it could be for themselves - but I also think that most of these people are or were the way they are because they have been brought up to be that way, and if they were raised in a society that let them fulfil their dreams without being psychopathic they could and would do so.

Anyway, it is getting very late and I am not in a really good mood for some reason and am kind of forcing words on to the page, which is not the best thing to be doing.

Time to go off to the sea for a day or two. Hang in there. All we can do.



"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." —Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See