DC Sept 4 2004 - As the western media gnashes its teeth and promotes thoughtless hysteria and hatred of what THEY define as "terrorists" around the world, here is the kind of stuff it would be a LOT more useful to be talking about - Questioning legitimacy of rulers -
Measuring and controlling the actions of governments by Dr. Richard Lawson. Just imagine if, every day, the citizens of Canada were encouraged to think about, and talk about, stuff like this, rather than UNDER THE BEDS THE TERRORISTS ARE COMING LOWER TAXES LOWER TAXES!!!!!. How can we get the citizens of Canada MORE involved with government, rather than less? How can we encourage rational thinking and decision-making rather than hysterical, thoughtless reactions to violent events around the world - how can we figure out WHY that violence is occurring? Are there people out there who are truly evil and trying to destroy our western "democracies"?? - or just MAYBE might that violence be somehow in response to things our "democratic" governments are doing to these people, and this kind of violence is the only way they have to fight back, to try to draw attention to their plight? I don't know for sure - but what is pretty evident is, whatever answers I find to such questions are going to have to come from sources other than the "great free democratic Canadian media". (I gotta say - if we did set up a system like this Lawson guy recommends - where do you think Canada would come? Sure we'd be ahead of places like Burma or Iran or the US - but is that enough??? Is 65 out of 100 a good score? I think we could do a HELL of a lot better than we are - I also think we ought to be going forwards instead of backwards...)
DC Sept 4 2004 - well - look what pops up coincidentally - The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2004 (yea it's a bit premature, but I guess they figured there'd be enough THIS year for two volumes haha) - some pretty important stuff here which, if it ever got mentioned at all, got a short para somewhere in the back pages (sort of like child poverty in Canada, a national disgrace the media is NOT going to talk about, not as long as it is pushing LOWER TAXES LOWER TAXES for the wealthy - there is, of course, a connection, that even tv-numbed brains could make, so the best thing to do is not to talk about it - those same tv-trained brains are not going to think much about something they have not been told to on the tv.
DC Sept 3 2004 - The Chechnya hostage taking is top of the line these days - they somberly spent a few minutes last night on CNN giving comments from politicians about how terrible it is to use children as hostages, just not acceptable etc and etc - all of which is true enough, I certainly don't condone what is happening - but what got my poor brain a little woozy was the incredible hypocrisy of all this, the crocodile tears, the amazing phoniness of mass murderers criticizing others who use violence to achieve their ends - does nobody recall the terrible picture of little Ali from Bush's war last year? - and horrible as that is, it is only mildly representative of the thousands of other kids killed and mutilated, many far worse (and let's not even get into napalm and Vietnam - people who would knowingly drop napalm on children are truly monstrous beyond words) - and yet this stuff never got more than the merest sort of tsk-tsk from the same media - "Ah well, darned shame and all that, but we do have casualties in war..." etc.
But the only difference between that (and 50 years - or 100 - of American atrocities around the world) and what is happening in Chechnya is that the US has the biggest military in the world, and when IT wants to send a serious message that it wants something changed, it goes and spends a few weeks or months bombing the fuck out of everything in sight, killing thousands or tens of thousands of civilians, most assuredly including any number of children, destroying infrastructure, and in "modern" times seeding various chemical poisons all around the country-de-jour that will continue killing and maiming for decades (kids are still being blown up in Cambodia from American bombs dropped over 30 years ago, and the DU they spread in Yugoslavia and Iraq will be causing problems for tens of thousands of years - how barbaric can you get???) - and basically not a murmur of protest for all this destruction from the western press - quite the contrary, usually they spend huge amounts of time and space justifying such destruction and spreading around the US gov lies and propaganda they are using to justify, at least on paper, their own terrorism - the US excursions into Iraq (twice), Yugoslavia and Afghanistan being the most recent examples - and even as we sit and read or write today, the same press is getting everyone ready for the next excursion, regardless of who wins the US election, into Iran (using the same arguments they used two years ago to justify Iraq, which turned out to be total fictions - and now nobody (in the mainstream media that is - there is of course lots of truth as usual to be found on the net, although this is apparently unexplored wilderness outside of E-bay and porn sites (nono - that DOES include Fox and CNN - think about it...) for most of the population - another mark of the brainwashing of modern "education") is even batting an eye when they trot out the same lies for Iran - I really do feel like I am living in Cloud Cuckoo Land most of the time!) - where they will once again bomb and spread chemicals, and kill hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of children and women and old people and innocent civilians - and the very worst the same press that is condemning the Chechnya situation will do will be to say again how it's a bit of a shame, but that's war.
Well, maybe this is war too, in Chechnya - but the people fighting the war don't have a 100 billion dollar war machine to drop bombs and spread chemicals around to make their message, or an equally powerful corporate media to spread their propaganda, and this is all they can do. Even if these people killed all the kids - around 300 - they wouldn't be NEAR by several orders of magnitude the US in terms of sheer numbers of atrocities, of horrible deaths and injuries inflicted on children and anyone else who gets in their way - I doubt anyone in history will ever approach what the US has done in the last century - names like Attila or Genghis will literally pale in comparison, when the true history books are written, when compared to the 20th century US empire and its atrocities all over the world. And yet these people can brazenly pretend to be outraged at the activities going on in Chechnya.
Astounding. And even more astounding that so many "We the People" let them get away with all this bullshit. It is right that we protest the taking of the children hostage in Chechnya or anywhere else, such things are surely unforgivable for any reason - but it is equally unforgivable and unconscionable that so very, very few people here seem to give a sweet fuck about the tens of thousands of children like little Ali killed and maimed by the US all over the world, generally with the approval of our own Canadian government, and the complicity of our own Canadian corporate media in all of this - even though for some mysterious reason Chretien declined to go to Iraq, he was all gung ho with the frameup of Milosevic and bombing of Yugoslavia a few years ago. Unforgivable.
But I suppose it's the way we are "educated" - maybe trained would be a better word - I mean, look at the headline in the Star - 'My poor child, take me instead' - now is that rational analysis of a situation, or comic book stuff for emotional teenagers - be hysterical! don't think - react! damn terrorists!!! - there's nothing in the story about WHY the so-called "terrorists" have done this, and NO background on the Chechnyan situation - just CHILDREN HOSTAGES TERRORISTS!!! Think on it. The way this differs from Iraq, for instance, is that in Iraq, the media - including the Canadian media - spent months promoting the American invasion, setting the stage of what a monster Hussein was, and how we HAD to get rid of him - and then they went and did their own terrorism, killing something like 35,000 civilians, including obviously thousands of children as noted above, many of them horribly and gruesomely and they sure as hell must have been pretty terrified - and there has not been a single WORD in the media, or from major spokespeople, about how it is just not acceptable to be doing this to children. Not a frigging word. Message being clear enough - if WE want to undertake some military adventure, and kill a lot of children, that's their tough luck - if somebody we don't like kills children - oh bad - let's get the hankies for the poor innocents, and crank up the crocodile tears. The hypocrisy is just amazing. A story just a couple days ago, the Americans sent a few bombs into a house they "suspected" had some people who were plotting against them (i.e. some Iraquis defending their country from a foreign occupier) - and several children were killed. The media barely noted this in passing, with no comment whatsoever about how it's not a very nice thing to be going into other people's countries and murdering their children. Casualties of war, big deal - it has happened so often, it's not even worth mentioning. A few more little Alis, to add to the tens of thousands that went before - big deal. Not worth a comment. I still wonder sometimes how I got stuck on the same planet with these moral-less creatures who do this kind of stuff, and then actually "justify" it - it's completely unthinkable to me, yet they do it and accept it as casually as I swat a mosquito.
All of which pales, anyway, when considered beside the half a million or so Iraqis who perished during the 11 years of American sanctions and bombing between 93-03 - again, not worthy of mention in the major media, Canada included - and not forgetting the famous Albright quote under Clinton - "Unfortunate - but we think worth it." These really are a bunch of sick puppies out there.
But back to the "story" - wouldn't it be more useful to give us a bit more background about what was going on, rather than more and more details of bodies and weeping mothers? Why not a bit of background on things - like you find here for instance Crisis in Chechnya??? Well, trick question haha - they don't WANT you doing any self-analysis about things - that gets into all kinds of dangerous areas - and sooner or later you're going to start understanding that this whole game is not a few "terrorists" fighting "our great free democratic governments " hahaha - no, what we are seeing are the few remaining people in the world who are angry or desperate or courageous enough to challenge the New World Fascism, and fight for their countries or beliefs.
And it's not only the hypocrisy we and the media show in terms of ignoring the killing of innocents by "our" side in other countries around the world - it is the hypocrisy one sees if one considers - hey, what about right here, what about CANADIAN children?? How are we treating them??? - and for far too many Canadian children, the answer is - pretty poor. Pretty damn poor altogether - and that too is without excuse, and inexcusable. If we consider the idea that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones - or to be more direct, you should not be criticizing others for things you are doing yourself - then we as a society have little right to be critisizing the mistreatment of children in other countries - we have a whole lot of cleaning up to do right here at home before we start that stuff. A whole lot.
Do we recall the number of food banks in this country? Do we recall that close to 20% of Canadian children are living in poverty, and as such are pretty much doomed to a second-class life - so very much of what a person is, or accomplishes, is decided during the first few formative years of life, when a person's responses are formed, and the basic patterns for so much else laid down - and yet we as a society are turning our backs on these hundreds of thousands of children. And it is NOT necessary, we are NOT a poor country in any way - but we are saying that it is more important for us as a society to let rich people be richer than to help the poor children get a decent start in life (and we have seen this week again how the privileged repay us for turning our backs on our own children - Conrad Black was front and center in the fight for lower taxes and more privilege for the wealthy and closing the doors on our poor - but even that wasn't enough, as he stole even more from everyone who trusted him. We see it also regularly from such groups as the CCCE, representing the richest corps in Canada, and "think tanks" like the Fraser Institute, after years of tax breaks, demanding ever more, and telling us we don't have enough money for healthcare, or education, etc and etc). For a detailed look at this, if you want, check out Mel Hurtig's Pay the Rent or Feed the Kids.
Here in Canada, the greed of a few is allowed to take precedence over the welfare of not just a few hundred, but hundreds of THOUSANDS of children - and that really is a sign of a society completely without morals.
And as long as this situation prevails, it's pretty disgusting to listen to people pretending to be shocked at what other people are doing to children somewhere else in the world. Heck, we don't shoot a few hundred kids here to make a political point or demand - no, we just condemn hundreds of thousands of them to lives of misery, and poverty, and abuse. For years and years, world without end. To pacify the greed of a few.
Way to go Canada. You sure are a great example for the world.
DC Sept 3 2004 - We got this - Hospitals threaten cuts
$600 million shortfall forcing tough decisions, they say - and this - Ontario Finances (2004) Paper A -in which we see the "interest" on the Ontario debt this year a bit over 10 Billion bucks - on a 78 billion dollar budget - over 12%. And then this - Debt Scam. I don't know - obviously nobody in the Canadian corporate media can connect dots - waddaboutyou? It is nothing short of criminally insane or unbelievably stupid that We the People finance our economy by borrowing the money into existence!!! What a bunch of marks! hahahahaha - boy they must have some good laugh fests high over Bay St when We the People are sitting safely in front of our tvs listening to the latest BS about everything - as long as we behave like mushrooms, they'll treat us like mushrooms.
DC Sept 3 2004 - Don't know if I've mentioned Ran Prieur here before - an irregular writer, but well worth a read - his latest - Election as Psychological Operation - "...When he stole the last election, we should have started rioting in the streets and not stopped until the bastard was out..." - substitute any of the things the Canadian gov has pushed through the last 20 years against the wishes of most of us. Ran knows what we need to do. As soon as enough of We the People wake up and understand the same stuff - THEN things get better. Not before.
DC August 31 2004 - Save medicare with a dose of competition By MICHAEL KIRBY AND WILBERT KEON - "Their study, Why Competition Is Essential in the Delivery of Publicly Funded Health Care Services, notes the Globe, is published today by the Institute for Research on Public Policy..." - those of us over a certain age have memories of Michael Kirby - in the Mulroney days, a prime pusher of "free trade", more recently author of a Senate report recommending widespread privitisation of Canadian healthcare - and the IRPP- well, noted a few days ago for its top dog Hugh Segal, and his somewhat incoherent defense of one George Bush, who Hugh thinks is such a great guy Canadians who don't want to vote for him are crazy. Seriously. Which should be enough, all in all, to establish the creds of this IRPP outfit (although we should note the loss of a once-honorable publication - the main IRPP periodical, Policy Options, used to offer just that - things from all perspectives, your basic centrist thing with well-written opinions from both sides - more recently it seems to be little more than another right-wing neocon "think tank" rag along the lines of the Frasers, CD Howe, CCCE, etc - offering "studies" designed to convince people that becoming US North is the best path for Canada) - but this whole "productivity" angle needs a few words, so why not today, I say?
Productivity productivity - one of the buzzwords of the neocons the last few years - which is an immediate ALERT TERRORIST WARNING sign - if the neocons want it, it must be bad for We the People - if it's good for Sauron, it ain't good for the Hobbits. We know this. It ain't rocket science or calculus - when the schoolyard bully is heading your way, you KNOW it ain't for your own good he's coming. If sweet words come out of his mouth, you gotta look for the con - there will ALWAYS be one. Like schoolyard bullies, the neocons are not into charity much.
Likewise with the "productivity" stuff - sounds good, like a lot of what they say, if you don't probe around much (why do you think they've been encouraging sound-bite "news" and short attention spans the last 30 years? (not to mention short "letters" to the Editor)). But basically their game, although they have places like the Frasers and IRPP to dress it up with some big, fancy sounding economic words, the bottom line is - "increased productivity" means getting more work from "We the People" for the same wage-cost - we're gonna keep your pay the same, but you turn out more widgets. And who picks up the extra profit thereby derived? We the People or We the Investors? Haha - trick question - we all know the answer. But they can manage this "increase in productivity" other ways, if you just can't turn out any more widgets in the course of a day no matter what you do - they can lower your wages! - with the same result - the "productivity cost per unit" also decreases ("investors" love this kind of talk - they know it all stands for MORE MONEY MORE MONEY!!!). Have you noticed any prices going down anywhere lately? hahaha another trick question! - no, of course not - so once again, We the People get less, We the Investors get more.
Is that how you want things to continue going? Does your reading of the modern world indicate that the "investor-banker-CEO" class is sort of pinched for money and needs more, while the We the Working People class has really more than we need, and can afford to be a bit more generous with our allowances to the investors-bankers-etc?
hahahaha lots of trick questions today. (but other countries are reducing their costs so we have to to stay "competitive"? - hahaha but golly, Mr. Banker-CEO - you promised us a few years ago that opening our borders would make things better for us!!! - you promised over and over that this would not be a "race to the bottom" - but a rising tide that would lift all boats, Sir! If we are now getting less money for more work, or something like that, and you are telling us to take even less because people in other countries are getting less - isn't that just like a race to the bottom, Mr. Investor Sir??? hahahaha - wait for THAT line in the Globe! -- but don't be smart! Conditions change! We weren't expecting the bubble to burst, and that darn war on terrorism has made investors shaky don't you know!! Alright then, Mr. Investor, Sir, maybe we'll just cancel the NAFTA thing until things get stable again, ok, and stop this race to the bottom with our wages, while your profits race to the top??? hahahaha right.)
But back to the credible-less Mr. Kirby - let's have a quick boo at some of his clever ideas for "increasing the productivity" of things related to the Canadian health care system - they really need to have somebody talking back to them some times - it sure would be nice to have a real media in this country. Oh well, that's my calling, I guess. I sort of like talking back to as - whoops!!! huffy-puffies anyway.
He talks about, as one of the problems that some productivity doctoring would deal with, doctors who "...spend inordinate amounts of time on matters that could easily be handled by others..." - I don't know about this - I haven't been to a doctor in awhile in Canada, but nurses do simple things like blood pressure and temperature and shots and telephone calls and filing - he ought to be a bit more clear about this. My memory is (and reinforced by talking and reading) is that the problem with doctors is that funding has been so cut back the last lot of years that there just isn't enough of them - they see huge numbers of patients, and do not have time for any more. And the odd time I do see a doctor, I want to have the idea that he or she cares about me, and is going to spend at least a few minutes trying to suss out what is wrong with me, rather than doing some rushed superficial thing, giving me some pills or a prescription, and going to the next customer on the assembly line - time spent thusly is not, in my opinion, wasted, or something that could be handled by others - a well-trained, experienced doctor needs to talk to me in person, and spend at least a few minutes getting to know my history, the history of my problem, etc, if he's going to have the info he needs to make a decent diagnosis - and that's what he gets paid for. Kirby et al seem to prefer a more "3 minutes your time is up" approach to health care (at least for us - I suspect they demand a little more in their private parliamentary clinics). But the solution here is not to start bringing bean counters into doctors' offices and treating them like goofing-off assembly line workers (they've been doing this in the great ol USofA the last lot of years, and the results have NOT been laudable) - the solution, as most everyone knows who depends on the Canadian health care system and is not independently wealthy or has access to Clinics for the Elite is indeed to spend some more money on the system, to staff it with an adequate number of doctors and support staff, and THEN things get better. Indeed money does not cure ALL ills - but problems that are directly caused by a lack of money are not going to get better until that money is forthcoming, and a shortage of doctors, caused by ill-advised budgetary cutbacks the last 10+ years, IS the problem, and the ONLY solution is to get that funding back to decent levels and get the doctors into the system that the system needs. Calling in the bean-counters to see if all the doctors can whittle a few seconds off of each office visit is, sorry to be blunt, a really idiotic idea, and only someone desperate to hold on to their money rather than paying some sort of fair share of taxes would even bring up such nonsense. These guys need a Scrooge experience. Soon.
And do we really want things like "diagnostic services" contracted out to the lowest bidder? Have we forgotten Walkerton so soon??? There's lots of stuff not so great about this - first, Kirby is being more than a bit disingenuous by saying that costs can be reduced - as he does not clarify that lesser services usually cost less money. Sure honey, we can get the $1.99 brake job on the car - no point in spending $50 bucks for some lousy brakes - who needs them new brake shoes and stuff!!! I just don't think it's a good idea having important diagnostic tests done by people getting paid minimum wage, with minimum training - their commitment is not there, any more than their skill is. I'd rather pay decent wages to decently trained staff in the health care institute, and have some confidence in the results. Kirby also, for some reason in this discussion (it's habitual with these people) sort of forgets to mention that in any "private business" there has to be a "profit" component added in, that is NOT present in the public provision of services - so if they are going to provide the same service, for less money, and WITH a profit - wow! - as they say in the old "we watch those con men closely" circles - "Gotta be a catch of some sort!!!". And do you really want bean counters in the labs with your diagnosticians? Not me, anyway.
- and yea, I know there are some problems with unions sometimes - but in the health care system, it's like anywhere else - direction comes from the top down, and if "the top" is sending out the message that they are FAR more concerned with penny pinching than the health of the people they are supposed to be looking after, then that attitude is going to "trickle down" into the staff - who are going to start watching their backs to see how the management is going to try to screw them next, rather than watching their patients, as well - and an attitude of distrust and cynicism will pervade the system, and all will suffer. The solution is NOT to bring in armed guards to watch the workers! - the solution is to provide the system with enough money so that once again we have staff - from the top down - whose primary goal is doing a good job, not pinching pennies so that the gov can once again take a few points off the income tax rates of the wealthy in this country.
And that's all this is about, in the end. The bottom line in all of this, as always, is simply money - those making the most money, those benefitting the most from this great country, have gotten disgustingly greedy in this neocon era, and simply would rather be spending their money on expensive toys of various sorts than supporting this great country, and the people who do the work that makes them wealthy.
They have also, unfortunately, taken over the political process in this country, so that most politicians give them what they want, and then spend interminable amounts of time trying to tell We the People that "they just don't have any money".
In the final analysis, it's not about "productivity" at all - it's about greed.
This productivity stuff, like pretty much all the neocon lines, is all a crock - there's lots of money in the country - all they're doing is saying they want to arrange things so the wealthy bankers and investors get most of it, and We the People get pittance.
And they'll keep doing it until enough of We the People stand up and say no more. NO MORE. NO MORE.
cool. what's on America's funniest home vids tonight sweetie? This guy's getting waaaay too serious - and I gotta get up early tomorrow - the boss wants a couple extra hours a week - and I wanna keep the job ...
DC August 30 2004 - Here's a good piece - THE PERPLEXING PUZZLE OF THE PUBLISHED PASSENGER LISTS - I keep saying I'd like to see some kind of "real" investigation into what happened on that terrible day three years ago - and this is exactly the kinds of things a real investigation would be doing. And again I have to repeat - it seems very, very obvious to me why there has been no such investigation - there is no way they could bullshit their way through it, they could not induce all of the people involved to lie as much as would be necessary or kill them all, and it would quickly become obvious that some very high, very inside people were part of this - so the only path is what they've done - stonewall until the storm blows over - a strategy that only works as long as there is compliance from the media, and We the People let them do it - like the con only works as long as you let the con steal your bucks. "Oh, pshaww!! I won't listen because our government simply would not do this!!" is NOT a response to this - either point me to the investigation that explains the questions raised in this story (and the many other unanswered questions around the happenings of that day), or explain (credibly!) why there has been none - there is no acceptable reason. OUR people - the so-called "conspiracy theorists" have done huge amounts of work presenting very detailed timelines and other scenarios that appear to explain what happened that day (i.e. Understanding The "War On Terrorism":
Engineering Public Opinion -- Part 2 -- Pearl Harbor and 9-11 and Peter Meyer's The World Trade Center Demolition and the So-Called War on Terrorism - you just canNOT read this stuff and keep your head in the sand and pretend there is any truth at all to the "official" version) - but we acknowledge that it IS conjecture - and we all WANT a REAL investigation to get at the truth. (And don't start with the recent so-called 911 "hearings", big flashy report and all - remember, they start from the premise that they "knew" bin Laden and "al Quaeda" (whoever they are) did this, and all they actually looked at (and they stonewalled and lied about a lot of this, of necessity) was "how the mighty US "intelligence" (sic) services screwed up that day. hahaha - your basic "lynch mob justice".
Here's a very interesting flash presentation about the fable of a big plane flying into the Pentagon - 3 meg plus, be warned if you're on a slow connection - be warned also that it's going to be even harder after seeing it to maintain your faith in the stories about this that are currently accepted.
It's one of the Big Lies of the times (the ongoing theft of the National Debt Scam being the other, although there are many almost as big) - and we will NOT live in a decent world with truth and trust until the truth of this is gotten to.
DC August 30 2004 - Reply to New York City tabloid and police smears and lies By Jaggi Singh - Jaggi's been out of the news for awhile, but this is worth a read as it indicates AGAIN the kind of treatment we can expect from the corporate media as we try to create a better world - and, as Jaggi refers to a couple of times, the "justice" system here in Canada is definitely part of the problem.
DC August 30 2004 - Murdani, Indonesian military hero who led Papua, Timor invasions, dies at 74 - my my my the Canadian media in action! How to make sense of it all?? Someone like Slobodan Milosivic is accused of genocide with a great hysterical outpouring from the press, and his country invaded and bombed for months causing billions of dollars in infrastructure damage, spreading DU around - and it later turns out not a single "mass grave" has been found (here or here), so the "butcheries" he was accused of were very, very much less than the accusations but we went after him anyway (point being that there is NO WAY the people in power really believed their stories about "mass graves" and "genocide" any more than the stories a couple of years ago about Saddam Hussein's "butcheries" (also wildly exaggerated - see here) and WMD - they were just that - stories to get "the people" to go along with the desired actions) - and yet here we have a person who we KNOW butchered FAR more people than Milosivic and Hussein combined - and he's lauded in the Canadian press as a "hero"!!!! What is it with Indonesia anyway??? Something under the surface here - remember in Vancouver at the APEC meetings a few years ago when the RCMP pepper-sprayed protesters, it was to avoid having the Indonesian dictator - another whose butcheries FAR outnumber the crimes of the two mentioned above, and of "his own people" at that (although they were "lefties" of some sort, and we all know, from reading the Canadian media, that "lefties" are a sub-human species at best, so I guess their lives don't count for as much) - to avoid having this butcher have to read posters or hear voices accusing him of his crimes. The ZNET page on East Timor, and a specific story on Canada's involvement and reaction - For Gain... For Shame - For 24 years, Canada has been too reluctant to criticize Indonesia’s brutal treatment of East Timor.
DC August 29 2004 - No more rise and whine - right. THIS is why they can't publish "long" letters about the evils of privatisation, or the idiocy of the last neocon whining (as in lying) about the lefty-lib press, or any of the thoughtful (if slightly lengthy) missives I've written the last few years (and no doubt many others) - they need the space for important stuff like how to handle kids who resist even a little bit joining the capitalist wage-slave economy.
Editor - Letters@GlobeAndMail.ca
RE: No more rise and whine, By KATHY ENGLISH Saturday, August 28, 2004
Dear little johnny, Tell Mom to get stuffed - that she should be YOUR MOM (and friend) rather than a Capitalist Surrogate-Trainer (definitely NOT your friend). Tell her you don't want to go to school every day and get your brain progressively turned into porridge. Tell her you want to sleep in a bit, then go learn how to fix motorcycles and have a game of catch with your friends (and point out to her that the only reason you want to stay in bed is because of the brain-killing prison haha excuse me school she's sending you to - if you knew you had a great FREE day of LIVING and enjoying life like a real human being should be doing ahead of you, you'd be up like a flash!). Tell her you already know how to read, and there's a lot more interesting stuff on Slashdot and Indymedia and all over the net than in any school text book you ever saw. Tell her you've been doing some of your own research around the net, and it turns out there actually ARE alternative economies, and alternative ways of organizing society and how we divide up the work and the results of that work besides everyone working all their stupid lives at some boring job so there's 800 kinds of dish soap in the supermarket and malls full of worthless junk - it won't really be the end of the world if some "investor" who inherited a wad from his family doesn't get to skim half of your entire life's work to jet set around the world on. Tell her you don't mind a little work - but you'll be darned if you're going to go to some job from 8 am until 5 pm for 50 weeks a year for the rest of your life to cover the mortgage on your flat in suburbia - tell her you're getting to an age now where you think you have a right to have some sort of say in how things are organised in your world - and you want some changes. And when she says that's why you need "a higher education" - to get a good job - ask her how great her life is, rushing around like the house is on fire every minute of every day - wouldn't she like a bit of free time to relax and ponder the mysteries of the universe and life - or just goof off as the case may be? - and don't be so anal, mom!! (that'll turn her around!) - there's nothing wrong with goofing off sometimes!!! You don't ALWAYS have to be "earning money!!" She'll tell you "that's just the way it is, get used to it!" - tell her that might have been a good enough excuse for HER generation - but it ain't good enough for yours. Tell her you KNOW that this whole trip is a big scam where YOU lose and the Bankers win, and it stops with you - nobody asked you if you wanted to play or agreed with the rules, and you're checking out NOW.
She'll really be flyin by now, no time in her life for any sort of reasoned resistance like this, she's trying to teach you OBEDIENCE after all, like any stupid dog, like they taught her before that, and then she'll get on the phone, and then they'll be after you, the men in the blue coats with their clubs and guns clearing a path for the men in the white coats with their chemicals - you tell them to get lost too, tell em you want to choose your OWN rec chems - or not, as the case may be. They'll be coming at you with nets and tasers and stuff by then - be sure you have your running shoes on and a get away path, because if they ever get you, you're history - by the time they ease off on the pills and let you out of their white rooms and tie-down beds, there won't be much left in your brain but "Yes Sir!" - and then your life would for sure be over.
Good luck kid. It's risky, it ain't easy gettin away - but it's worth a try. Be Neo. Be Free.
Dave Patterson
for the young ones
DC August 29 2004 - Canada needs full defence debate - well, they got the headline right - but they seem to get lost after that. There seems to be quite a mix of fantasy stuff and civics course policy making (that is, recommending a course of action based on the idea that Canada and the world are the nice, theoretical constructs taught in high-school civics courses (we are a great democracy where elections are fair and a majority of Canadians elect the gov, all politicians are honest and do what they say they are going to do, MPs represent the people who "elect" them, etc and etc)).
For example, they start off by saying we need a national debate on "defence policy" to give the gov some idea of what Canadians want, noting the Romanov Report, that great cross-country effort that actually solicited the opinions and thoughts of Canadians on our ailing health care system, and actually turned out a pretty good report full of recommendations that Canadians supported - the first part of a pretty good democratic effort - the theory part they teach in school. What they don't add (or talk about in the theory classes) is that the government immediately shelved that report (as they have so many others on all kinds of topics in the past), and every politician in the country is doing their level best to ignore and forget about it, having their own agendas to pursue which have nothing to do with what Canadians actually want - which is quite obviously NOT democratic (this is the big merry go round of PRETENDING to do what Canadians want, as in "democracy", while actually doing what the CCCE et al. want - as in "Plutocracy" (that they most assuredly NEVER mention in the civics classes). So the value of these things is pretty questionable - they actually do as much damage as good, as while the hearings are under way, Canadians can be told the issue is being studied, and spend a great deal of effort and energy presenting stuff to the committee or whatever about what they want - and then afterwards, the politicians just play the old "...in a while!! we're looking at it!! we don't have any money!! OHMYGOD BOGEYMAN!!!! oh heck there's an election coming and we'll wait until afterwards...' games (there's dozens of excuses NOT to do something FOR We the People) - and the issue just goes back in the closet where the pols want it. Meanwhile, they're passing things like "free trade" treaties that most Canadians DO NOT want, but that the Corps and CCCE DO want ("free trade", "missile defence" etc and etc). Ain't "democracy" grand.
Anyway, they get off on a bunch of stuff that sounds good on first reading - but think about it for a sec and where does it go??
For instance - "...The Canadian Forces' first priority must be to safeguard our sovereignty..." - well, if the Star is so worried about Canadian sovereignty being protected, they ought to be urging the RCMP to do a bit more digging on the traitors at places like the CCCE and Fraser Institute, where the Big Brains are busy trying to sell the country to the Americans ASAP. What's left of it since the First Big Traitor Mulroney got through with it anyway. Actually the RCMP might not be that great of a bunch to call on, given their record - protecting Suharto at Vancouver, turning Canadians over to Americans for torture trips, rounding up innocent people on completely specious "terrorism" charges, raiding reporters trying to ferret out info like this, getting more and more "Top Secret" orders from the courts to lock people up without warrants and without publicity, etc and etc. Maybe we should call Cuba or someone whose police are relatively honest to have a boo at what goes on behind the scenes in the Canadian military ....
But that leads to "...That "hard" role dictates maintaining state-of-the-art warplanes and warships on our home turf to give the U.S. serious help defending thtaken over already by the Americans in all but name, through both foreign ownership of most of the major businesses, and traitorous governments the last ten years that have signed things like the "free trade" treaties that let the Americans do as they please here anyway - but that's something they just don't seem to want to talk about - we've pretty much lost our country all ready, and it ain't going with a "bang" like warplanes might make, but a big "whimper" like a bunch of tv-watchers would make when the SWAT team comes in the door and demands their biometric ID.
"...We must consider new threats from terror, missile proliferation and spreading nuclear weapons. And we must be able to project lethal, sustainable force abroad..." - they finish, with their description of the "hard" stuff we need (they sure are there with that manly talk, boy - we the warriors!) - and I gotta say I would LOVE a big set of hearings, in public, about what exactly they or anyone else perceives this "terror" threat to be, as I keep saying. Arabs don't wanna bomb Canada, as near as I can figure - what Arabs want is for the US to get the hell out of their countries and quit stealing their oil and mocking their religion. What Muslims want is pretty much the same, at least insofar as we are talking about "terrorism" originating in the mid-east, which seems to be the story, although they like to leave it all as vague as possible. But it's like any bogeyman story - you sit it down on a chair under a light of some kind, and you quickly find there's precious few facts and a WHOLE lot of smoke and mirrors that's pretty hard to pin down. And I don't think we should be making policy on smoke and mirrors. Sure the spooks are all excited about it - they get a pretty good life out of smoke and mirrors, so it's kind of in their interest to keep everyone on the edge of their seats - but I don't much care for it myself, and I sure as hell don't like people manipulating me with bogeyman stories - I got over that when I was about 10. Vaguely defined "terrorism" threats are great for passing new laws restricting our freedom too, as we see over and over again. But I really want these people to explain exactly what the problem is, and how they think these new things like a big military budget are going to help. Sort of like instead of screaming in panic and running for cover, we ask the kid who screams "THE SKY IS FALLING!!!!" - to go and get a piece of it, and take us to the exact location, and stuff.
If there ARE "terrorist" organizations operating in Canada - and insofar as this stuff has validity, which, in this violent world that the Great Powers make and keep violent because they do GREAT business in arms sales, there probably are - they aren't something that buying warplanes is going to solve! They are at best a small group of people, and a decent police force should be dealing with them - if we HAD a decent police force that was concerned with this kind of thing - unfortunately, as we see over and over again, they are much more concerned with pepper-spraying Canadian citizens who dare to say they don't approve of certain activities their government is up to, and when they do find time to "investigate" "terrorist" plots, they come up looking more like the Marx Brothers (as in rounding up the 20 innocent guys a year ago) than a credible police force (how embarrassing) - maybe they could spend some of that money on some training about REAL investigations and REAL evidence beyond an anonymous phone tip or something, which they could NOT have had much more than last year. To stop "terrorism", we have to recognize that "terrorism" is not an aggressive act, but a reactive act - that is, that halfwit to the south of us notwithstanding, these people are NOT behaving as they do because "they hate our freedoms" (jeezuz!!!!! I can't believe so many people buy this shit!!!!) - they are doing what they do because their countries have been taken over by very powerful, hostile American-based forces, and they are fighting back the only way they have available. Sure the Americans can get huffy puffy and say "COME OUT AND FIGHT LIKE A MAN!!!! YOUR SLINGSHOTS AGAINST OUR 500 BILLION DOLLAR ARMY!!!" - but they're not totally crazy - and when a vastly superior force has invaded someone who is really determined to fight but has no money for a "real" American-style war machine, bombs and subterfuge are the only thing they have to use. It ain't pretty, but it can be effective (remember Saigon?) The Americans do the same thing - both in Yugoslavia and in Iraq they had spokespeople who said something like "Make the situation bad enough for the civilians, and THEY will change the leadership" (talking about bombing civilian infrastructure and killing civilians - totally against the Geneva conventions - but if you're American, it's ok! - it's only when "the terrorists" do it that it's bad) - well, what do you suppose the "terrorists" (freedom fighters to some) are doing when they target civilians? Same thing as the Americans exactly, although the American corporate press isn't going to say so. The "terrorists" figure if they take out some civilians, then maybe the other civilians will tell their government to quit stirring up the hornet's nest!!!
And IF IF IF IF (that's a REAL big if) anything ever happened in Canada - it would be the same idea - they'd be telling the people of Canada that they don't like what "our" government is doing in their countries to their people, and this is the way they're sending the message, since we don't seem to be getting it any other way. Ergo - the solution is NOT bigger guns and bombs - that's the way of violence, and increasing violence - the way to stop them is to quit doing really bad shit to them! Jeez, maybe we could even help them!!! - cancel the debts that are impoverishing them! Send over teachers and engineers to help them put their countries back together!!! Make friends instead of enemies and you don't need so many guns and bombs!!!
Jeez it ain't that complicated - but it seems too much of a stretch for the Canadian media, who seem all gung ho on the idea of keeping TERRORISM front and center, so we'll just say it here.
"Missile proliferation and nuclear weapons"????- who has em, and why would they want to send them our way, and if they did what could we do about it????
"We must be able to project lethal, sustainable force abroad..?" - well, I hope they got other things in mind besides joining more US invasions like the bombing of Yugoslavia a few years ago (they've pretty much decided now there were about as many "mass graves" there as there were WMD's in Iraq - funny we don't see much about this stuff in the papers - the whole damn NATO crew ought to be on trial for war crimes, including big Jean and a lot of Canadian military leaders) - or stuff like this, that some REAL journalists dug up - Canada in Haiti - Who Engineered the Overthrow of Democracy? by Anthony Fenton - how's that for a "lethal" force abroad? Why aren't they bragging about that in the Star, I wonder????
Oh well on and on and on we go, and it's like pissing into the wind - the corporate media has everyone bamboozled, endless bogeyman stories like this, day after day, and these few words aren't going to make any difference. I do favor a military of some sort - but under the control of We the People, for OUR purposes, not the Elite, call them what you will - as we see all too often in Canada, the military is not being used to "protect" us, but to control us - protecting "them" FROM us. But a real We the People military could be a good place for young people to spend some time, learn some things about helping people, get a chance to see a bit of the world, do some community service, learn about the country - and be there just in case a boatload of armed Chinese happened to decide to invade some day. hahaha (I have some sympathy here for the pretty smart people who wrote the American Declaration of Independence, and Constitution, and Bill of Rights - in saying "A well-regulated militia is necessary - so the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" or whatever - the idea here was that a professional military can be as dangerous as a foreign army - the only real security people are going to have is when they work together to protect themselves, as necessary. The problem with an army is that it is trained first and foremost to take orders without question from superiors - and if those "superiors" happen to be working for the Corps rather than We the People - well - as they say, what goes around comes around. If We the People take to the streets to protest things our government is doing - which side of the fence do you suppose that military is going to be on???? Are you happy with that???? We the People ok. But we gotta be careful, real careful.
And we should be ready to go abroad to help others as well, in a limited sort of capacity - that is, the Star is worrying about "Canadian sovereignty" - and that principle ought to be extended to others, as well. Interfering in the workings of another country ought to be undertaken very, very carefully - certainly a broad-based UN supported sort of thing - imperfect as that is right now (and let's not forget that a great deal of its "imperfectness" is solely because the great US opposes so much of the good things it does try to do), we still do not want a world where vigilantism is accepted - the bombing of Yugoslavia a few years ago, and the current invasion and occupation of Iraq, are and were crimes against humanity, although it's unlikely anybody in the current world is going to play hero and go after the big bully on the block. But we should NOT be participating in such stuff. We could do a lot more to prevent military dictatorships in other countries simply by stopping supplying them with money and arms! And where humanitarian crises are occurring, such as in the Sudan right now - we could be there helping.
Oh well enough for one morning.
DC August 29 2004 - The Russian planes going down is interesting, for those who have a sense of history longer than last week's news - but look at all the debris in the pictures!- wings, and engines, and wheels, and body parts all over the place - big chunks of stuff, that are very obviously airplanes. (twilight zone music do do do do etc) - now think back to the day the planes were driven into the world trade center - it was over an hour before the buildings came down - think back to all the shots of airplane parts lying around the ground at the foot of those buildings!! (???????????) - and the Pentagon especially - all the wing and fuselage bits, and wheels, and engines, and - ??????What?? There weren't any debris parts?? None of them huge engines? Wings? A tail???? No fuselage bits???? How odd Watson!!!!!! Hmmmm!!!!!!!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA - How odd that on one particular day all the planes that had unhappy endings basically disintegrated ("vaporized") when they encountered a solid object (actually ground is pretty much more solid than buildings full of space and windows!) - but a couple of years later in Russia, they just mostly broke up into big pieces lying around for everyone to see and examine!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA there he goes with them darn coincidence theories again!!!
Most recent ravings HERE
Notes:
*that doesn't mean boy and girl trolls, we all know a rat in a dress is still a rat hahaha - it means big trolls, like Asper and d'Aquino and Mulroney, and little trolls, like the neocon "journalists" and "judges" and "cops", those traitors to We the People without whom the big trolls could not survive...
|
