In presenting Vladímir Putin’s 21st Century equivalent to Khruschev’s “We will bury you.” the CBC last night failed to read Putin’s macho but desperate attempt to show the whole world that no one, not even the US, can come out of a nuclear war unscathed.
Our CBC only approximated fairness last night. Still the same, implied, refrain meant to be innately picked up by couch potato feelers:
“See? Putin is, as we said, ruthlessly scary etc.” A deliberate misread, in my opinion.
The real NATO threat that has forced Russia’s hand: America’s broken promise not to expand NATO Eastward beyond Germany, made to Eduard Shevardnadze by James Baker in 1990 and illustrated by this brilliantly sarcastic image:
The answer to a friend’s worthwhile tweet question “Can’t we all just go home and respect others’ need for security?” is, I believe, in Simon and Garfunkel’s “people talking w/o speaking” (the weaponized mainstream media) and, since 2001, largely for profit FBI and CIA: the “Neon god they made.”
Disturbed’s inspired, intensely visual, version of Simon and Garfunkel’s amazingly prescient (so clearly now) The Sound of Silence…
And the original by Simon and Garfunkel… with high praise for their poetic insight.
A delightful, irreverent, Aussie phrase for unthinking submission to the status quo, blind faith in the “experts.” I got the expression from a great CBC Ideas Podcast called It’s the Economists, Stupid on the scary B.S. and hubris of this pseudo-science.
Sometimes I picture a worker bending over in a field… or something more bawdy… The powerful like us that way.
Come on folks! We owe some difficult work to our grandkids. We all must do more than trust the “news” fed to us by any mainstream paper, radio station or channel to be accurate. Should we trust respectable sources like the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, the Guardian? The CBC? PBS? BBC?
Hell, no! We need to use alternative sources of news.
Why alternatives? While the traditional sources will point out some negatives about political figures and policy through their token liberals, on some of the huge issues of geopolitics (like, for one, the US/NATO/Ukraine/Russia debacle) even the most respected media are presenting the neocon-approved side almost all the time. They were wrong in unison with Bush and Cheney on Iraq’s WMD; only Canada’s PM, Jean Chretien, was brave enough to disagree publicly in 2003. And there are many more abject failures that most of us aren’t aware of – Libya, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Honduras, etc.
Not to do some fact-checking as an elector is failing to fulfill your duty as a citizen – your duty to your grandchildren and future generations.This is because our democracy is on life support.
Never before in history has so much been asked of the average citizen.
Check my blogroll for some of the truly alternative news and opinion sources.
The respected MSM are all singing essentially the same tune as the tabloids – though the harmonies may be more complex – a few more flat 9ths and a smattering of augmented 5ths, perhaps. They distract us with cute human interest stories, advertising, endless repetition of items sanctioned by the powerful and not even daring to mention other key viewpoints on hugely important issues. They serve the tiniest fraction of the population: the 0.0001% who corporately control all US presidents and everything else on our planet.
Many billions are spent every year on false news to keep the corporate ball rolling.
In the U.S. they offer Americans the choice between Democrat and Republican, which really means “You can have your choice of two candidates in November, neither of whom will rock the deadly neocon destroyer skippered by the super rich.” Significant differences are basically imaginary. Neither the erratic Donald Trump nor the closet neocon, Hillary Clinton, will make the world a better place. You can have strawberry or vanilla, but it’s ice cream only, folks, and there are only two flavours.
And Justin Trudeau just may turn out to be on the wrong side of the two biggest issues, for me, in Canada: punitive trade deals like the TPP (bad) and true Proportional Representation (good).
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What politics do I read?
Tweets and their linked articles. Following the Arab Spring got me started.
Following the farcical, phoney, Dutch-led, America-run (let’s face it), investigation into the MH17 incident devoured my time for over a year and still brings me back to Twitter. Ukraine, one suspect of the shoot-down, has a veto over what gets published!
Robert Parry, via consortium news.com. Parry won awards in the 80’s when he exposed Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal and one in 2015 from Harvard for distinguished investigative journalism. He still has CIA contacts who give him the scoop on stuff.
John Kerry… just kidding…
Noam Chomsky. In the 80’s I discovered him on US exploitation of its Central and South American back yard.
Naomi Klein of no-logo and BDS fame, and a recent convert to environmentalism.
The New Republic, thought-provoking for more than century (since 1914).
Lots of other stuff.
To what do I listen? CBC podcasts, particularly three:
Writers and Company, the wonderful in-depth interview skills of Eleanor Wachtel interviewing so many of the great writers.
Ideas, on every night from 9 PM until 10, hosted by the great Paul Kennedy
The Sunday Edition, with its illustrious, long-time host Michael Enright.
These three, at their best, almost make me feel guilty, glancing sometimes over my shoulder in fear of the Orwellian thought police. Try them; you’ll like them. The link to CBC Podcasts is also in my blogroll.
What do I watch on TV?
Almost nothing. It is not the best, or the healthiest, use of my time (it makes me curse). Mainstream TV news is entertainment and, much worse, propaganda, increasingly styled à la WW II.
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So for the sake of your grandchildren, get off your intellectual ass and find alternatives to the easy stuff. We OWE our descendants a better chance at survival.
Harper lied about the “greatness” of his economic stewardship. Sooo…
Harper Will Lie About The TPP:
In 2011 the Harper minority government was defeated after they were found to be in contempt of parliament. They denied a contract had been signed (LIE) and kept on lying about the cost. They won a majority with a whopper of a lie. From rabble.ca:
On March 25, 2011 Harper’s government was brought down after a non-confidence vote and a finding that the Conservatives were in contempt of Parliament for refusing to disclose full information about the cost of the fighter jets, as well as the cost of their crime legislation.
Throughout the election campaign, Harper and his campaign insisted on figures between $14-16 billion. But, at the highest levels, they must have known it was false.
So they lied. Harper knew, and Harper lied. Harper lied before, during and after the election campaign that saw him win a majority government.
Harper has and will continue to lie about the virtues of the TPP. Here are key questions we must demand answers for, not from his or any CPC mouth, but from the publication of the actual document signed on October 5 or any other source known to be correct:
The Questions:
BGH: American milk and meats use Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH), suspected of being associated with cancer. Will we be exposed to this?
Food Safety: Will Cdn standards on food safety (already weakened by Harper cuts to Food inspector jobs) be further weakened by TPP?
Labeling: Will Canadian products still be identified in supermarkets?
Bank Deregulation: Will banking regulations be weakened?
Privacy: Will Canadian privacy, already blown away by C-51, be further jeopardized by this agreement?
Temporary Foreign Workers: Can foreign corporations that procure TFW’s sue for lost income if Canada cuts numbers of TFW’s? This is already being done in a case about McDonalds. And Canadian Seafarers are threatened and fighting back. TFW’s are themselves abused and are already being inappropriately used to keep Canadians making a just wage from working.
Job Losses: Will Canadian jobs be lost in large numbers to workers from countries with lower wages, labour standards, less unionization?
Investor-State Dispute Settlements: ISDSagreements allow foreign corporations to sue the ass off countries and cities that enact legislation to protect health care, the environment, jobs, wages and democracy.
Other Trade Deals: Trade deals (TPP, TIPP, CETA, TISA), written in secret by Corporation lawyers, all contain similar threats to democracy, environment, health and jobs. For example, this from the Independent (UK) on TTIP: Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
This is my incomplete list. Please check out these questions and feel free to comment (PLEASE) or to add your own.
Today is a key day in the negotiations for the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement. Japan is going home on Monday. I hope that it does not pass.
This is a quick summary of some stuff I tweeted today in response to a tweet by a concerned @inky_mark that links to a Globe and Mail article about the now or never aspect of this trade deal.
The Globe and Mail falsely holds up #TPP as vital to Canada’s future trade and growth.
What the Globe doesn’t say is that the TPP is anti-CBC, anti small farms, anti Canada Post, anti public utilities and any vital national service that is publicly funded and not “profitable.”
The TPP would be an impregnable legal fortress defending the unsustainable, planet-killing growth of unfettered capitalism. A vehicle for corporations to sue countries for enacting laws that protect the environment or the marginalized if these laws impact the sacred “God-given” rights of multinational corporations (MNC’s).
In their otherwise useful article, the Globe and Mail deceives by omission as usual. It has shed light on some of the details, but has left out the dangerous points I raise above.
Then there is the overall picture:
In essence the TPP, led principally by U.S. corporations, including the beneficiaries of its obscene war machine, is America’s latest attempt to isolate China, Europe and BRICS Nations. It ignores issues of environmental sustainability. By replacing publicly-funded institutions with more expensive private corporations it wages a class war against the middle class and the planet’s poor. It will take us back to poverty, sickness and, ultimately, serfdom.
Finally, I fear, this competition about power and scarcity will take us into a military WWIII.
Looks like the environmental Rip Van Winkles among us, after letting Monsanto, Bayer et al. poison everything that isn’t a profitable crop, are finally getting a rude awakening:
CBC’s Ontario Today asked people to call in and report what species they’re not seeing now that they used to see. The many responses were scary. Here’s one dramatic example:
Russ, a farmer from Acton, ON, has seen 50 barn swallows every year in his barn. This year: NONE. Suddenly, none.
We snored through the Monsanto Roundup years and even the recent Bayer Neonicotinoid bee-killing years. “Health Canada” is a disgrace to its name, in recent years just a follower and a pawn of agribusiness and big pharma. And, down south, Monsanto is close to being favoured with draconian legislation that will nullify a ton of existing local American laws against GE crops!!
Maybe the accelerated vanishing of our feathered, fellow-vertebrate friends like barn swallows and (in our back yard) hummingbirds, will wake us up to the global threat to the entire food chain caused by pesticides that are hugely potent and woefully undertested. We are blind to the critical importance of the tiny, even microscopic, living things in this world, without which the bigger things like us can not continue to survive.
Gotta be a better way than snoozing our way to mass extinction…
Acropolis from the Plaka Hotel, October 24, 2011 … Hey, is THIS for sale???
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Europe has never been asked what happened to what they gave Greece. They simply didn’t control it. Why not? Because Germany and France have done good business.
Petros Markaris
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Petros Markaris is a very popular Athens-based, Greek author and playwright who has created a series of novels based on an Athens police detective called Costas Haritos. Markaris was born in 1937 in Istanbul to an Armenian father and Greek mother. The family moved to Athens when Markaris was 17. He went to university in Vienna and can write in German, Greek and Turkish. He has lived in Athens for four decades. He is a candid lover of Greece and an astute observer of its politics.
Decades ago (I’m guessing ca. 1980) an adult family conversation occurred in my parents apartment. My cousin’s husband was very successful, having studied computers and accounting at university before the digital age took off. He traveled the world setting up distribution systems for a major door-to-door cosmetic firm.
He had recently participated in a think-tank session on the future, in which young, forward-looking minds from Canadian industry, government, media and trade unions had been asked to participate. He had a piece of inside information to share:
Industry and government were, way back then, looking at the potential problems that would occur when the typical 40-hour work week shrunk due to information technology and the great unwashed found ourselves with time on our hands and an increased feeling of alienation from the sense that we were contributing to society through work that could be thought of as useful and worthwhile.
One major conclusion:
Ways must be found to keep the masses occupied and entertained.
On December 2nd CBC’s Evan Solomon presented Ryerson Professor, and lawyer, Pam Palmater arguing against the First Nations Financial Transparency Act. Arguing for so-called “transparency” was Aaron Wudrick of the small, parsimonious, right-wing lobby group, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. If you can wait out a compulsory 90 seconds of commercials forced upon you by CBC Player you can listen to the powerful Palmater dissect and consume Aaron the Unreadyhere. It’s worth the corporation-enforced wait.
I will not précis the whole issue but will only say that the Harper CPC can only get away with this egregious harassment of First Nations because of the abysmally ignorant state of Canadians on everything to do with our First Nations. Government “logic” succeeds only because of the typical Canuck couch potato’s massively wrong assumptions and deep, unconscious prejudice about our indigenous people. “Settler” mentality creates big holes in public awareness for the government offence to run through.
Via huge omnibus bills the Harper Conservatives have passed (undebated) a boatload of needle-in-haystack legislation designed to totally destroy the power of our First Nations to stay united and fight pipelines and other attacks on our shared and fragile biosphere.
Professor Palmater maintained, in a talk to Idle No More – Alberta, that:
“It’s time to come up with a plan to let Canadians know that we (i.e. First Nations – ed.) are their only hope of saving the land and waters and animals and plants in this country.”
Here, largely as a note to self, is a very old concept diagram I built from a small book or article whose source I cannot remember. It is from the “days of yore,” designed to examine tools, and dirty tricks, used in actual verbal or written discussion:
This wide-ranging, timely yet historical, superbly researched and linked article from FreeThePressCanada on the way our freedoms are being severely reduced scared the crap out of even cynical, septuagenarian, constipated ol’ me.
Lots of interesting puzzles about recent news events, precipitated, perhaps, by puzzling irregularities in Canadian and/or US media coverage of the killings in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and Ottawa. Lots of background information on the ongoing interference with our media and our liberties in general is also presented.
Anyway, just to whet your appetite, the article points out downright unethical revision (replacement, almost) of a Toronto Star article on the Quebec car killing – the article was taken down and rewritten without “error” notices. The revisions removed witness testimony that Rouleau came out with his hands up! It also mentions the US media knowing the name of the Ottawa shooter while curious Canadian reporters were shouted at by soldiers pointing guns to get out or move – even off the roof of the Chateau Laurier. Tweet machine Kady O’Malley being one of those reporters.
mightyturk 