What happens to journalism when narrative detaches from reality?

I watched a great podcast today that addressed that Q in some detail. Retired US military guy Danny Davis had retired Brit spook and diplomat Alastair Crooke on, and they spent an hour dissing the Empire that once provided their paycheques. They covered in some detail the Trump regime's ongoing campaign to pursue policies completely divorced from on-the-ground realities. The American Empire is bleeding out in the Middle East and it is bleeding out in Ukraine, and there's no strategy in sight that promises anything other than more bleeding. Yes, for Russia and Iran, but ultimately, for America too. Our legacy media still push the absurd notion that a Ukrainian victory is just around the corner. I can't imagine what corner that might be. There was a time just weeks into this war when a peace deal was just around the corner, but then Boris showed up with "NATO is 100% behind you with whatever it takes for as long as it takes." Ukraine has been taking the dirty end ever since and there's been no sign NATO ever had either the guns or the balls to fight, although they are planning some new factories that might begin to address NATO deficiencies in... oh ten or twenty years or so? Yet legacy media platforms keep pushing for more war. That's an embarrassment to the profession of jounalism. Just today Doug Saunders informed me that Zelly may in fact be the reincarnation of Winston Churchill, but, like Winston, he's a really shitty leader on the domestic side. Sure, so that's the guy to follow if you're keen for more war? How is that still attached to reality? Doug asserts that Zelly's election in 2019 was the "permanent end to far-right politics in Ukraine." Huh? Within two weeks of Zelly's win the far-right had overturned his election platform 100% and consolidated their grip on power. I'm sure Dopey Doug understands this as well as I do, but his paycheque depends on hewing to the approved narrative long after it's completely detached from reality. At the end of the war, hopefully there will be some accountability for the hordes of Western politicians who kept pushing for more war. NATO reparations for Ukraine after our war-mongering destroyed their country is the least we owe Ukraine.

Globe & Mail once again bullshitting us about Ukraine disaster

One of the top knobs at the Globe brain trust offers a masterpiece of revisionist history in his Saturday op-ed; Toxic myths about Ukraine are poisoning its future. Here are the toxic myths, or “three malicious fictions about 2014,” as Doug Saunders puts it. There was a coup in 2014 The coup involved NATO The United States and its officials interfered You need to read the whole thing yourself to fully appreciate Doug’s nuanced grasp of geopolitics, but here’s his concluding paragraph, just to give you a taste; Talk of Ukraine joining NATO, and of significant Western support, didn’t really begin until after Mr. Putin’s second invasion in 2022. A decade ago, the Americans and NATO both wanted to stay away from Ukraine. Far from the “Western expansion” fictions, the fate of Ukraine was left to Ukrainians. Oddly enough, NATO itself contradicts Doug’s nonsense. Check out Relations with Ukraine on their website. Here’s a quote; In response to Ukraine’s aspirations for NATO membership, Allies agreed at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine will become a member of NATO. According to Doug, 2008 was the year NATO made it “clear they did not want Kyiv in the alliance!” I don’t want to rush to judgement, but it looks like the Globe is publishing bullshit again. Here’s the text of my letter to the editor. To: Letters The historical record reveals Mr. Saunders' "three malicious fictions" are themselves toxic myths.  Saunders claims that the infamous Nuland-Pyatt recordings, widely interpreted as America choosing the next government, was made after Yanukovych "stepped down," and was merely "expressing her wish that more democratic candidates would prevail -as one would hope any diplomat would." In fact, the tape was released on February 4th, Yanukovych "stepped down" on February 21st, and the candidate favored by Nuland and Pyatt was president by the end of the month. Nuland also claimed in 2014 that the US had invested over $5 billion in "promoting democracy" in Ukraine since 1991. The claim that "talk of joining NATO didn't really begin until 2022" is equally spurious. The Globe and Mail archives reveal an abundance of stories and op-eds that focused on exactly that, going back at least as far as the early days of the Harper government. It is relentless American interference(with the enthusiastic support of Canada) in the internal politics of Ukraine that has poisoned its future. Dieter Neumann

Move over Uncle Sam; here comes Dudley Do-Right

Globe and Mail star pontificator Doug Saunders had an alarming op-ed in the paper today. Given that the ignorant masses in the USA have just elected a fascist president, the Free and Democratic World obviously needs fresh leadership, and it’s time for us Canadians “and our allies” to step up. Yessiree, the future of democracy depends on us! And our allies… You know; Germany, France, UK… Looks to me like our allies are all having existential crises. Olaf the liver sausage’s government just collapsed. Macron is barely hanging on, mainly via procedural chicanery, and the UK, of all the Nations of Virtue, is clearly winning the race to failed-state status. Which leaves us Canadians to shoulder the burden of leadership of the Free and Democratic World. Doug admits that’s gonna be expensive. But he assures us it’s a worthwhile endeavor. After all, there is nothing more important than ramping up our military capability so we can fight those evil-doers who threaten the Free and Democratic World. Like Russian and China and Iran and North Korea… Yup, we and our allies have no greater challenge than whupping the bad guys on the battlefield! So full speed ahead on hundreds of billions in spending on F-35s and warships and rockets and missiles and bombs! Ya, we’ll have to make some sacrifices, but health care, education, and housing aren’t worth shit if you don’t have Freedom.

Blaming the victims for instability in the Middle East and North Africa

Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders has an intriguing take on "Arab Spring 2.0" in today's paper.

According to Doug, back in 2011 Western leaders were "jumping over each other" to support popular uprisings in the Arab world. But, due to how things have since turned out, particularly in Libya, their enthusiasm to get behind current popular unrest in Algeria and Sudan has waned mightily.

Doug poses the rhetorical question, "Would the Middle East and North Africa be in better shape if its strongman dictators... had been kept in place?" He finds his answer in Syria, where "the al-Assad regime remains in power... and the mass uprising against him was denied a victory, either through deliberate neglect or insufficient commitment from outside."

Note the assumption that it is up to Western leaders, outsiders, to determine the course of politics in Arab nations. With the exception of Libya and Syria, no Western leaders anywhere were "jumping over each other" to support any popular uprisings in 2011, certainly not in Tunisia, or Egypt, or Bahrain, or Yemen.

In Egypt, the West backed away from Arab Spring from the beginning, and fully connived in the overthrow of the Morsi government in 2013.

In Libya and Syria, on the other hand, modest popular protests were soon fanned into regime-change operations via wholesale interventions by the West. Oddly enough, those were two secular Arab states which had made reasonable, in Libya's case exceptional, progress in human development.

Libya was perhaps a special case. So few people, all that oil; that's a combo bound to pique the interest of the humanitarian interventionists in the West, which it did.

The strongman dictator of Syria didn't have a lot of oil, but did have the misfortune of sharing a common border with Israel, and that alone is enough to make a stable Syrian government a threat to US interests. Here's a telling headline from the Guardian in 2012; Most Syrians back President Assad, but you'd never know from western media. That was Jonathan Steele on western propaganda, an unrelenting barrage of disinformation that has persisted right up until Doug's column today.

As for the future, "getting behind the people in the street" in Sudan seems a dubious goal. The "educated, hopeful, next generation" will hopefully get educated sufficiently to understand that our "help" is generally not in the interests of the people we purport to be helping.

**************
Further reading on Sudan and Arab Spring

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/07/2013710113522489801.html

http://www.gallup-international.com/surveys/syria-poll-march-2018/

https://www.howwemadeitinafrica.com/the-decline-of-sudans-cappuccino-sipping-middle-class/44575/

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/04/quietly-angrily-washington-confronts-its-wayward-offspring-south-sudan-africa-diplomacy-foreign-aid-war-conflict-peace-deal-salva-kiir/

Mainstream media and the Ministry of Truth

With the latest tweaks to the Google algorithms that decide who might or might not happen upon this blog, I think my regular readership has dwindled down to Mum, Dad, my old pals Kipling, Robert, and Iris, and Ken from BC. A blog that for several years had three to four thousand looks per month struggles to attract two dozen per day.

Why?

I don't think the problem is the quality of the writing. Hell no! In fact, this blog is pure poetry compared to a lot of stuff out there!

No, I think it's more about content... and there is no denying that a lot of stuff here falls afoul of the parameters set out by the freshly minted "Critical Election Incident Protocol Group," also known as the Ministry of Truth.

Those are the folks charged with making sure the general public doesn't get exposed to "fake news." What is fake news? It's anything that doesn't jibe with official Western ideology as promulgated by NATO, the Atlantic Council, and "mainstream" media.

Let me walk you through today's Globe and Mail to provide a few examples of this phenomenon.

The Globe and Mail remains, pretensions of PostMaster Paul Godfrey aside, Canada's "newspaper of record." The front page today is the first of a five page nothingburger about Bad Vlad's "seizure" of Crimea. A couple of thousand words into the story, Mark MacKinnon acknowledges that "most Crimeans did, and do, favour union with Russia."

In other words, there's no actual story here. You can call the Crimean referendum a "sham" all you want, but once you've acknowledged that the overwhelming majority of Crimeans prefer being part of Russia to remaining part of Ukraine, there is no point in pursing this line of reasoning.

Elizabeth Renzetti's service to objective journalism I've already dealt with, in a post that has garnered a grand total of one page view several hours after it was published.

In the "opinion" section, we've got Mr. Renzetti, Canada's answer to Thomas Friedman, giving over his entire column to Bill Browder's paranoid fantasies. Apparently Bill is disappointed that Canada has failed to take a leadership role in his campaign to slander Putin and glorify himself. We've done much, but we coulda done more!

Here's how Doug characterizes Browder's wholesale looting of the post-Soviet Russian economy; "Bill Browder... became very wealthy running an investment fund that profited from Russia's awkward postcommunist transition."

I guess that's one way of putting it.

Not only did Browder make himself very wealthy on the backs of the impoverished Russian populace, he has been gifted with a CIA-supplied magic wand that opens up editorial board rooms of newspapers of record throughout the "free" world!


So, in this new era of post-truth Truths, you can bet that the fantasies of a Bill Browder will meet the truthiness criteria of the "Critical Election Incident Protocol Group" with flying colours, whereas any dissenting opinions will be well and truly buried.

Doug's world

Doug Saunders has quite the wagon-load of wishful thinking on view in my Globe and Mail today. The headline gives it away; "Canada  almost saved Venezuela - until Washington crashed the party."

That's right! Canada has been working really hard behind the scenes to restore democracy in Venezuela, and we nearly pulled it off, but then "one man walked into the room, late to the party, and began shouting his support."

That man would be Donald Trump, of course, the know-nothing imbecile currently in the White House. Fearing that the deft diplomacy of Chrystia Freeland would knock him off the top of the news cycle for a few minutes, Trump elbowed his way into a situation that was none of his business, and wrecked all our hard work.

So there you have it. A peaceful transition was within reach, with perhaps a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for Chrystia following soon after...

Hard to know where to begin. First of all, Trump isn't exactly late to the party. America's regime change strategy (also known as "restoring democracy," per the time-honoured US tradition we have seen applied in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, Haiti, Honduras, among others) vis-a-vis Venezuela dates back to the election of Chavez twenty years ago.

In the interval, the US has funded many opposition initiatives in Venezuela, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars through agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy. The "party" going on in Venezuela is pretty much Uncle Sam's party. It's Chrystia and Justin who arrived late.

Secondly, why no mention of US sanctions? I have no doubt that corruption and ineptitude have played a significant role in creating the current mess, but surely many years of US-led sanctions deserve some credit. Doug carefully avoids any mention of the recent Alfred de Zayas UN report on the impact of those sanctions.

Speaking of corruption and ineptitude, Canadians need to take a good hard look at our bedfellows in the "Lima Group." We've tossed our lot in with the likes of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina... any of which could give Venezuela a run for its money in the corruption department. By the way, it's worth noting that the new government in Mexico has been distancing itself from the Lima Group, an act of Trump defiance, which is the exact opposite of what Justin and Chrystia are doing.

Finally, given that Doug's column bears little or no resemblance to the actual political history of US-Venezuela relations over the past two decades, what do you suppose would be the point in writing it?

I see two objectives.

The reputation of the Freeland-Trudeau team on the world stage has taken quite a bruising after diplomatic screw-ups with India, China, Saudi Arabia, and the US. The brain-trust guiding Canada's newspaper of record may believe a little turd-polishing is in order, and what better way to signal our virtue than by taking another gratuitous kick at the Orange Ogre.

The truth of the matter is that Canada and the rest of the "Lima Group" satrapys are 100% bent on advancing America's two-decades-long regime-change strategy in Venezuela. Dissing Trump while kissing Uncle Sam's backside is what used to be called hypocrisy... and that's an arena in which Canada truly does punch above its weight.

Putin against the world

Our corporate media had a good week of it moaning about Putin's latest aggression against the hapless Ukrainians, so anything I read in Doug Saunders me-too column in the Globe today I'd already read several times. I guess Doug is down to one weekend column due to his employer finding efficiencies. Don't sweat it, Doug, the new Amazon warehouse in Vaughn will be hiring soon!

You'll be fine.

Anyway, taking a break from sowing generic chaos and instability around the world, Putin has once again gone out of his way to pay special attention to the immediate threat on Russia's doorstep, Poroshenko's model democracy next door. That's because he's afraid that the Russian people will sooner or later realize that life is so much better there, and they too will demand a Nuland/Payette democratic transfer of power to someone more amenable to taking direction from Washington than the habitually recalcitrant Putin.

Then life will be good!

This line of reasoning, and it is certainly not original to Doug Saunders, as his contemporaries in other major media outlets have been beating this drum all week and Doug had to wait for his weekend slot, contains an inherent contradiction that the apologists for American exceptionalism tend to avoid addressing, which is this; if Putin is indeed "weak and isolated," as we are continuously led to believe, then how does he manage to sow all that global chaos and instability? And not only that, he manages to sow world-wide mayhem with a war chest not 10% of the USA military budget!

Clearly, the man is a genius!


Either that, or our mainstream pundits are full of shit.

The crux of Saunders' imaginary thesis is that Putin is at his most dangerous when cornered, as he is now. How do we know we've got Putin cornered? His approval rating is down to 60%.

Let's apply that logic to the cornered career criminals in the Nations of Virtue. Macron and Merkel are under 30%. The greatest leader since Moses is in the high 30s. Trump is in the low 40s. Our own PM Fluffy is barely over 50%.


But Putin is on the brink because he's only got a 60% approval rating?

Helmet laws

I'm pretty sure we've got helmet laws here in Ontario. True, I prefer not to wear one myself, but I'm just putting around back roads in the neighborhood, where there's little chance of a) needing one, and b) getting caught without one. That wind-in-the-hair thing is worth the risk, and I plan to chase that thrill as long as I've got any hair left.

I raise the question because yesterday, as I was coming back from Wiarton with my Saturday Globe and Mail, a guy on a very loud Harley goes thundering past with his helmet dangling from his elbow! Technically, I guess he was wearing a helmet, but isn't there something in the law to specify that it must be worn on the head?

As for the Globe, (still $6.30 at the Korean extortionist) I have to say there's not much in it this week. Wente seems to think that Justin's "we won't get pushed around" bravado was perhaps ill-advised, and I'm inclined to agree with her. It is true though that, at least in the short term, Trump's antics have done wonders in bringing Canadians together.

Doug's got a sure-fire plan for how the Democrats can derail the Trump Train in the mid-terms and in 2020. They can outflank the GOP on the left AND on the right... at the same time! As evidence for this novel theory he cites the recent victories of Conor Lamb and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I'm not so sure. While there remain some authentically progressive voices in Dem circles, and Ocasio-Cortez is certainly one of them, I don't see a long term home for them in the donkey tent.

Unless of course the Bernie crowd succeeds in overthrowing the Dem party establishment and rebuilding the party from the grassroots up. Until that happens the Democrats will just be the other Wall Street Party.

Guest self-promoter Jared Yates Sexton caught my eye with a headline informing me that "now, more than ever, we need to rally around the media, not denounce them."

Sexton was a literary type toiling in well-deserved obscurity until he branched out into political commentary just as the Trump Tide was beginning to rise, and that uncanny timing has led to him becoming a leading voice of "the resistance." The gist of his opinion piece is that Trump bears responsibility for the mass shooting at the Capital Gazette, and not only that; he has single-handedly "inspired a virulent hatred that's led to harassment and death threats."

Really? I think he's giving Trump rather too much credit. Sure, Trump the politician has always been contemptuous of the media, but for at least forty years that same media slobbered all over the guy, giving him the profile that allowed him to go into politics in the first place, and also sowing the seeds for his well-founded contempt for the journalism profession.

The idea of bold journos speaking truth to power might have rang true in some bygone era, but the journalists of today are generally more interested in sleeping with power than speaking truth to it.

Other than that, there was a lot of aren't-we-great pap in keeping with our Canada Day celebration today.

And you know what?

For all the problems, all the challenges, and in spite of everything that's not quite right or could be better, there's no place on this earth I'd rather live.


Happy Canada Day!

Pot-addled hillbilly beats mainstream media to NFL demise by years

Mark Kingswell had an op-ed in my Globe this morning about the demise of the NFL.

I couldn't agree more.

Obviously, the pot-addled hillbilly here at Falling Downs was all over this insight well before Kingswell, one of the top intellectual prognosticators in all the land.

In other insights from the Globe and Mail's op-ed page, I've got The Plagiarist bemoaning the barbarian storming the gates in Ontario's election, and Doug Saunders bemoaning the implosion of the democratic world at the G7 shindig in Quebec.


Here's what the pot-addled hillbilly prognosticator thinks, and you'd be well advised to pay attention, because I generally beat the mainstream experts to the nitty-gritty by a generous margin.

The NFL, the G7, and business-as-usual politics in Ontario are all well beyond their best-before dates.


Change is long over-due.

Al Jazeera on press freedom in Canada

I don't really follow the goings on at the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression NGO. I blithely assume that as Canadians we are privileged to enjoy one of the free-est media environments on the planet.

Sure, it's obvious that the big media platforms are all singing out of the same hymnal, but we've long enjoyed a healthy sub-culture of counter-mainstream media, from The Tyee and Rabble on the left to Ezra Levant's rancid Rebel Media at the other end of the spectrum.

It therefore came as somewhat of a surprise to learn, via Al Jazeera of all things, that Kevin Metcalf, the communications officer for CJFE, was recently canned for having the temerity to call out our government for its failure to censure Israel for the murder of unarmed protesters in Gaza. Oddly enough, the think tank here at Falling Downs had just made the same observation.

Interesting to see Doug Saunders tweet referenced in the AJ story. Doug is Canada's Tom Friedman. As the most high-profile prognosticator at Canada's newspaper of record, Doug has a lot of schlep, and Doug was "disturbed" to see CJFE trying to influence our government's position on Israel.

I guess if you're gonna disturb Doug, your career is at risk.

Well Doug, our department of Global Affairs routinely expresses our outrage over perceived transgressions against fundamental human rights all over the world on a near daily basis.

Perhaps you could explain why criticism of Israel is out of bounds.

Globe and Mail normalizing Trump

Seems to me the guardians of Canada's democracy at 351 King are letting their guard down. All through the first section, not a single headline with the name "Trump" in it. Nowhere in the Opinion section either. And not a single letter to the editor mentions Trump even in passing.

Let's hope they're over their obsession with Trumpian doggerel. It's nice to have my newspaper back.

Silly Philly demonstrated a new trick this morning on our trip to ransom the Saturday Globe from the Korean extortionist. Exiting the car via the window. I had just parked the car out at the water treatment plant to let the girls out for a romp, when she popped up outside my window. She'd let herself out. For some time she's been able to lower the back windows by standing her front paws on the arm rest, a trick the gals at the Timmies drive-thru window find really cute. Today was the first time she actually went out the window, though.

Then she did it again five minutes later, as we're driving by the marina on Bayview Street. That's not funny anymore! Luckily, there's not much traffic there in February, but after that I figured I'd best activate the child locks for the first time in many years. In another month her ass will be too big to fit out the window, but in the meantime we'll play it safe.

Another thing that's not funny any more is what screen addiction is doing to our society. The Opinion section features a lengthy discussion between psychiatrist Norman Doidge and Jim Balsille of "Crackberry" fame. Me and the Farm Manager have long been skeptical of all this supposed connectedness technology has gifted us.

We'll be sitting in a restaurant and there's entire families around us so connected that they completely ignore one another.

Mothers are pushing strollers down the street while texting.

Otherwise respectable people think nothing of giving iPads to their pre-schoolers.

Anyway, that alone is well worth the price of the paper.

Elsewhere, I found myself agreeing with both Saunders and Wente's opinion pieces. Not sure what's going on there... maybe those folks are finally coming to their senses?

Or maybe that's just another marker on the side of the Alzheimer Highway. Either way, it's boring to read stuff you agree with.

Democracy Canadian style; an exemplar for the world

Doug Saunders got a lot of column inches in the Globe and Mail opinion section today, mainly because Shribman and Kendzior weren't in it. That left some blank space to fill.

Doug was happy to fill it.

Since I've been bemoaning the presence of those Yankee interlopers for some time, you'd think I'd be happy about this.

I'm not.

Dear Doug devotes his three or four pages to lobbying for more Canadian interference in the electoral process in other countries. After all, that's what we used to do when we used to be great, at least according to Doug.

Doug cites our interference in Ukraine as an example of the good things that could happen when we interfere in other countries. He posits that as an example, and then leaves us hanging.

Maybe he lost his train of thought...

OK Doug; by what metric is Ukraine better off today than it was before we, the purveyors of democracy, pushed for the demise of the democratically elected government of Ukraine?


Sorry Doug, you're just peddling bullshit again.



Dear G&M management,

Please bring back Shribman and Kendzior and stop giving that idiot Saunders all those column inches.

Thanks!

Explaining the difference between capitalism and it's psychopathic spawn, neoliberalism

Canada's Thomas Friedman, Doug Saunders, informs me today that "neoliberalism" and "cultural Marxism" do not exist.

As far as the latter is concerned, he may have a point. In my experience, the folks who invest in that concept tend to be one step or less distant from the "Obama is a communist" crowd, which is a crowd I generally consider too stupid to take seriously.

The neoliberalism thing is a different animal altogether, and since it's what Doug gets paid to shill for on a regular basis it's somewhat disingenuous of him to disclaim its existence.

Saunders may be somewhat close to the mark when he says the "very far left" uses the term as a synonym for capitalism. That's true insofar as we can acknowledge that there are different hues of capitalism at work in our world.

In the America that's been going downhill for fifty years and which recently put the cherry on that downward spiral with the election of Trump, capitalism manifests more or less as neoliberalism. It's a robust, manly, macho capitalism that says billionaires deserve their billions because they're smarter than you and they work harder.

That's a philosophy that translates into a particular suite of policy initiatives. Taxes are bad. The private sector can do everything more efficiently than government. Poor people are weak and stupid and deserve their fate...

And so on.


But there's a different capitalism in much of Europe, where the heirs of Karl Kautsky have nurtured a more effete version of capitalism. Ya, we'll have capitalism but we'll tax the shit out of the rich and make sure everybody has a roof and three squares a day.

That's still capitalism, but it is not neoliberalism.

Globe and Mail gets a makeover

Been seven years in the making, apparently. The only "new" stuff I noticed was the obits are now at the back of the business section instead of the sports section, and there's a "new section for opinion writing," which isn't new at all, but its name has been changed to "Opinion" from "Focus."

Oh, and there's a nifty new feature called "Applause Please." Brad Wheeler wants you to forward the names of any unsung arts and culture heroes you may know so they can get the props they deserve. The inaugural unsung hero is one John H. Daniels, the unknown Torontonian whose name adorns the U of T's Faculty of Architecture. Maybe they should call it "More Applause Please."

Still with architecture, U of T's smarty-pants-at-large Mark Kingswell wants you to know that he's really smart and what universities are doing is indoctrinating students into something called "critical thinking." Of course they are. The recent stinkfest at Laurier is a great example. Had Lindsay Shepherd not left her iPhone in record mode we wouldn't have gleaned that great insight into just how hard universities work to foster critical thinking.

In the course of making his case, Kingswell drops the term "postmodernism" and tells us that "scholars who pay attention to accuracy will tell you that the term first surfaced in 1960s architectural lingo." Actually, I'd hope they wouldn't; the pot-addled hillbilly is no scholar, but even I can tell you Kingswell is a few decades off the mark with that assertion.

One of the more intriguing reads is Kate Taylor's piece on Call me by your name, the story of a love affair between a man and an underage boy. Hmm... I wonder when they're gonna film the love story about an assistant District Attorney and an underage girl in Alabama? And when they do, will it be deemed Oscar worthy?

Elsewhere, Doug Saunders get's our attention with the shocking headline that "Jerusalem was "Israel's last hope of peace - until Trump threw it away." Ya right. In the fifty years since the occupied territories were occupied, there's been plenty of time to move closer to the fictitious "two state solution." If anything, this story would provide a good point of departure for an investigation into Israeli influence in US politics, but apparently that topic remains taboo.

Overall, the "makeover" leaves me wondering who cares. Not as desperately daft as the exercise in "creative execution" from a couple of years ago, but seriously, what's the point? I'd rather they spent the money wasted on consultants in hiring back some of the proof-readers they used to have around the place. When you can't read the lead editorial in Canada's newspaper of record without tripping over multiple typos, the fact that they've tried to spruce up the old sow with a coat of fresh lipstick leaves one underwhelmed.

Maybe the "Head of Experience" will look into that.

What up in the Kingdom?

Doug Saunders, Canada's answer to Thomas Friedman, laid a bit of an egg with his opinion piece in the Globe yesterday, if you want to know my six dollars and thirty cents worth. I mean, what was that other than another not-so-thinly veiled plug for his book?

Ya Doug, we know! You've got a book coming out. Maximum Canada... I hope a hundred million Canadians get to read it someday. Now try to write your column without mentioning that you've a book coming out.

By the way, I'm guessing you've noticed by now you miss-spelled the name of Canada's Immigration Minister. Five times in one editorial. Come on, Doug, pull up your socks! I pay $6.30 every Saturday to read this shit.

But anyway, what's afoot in The Kingdom? Looks to me like the boss princeling is working overtime putting his stamp on things. Let's see... so far, he's engineered the Yemen war.

Epic fail.

The collapse of global oil prices.

Epic fail. As far as I can see, that ambitious strike against Russia and Iran turned out to be a near-mortal self-inflicted wound more than anything.

Let's not forget the brouhaha with Qatar. The only question about that fail is how epic it'll turn out to be in the final analysis.

And now, the putsch. The "night of the long knives" as some are calling it. The KSA hasn't seen this much intrigue since Bandar Bush went AWOL for a spell a few years ago! The Hariri angle is the icing on the cake.

Netanyahu went overboard trying to make hay out of that one. Hmm... maybe Hariri knows something? Maybe he knows that the immediate future of his country is looking rather bleak, and he'd rather spend the next few weeks in Riyadh than in Beirut?

But back to the putsch. One thing I'm wondering; was this a preemptive strike? Did Crown Prince MBS get wind of something and decide he'd rather be the hammer than the nail? In any event, looks like there could be a rush of "high net worth" Saudi refugees looking for a roof soon.

Or a luxury suite. Or a few floors of a five star hotel. Luckily, Canada has the infrastructure in place to accommodate this imminent refugee flow.

The Lebanese won't be a problem either, once the fireworks start. I mean, half those folks already hold Canadian passports. They won't even be refugees... they'll just be coming home!

Hezbollah today, here tomorrow! That's OK too. At least it'll get easier to find a decent tabbouleh. And that divine Bekaa Valley Blonde those people are renowned for.

I wouldn't worry about the Israelis either. Most of those people already hold US or German passports, so let them go there. The rest we can take in as refugees. That would make up for the shame of the MS St. Louis debacle back in '39.

So between a half million Israelis, six million Lebanese, and whoever can escape the clutches of the Insane Clown Prince, I figure we could be welcoming a good ten million refugees in the next few months.

Looks like we'll be well on our way to Maximum Canada!

Maximum Canada: Why 35 million Canadians are not enough to keep making the rich richer

Doug Saunders has been pounding the maximum immigration drum for a few years now, and he's got a new book out that promises to up the decibel level a few notches. What better way for his publisher to ensure a friendly reception for the book than to farm out the review to Irvin Studin, who has himself been banging on the same drum for the better part of a decade?

For better or worse, Studin gives the game away with a shout-out to The Century Initiative, "an ambitious new think tank... created explicitly to prepare Canada for our evolution to 100 million."

Created by whom, you ask?

Good question! A cynic might say The Century Project is a side project for big biz/big gov mega-consultants McKinsey & Co, and they'd be more or less correct. As such, they bring a particular world view to bear on their vision for the future. Specifically, they are aghast that current demographic trends will irrevocably impair future growth of Canada's GDP.

The solution? Open the immigration floodgates! Recruit the best and the brightest from around the world in their tens of millions! It's the only way to ensure our continued prosperity, don't ya know!

I'm not so sure. I get that when these folks look out the windows of their multi-million dollar homes they see the lovely diverse and prosperous Canada of their cliches, but that's not the Canada most Canadians live in. Most Canadians struggle with housing affordability, job and income insecurity, child-care availability, and a litany of similar pedestrian concerns that don't trouble the tenured and the connected.

That aside, hasn't the notion of perpetual growth in a finite world lost some of its lustre over the past few decades? We should be focused on ensuring sustainable prosperity for the 35 million who call Canada home today, shouldn't we? And we have a very long way to go in creating that inclusive prosperity for all before we even get around to worrying about its sustainability.

We need to get our house in order before we put out the welcome mat for tens of millions of "new Canadians."

Otherwise, they'll just be propping up an economic model that has long outlived its usefulness.


Look around you.

Globe and Mail tells you twice, in case you missed it the first time

The folks on the bridge of the Good Ship Globe & Mail want you to believe that the USA was a benign hegemon from 1945 till January 20 of this year. Sure, those Yanks may have made a misstep here or there once or twice, but that's to be expected when the weight of the world is on your shoulders, and besides, even those missteps were clearly cases of good intentions gone sour - through no fault of America, of course.

Yup, for over seventy years the planet basked in an unprecedented era of peace and freedom and democracy and prosperity, thanks to America's leadership.

Then Donald ascended to the oval office and darkness descended on the planet.

Just how dark is it?

Oh, dark enough to give Doug Saunders some prime Focus section real estate in today's paper. Chances are if you're a regular G&M reader you already know Doug's opinion on Trump, so there's nothing new here.

Maybe that's why the guys who make the big decisions at 351 King decided to commission an article by an actual history professor from U of T to run right beside Doug's rant saying more or less the same stuff.

See! Doug's not full of shit; real live history professors from Canada's number one university agree with him!

In fairness, Doug does see a bit of a silver lining; "the West may regroup," whereas our U of T historian claims "the fracturing of the transatlantic relationship is a disaster for the world."

What's been a disaster for much of the world has been the last seventy plus years of American leadership. Sure, Western Europe has enjoyed relative peace and prosperity, but there's more to the world than Western Europe.

How has Southeast Asia enjoyed these last seventy years of US leadership?

Or Central America?

Or Afghanistan or Iraq or Libya?

How are our European allies enjoying the refugee crisis that US foreign policy has gifted them?

How are the people of Greece enjoying the austerity enema that our idol Angela has been forcing on them for the past few years?

Yes, great things will happen if the West "regroups" behind the leadership of big-bank toadies Merkel and Macron!

Doug, I fear you are sadly mistaken.

Night did not fall on the 20th of January. In much of the world, it's been getting darker for a long time.

Trump is a mere symptom.

"American exceptionalism" is the disease.

Spring's sprung

Me and the Farm Manager were sitting on the front porch this afternoon, enjoying the warm weather, when the first guy of the season in bicycle pants rode by.

A sure sign that spring has sprung. There's a cycling club in Owen Sound that has the road in front of Falling Downs as part of their regular 50k loop. These folks always remind me of the punchline to one of Jeff Foxworthy's jokes; "if Burt Reynolds can't get down that river a Frenchman in bicycle pants doesn't stand a chance."

Too bad I can't remember the joke that was the punchline to...

I actually did a lot of cycling in my time. Back in my U of Goo days I used to pass cars coming down the Gordon Street hill. No bicycle pants, no helmet, just a Raleigh 18 speed weaving in and out of traffic after a Sociology of Poverty class and a four hour stint at the campus pub.

Those were the days!

But these days are pretty good too.

Just yesterday I put the canoe in across the road and paddled my way down to Bass Lake. That's a small lake by local standards, but it houses a few dozen cottages and a trailer park. Shame about the trailer park. You'd be hard pressed to find a cottage on that lake for under 400 thousands, but you can rent a trailer site for a hundred bucks a month. On the same lake.

Go figure.

They don't call it a "trailer park," of course; it's a "holiday resort."

Sure it is!

That Bass Lake canoe trip only happens in the spring, when the water's high. In another month I'll be able to walk down the Indian River in rubber boots and reach Bass Lake without getting my socks wet.

Nothing much in my national newspaper of record this weekend. Marcus Gee had a nice take-down of Richard Florida. He was a hot commodity a few years back when U of T hired him. An apostle of intelligent development I suppose you could call him.

Not sure what that means. I've bumped into more than a few folks in that business in my time, and none of them were stupid.

Short-sighted? Greedy? Selfish?

Maybe... but stupid?

Nope.

So Florida is having second thoughts about the thesis that brought him fame and fortune and a tenured post at U of T. Gather up all the young creative disrupters you can and turn them loose on your town. Great things will happen!

Mostly what's happened is the young creatives can no longer afford to live in Toronto.

So it was a beautiful canoe trip. You don't really get into cottage country till you're three quarters of the way down the lake. There was still spots of snow on the ground here and there and I set out a little apprehensive; after all, the historical record of me and canoe trips would suggest there's at least a 50/50 chance of ending up in the drink.

Thank goodness I beat the odds yesterday. The water was really really cold and I couldn't find a life-jacket anywhere.

Doug Saunders had a bit of a mystifying opinion piece in the paper, all about George Soros. Here's the head-scratcher that caught my eye; "One of Europe's most important higher education institutions, Central European University..."

Huh?

CEU was founded twenty-five years ago and has less than 1500 students. We're talking about Europe here. Universities are hundreds of years old and have tens of thousands of students. By what metric might CEU be considered one of Europe's most important higher education institutions?

Come on, Doug. You destroy your own cred with that kind of hyperbole.

But I suppose it can be deemed important in the context of writing hagiography for Soros. CEU is a Soros project from end to end, and Doug's opinion piece this weekend was determined to show the old greed-bag in a good light.

Soros is certainly an interesting character study. On the one hand, he lobbies for higher taxes on billionaires like himself. On the other, he's not shy about availing himself of every tax dodge he can.

On one hand he likes to portray himself as a victim of Antisemitism.  In Israel he's widely considered one of the greatest Antisemites of the modern era.

Soros has partnered for many years with the National Endowment for Democracy, the US government funded "NGO" working non-stop to make the world safer for Soros-style financial looting. By and large it's a strategy that has worked well.

There's the odd hiccup, however. Hungarian president Oban for one has seen through the "open society" schtick, as in being "open" to world class billionaire currency speculators like Soros doesn't necessarily mean good things for the man or woman on the ground in Budapest. Hence the squabble over Soros U.

At no point does Saunders address the obvious elephant in the room; billionaires just have too much money. Whether it's the Koch boys spreading Tea Party goodness or Soros pushing his "open society" agenda, a little tweaking of the tax code would go a long way toward cutting out this foolishness.

We live in messed up times. Former Soros business partner and fellow billionaire, current POTUS Donny J did a 180 on US foreign policy the other day because he saw some "beautiful babies" die on TV.

The Tomahawks were in the air before you could ask for an independent  investigation into that alleged war crime.

It's all too much for me. I think I'll just sit tight and plan my next paddle.

Putting the "fake" into real news

Doug Saunders' journalism has been gracing the pages of Canada's newspaper of record for about twenty years now. His current position is "opinion writer on international affairs" or something along those lines. As such, he's more on the analysis and commentary side of things. In other words, his job is to spin the facts into a narrative that his employer is comfortable with. 

The print version of his column today is titled "The fall of Aleppo:Four sobering lessons." His four sobering lessons also appear in the online version of the story, and I have copied them verbatim below. My comments are italicised. 

Doug Saunders' four sobering lessons from the fall of Aleppo

Did Aleppo "fall" or was it retaken by legitimate government forces?

1. The Islamic State was never the main problem. The territorial ambitions of the ultra-Islamist militia have ruined lives, imprisoned regions and showered terrorist outrages on Western cities. But the newly redrawn map of Syria makes the basic fact more clear: the Islamic State (also known as IS, ISIS or ISIL or Daesh) was purely a product of Mr. al-Assad’s decision to resist a mass uprising against his rule. It only remains a threat as long as he continues his fight.

ISIS was "purely a product of Mr. al-Assad's decision to resist a mass uprising against his rule." It was? Virtually any mainstream explanation of the rise of ISIS posits its roots in the US invasion of Iraq. ISIS evolved out of the radical Islamist insurgency that grew out of that invasion. That's the consensus position on virtually every news site. Mr. al-Assad is not responsible for the creation of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. America is.

The Islamic State will not fade away soon. It just used the chaos of the assault on Aleppo to retake the historic city of Palmyra. But the Islamic State is a symptom, not the disease: Nine out of 10 deaths have been delivered by Mr. al-Assad’s state forces. The Islamic State appeared when he lost legitimacy, and will not disappear until he loses power.

"Nine out of ten deaths have been delivered by Mr. al-Assad's state forces."

They have? Not if you consult the Wikipedia entry for Casualties of the Syrian civil war. The article cites various sources including some that are prominently anti-Assad to come up with estimates of approximately 100,000 government combatant casualties and a similar number of opposition combatant casualties. That takes care of about half the casualties right there. The idea that 90% of the casualties have been innocent civilians targeted by Assad is rubbish.

2. Puppet states are back. Post-Aleppo Syria is a manufactured product of Russian and Iranian military and economic aid, period. Not since the Cold War has a satellite state combined a total lack of public legitimacy with total repression of its people in such a horrendous way. Let us not allow this to become a model.

Mr. al-Assad has a "total lack of public legitimacy?" That's not the opinion of Jonathan Steele in this story at the Guardian titled "Most Syrians back President Assad, but you'd never know from western media."  Nor is Saunder's claim supported by this story at Foreign Policy titled "Assad's Sunni foot soldiers" from 2015. Or this story from The National Interest from earlier this year. These are mainstream sources that Mr. Saunders must be very well acquainted with in his capacity as the Globe's number one foreign affairs commentator. The "total lack of public legitimacy" chestnut is a total fabrication.


3. The refugee camps will become permanent cities. Turkey’s Gaziantep and Sanliurfa camps and the surrounding cities each contain around 300,000 Arabs and Kurds (of 2.5 million now living in Turkey) who have fled Mr. al-Assad’s vengeance. Jordan’s Zaatari and Azraq refugee camps contain more than 140,000 people. As long as the Assad regime remains in control, they cannot return; nor can the much smaller numbers of refugees who have fled to Europe and North America. It is time to start acknowledging these new cities, and populations, as long-term realities that could exist for a decade.

A decade? The Palestinian refugee cities scattered about the Middle East have been around for well over half a century. The reverberations from our failed regime change policy with respect to Assad can be expected to last at least as long. Had Turkey and Jordan not connived with the US "regime change" agenda from the beginning, they wouldn't be facing this refugee burden today.

4. The Libyan option was preferable. The decision by the United States (and Canada) to avoid a full-scale military intervention in Syria in 2012 and 2013 was based largely on recent precedent: The long-term invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were catastrophic failures, leaving little appetite for another. But why, after the gas-attack nightmare of 2013 crossed every red line, didn’t we lend our military strength to unseat Mr. al-Assad? The answer, by then, was Libya: The same thing was done there in 2011, when NATO forces lent air support to the popular move to overthrow their own dictator – and now look at the place. A disaster.

But that’s the less horrific option. Libya is an unstable mess verging on a civil war of its own. But it is not the site of the sort of enormous-scale monstrosities, involving hundreds of thousands of deaths, that it would have become if Moammar Gadhafi had been kept in power and permitted to mete his revenge.

We also have to remember, when contemplating U.S. President Barack Obama’s fateful failure to take action (and Justin Trudeau’s promise not to get involved), that the best possible outcome “getting tough” could have produced would have been something resembling current-day Libya. He would be under attack by media and Republicans for provoking this outcome, and Western militaries would be caught in an impossible position. But hundreds of thousands would likely still be alive.

Just wrecking Syria the way we did Libya would be preferable? Libyans enjoyed the highest standard of living in all of Africa under the "despot" Gadhafi. What are they enjoying today? The disgusting arrogance on display here is utterly despicable. How is it our business to decide what's right for Libya or what's right for Syria?

The Globe and Mail: from Canada's newspaper of record to America's conscience

I'm a newpaper guy from way back. Not that I ever played any part in the business; I just like to hold a paper in my hands as opposed to reading my news off a screen.

The glory days for me were back in my U of Goo days, when the library there had the budget to bring in newspapers from all over the world. Real newspapers where you actually turned the pages. For me, a meaningful morning means (triple alliteration... nice!) a newspaper, a coffee cup, and an ashtray. It's a beautiful thing!

And although the world has gone digital, I still drive into town on Saturday to fork over a ten dollar bill to The Korean in return for a few coins and a Saturday Globe and Mail.

If you can only afford to buy one newspaper per week, that's the one you want.

Or at least it used to be.

Lately, I'm having my doubts. I've ranted before about how the US election has pretty much trumped Canadian news in Canada's newspaper of record. Today I naively figured that, since the election is over, maybe things would be back to normal. After all, there must be some Canadian stories that Canada's national newspaper of record could be focused on.

Wrong.

The front page is all about Trump. The entire Focus section, eight pages of what I expect to be the meatiest writing in the paper is instead eight pages about Trump.

Hey folks, can you get the fuck over it already! I'm not giving up a ten spot so I can read wall to wall Trump paranoia on a Saturday morning! (BTW, the only Trump story remotely worth reading in today's paper is John Doyle's column.)

This is Canada for fucks sakes!

And a lot of the anti-Trump diatribe that they're filling my paper with four days after the election is just crap. Take for example this howler from Doug Saunder's feature story in Focus;

...(Trump's) biggest advertising expenditure was a two minute November ad in which he describes a global conspiracy of meddling Jews manipulating the economy - an ad that the Anti-defamation League has denounced as resembling anti-Semitic propaganda.

I've seen that ad and nowhere does it mention meddling Jews. I get why the ADL claimed that it "resembled" anti-Semitic propaganda. That's what the ADL does, sniff out potential anti-Semitism, real or imagined, at every turn. It's their job.

I don't know why it's Doug Saunder's job to report ADL's musings as proof of Trump's anti-Semitism. I'm pretty sure guys like Bob Mercer and Sheldon Adelson aren't going to be funding anti-Semitic TV ads, and in fact the ADL story got a sharp slap-down from the Republican Jewish Coalition.

The ADL was out of the blocks early Wednesday congratulating Trump on his victory.

Not so the opinion makers at the Globe and Mail. No, they're still pouty. After their unprecedented call for American voters to reject Trump, they can't seem to let it go.

They have made themselves America's conscience.

Meanwhile, as I'm sitting in the truck leafing through my paper in search of Canadian stories, the Farm Manager comes out of the store and announces that the Toronto Star has Bowie, Prince, and Leonard Cohen on its front page...

She said she would have bought the paper but she knew I already had the Globe and Mail.

Pity, that.