In praise of double standards

Thank goodness we in the West enjoy the blessings of a free press and unfettered TV news coverage. Unlike in Russia, where the benighted masses have access only to state propaganda, we are privy to the truth.

And the truth can be ugly, as the 24/7 saturation coverage of Putin’s war in Ukraine makes plain. Who can even imagine the sub-human barbarity of killing civilians, even women, children, and most shockingly, babies! If there was ever any doubt who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in this world, is has been definitively put to rest for all time.

The people of Afghanistan must be relieved they spent twenty years occupied by USA/NATO, and not the barbaric Russians. We don’t talk about civilian deaths (100,000+) because, as Stalin once said, when you cut down a forest there’ll be a few wood chips. “Collateral damage,” we call it.

Last we heard, and we’ll hear nothing more while Putin hogs the news cycle, is after the good guys left, we seized Afghanistan’s gold and cash reserves from UK and USA banks. Afghan civilians, women, children, and yes, even babies, face certain starvation.

The ongoing Saudi war on Yemen, aided and abetted by UK/USA, has some collateral damage too. (100,000 +)

The carnage continues in Iraq, where US troops remain on the ground two years after the democratically elected government demanded they leave. (200,000+ civilian deaths)

Let’s not forget Syria (350,000 + civilian deaths) in a “civil war” that wouldn’t have lasted a month without the lavish support of the Nations of Virtue. American forces remain on the ground protecting Syrian petroleum resources from Syria.

So let’s not forget who is good and who is evil. NATO officially announced today that Ukraine can stop waiting for actual military support, because this war has nothing to do with it. After engineering the 2014 coup, after 30 years of vague promises of EU and NATO membership, after coddling and encouraging the most belligerent and reactionary elements recklessly and relentlessly for many years, the long-sought disaster unfolding today is not our problem.

That’s how we roll, here in the Nations of Virtue!

The truth is more important now than ever

I look forward to my New York Times International Weekly, which is included at no extra charge with my Sunday Star. It gives country bumpkins like me a chance to view true world-class journalism, unlike the crap those hacks in Toronto shovel out. I also have a hunch that recycling NYT copy is way cheaper than paying their own writers for original work.

In this era of truth being more important than ever, it's surprising how much truth the Times' world-class journos forget to include in their stories. Ruth Maclean reports on the conflict in Mali, and totally forgets to mention said conflict was unleashed when the USA destroyed Libya.

Julie Turkewitz reports on the heart-breaking plight of children in Venezuela. It truly is heart-breaking, but in a half-page story, there is nary a mention of the devastating sanctions the US has imposed on the country.

Alissa Rubin informs us that these are the "worst days ever for Iraqis." The poor sods are getting it from all sides. Collapsed oil prices, a collapsed economy, collapse upon collapse, and the ever-present meddling of the Iranians behind it all. If any of Iraq's travails had anything whatsoever to do with the USA's destruction and continued occupation of the country, you'd never know it from Rubin's story.


For an outfit that coined the slogan "The truth is more important than ever," that's a pretty slovenly performance.

Canadian military mission to bring diversity and inclusion to Iraq

I personally couldn't make up something that stupid. Read it for yourself at The Globe and Mail.

Professor Momani makes some dubious claims.

"We are seen as positive examples of how diversity and inclusion work in practice."

We are? By whom?

Perhaps we are a model of diversity and inclusion because our Minister of Defence sports a turban. Not only that, but Justin himself has reassured us many times that "diversity is our strength." Alas, a quick turn on the Googlator would seem to suggest that's mostly bullshit.

How are those class-action lawsuits coming along, the ones that accuse the Canadian Forces of systemic racism and misogyny?

And check this out; Racism and discrimination rampant throughout ranks...

And here's a heart-warming paean to diversity and inclusion. Yup, that's Defence Minister Sajjan a mere three months ago, promising a "crackdown on the growing number of racist and misogynist comments on the Canadian Forces official Facebook page."

So, either Mr. Sajjan has turned around the Canadian Forces' deep-rooted culture of racism and misogyny in only three months, or Ms. Momani's op-ed is an exercise in wishful thinking.

Some would call that "fake news."

I just call it bullshit.

What I learned from my Globe and Mail today

Jeremy Freed informs me that I can spend $2,300 plus applicable taxes on a baseball cap!

I had no idea! But it's true; Stefano Ricci has opened up a boutique in Vancouver. Great! You'll just have to step over the homeless addicts on the sidewalk, and you too can put down $2,300 plus tax for a baseball cap!

Is this a great country or what!?

Elsewhere, Kelly's got an interesting profile of Tim Bezbatchenko. Even though I don't give a fig for football, a good writer can find the human interest angle in any story. But the best part of the sports section was the obit for Gregory Baum.

I've always been fascinated by obviously intelligent and well-educated people who manage to hold on to their religious convictions in spite of their intelligence and education, and Baum was such a man. It is somehow reassuring that such a thing is possible.

On A21 Lee Berthiaume tells the sorry tale of Canadian Special Forces who have been training the Kurdish Peshmerga and the Iraqi army for a couple of years. Yup, we trained them both and now they're fighting each other!

Good job, Canada! That was an obvious waste of resources, and underlines once again the folly of doing something just to be seen as doing something, even as you have no clue as to what you're doing.

Berthiaume completely misses the bigger story; most of the nominally independent Kurdish area in Iraq was retaken by Iraqi forces this past week in an operation so swift and seamless that it must have had the connivance of the American overlords.

Thanks for your help with ISIS, now forget about that Kurdish homeland nonsense and do as you're told.

Also on A21 we're treated to a Canadian Press story about a chap in Gatineau who inflicted a year's worth of violence on his teenage daughter for "removing her hijab when she was away from the family home." Hmm... wonder what culture that family hails from?

What a pity the Globe brain trust couldn't find room to place that story on A5, where Ingrid Peritz gets an entire half page to bemoan the fate of niqab-wearing women who are being bullied by Quebec's Bill 62. It would have made for great juxtaposing.

Frankly, I think Bill 62 is a pretty big hammer with which to thwart the scourge of a few dozen Muslim women choosing (or being coerced) to cover themselves. Is this really a "problem?" Don't they have bigger fish to fry?

No edition of the Globe is complete without at least some token Putin-bashing, and that's what you'll find on A6. Between hosting the latest Ukrainian PM and passing our version of a Browder Bill, we're still sticking it to Putin big time.

Finally, Renzetti uses her A2 slot for something other than professing her love for Hillary or contempt for Trump. She dumps on Amazon instead! How refreshing! There really needs to be more questioning of Amazon and Big Tech in major media, and it's a welcome thing to see at least a hint of it.

There you go. Was it worth $6.30?

WTF is up with those "moderate rebels?"

Who invented the category of "moderate rebels" anyway?

Can you imagine the headlines if "moderate rebels" were trying to foist an armed rebellion on America?

But apparently it's A-ok if "moderate rebels" attempt a coup in Syria... especially if those "moderate rebels" have been trained and armed by the USA from the get-go.

Armed insurrection would not be tolerated for five minutes in the USA.

But when the armed insurrection in Muslim lands is trained and funded by that most exceptional nation, everything is hunky-dory.

America remains a long way from an honest look in the mirror.

How to shut down the Towelheads 'o Terror

It was more than a little discomforting to hear Mr. Hollande, he of the spurs etc, not to mention the really expensive haircuts, promise to avenge the Nice travesty by ramping up the bombing of Iraq and Syria.

Apparently there's a lot of folks in our leadership circles here in the Nations of Virtue who fail to connect cause and effect.

As vile as the Nice attack was, you have to admit that a terror attack in Libya or Iraq or Afghanistan that killed a hundred people would not so much as raise an eyebrow here in the Nations of Virtue.

That's because white lives matter so much more, regardless of how much brown or even black lives matter.

So here's a thought; perhaps, if we in the virtuous West are serious about combating "terror," we begin by stopping our terrorising the Islamic nations.

All of them.

Now.

Dropping names, dropping bombs, and why Obama needs to put US boots on Syrian soil

That indefatigable cheerleader for war, Bernard-Henri Levy, solemnly informed us this week that, make no mistake, we are at war with Islamic State.

"A new kind of war," no less.

And please note that this is not a war of our choosing; this war has been forced on the US and France and their allies. Yes, the sordid history of France in Algeria and America's serial wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria have nothing to do with the emergence of radical Islam.

They hate us for our democratic values, our openness, our tolerance...

Even the great BHL seems to be vaguely aware of what a putrid pile of shit he has concocted here. Perhaps that is why he has perfumed this outrageously dishonest dung-heap of a call to war with no less than twenty instances of name-dropping:

 Leon Blum

 Elie Halevy

 Georges Bataille

 Michel Leiris

 Roger Caillois

 Thucydides

 Clausewitz

 Carl Schmitt

 Saint Augustine

 Saint Thomas Aquinas

 Victor Hugo

 Paul Claudel

 Hitler

 Massoud

 Izetbegovic

 Mujibur Rahman

 Tariq Ramadan

 Abdelwahab Meddeb

 Churchill

 George Pitt-Rivers.

Wow! That's a staggeringly impressive level of erudition on display in one relatively brief essay! How is it possible that such a brilliant narrator could be lying to us?

And fear not, BHL already has a road-map to victory in the war that the forces of darkness have forced on the Nations of Virtue.

Yes, they've got us cornered, those "fascislamists" do, and we freedom-loving peaceable nations who have been ravaging and plundering and humiliating the Islamic world for generations have no choice but to fight a merciless war for our very survival...

And the very survival of Western Civilization depends on Mr. Obama putting American boots on the ground.

Now!

...at least according to that philosopher, war-monger, and imbecile-at-large, the esteemed Bernard-Henri Levy.

Pentagon poised to gift heavy weapons to pro-Russian militias in Eastern Europe

Ya, I know that's not what the headline in the New York Times says.

The US is just parking the hardware in Eastern Europe to deter Russian aggression.

Just like they parked dozens of Abrams tanks in Yemen to deter Houti aggression. Guess who's driving those tanks around Yemen now?

And those 2500 armed Humvees that recently fell into the hands of ISIS in Iraq; they were left in Iraq to deter ISIS aggression.

Seems that some folks at the Pentagon have missed their wake-up calls.

Either that or they're just profoundly stupid.

What I learned today from Canada's national newspaper of record

We're at $4.75 for the Saturday Globe and Mail at Chow Dong's variety store in Wiarton.

Just so you know... I obviously take the news seriously.

What did I learn today?

Well, I read the whole thing cover to cover, and what I learned is that Islam is seriously messed up.

Yup, there's something wrong with that religion.

Right there on page F3 Elizabeth Renzetti has an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. That's the Somalian woman who has carved out a great career in the West by slamming Islam.

Normally I have a certain amount of respect for Ms. Renzetti. She's generally more on top of things than her idiot partner, who also happens to write for the same national newspaper of record.

Ya, I know...

But I think she dropped the ball with today's story.

Hirsi Ali, like Canada's own Irshad Manji, has an axe to grind and books to sell. The "Islam is intrinsically evil" trope is a big hit in the West. Both Ali and Manji have been flogging it to death, pun intended.

Not that there's anything punny about flogging anything to death....

But back to Renzetti's interview with our prized Islamic rebel Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She is apparently Islam's iteration of Martin Luther.

No shit!

So she gotta be great!

Hmm... all I see in that interview is how there is something inherently "wrong" with Islam...

There's gotta be... after all, how else to account for all that extremist Islamic terror?

Well, you could start by addressing France's war on Algeria...

Israel's relentless ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem...

America's (and the me-too ass-kisser states) wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria...

There's something fundamentally amiss in Islam?

The biggest problem with Islam is that the Nations of Virtue have been bombing them to ratshit for the last fifty years.

Unless of course they are totalitarian puppet states who agree to spend their oil booty on lots and lots of bombs and guns manufactured by their betters in the Nations of Virtue.

No wonder the Muslims are pissed off!

Freedom of speech long fucked in France

Ask Dieudonne M'bala M'bala about "free speech" in France.

The spectacle of 40 plus foreign leaders jockeying for photo-ops in Paris today was truly wretch-worthy.

I'm listening to the Rex Murphy show on CBC, and today's topic is the past week in Paris. We're getting late into the show, but thus far the only caller who tried to connect the dots between Paris this week to our drones, our bombing of this Muslim nation and that, our ravaging of Iraq and Libya and Afghanistan, was cut off early.

Obviously, at the CBC, "Islamic terror" is a spontaneous eruption of irrational hate, aimed at the West generally and at Jews specifically, for no reason whatsoever, other than that the crazy Islamic religion just makes towel-heads crazy with hate!

A few topics not in any way approached on Murphy's show; the history of colonialism, Algeria, Palestine, America's serial wars on Muslim countries, that lovely photo collection from Abu Ghraib...

The Rex Murphy show today is a great showcase of Western ignorance and denial. The only caller who suggested a causal link between "terror" and what we do to "them" was cut off.

If we can't get beyond our ignorance and denial, we're headed for lots more of what we saw this week.

Some thoughts on the international refugee crisis

There's a minor flap afoot in Canada about our shameful response to the Syrian refugee crisis. At this point in time, Canada has admitted a grand total of 750 or thereabouts Syrian refugees.

For all of our grandiose talk of human rights, we pull up lame when it comes to delivering.

Right now well over a million Syrian refugees are holed up in both Turkey and Lebanon. Well over half a million in Jordan. There are almost a quarter million Syrian refugees in Iraq!

How desperate would you have to be to seek refuge in Iraq? Iraq is itself a major source of refugees in the global refugee equation.

The news that Canada is cherry-picking potential refugees based on their religious affiliation should give pause for thought too. A refugee is a refugee. A human being is a human being. Politicizing the refugee process makes Canadian government bureaucrats no different than the Nazi operatives who were charged with deciding who goes to a work camp and who goes to a death camp.

Here's another thing about the refugee crisis. All the top refugee source countries are countries in which the Nations of Virtue (EU, NATO) have been heavily meddling. Until we decided on regime change in Syria, the top source countries were Iraq and Afghanistan. Syria now tops the list. It's not hard to see what these nations have in common.

Here's a policy suggestion that I hope somebody in Ottawa will read; lets eliminate the Temporary Foreign Worker program entirely, and meet our labour needs by bringing in refugees! That's a win-win and win again.

Out with 400,000 TFWs, in with 400,000 refugees.

We have every reason to believe that a Syrian or Iraqi refugee, allowed into Canada, would be every bit as productive a worker as the TFWs from Mexico or Bangladesh. And this would ease the pressure on countries like Lebanon and Jordan, allies who are groaning under their refugee burden, and who are at considerable risk of becoming adjunct states to the Caliphate.

The only downside is this; if the Harper government actually instituted such a humane and sensible policy, those 400,000 new refugee-immigrants might be inclined to vote for him...

The many uses of ISIS

It has become abundantly clear that the ruling elites throughout the Nations of Virtue have seldom enjoyed such a useful enemy as ISIS.

In the first place, having hordes of disaffected Muslim youth abandon the Islamic ghettos of the great European cities to make jihad in Syria and Iraq serves as a valuable pressure-relief valve. Let them roam around in the deserts of the Levant slaughtering other Muslims, instead of making mischief in Stockholm and Marseilles.

The fear of what these radicalised youth could get up to when they come home in turn gives our rulers another lever with which to further tamp down our ever-eroding civil liberties. What are a few more limits on citizenship and freedom if they'll keep us safe from these fanatics?

Then there is the never-ending gravy train created by the need to train and provision forces that are willing to fight ISIS, because aside from dropping bombs and missiles from a safe distance, we're not. That creates vast wealth for myriad Western defence contractors, sub-contractors, consultants, and weapons manufacturers of all stripes.

ISIS also helps draw the eye away from the systemic human rights abuses among our allies in the region. What's another child shot dead in Gaza by the IDF when compared to this ISIS rampage? What's another dozen be-headings in Saudi Arabia when the blood-thirsty goons of ISIS be-head Western journalists?

And what a great excuse to send our warplanes into Syria to soften up that stubborn al-Assad, all in the name of supporting the moderate opposition, mind you!

Finally, the closer we can come to Iran's borders in the name of fighting ISIS, the shorter that final drive into Tehran will be!

By God, if fate had not provided us with such an extravagantly useful enemy, we would have had to invent them!

The stupidity of having losers provide combat training

The Al Jazeera network has a story on view that questions the efficacy of the billions of dollars the US taxpayer has spent in "training" foreign forces.

Well, that's a no-brainer. If you x out Grenada and Panama, the US military hasn't actually won anything since the 1940's, and even that is debatable. After all, any serious student of the WW 2 will readily acknowledge that it was the Red Army that won that one, not the US of A.

Somehow the US military-industrial complex is able to maintain the illusion of being the go-to guys for global dominance.

I don't know... sounds lame to me.

On 9-11, 19 towellers breached every bulwark of the most powerful nation on earth to bring down the twin towers... and that other tower, that was never hit by anything, a few hours later.

Then the most powerful nation on earth invaded Afghanistan, and left ten years later, declaring victory and pleading with the locals to let them stay a while longer, because there were more hearts and minds to be won, and a premature withdrawal would just hand the country to the towelheads who actually live there and own the place.

And then there was Iraq, the cradle of civilization, completely rubbished by the greatest democracy in the history of history... another great successful failure for the Washington warmongers.

But yet, we continue with the imbecilic charade of having to mobilize resistance to those who are resisting our tender ministrations of freedom and democracy...

Apparently all that our bum-boys need is a little more "training" from the guys who have lost every war they've started since 1945.

NATO's weakest link will be the first domino to fall

It's definitely NOT coming up roses for the wily Erdogan these days.

Erdogan is being pushed into a corner by his NATO overlords. He has spent three years building up ISIS at their behest, and now that it's become more than obvious that ISIS has (supposedly) slipped its leash, he's being fingered by Biden as the shady dealer who has facilitated the rise of the Islamic State.

No wonder he's pissed!

Tonight, as the Turk army watches from across the border, NATO's Frankenstein is taking the city of Kobani in Syria, and ethnic Kurds are rioting in at least 30 major cities in Turkey.

The Erdogan regime almost collapsed not too long ago over plans to build a shopping mall.

Now it's caught between ISIS and NATO.

Realistically speaking, the Erdogan regime is a partner of both.

The Beltway nabobs are ready with an Erdogan replacement; Fethulla Gulen has been biding his time there in Pennsylvania, waiting for his turn in the spotlight.

Unfortunately for the masters of the universe, it is unlikely that their bumboy of choice could conjure up more than token support on the ground in Turkey.

Which means that going forward, Turkey is destined to become one of the ruined states like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, that have been deliberately destroyed by American meddling.

This scenario isn't going anywhere good.

Pot apologizes for calling kettle "black"

I see where the dunce Joe Biden has had to do a bit of a climb-down and apologize to Turkey's wily Erdogan for having suggested that Turkey has facilitated the entry of Islamic extremists into Syria.

Biden was correct in making that accusation of course. Turkey has been complicit in flooding Syria with anti-Assad rebels from the beginning of the "Syrian Spring." What Biden failed to mention was that Turkey was doing America's bidding at the time.

Those were the hopeful days when every anti-Assad rebel was a "freedom fighter" and Assad had only a few days or weeks to go before his brutal police state crumbled and democracy bloomed forth in its stead...

Another great example of plans going off the rails...

Now of course those freedom fighters have morphed into the most evil evildoers of all time. They are running wild throughout Syria and Iraq, sporting the best and the latest of American armaments, and threatening to over-run Jordan and Lebanon in the short term, and the rest of the neighbourhood a few months later.

To which the Nations of Virtue, who created this fanatical killing machine, are responding with yet another iteration of a "coalition of the not-so-willing" who propose to eliminate this threat to American hegemony in the Middle East by carpet bombing the Middle East.

That's bound to win us lots more hearts and minds...

Can an elevator mechanic be a national leader?

That's not a question that we have to ask very often, is it?

National leaders pretty reliably come from the legal trades, not the mechanical trades.

Everywhere you go in the world, more often than not lawyers are politicians and politicians are lawyers.

That's why this story drew me back for a second look.

Seems our new bumboy in Iraq used to be a elevator mechanic in London.

That can cut several ways.

In the first place, Al-Abadi would, having been an elevator mechanic in London, be able to instantly differentiate between shit and shinola.

The elevator either works or it doesn't.

You can't bullshit the fact that the elevator ain't running when the elevator ain't running. Haider knows this in his workingman's soul.

But Haider is in the big leagues now.

Will he sell out or will he keep his workingman's soul?

Some humans more deserving of "humanitarian assistance" than others

The Nations of Virtue are in a righteous tizzy over the plight of some Iraqi folks trapped on Mount Sinjar without food or water, being threatened by Islamic militants. Western media are inundated with reports of the horrors visited on these poor souls. The leader of the free world has responded by raining humanitarian bombs on the militants and airlifting "non-combat" US troops into the region.

Meanwhile, on another mountain 7,000 kilometers away, a virtually identical scenario is playing out. Nigerian survivors of a Boko Haram raid on their village are trapped, with no way out and no food or water.

They are getting no headlines in Western media and no help from the Nations of Virtue. There are no bombs being dropped on their tormentors and no soldiers coming to help them.

They will most likely die there.

Why?

Russia massing troops on Ukraine border... or not

Versions of this story have dominated Western media coverage of the Ukraine crisis for the better part of the past week. Tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of troops, miles long tank convoys, all ready to swoop in on Ukraine whenever the whim seizes the unpredictable megalomaniac Putin.

Jim Maceda has a story at NBC that is a radical departure from the standard coverage of this story. He did something quite rare for a reporter in the Big Media arena; went to have a look for himself instead of regurgitating the standard talking points of dubious provenance. Over four days and a thousand miles of Russia-Ukraine border this past week, he saw no sign of a military build-up.

The usual anti-Putin hysteria, whipped up by the likes of Canada's big-talking lightweight duo of FM Baird and PM Harper, would have us believe that Putin is hell-bent on re-establishing the Soviet empire. This is not a point of view conducive to acknowledging that Russia has legitimate security interests in its own neighbourhood. It's also a perspective that requires near-total amnesia about the carnage that the Nations of Virtue have wrought in nations nowhere near their neighbourhoods over the past twenty years; Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, to name just a few.

It takes a powerful dose of self-deception indeed to imagine that the West holds the moral high ground in this discussion.

Obama takes credit for failed French mission in Somalia

Well that's good to know.

Always great to be part of a winning team, isn't it?

America has not even tied up the loose ends in Iraq and Afghanistan. Syria is an open sore. But America will follow France into new adventures in Africa?

How retarded would you have to be for this to make any sense?

The inexorable slide into war

Senator John McCain was all over the news today with his plan for bombing Syria.

Back in saner times that used to be called war.

Seems to me that the last couple of wars that America has embarked on haven't really turned out that well.

A trillion dollars sunk into Iraq so that Iran can have more influence there than ever before?

Closing in on another trillion as America gets ready to hand Afghanistan back to the Taliban?

A commitment to our puppets in both Iraq and Afghanistan to prop them up in perpetuity, at a cost that cannot even be imagined.

In this environment Senator McCain wants to start another war?