NATO must send troops to Ukraine, or face catastrophic defeat

Here’s a stunning revelation from old-school American Empire Uber Alles warhawk Edward Luttwak. This is a dude who used to get his opinion bits into the NYT and the WSJ whenever he wanted. The fact you’re now reading him on UK alt news websites tells us he’s pissed off some powerful people. That totally boosts his credibility in my estimation. Enough with my two cents. Here’s Luttwak’s essay; It's time to put NATO troops in Ukraine. That sure would put Canada up a stump, eh? We can’t even hit recruitment numbers when we’re clearing snow and fighting forest fires. Who’s gonna sign up to get vaporized by a 2000lb Russian glide bomb for… Ukraine? These past few years have seen a great remake of the CAF. Instead of the old-timey shit like following orders and stuff, the Forces have been remade into a safe space where you are welcome to explore and develop your unique personality. The new approach has yet to goose recruitment, so Canada will once again be humiliated in front of our NATO allies. Well, better to be humiliated in front of our allies than be vaporized…

New York Times exposes Canada's Foreign Student scam

It can’t be a secret anymore if the New York Times is writing about it. Many Canadian post-secondary institutions have become de-facto fast-tracks to Canadian residency and the prospect of citizenship. That’s because chronic government under-funding has made colleges and universities dependent on the extortionate fees they charge foreign students. Schools like Northern College hire agents to recruit foreign students. These agents scour the Indian countryside looking for prospective students willing and able to fork over the tens of thousands of dollars required for a diploma in “culinary arts” or “early childhood education,” which qualify the graduates to work in two of the lowest paying occupations in Canada. The recruiters work on commission. What they’re selling isn’t education, but access to a student visa, and hence to Canada. There are hundreds of thousands of student visas issued every year, and all those foreign students need somewhere to live in a country with a chronic and ever-worsening housing affordability crisis. Nobody’s getting much of an education, but the colleges get to stay in business, the recruiters can get rich, and the students get a back door to Canadian residency! What’s not to like?

Putin has looted trillions from Russia

When Bill Browder showed up on CBC recently, I thought Brodie Fenlon’s CBC News must be the last news network to give this charlatan any cred. I was wrong. Here he is on MSNBC; Putin's a mafia boss trying to hold on to power. Bullshittin’ Bill has a whole new take on the Ukraine war, not to mention a new book to flog. Apparently this war isn’t about NATO expansion or any of that stuff, not at all. Instead, it’s about Putin the mafia boss desperately trying to stay in power. Hmm… Well, Bill should know a thing or two about mafia bosses. “His” Hermitage Capital was the wunderkind of a couple of Israeli mafia bosses. If you drew a venn diagram of Israeli and Russian mafia bosses you’d see an extraordinary overlap. They had a decade of salad days looting post-Soviet Russia. They originally supported Putin on the mistaken assumption that he would allow the party to continue. He didn’t. Bill got most of his ill-gotten loot out of Russia in the nick of time, and reinvented himself as a human rights crusader, a discredited schtick that apparently still has traction at CBC and MSNBC. Here’s a NYT story about the much-suppressed doc about Browder, The Magninsky Act; Behind the Scenes. You can still find it online if you make the effort. My favorite scene is near the end, where the pudgy middle-age Jew leaps out of his limo and sprints a hundred yards in nine seconds flat to avoid a guy trying to serve a subpoena! Bullshittin’ Bill still bills himself Putin’s enemy #1. If that’s the case, Putin doesn’t have much to worry about.

Dumbest thing you'll read today

I've often railed against Torstar Corporation's practice of piggybacking The New York Times International Weekly on its Sunday Star. I think we have enough competent journalists in Canada that we can do without imported propaganda.

And not only that, but there's way too much really stupid shit in the NYT. Today's story by Stanley Reed, titled "Germany Looks at New Type of Fuel," is a prime example. In a thinly veiled bit of Putin bashing, the article claims that Germany needs an alternative to its Russian natural gas supply.

Shipping natural gas in condensed form on supertankers is exponentially riskier and more expensive than shipping it via pipeline, and I'm sure there's not a great hue and cry among the German people to pay double for their heating fuel just to spite the Russians.

But wait! There's another potential bonanza associated with building a LNG terminal!

Tourism!

Reed quotes Niels Fenzl, a VP at would-be LNG supplier Uniper, to the effect that the LNG supertankers "are quite a sight."

No doubt! I hope the folks in Kitimat BC are ready for the hordes of visitors who will overrun their town once their LNG terminal is up and running!


Like I said; the dumbest thing you're likely to read today.

Media malfeasance

Within forty-eight hours of Nancy Pelosi announcing the Trump impeachment initiative, the brain trust that runs Canada's national newspaper of record weighed in on the matter with utter certainty; Trump was guilty of treason.

There's a belief among Globe and Mail "thought leaders" that they can't be seen as deviating too far from whatever the NYT/WaPo/WSJ consensus might be.

If they would stick to reporting actual news, that editorial would not have happened. Ukraine-US history didn't begin with Trump's phone-call to Zelensky. It didn't even begin with the US sponsored 2014 Maidan coup.

Nor did political corruption in the Oval Office begin with that call. As near as I can tell, even when you put the worst possible spin on Trump's "arm-twisting," it's nothing more than a business-as-usual moment in American history.

Trump may be a serial liar, but he's not the first American president to tell a lie, or lots of them.

Trump may be using the office to enrich himself, but that's a time-honoured American tradition. A number of US presidents of the past were born in poverty. None of them died in poverty.

What was the Clinton Foundation other than a massive pay-to-play scheme?

If our "free press" were even remotely free, they'd be giving us the whole story.

Instead, they relentlessly pursue an obviously partisan agenda that bears little or no resemblance to lived reality.

Ultimately, this is not about Trump. The same media that today denigrates Trump at every turn, never missed a chance to kiss his ass in the twenty-five years before he entered politics. How else did Trump become a "celebrity?"


What's really threatening America's elite isn't having a serial liar in the White House. It's having a self-proclaimed "socialist" knocking on the door.

DNC on brink of spectacular own goal

On page A9 of today's Globe and Mail a headline informs me that "Trump allegedly asked Ukraine to investigate Biden's son." That's the Globe's version of this story, found originally in the Wall Street Journal, and now a staple across mainstream media.

Yup, there goes Trump again, abusing his office to stymie a potential rival...

Unfortunately, it's Biden's own words, and not any dirty dealing on the part of Trump, that are going to cause some embarrassing blow-back here. Check out this story from the NYT  back in May. Or, if you think the Times is too Trump friendly, even Michael Bloomberg's personal propaganda platform reports Biden bragging about getting a top Ukrainian judge fired for investigating his son Hunter's adventures in the Ukrainian natural gas business.

Obviously any competent journalist reporting these latest allegations would be aware of both Hunter Biden's involvement in Ukraine and his Daddy's boastful comments about interfering in Ukraine's internal affairs. So why don't they pull the loose threads together and tell the whole story?


Because the Democentric mainstream media have a horse in this race, and it ain't Donny J.

Recycling NYT's shoddy journalism cheaper than producing your own

News-hungry hicks in these parts rush to the newsstands bright and early every Sunday to get their hands on The New York Times International Weekly, which comes as a supplement with the Sunday Star. This week we were rewarded with a front-pager titled "Deception Fuels Tilt To Nativism In Sweden," which is a recycled version of this story which ran in the mother ship a week earlier.

The gist of the story is that anti-immigrant sentiments in Sweden are due not to reckless immigration policies that brought in migrants in substantially greater quantities than could be readily assimilated. Nope, it's not that... it's Putin!

That's right! Kremlin troll farms are doing their devious best to "...weaken Western countries by polarizing the debate," thereby opening the eyes of the docile Swedes to the fact that some neighbourhoods in their country have become ghettos of dark-skinned people.

I'm no expert on Sweden, but I have a hunch the Swedes would have noticed that without prodding from Kremlin trolls. What we have here is not a news story per se, but just another exercise in Russia bashing.

Writer Jo Becker quotes an expert from the "Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a non-profit that tracks extremism," to lend the story a sense of gravitas.

Here's what you should know about the Institute for Strategic Dialogue that Becker neglects to mention. Its "partners and funders" include:

•  Brookings Institution
• Chatham House
• Google
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Microsoft
• Yale University
• British Council
• Open Societies Foundation (Soros)
• International Republican Institute
• US State Department
• UK Foreign Office
• Governments of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Australia, Canada

There's more, but you probably get the drift. The partners and funders of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue are a veritable roll-call of institutions and vassal states committed to American Exceptionalism, which we are constantly reminded has ushered in the era of peace we have seen since WWII, not to mention enforcing the "rule of law" and lifting billions out of poverty, etc.etc...

And of course, they all agree, the biggest threat to continued world peace and prosperity and the "rule of law" is... Putin!

I have no problem when our "free press" labels Sputnik a Russian propaganda outfit. They are, after all, funded by the government of Russia to put a pro-Russian spin on their reportage. However, it's disingenuous to pretend that the NYT or the Institute for Strategic Dialogue are any different. They are American propaganda outlets every bit as much as RT or Sputnik are Russian propaganda outlets.

As for the Toronto Star, they have numerous anti-Russian propagandists on their own staff, so why do they need to import it from the US?

Top cheerleader treats entire football squad to leg-spread

A couple years ago there was a rumour to that effect going round the local high school.

Apparently said rumour was kicked off by a "rival" who had an eye on one of the boys on that team, a boy who was smitten by that top cheerleader.

All of that is just typical teenage drama, but social media magnifies these petty wranglings into shit that becomes really important, certainly for those reading about it on Facebook, which, as much as I find it hard to believe, is where a whole lot of folks get their news.

And that should be truly frightening.

I don't mean to sound elitist here, but if you get your news from Facebook, you're a retard.

Shop around a little. All the news sites are bullshitting you one way or another. With a little time and a little experience, you'll gradually work your way to a place where you can, at least most of the time, tell the difference between the wheat and the chaff.

The difference between the Shit and the Shinola...

**********

For those who get their news from Facebook, I suggest you fork out a few bucks per month to check out WSJ, NYT, and the WaPo.

Canadians should augment that with a daily perusal of the Globe and Mail, even though they're unlikely to find anything interesting there that didn't originate in the already mentioned titles.

Canada is, after all, first among the me-too nations.

While you're busy taking in the Empire's point of view, you should also take a peek at what's up at Sputnik, RT, AJE, Press TV, and the Jerusalem Post.

And there's plenty of once-prime English language journo's, even Pulitzer types, who have been blackballed from the mainstream and are basically glorified bloggers now, because, get this, they thought it was their job to speak truth to power!

So you'll find Chris Hedges at Truthdig.

Robert Parry founded Consortium News.

Seymour Hersh shows up on the fringes sometimes, but he's clearly not welcome in the MSM.

Spend enough time rooting around in the bowels of social media and those foreign news feeds, and you'll soon discover that errant cheerleaders are the least of our problems...

Huawei or not Huawei, is that the question?

Globe and Mail reporters Steven Chase and Robert Fife have a front-pager in today's paper about the trials and tribulations of the Chinese tech conglomerate. The gist of the story is that Huawei has been loading up with all kinds of lobbyists and strategists for a full-on assault on Canadian public opinion.

The reason for that lies in the controversy over whether or not US allies should be allowed to use Huawei technology in their 5G networks. Uncle Sam has said we'd better not if we know what's good for us. Some US allies, like Australia and New Zealand, have fallen in line, while others, like the UK and Canada, are, at least for the moment, maintaining the fiction that they are sovereign nations who make their own decisions.

Being a Chinese company in the grip of the Chinese Communist Party, the official fear is that the commies are going to use their technology to spy on us. Probably true, but they're going to spy on us anyway, as are the Russians. Most of our allies will be spying on us too. That's just statecraft in the 21st century. Everybody spies on everybody.

Spying aside, there's a far more important reason why we should go slow on the 5G roll-out. Google "dangers of 5G" and over sixty million results come up. I haven't had the opportunity to review all of them, but it strikes me that the technology is a long way from having been proven safe.

The New York Times would have you believe that 5G health concerns are fake news invented by Russia's RT network. After all, Russian and China are moving ahead with implementing 5G in their own countries. Would they be doing so if they really believed it was unsafe?

I don't know, but it's hard to believe that the NYT wants us to set our public health standards at the same level as Russia and China. Does that strike anyone as a prudent strategy?

The history of technological "progress" is littered with really bad ideas that were pushed on us by people who profit from them, from thalidomide to nuclear power to fracking, which in hindsight might not have been such great ideas after all.

The sensible thing to do is to take the focus off the politically motivated Huawei hysteria and pause while we get a better understanding of the health risks associated with this technology, instead of taking the promoters at their word about its safety.

Elizabeth Renzetti delivers tutorial in shoddy journalism

Fifty years ago, when Nancy Pelosi was already clawing  her way into the upper reaches of the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Party was known as the party of civil rights. By 2016, it was instead known as the party of Wall Street, and Nancy Pelosi is now the most powerful woman in America.

That's why it's hard to square her actual history of connivance with money and power with the portrait painted in Renzetti's editorial in today's Globe and Mail, where Pelosi is rendered an icon of progressivism.

Renzetti seems aware of the cognitive dissonance echoing through her article. The "progressive members of her own party (i.e. the DSA contingent) think she's part of the old guard..."

That's because she most assuredly is a member of the old guard! Who could think otherwise?

Yet, "they fall into line behind her when she demands it." She is "terrifying to her opponents, both Republicans and rebellious members of her own party" (i.e. the DSA contingent).

The most interesting question in US politics at the moment is how long will it take for the true progressives to either mute their progressivism, or get terrorized out of the party. My hunch is that the old guard will effectively muzzle them... forget the wealth tax, forget public health care, forget free post-secondary education; focus instead on symbolic gestures like clapping back at Trump!

That's "resistance," Pelosi style!

Renzetti also gets a shot at a book review this week, giving us the low-down on former NYT executive editor Jill Abramson's tell-all, "Merchants of Truth."

Alas, the biggest story around this title for the past week has been a plagiarism scandal! Seems the esteemed NYT alum who penned "Merchants of Truth" especially likes lifting the work of students at Toronto's own Ryerson Journalism School!

That's the kind of dishonesty that empowers those who want to paint the journalism profession with the "fake news" label. The fact that Renzetti can pen a two thousand word book review without so much as a single line acknowledging the plagiarism controversy strikes me as a little... dishonest.

Must have been a slow news week

Nothing much in the weekend papers. Former G-G Adrienne Clarkson got a bit of self-serving twaddle into the Globe and Mail explaining why we should be grateful that she's still sucking hard on the government teat almost fourteen years after giving up that sinecure.

Elsewhere in the Globe we learn that the US will "temporarily allow" eight countries to continue buying Iranian oil after the new US sanctions kick in tomorrow. The wanton twattery of a bunch of American exceptionalists presuming to dictate to the world who can and who cannot buy Iranian oil passes without comment, naturally.

Things are pretty thin in the Sunday Star as well. Drake claims he was racially profiled at a Vancouver casino. Really? My hunch is that casinos are more interested in credit score profiling than racial profiling, and you'd think he'd be golden in that department, but whatever.

The NYT International Weekly (included at no extra cost with your Sunday Star, because actually paying Canadian writers for original copy is prohibitively expensive) makes the case for Colorado Governor Hickenlooper, a made energy industry bumboy from the get-go, taking a run at the White House in 2020. Seriously? I write more insightful shit than that.

Both Kristof and Stephens have op-eds that don't mention Donny J, to my considerable surprise. Maybe Sarah Kendzior is onto something...

Picked up a Toronto Sun just to see what the semi-literate folks are reading these days. With Remembrance Day around the corner, we've naturally got the predictable jingoistic claptrap about how the bold Canucks punched above their weight in the WW I.

What a concept, that WW I. The royal families of Europe had some differences. They're all related anyway, so you'd think they could sort things out with a family picnic or something, but no. Millions of working class schmucks on all sides had to make the ultimate sacrifice. We remember their sacrifice every November 11. Their naivete and gullibility, along with the craven cynicism of those who sacrificed them, we prefer to forget.

Further in we get a few accolades for Doug Ford's war on the poor with his Making Ontario Open for Business Act. But even that isn't enough for guest columnist Peter Gossman, who is pleased to inform us that he's planning to open his next factory in the US instead of Canada.

I'm sure Trump will appreciate your help in making America great again with the few dozen minimum wage jobs you might create there, Pete!

Gossman also informs us, via a quote from another PostMedia title, that "...oil, gas, and coal remain the fuels of the future."

Huh?... oh ya, we're reading the Toronto Sun...

Pres of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce Rocco Rossi gets a guest column too, although it's largely incoherent. Since it's in the Sun maybe the readers won't notice. His members are experiencing both a labour shortage and a skills shortage, so the Ford government's war on the working poor is going to create a lot of jobs...

Or something.

The Sun still has their Sunshine Girl, but she's near the back of the paper now. Used to be on page two or three if I remember correctly. That was a great gig for the photographer back in the day, at least till he got charged with attempted rape or something. I think he went to jail for a spell. Today's Sunshine Girl, Lavender, "is a Sagittarius who is all about Sunday, smiles, and sunshine."


Good to know!

We'll drown you in 24/7 Trump till you beg for mercy

September has been all Trump all the time on the news networks. It kicked off with that nauseating McCain funeral carnival. Did you notice the media made that more about Trump than McCain?

Apparently Mr. President was not invited to the show and played a round of golf instead. Anytime I can avoid a funeral to play golf instead I figure I'm way ahead of the game, but this was treated as a major snub of the Orange Ogre.

Not that Senator McCain wasn't a "great American." Born into wealth and privilege, McCain used his advantages to his own advantage all his life, as great Americans generally do. The one courageous stand he took during his career was against torture, and he was more or less cornered into that to maintain the myth that had grown around his status as a one-time victim of torture.

Then it was the Woodward book. By God, somebody told Woodward that somebody in the White House referred to it as "Crazy Town!" I've never worked anywhere that at least a few folks didn't consider "Crazy Town," but I guess it's supposedly a different thing when you work at the White House.

By the way, do you ever wonder why a journalist whose career peaked over forty years ago is treated as a living legend of investigative journalism, while working journalists like Sy Hersh, who has at least as significant a track record, have been effectively de-platformed in US media?

Then came the infamous NYT op-ed...


When I'm having that much Trump waved at me to the exclusion of virtually all other news, I get suspicious. What's going on? Has The Empire really given up on regime change in Syria?

I think not.

Notice the impeccable timing of the lame-duck May government's latest allegations regarding the so-called Skripal affair. Other than being a convenient excuse to work the words "gas attack" and "Russia" into the same narrative, that story remains as dodgy as it ever was.

Notice too that this comes as the US, UK, and France have all vowed retaliation should Assad "use gas against his own people."

The stage is now set; Syria, and those well-known gassers in Russia, are poised to clean out Idlib. Inevitably, there will be claims that Assad and his Russian backers have resorted to using poison gas, because that's what those people do. Then the Nations of Virtue will rise as one, remove Assad from the scene once and for all, and put Putin on notice that the next time his minions run wild gassing retired Russian spooks in England we're coming for him too.

With Assad gone and Putin's fingers burned, Iran will be isolated. What a perfect opportunity to restore the pre-'79 liberal democracy in that benighted land!

The same crowd in DC who have convinced themselves that they are the shapers of history are about to shape some more.


What could go wrong?

The myopia of Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman is a big deal. He's the guy all the top guns in the Canadian punditocracy have to read to make sure they're onside with the latest slant on US Exceptionalism.

Friedman's insights trickle up here to the boonies a little late. The column that appeared in my "New York Times International Weekly" today actually showed up in the NYT five days ago, but better late than never.

Thomas is keen to have us know that he's hound-dogging his way around the continent on his NYT expense account, having dinner parties with various government and international experts, "trying to understand the refugee crisis that is fracturing the EU, much of which originates in Italy."

We'll call this the first Tommywhopper of the piece. The refugee crisis primarily originates in countries where the US and the gang of toadying me-too nations have been busying themselves spreading freedom and democracy. Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan...

It doesn't take Thomas long to come up with Tommywhopper 2; there was nothing wrong with the illegal destruction of Libya other than the small detail that the destroyers failed to hang around and "build a new order."

Really?

Friedman does notice that on his current frolic through Italy, "unassimilated migrants are now visible in the streets, squares, and train stations." Is this the result of America having destroyed their countries?

Gosh no! It's because we haven't provided the migrants with "legal pathways for immigration," nor have we, the always-virtuous West, come up with "a strategy to improve effective and accountable governance in Africa."

As if that should be our job. Hey, we're trying to get past that colonialism thing, aren't we?    

We'll call that Tommywhopper 3. All EU countries have legal pathways for immigration. Having legal pathways for immigration is a condition of EU membership. What those legal pathways never anticipated was the over-whelming flood of refugees created by US foreign policiy.

That's America's responsibility, not Italy's. Or Hungary's or Spain's or Germany's or Sweden's. There is not the slightest whiff anywhere in these 800 words 'o wisdom from the American Establishment's number one pundit, that remotely hints that America bears any responsibility whatsoever for the refugee crisis.

The latter half of Friedman's rant is, predictably, all about Putin and his bumboy in the White House, although Steve Bannon makes an extended cameo. If those guys get their way, "who will write the new rules for the 21st century?"


Well Thomas, I guess that remains to be seen.

Folks who love peace and democracy just hope it won't be the same people who wrote the rules for the the last century... you know, the century that brought us Hiroshima, Korea, Vietnam, Timor, Suharto, Pinochet, the Shah, Rios Montt...

And so much more!

Making homophobia cool again

Gay-bashing and fag jokes seem to be making a comeback. Is the tide of political correctitude finally receding?

Polite society has overtly shunned homophobia for at least a quarter century now, but apparently if you really really despise someone, well, it's once again OK to call them a fag.

I've noted this tendency before. How do intelligent people like Colbert and others justify queer slurs to get an easy laugh? It's enough to put me off watching their stuff, and if they're doing it and their audience finds it amusing, then maybe we haven't made the kind of progress these past few decades that we thought.

That ultimate bastion of mainstream liberalism, the New York Times, is now in on the gay-bashing.

Oh, look how clever we are!... we called out Trump and Putin as gay lovers!!! Aren't we just sooo witty!

Well no, you're not, actually.

Do you seriously think garbage like this hurts Trump or Putin? No, but it helps make life more difficult for innumerable young people who may be struggling with their identity. They've got more than enough on their plates without the NYT legitimizing their ostracization.

What's next?

Perhaps the n-word will make a comeback?

Sarah Kendzior; disingenuous, misguided, or just plain stupid?

I like Sarah Kendzior. Back when she was a freshly minted Dr. Phil who found herself squeezed off the tenure track, she used to write about that. The writing was heartfelt and convincing because she knew what she was talking about.

She has yet to find that track, but she may no longer care. Check out the brand she's built. This woman is going places! She's one 60 Minutes profile away from becoming a serious public intellectual!
 
But when I consider that, and when I read of the various accolades she has won over recent years (Foreign Policy named her one of the 100 people you should follow on Twitter to make sense of global events - as if Twitter is required to make sense of global events...), I have to marvel at the fact that the bar has been set so astoundingly low.

Take her latest effort as "op-ed columnist for the Globe and Mail" for example; Gutting net neutrality is a death knell for the resistance.

Ah yes, "the resistance!"

That one word conjures all sorts of imagery of heroic anti-Nazi derring-do in occupied Europe during the '40s. The French resistance. The Dutch resistance...

The Greeks and Poles resisted too. In every case we saw courageous citizens, infinitely out-manned and out-gunned, standing against the Nazi behemoth.

Although she is fully aware that's the image you'll carry in your mind's eye when you read the word "resistance," that's not the resistance Kendzior is talking about. No, she's talking about the resistance to Trump's election victory. This is not a resistance led by courageous partisans hiding out in the woods and risking their lives for a cause.

It is a resistance led by Hillary Clinton and a Democratic Party elite that a year ago lost an election in spite of having more Wall Street money behind it than any previous campaign in US electoral history.

It's not the resistance of the oppressed.

It is the resistance of an entitled ruling class clique who are pouting because another, perhaps slightly less entitled ruling class clique, grabbed the steering wheel out of their hands.                    

I can see why they'd be pissed.

At the same time, the claim that the Dem Party establishment or any of the mainstream media platforms Kendzior regularly appears on are even remotely threatened is beyond hokum.

Seriously?

Some players in the internet ecosystem want to squash net neutrality so they can make more money, not because they want to silence the Globe and Mail and the US news sites the Globe reflexively parots, the Washington Post and the NYT.

Pretty sure they're not interested in silencing Kendzior either.

As you know, all those platforms are vehemently anti-Trump.

What's being silenced are media platforms that question the narrative of Kendzior, Dem Party elites, and the "resistance," sites like RT and Sputnik and Michael Chossudovsky's Global Research.

So relax, Sarah... so long as you continue to faithfully toe the official DNC line, you've nothing to worry about!

Change

I've always been a reader.

Got my start reading the funnies in the Guelph Daily Mercury in the late fifties.

Eventually got to the two Pauls, de Man and Feyerabend. I especially liked Feyerabend.

In the popular rendering of working class folks, we're a bunch of semi-literate yobs. There's an element of truth to that.

But there's always been a strong community of readers among us.

Like Johnny, who managed to get through most of the Globe and Mail crossword puzzle every day for thirty years. At work.

Or Andy, the pipefitter at Irving's shipyard in Saint John who happened to hold a degree in German Literature.

Or Dudley, who worked the pipe-bender at Kearney National during the week and partied with Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster on the weekend.

I'm still reading. Mostly I read stuff on my laptop these days, but I still indulge the luxury of the printed page from time to time. Like when the internet goes down.

Which is why I happened to pick up a copy of The New Yorker this evening and read about the legacy of the Sackler family. That legacy includes hundreds of thousands of opiod OD deaths and hundreds of millions in philanthropic gifts.

The two are intimately related.

That's the second time in a month I've read a mainstream take-down of the Sacklers.

And the mainstream has been busier than I could ever have imagined dismantling the legacy of Weinstein and his myriad fellow travellers.

Who ever imagined such a thing?

What's next?

A New Yorker critique of US foreign policy?

A NYT disavowal of capitalism?

A WaPo editorial slamming the occupation of the West Bank?


We are on the cusp of great changes.

Hold on to your hat... and keep reading.

The convenient myopia of elite opinion-makers

It's Sunday once again, so The Sunday Star treats its readership to a recycled Friedman column from the New York Times circa Tuesday last; "Trump, Niger and Connecting the Dots." Much more "economically efficient" than producing original copy, I suppose. At least I'm not asked to pay $6.30 for it... yet.

So Friedman, certainly one of the most influential voices in English language media, wants us to know "just how foolish, how flat-out dumb President Donald J. Trump is. Trump is a person who doesn't connect dots - even when they're big fat polka dots."

Friedman furthermore wants us to know that unlike the imbecile Trump, he knows something about Niger. Take it away Thomas!

Connect those dots for us!

Which he does. He finds the climate change dots and the overpopulation dots and the poor governance dots and offers numerous asides about the ineptitude of the current President, all without ever mentioning the one humongous dot that arguably dwarfs all those others; Libya.

Those US special forces in Mali and Chad and Niger aren't there to fight climate change or desertification or overpopulation; they're there to fight "terrorists."

And why did these African states see a sudden rise in terror activities in 2012? Could it have anything to do with the US led destruction of the Libyan state in 2011?

That would be an exceptionally obese polka dot to leave out when one is purportedly connecting the dots in Niger, wouldn't you think?

Friedman knows this of course. The NATO assault on Libya and the murder of Gaddafi was a monstrously foolish and way-past-flat-out dumb decision. It unleashed forces that will destabilize the region for decades.

Unfortunately for the narrative Friedman is spinning, that White House decision was taken several years before Trump took up residence there.

Best to leave out stuff we can't pin on Trump!

The temp agency - slave traders of the 21st century

I wrote a post a few years ago sarcastically applauding Canada's enthusiasm for "temporary foreign workers."

Some poor schmuck in Indonesia who has a limited grasp of English, or at least a limited grasp of sarcasm, tweeted my blog to all his buddies and before I knew it I was inundated with queries about how a welder from Indonesia or Malaysia or half a dozen other countries might make their way to Canada.

Had I fewer scruples and more ambition, I might have replied to those queries by offering some bullshit "immigration information package for qualified welders." Yup, for a mere five hundred bucks I could have sent them stuff they could readily find on the internet for free. And thousands of them would have bought it.

I could have become a labour broker! Those desperate migrant welders could have made me rich!

That's what temp agency's are; labour brokers. Calling them slave traders is a bit of an insult to slave owners. Slave owners made an investment and had a vested interest in maintaining or enhancing their value. That required them to feed and house their slaves. The modern corporate employer has no such obligations, and the temp agency that sources the vast majority of employees today has even fewer.

Here's a story from the New York Times that contrasts the career trajectory of a worker in the pre-temp era to what's going on today. Forty or fifty years ago employers generally had some sense of duty to their employees. I remember when I was hired on at Kearney-National in Guelph back in '77, the woman in the HR office telling me, "welcome to the Kearney family."

I'm pretty sure nobody hears those words when they're handing in their paperwork at the Acme Employment Agency today. In the event, I moved to a better-paying family after a couple of years, but the point remains that the hiring process was qualitatively different when the employer was directly responsible for the hiring.

But, as Neil Irwin points out in that NYT story, the temp agency has allowed the corporate greedbags to run a more efficient ship.

Fuck the worker, and may God bless the bottom line!

Nothing new about "fake news." Here's Carl Bernstein writing about CIA manipulation of mainstream media forty years ago

There seems to be lots of folks in the United States of Amnesia who believe "fake news" was discovered mere months ago by the mainstream stalwarts at WaPo and NYT.

That would be fake news. Carl Bernstein (among others) was writing about the manufacture of fake news by the CIA, in collusion with mainstream outlets like WaPo and NYT, forty years ago.

How odd that the two most influential purveyors of fake news post WWII would "discover" it at this late date!

And all thanks to those hacked emails that lifted the veil on Dem Party hanky-panky in their slimy sandbagging of the Sanders' campaign.

Putin was behind it, of course!

That's a fake fact regurgitated endlessly by the pointy-headed pundits at both of those esteemed outlets, without ever a whiff of proof being provided. From there it ripples out endlessly to "legitimate" news sites around the world. Nobody needs to provide proof because the Times and the Post already gave these fake facts their seal of approval.

That's why it's more than a little scary to read that Zuckerberg and his billionaire Silicon Valley cronies are all in for saving journalism. Facebook and Google are already busying themselves in their self-appointed role as censors of the internet and guardians of truth, and Amazon boss Bezos, who does hundreds of millions in business with the CIA, already owns the Washington Post.

They are truly doing God's work, because even W, steadfast truth-teller that he wasn't during his eight year reign of terror (at least from the perspective of millions of common citizens in Afghanistan and Iraq) has come out as a champion of truth in media.

A free press is the very cornerstone of our democracy, dontcha know!

Yes, it's time to push back against the fake news tsunami, and who better than Zuckerberg and Bezos to lead the charge!

What could go wrong?

Back and forth to Mexico

Every Sunday the Toronto Star includes The New York Times International Weekly with their paper. I used to think that was intended to give us hicks in the sticks a taste of big league journalism, but that may only be the half of it. The other half might be the fact the Star puts out its paper with about one third of the journalists they had on staff ten years ago.

I'm guessing it's way cheaper to buy a dozen pages of stale-dated NYT content than it is to produce an equivalent amount of original content in-house.

On page 10 of my NYT International Weekly is a story by Azam Ahmed and Elisabeth Malkin, "Mexicans Also See Nafta Failing." In the story we meet Jorge Martinez, who has worked at Prolec for ten years. Prolec is a joint venture with General Electric that builds transformers.

Back in the mid-seventies I worked at the General Electric transformer plant on Woodlawn Road in Guelph. One of my workmates became a modest celeb, famous in our circle for taking his Econoline van on a road trip to Mexico on his summer holiday and coming home with fifty pounds of weed stuffed under the floorboards.

Those were naive and innocent times. Buddy got out of the drug-running game while the getting was still good. General Electric got out of the transformer plant in Guelph and now builds transformers in Mexico instead.

Jorge Martinez makes about $100 per week for a six day workweek. In 2017. That's less than half of what we made for a five day workweek almost forty years ago. Figure in inflation and GE is paying Jorge about 10% of what they used pay us to build transformers in Guelph.

For almost forty years the prevailing wisdom emanating from the pundits and opinion makers and politicians was that "free trade" was good for us. We knew otherwise. It wasn't until the 2016 White House race, when both Trump and Sanders picked up on the issue, that the prevailing wisdom was challenged.

But the pundits and opinion makers and professional politicians still can't figure out how Donald Trump got elected.