Month: August 2016

I am desperate. I have two documents to e mail. But they are on paper, not in my computer. And my printer does not have a scanner, so I can’t put them into my computer for mailing. Both are important. Does anyone know if anyone in the Moncton area offers such a service?  (Staples doesn’t.)
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http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-khans-feud-1.3703044

Trump certainly deserves the pasting he’s getting from the story above. But there’s more to it.Mr. Khan is certainly an intelligent man – and a fluent speaker. But, again we’re being manipulated.

I watched Mr. Khan on several news channels. His comments, while fluent, indicated an astonishing ignorance of why his son died fighting for God bless America, and the standard American ignorance of the killer state the U.S. has always been since its origin.

The Iraq war was staged. It was planned even before Bush was elected. You can learn that by reading Project for the New American Century. George Bush and Tony Blair lied about the reasons for invading Iraq. That’s not a guess. There is lots of documentary evidence. They lied. That British government has just completed a report on it – The Chilcot Inquiry. They lied, and they killed over a million people, most of them civilians.

Mr. Khan’s son was killed while murdering those people to restore the control of American oil billionaires over Iraqi oil. Then they hanged Saddam Hussein after an illegitimate trial because they said he was a war criminal. In fact,  the war criminals were Bush and Blair.

(For that matter, the U.S. had been a big ally and supplier of weapons to Saddam earlier so he could fight a war against Iran which had displeased American oil billionaires by taking control of its own oil fields. Another million died in that.)
Then Mr. Khan spoke of how the U.S. has spread democracy all over the world. Really? Name a country it has spread democracy to. Cuba? The U.S.  installed a brutal dictatorship that ruled Cuba until 1950. Guatemala? It has invaded Guatemala at least twice since 1945, first to destroy a democratic government, and then to murder hundreds of thousands who wanted one. It invaded Haiti early in the twentieth century to install a  dictatorship. When Haiti did rise and set up a democratically elected government, the U.S. intervened to “protect Haiti”. It played a role in the murder of the elected president of Chile. When it conquered The Phillipines over a century ago, it installed a dictatorship. It undermined the only elected government Egypt ever had. Today, it routinely sends out teams of hired killers (special ops)  to murder government figures opposed to US policies.  American history is one of destroying democracy, not spreading it.

As well, the US, itself, is not a democracy. It is ruled by an aristocracy of the very wealthy.

How come an intelligent man like Mr. Khan doesn’t know that?

He doesn’t know it because the American media never tell him. George Bush is a mass murderer. He killed over a million Iraqis. He lied about the reasons. We have piles of evidence on this. We have an eminently respectable British government enquiry on it. George Bush is a war criminal. (At least, Americans should now have some sympathy with Germans who rallied to Hitler’s call.) How could Mr. Khan not know this?

He doesn’t know it because the billionaires who own virtually all news media in the U.S. have told him nothing but lies and propaganda. He thinks America has qualities of goodness, and selflessness, and heroism because that is what his news, TV, movies and history books have told him.

And what will the U.S. news media do with this story? They will play it up big. That’s what I saw last night on TV.  Big business, normally in bed with the Republicans, has shifted its money to Clinton. She’s a known quantity. And she’s bought and paid for. Trump is certainly bastard enough to appeal to the corporations. But he’s not a reliable bastard.

And the corporations own the news media.
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As an aside, can we get over this crap of calling everybody who  goes to war a hero? What was heroic in murdering millions of Vietnamese? Over a million Iraqis? What is heroic in  killing and starving the people of Yemen? What is heroic about making tens of millions of refugees, separating families, causing starvation and drowning in their flight….? What was heroic about the special ops killer who murdered a woman in Guatemala because she was an environmentalist?

If the people who did that are heroes, then so were the gallant soldiers of Hitler’s SS, and the stalwart guards at Auschwitz.
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And the irving press?

Almost a full page is given over to the trite, boosterist comments about New Brunswick by four NB recipients of the Order of Canada.. The rest of section A news is even less interesting.

The editorial is empty blather ending on the note that our government has to promote the safe development of our natural resources. (Is somebody out there saying we should promote unsafe development?) Anyway, this is really just a pitch for fracking and an oil pipeline.

It also revives the myth that New Brunswick paved the way for confederation and did it because it was prosperous. Those two statements, both of which often appear in this paper, are pure rubbish. Confederation happened because British investors and speculators wanted it to happen.  And New Brunswick was NOT prosperous at the time.

Norbert’s column is even emptier than the editorial. Most of it is pointless gush. We have a cultural mosaic more varied than our neighbours? Come off it. It’s almost identical to that of Nova Scotia. (And both New Brunswick and Nova Scotia now have fewer blacks than they should have because so many of them moved to Montreal to escape the racism of the maritimes.  Montreal, alas, was racist, too.)

I was uneasy at the start of Steve Mallory’s column because it looked like an ad for Rogers internet. And it is – but as a side-effect. It’s really quite an interesting column.

Below him is another column of gush about how New Brunswickers are the most wonderful people in Canada.

Alec Bruce tells a pointless story.

I could find no reason to read Section B. It’s a miserable, four pages, and most of it is trivial or out of date.
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Funny, I don’t recall seeing the article below in the irvng press – but it made The Guardian way over in Britain.

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/jul/28/canada-emissions-climate-change-justin-trudeau-corporate-business

Nor do I think it will matter much. Big business (and its government buddies) have shown very little sense of urgency about this problem.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/counted-us-police-killings

American police have, so far this  year, killed 625 people. That beats terrorists by far. Funny it hasn’t become a major issue for either Trump or Clinton.
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This one is undesirably heavy on adjectives. But the writer is a person who has to be taken very seriously, indeed.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45209.htm

It’s long, but worth reading to the end where it makes an obvious point. The U.S. has challenged Russia by building missile sites near the Russian border. The U.S. is also well into a decline relative to Russia and China. Nor can it maintain its level of defence spending which is already a potential disaster of debt. So –
The U.S. will soon have to decide it’s now or never to fire its nukes . And neither Russia nor China can afford to wait for the U.S. to fire the first shot. For over seventy years, the nuclear powers have made no serious attempt to get rid of nuclear weapons. Now the clock is running down. This is far, far worse than the Cuban missile crisis.
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As I wrote the site above, a couple of related points came to mind.

1. The word hero as routinely applied to every veteran did not come into use in the West until the Korean war. Then it became mandatory in the news media as in “Korean war hero gets traffic ticket.” Essentially, it was used as propaganda – and very effectively so.

2. Before that, the word was used largely in cartoons to describe Russians who, we were told had a passion for medals. So Russian soldiers, in cartoons, would each be wearing a huge star with the world ‘Hero’ emblazoned on it.

Actually, the world leader in medals, for decades, has probably been the U.S. Even the drone controllers who sit in comfortable cockpits that mimic real ones, and who guide drones  thousands of miles away to kill people who might (or might not) be threats to the U.S. get festooned with medals.
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Here’s look by a very reputable journalist at America’s longest war that still goes on, and that wasn’t even mentioned in the leadership races. Note, too, how Canada simply threw away the lives of 158 Canadians in that war that had nothing to do with defending Canada or anybody else. And we’re doing it again in Syria and Latvia.

So that’s what Canadians mean by the term ‘hero’, someone who risks his or her life to make American billionaires richer.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45210.htm
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This next one sounds true – and it must be. We can be sure of that because it didn’t appear in the irving press.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45207.htm
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The following note just appeared on my screen.

Urgent: Chelsea Manning is being charged for her own suicide attempt, faces indefinite solitary confinement!
After years of inhumane treatment, and having been held in conditions that the UN considers to be torture, Chelsea Manning, the Guardian columnist and whistleblower who has been in prison for years serving a 35-year sentence for exposing some of the U.S. government’s worst abuses, attempted to take her own life on July 5th, 2016.
Click here to tell the Army not to use this as an excuse to further punish Chelsea or to prevent her exercising the right to speach.
Army officials have informed Chelsea Manning that she is facing serious new charges directly related to her suicide attempt. These new charges include:
1) Resisting a group of prison guards called “the force cell move team” (Chelsea was unconscious when this team arrived, which makes this charge particularly absurd.)
2) Prohibited property (for the items she used to attempt to take her own life.)
3) Conduct which threatens (for somehow putting the prison at risk while attempting to take her own life, quietly, in her own cell.)
Click here to inist on humane and legal treatment, and the dropping of these charges.
If convicted of these bizarre “administrative offenses,” that are effectively charging her for attempting to end her life, she is facing indefinite solitary confinement for the rest of her prison term (another 30 years), “maximum security” classification (in the same facility), and nearly a decade before she can ever be classified as a “minimum security” prisoner.
It is unnecessarily cruel to threaten Chelsea with additional punishment while in this very vulnerable state. The government is trying to silence her important voice––for good. Chelsea has been systematically mistreated by the U.S. government since she was first taken into custody in 2010, including long stretches of extreme solitary confinement even before she had ever been convicted.
Chelsea is a transgender woman being forced to serve out her sentence in an all-male prison, which is in itself dehumanizing and exhausting emotionally. She is currently being denied medical treatment for her gender dysphoria, which experts have stated is the only course of treatment through which she would no longer be suicidal.
This is not the first time the government has harassed Chelsea with outrageous charges while in prison. Last year, they threatened her with solitary confinement for minor “infractions” including possession of LGBTQ reading materials and an expired tube of toothpaste. RootsAction and Fight for the Future and other groups gathered more than 100,000 petition signatures in response, and the outcry we generated kept her out of solitary. Now we need to do it again. Please, sign the petition and spread the word. Chelsea is depending on us.

Well, I rapped upon a house
With the U.S. flag upon display
I said, “Could you help me out
I got some friends down the way”
The man says, “Get out of here
I’ll tear you limb from limb”
I said, “You know they refused Jesus, too”
He said, “You’re not Him.”
— Bob Dylan
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We did not defeat Hitler. He set the stage for what the U.S. has become – and for what Canada is being sucked into.

Meanwhile, the George Bush who murdered over a million people is a respected member of the Methodist Church.
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Here another big story the irving press didn’t have room for. It needed the space for a really big story about how it has been exactly a year since Harper called our national election.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45208.htm

This whole section of information clearing house has a lot of good material that I didn’t have room for.
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Meanwhile, Israel has for years been denying water to Palestinians. They’ve been doing it for fifty years because – well, because they’re Palestinians. There are two things to note here. One is that Jews in Israel are behaving brutally and murderously  – and that is the result of what Europe, Canada and the U.S. have done to them for centuries. Just as we have created ISIS, we have created the brutality of Israel.

The other thing to note is that I have never seen a criticism of the behaviour of Israel in the irving press – and rarely in any other press – though the class of people who own private news media are the same class who persecuted Jews until very recently.

http://www.countercurrents.org/2016/08/01/israels-hydro-apartheid-keeps-west-bank-thirsty
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Here’s another story that will never make the irving press. President Erdogan of Turkey has made it quite clear that  the U.S. was behind the attempted coup in Turkey. The story names names, and says a bit about the methods.

http://www.countercurrents.org/2016/08/01/erdogan-accuses-us-of-supporting-failed-coup-in-turkey/

By coincidence, as I write this, thousands of Turkish police have surrounded the major U.S. air base in Turkey, the refueling base for attacks on Syria. You won’t find that in the irving press, either.
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I’m not quite sure what to make of this one. It’s all speculation. I don’t think it’s entirely true. But there certainly are incidents that give this credibility.

http://thesaker.is/false-flags-fluttering-in-the-empires-hot-air/
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And, as we send our soldiers to Latvia, tell me what evidence we have been given that Russia is preparing an attack?

I have been able to find only one item – and it’s no evidence at all. The story we have been told is that Canada’s intelligence service says, “Russia is preparing for war.” That’s it. Four words.

So the U.S. is preparing for world war on the basis of four words from Canadian intelligence? That’s it? Now, take a look at those four words. Russia is preparing for war….? Can you name a country that is NOT preparing for war? The U.S. is spending more to prepare for war than all the rest of the world put together. Britain is preparing for war. France is. Germany is. Canada is. Almost every country is preparing for war and always has been.

And on the  basis of that we are going to send an undersized and underequipped Canadian force on a task that could trigger a war?

That’s nice. That means if this does trigger a war, we can remember our fallen heroes on Nov. 11. If there is a Nov. 11 by then. And if there are any of us to remember them.