PALIN AND CRIB NOTES ON HER PALM - HARDLY A BIG POINT BECAUSE SHE HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO SAY WITH OR WITHOUT NOTES

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

The problem certainly is not the crib notes on Sarah Palin’s palm, although it makes a funny anecdote after her blubbering about teleprompters.

The problem is that Sarah Palin has absolutely nothing to say, with or without notes.

Almost every word that comes from her mouth is completely predictable. And all of it is as vacuous as the applause soundtrack from a 1950s television sitcom.

Organizations might just as well buy a DVD of her past appearances and play random selections.

Imagine giving this hare-brain a hundred thousand dollars to come and say nothing?

Ah, that's America, land of opportunity.

And, of course, when dear Sarah bounces around and waves her hands like a Baptist preacher at a tent meeting, she sees nothing from the podium but real folks in the audience, not beltway insiders.

This, as she works tirelessly to become one of those very beltway insiders.

What a truly tiresome theme, a re-tread of Newt Gingrich and Lamar Alexander and Phil Gramm plus countless other past opportunists devoid of content.

How is it that America has an endless appetite for such regurgitated tripe?

STILL MORE ABOUT THE GOOFY TEA PARTY: THIS TIME JOHN IBBITSON WRITES ABOUT AMERICAN ANTI-STATUS QUO MOVEMENTS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JOHN IBBITSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

John Ibbitson,

You really do have it entirely wrong.

I'm surprised at how much so. Perhaps it's your American-wannabe inner-self seeking expression?

There is nothing new, and certainly nothing genuinely anti-status quo, about the goofy Tea Party.

Good Lord, Sarah Palin - George Bush with a sex change - was there, and they were applauding that total airhead as she waved her arms around like a Baptist tent preacher.

And surely, you understand that there is nothing new about Palin except the color of her hair.

In fact, the Tea Party is the same tiresome bunch we've heard from dozens of times before in the U.S.

It's a re-run of a re-run of a re-run there: back to political basics and origins.

It's almost a hobby amongst the U.S. Right Wing, every once in while, we get a bunch of them with a new set of slogans.

This latest group of clowns reminds me of Lamar Alexander working desperately towards the Republican nomination in 2000, by going around in a red lumberjack shirt and offering the profound suggestion of a part-time government.

Likely it was a custom-made lumberjack shirt since good old Lamar is a multi-millionaire. Of course, in one sense, old Lamar was only talking about formalizing the de facto reality: America does have a part-time government if you count the time spent soliciting money.

Were you aware that one of their speakers at the convention also called for the re-establishment of literacy tests for voting? It's the old code phrase for eliminating black votes.

Anti-status quo? Yes, if you count going backward a century as being anti-status quo.

THE GOOFY TEA PARTY AGAIN - AND THE CLOWN SARAH PALIN - AND THE TRUTH ABOUT THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY KONRAD YAKABUSKI IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Oh, please, any group which can become excited by a certified airhead like Sarah Palin is pathetic.

The Tea Party is just one more in a long list of fad right-wing movements in America, most of them deliberately employing the language of revolution to make themselves sound consequential.

Well, they are all about as revolutionary, and as interesting, as the latest version of dish soap from Procter and Gamble.

And this author, Konrad Yakabuski, too, has a childishly limited understanding of the American "revolution."

"...driven by the same distrust of the ruling class that inspired the Revolution."

That statement is simply not true. It represents the American 8th grade civics-class version of the "revolution."

Americans in the colonies were a pretty privileged group in the world of 1776. Everything we read from foreign observers tells us how good and healthy and free their lives in fact were. From life expectancies, smart people like Franklin calculated how quickly the population would become large.

Britain - in the Seven Years War (aka, French and Indian War) - had even eliminated the worrying threat of the French encroaching into the Ohio Valley.

But when Britain wanted Americans to help pay for that war with some new taxes - a perfectly reasonable expectation – we first saw Americans acting like rude kids being served spinach for dinner, a behavior which has continued down to this day.

Indeed, the financial crisis which just threatened the world comes from the same dark place in the American soul: “I want it all, and I want it now.”

Britain also irritated the colonists by keeping rules about land speculation and against disturbing the natives in the Ohio Valley, an unpleasant get-rich-quick practice in which George Washington was a leader, surveying other people’s land and later selling it to new immigrants from Europe.

And it still further irritated the colonists – actually infuriated them – by imposing the Quebec Act, arousing the ugliest anti-Catholic rhetoric you could imagine, truly gutter stuff.

These are the true origins of the American Revolution, an event which is far more accurately called a revolt since it was an effort to overthrow an imperial power, not local government by locals.

None of the rhetoric about liberty and justice had much to do with it, unless you agree that people who trade in slaves make any sense in talking about such concepts.

Selfishness writ large.

And just so now, the clownish Tea Party.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, ESTABLISHMENT DARLING, ATTACKS GORE VIDAL - AND GRAHAM GREENE ON WHAT A WRITER'S RESPONSIBILITY IS - AND 9/11 FACTS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

This isn't an attack.

Gore Vidal is a crackpot, a rather delightful and entertaining one.

Christopher Hitchens, however, has become something much more unpleasant, and far more dangerous, than a crackpot.

Hitchens is now a relentless defender of the establishment, eloquent and wordy certainly, but serving interests a genuine writer should never serve.

Graham Greene said it so superbly:

"You remember Thomas Paine’s great apothegm, ‘we must take care to guard even our enemies against injustice,’ and it is there – in the establishment of justice – that the writer has greater opportunities and therefore greater obligations than, say, the chemist or the estate agent."

No matter what you believe about 9/11, it is simply a fact that there are many unanswered questions.

I do not think that that fact means the government was involved, but it could not be clearer that the government is hiding things.

Just the simple facts that structural steel used there required twice the temperature that aviation fuel burns at 3000 versus 1500 degrees), that most of the force of the impact and explosion was depleted by blowing out the other side, and that we have pictures of survivors standing by the entrance hole tell us clearly there was not enough energy to cause those collapses.

The recorded images of the collapse are, almost to a certainty, images of a controlled demolition, not a "pancaking" down of floors. Indeed, the central core was so immensely strong – overbuilt from an engineering point of view – that even if the floors could have “pancaked” down, the core would have been left standing.

And there are so many other questions.

Most of the perpetrators were Saudis, and, crucially important, had legitimate visas for the US. Who issued those? The Israelis knew about them and were curious, following them around with a large gang of agents who were arrested and deported afterward.

What was going on? A CIA training operation gone sour? A much larger plot than the men in the planes, including others who planted explosives at the building bases? Who knows, but we do know we have not been told the truth.

And as for the fourth airliner, there is absolutely no question but it was shot down by an American fighter plane. The debris field was vast and could not possibly have resulted from the official fantasy story of “let’s roll,” a story concocted to save the government from a monstrous set of lawsuits.

Yes, Christopher Hitchens is not a writer in the truest sense of the word, he is the kind of talented scribbler who has always served those with power.

ON THE ISSUE OF MERIT PAY FOR TEACHERS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ERIN ANDERSSEN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

True merit pay for teachers must cut both ways.

The better teachers should get more than average while the poorer teachers should get less than average.

That is the only intellectually defensible way to do this.

Of course, the truly poor ones – of which there are many – should be let go.

How much chance is there that the teacher's union - at its heart the cause of most of our educational woes - would support that? None.

As for only paying bonuses, that really is a bribery system. Because the education system is so much larger and complex in the US, it is only natural that bribes would come into being.

After all, American states and cities outbid each other in concessions to keep or receive industries.

In a large American metropolis, typically there are many school boards, ranging from immensely well-financed ones in breathtakingly wealthy suburbs to piteously financed ones in some urban centers (truly rural schools in the US are often terribly poor too).

In a place like Chicago area, there are suburbs with PhDs teaching high school and with facilities comparable to a private quality college. Then there are science labs in some Chicago neighborhoods where the Bunsen burners do not work.

Paying these bribes is just one more mechanism for the well-off to assure themselves all the very best. Poor boards are not able to compete.

It's just one more form of Social Darwinism in a country which specializes in such arrangements.

Another argument against this idea is a strong one too. The fact is, in Ontario, we have no in authority competent to judge the quality of teachers. Principals are afraid, often rather limp-wristed, and they are just teachers themselves who in many cases sought a way out of the classroom.

Once a graduate lands a permanent job in Ontario, his or her teaching is never examined or assessed. There are no specialist teams competent to do this anyway, as there once were.

Going right up the Ontario hierarchy, we have pretty much nothing but ex-teachers who’ve escaped the classroom. That’s how we get superintendents and even directors with little capacity for management or sound judgment.

NOISES IN THE MIDDLE EAST: IS MURDER INCORPORATED PREPARING A NEW WAR?

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY PATRICK MARTIN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Murder Incorporated has been making all kinds of threatening noises lately.

Threats towards Iran.

Threats towards Syria.

Threats towards Southern Lebanon.

And there's the effort to starve the Palestinians out of Gaza while daily stealing more of the property of others in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

We have a very ugly and threatening situation developing.

Syria is absolutely right to say that if a war starts, Israeli cities would be targets. It is the only way for Israel's savage leaders to reconsider whatever it is they appear to be planning.

After all, Israel and the U.S. have never hesitated to bomb and shell cities.

Israel used an artillery siege on Beirut in the 1980s. In recent years it has bombed Beirut and dropped ghastly cluster bombs.

Israel caused the deaths of thousands in just the city of Beirut in the 1980s. The U.S. slaughtered civilians in cities all over Iraq, especially in Baghdad. And it regularly bombs civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Its holocaust of Hanoi was one of the most bloodthirsty events of the second half of the 20th century.

The U.S. is the only power capable of restraining Israel's aggression, but it refuses to do so. Policy under Obama, just as under Bush, seems virtually set in Tel Aviv.

MORE ON THE TEA PARTY: THIS AN ARTICLE SO POORLY INFORMED IT SHOULDN'T HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED - BUT PERHAPS IT FITTINGLY SUMS THIS SILLY BUNCH

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY TOM VELK IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Tom Velk, this is a remarkably poorly informed piece.

First, you start with a straw-man argument.

The fact is no one on earth thinks the Tea Party represents rebels.

In fact, they are the same tiresome bunch we've heard from dozens of times before in the U.S.

Back to political basics and origins.

It's a fad amongst the U.S. Right Wing, every once in while, we get a new bunch of them with slogans.

It's been typical for them to use words or phrases like “manifesto” or “revolution” so that they grab attention and sound like something other than the retro-grade folks they are: Patriots with four-car garages.

The Tea Party will disappear within a year or two. It has nothing to offer. Good God, just consider they’re using the brainless Sarah Palin as a keynote speaker. Kind of says it all.

As for Jefferson, you seem unaware of the facts of his life. He said that the country needed some blood shed every twenty years or so to keep the Tree of Liberty nourished, and he wasn’t using poetic language. He supported the bloody French Revolution right through The Terror, leaving behind some pretty awful statements.

Jefferson actually shared qualities with Cambodia’s Pol Pot: he believed in the honest yeoman type and was against industrialization and opposed Hamilton’s sophistication in finances. He was repressive as in the revolt of Haiti and his horrible embargo of England and his Inspector Javert-like pursuit of Arron Burr.

Altogether a confusing and rather unpleasant man.

_______________________

"4. Describing America's growth in the 19th century: "the giant did not grow by conquest (except of a figurative sort)" The War of 1812 was an attempt to do just that; The Mexican War? the forced death March of natives from Florida; the many 'Indian Wars' of conquest."

Yes, indeed. Don't forget the Spanish-American War intended to steal Cuba and other properties.

Then there's the theft of Texas.

The theft of New Mexico and California.

The story of Hawaii is a very sad one. America stole the place after the British were gone and ignored the pleas of natives who even petitioned Congress and were completely ignored.

Don't forget the many bloody uprisings in the "Empire of Liberty" stretching back to putting down the Whisky rebellion to the ghastly mass slaughters of blacks in the 1920s in Oklahoma and Florida and other places. Bodies by the hundreds dumped into mass graves and their property stolen.

Actually, America's record, for those who know it, very much resembles Germany's rise in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries.

Only the fact that the places America attacked and pillaged were thinly populated prevents its record from being one of deaths in the many millions like Germany's.

Of course, its ruthlessness goes right up to the fire bombing and atomic bombing of Japan and its mass murder in Vietnam with perhaps 3 million victims left behind. And a million victims in Iraq.

It ain't a pretty record.

I really think the editors of the Globe need to do a much better job in selecting the people they print. This piece is uninformed trash.

THE AMERICAN HEALTH CARE POLITICAL MESS: A KEY FACT NOT WIDELY APPRECIATED OUTSIDE THE U.S.

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

One of the key facts in understanding American health care and the lack of support for serious reform is not widely understood outside of the United States.

That fact is that under the existing regime, the comfortable middle class almost universally receives very good health care.

Those who work at good corporate or government jobs receive good to superb insurance as a benefit.

This fact effectively removes society's most vocal and politically influential group of people from the debate. In fact, it actually puts them on the side against any change: "I've got mine, and I don't want it mucked up," is genuine if unspoken thinking.

The people who suffer most are the underemployed or those consigned to lives with low-level jobs - the great majority of clerks and retail employees and people who work at service work of many descriptions. They receive either no insurance or, often, insurance which is so poor in its coverage and rules that it can be close to useless. In effect, they are hard-working people who cannot afford to buy costly private insurance and have little prospect for a change in their circumstances over their lifetimes.

Of course, there are also the tens of millions who go entirely uninsured, but many of these are young and in a sense their plight isn't as serious as the underinsured.

So the total American population is highly segmented, as it were, into groups whose political importance also varies greatly. The politically important ones are pretty satisfied with their health care. The politically less important are generally not but tend to be inert.

When politicians are doing their electioneering (even outside of health care), middle class people are pretty consistently their target of first importance. They have the money, they have the voices, and they are statistically the most likely to vote. It’s fundamental part of “the calculus of consent.”

General ethical appeals have limited claim on many of them. America is not run as a society in which ethics, apart from self-interest, play a great role in politics. This is easily observed in many phenomena, but the words used by politicians and political commentators are especially revealing in this regard. People aren’t addressed as citizens or fellows but typically as consumers in America. There is a palpable theme of Social Darwinism that surges through most public affairs.

And, of course, as de Tocqueville observed a long time ago, “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” That characterizes every national election still, and Obama’s was no exception.

ARE THE VANCOUVER OLYMPICS TO BE A FINANCIAL DISASTER OR NOT? AND OTHER OLYMPIC MATTERS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GARY MASON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

"But if you're going to suggest, as Olympic critics do, that the Games have cost $6-billion, at least have the decency to say that a good chunk of that amount – $4-billion, in fact – has gone to things that were going to get built anyway."

This is just a roundabout updating of Mayor Drapeau's infamous line about Olympics and deficits and having babies.

Of course, in the case of Montreal 1976, we were left with a whopper of a deficit, and some of the infrastructure was poorly designed and built in the rush, yielding far less utility in the future than structures carefully done over time.

There's no reason on earth a city the size of Vancouver, not really a terribly large city, would have been spending $4billion on infrastructure.

And the comment on the immense security cost, above, is on the mark: we are at the point where a public event requiring this much security is not worth it.

The excesses of the modern Olympics are beyond counting, but they may perhaps be best symbolized by the Olympic Torch Relay. It costs a fortune to pull off this meaningless quasi-barbaric ritual in a country the size of Canada.

And what are its origins? The 1936 Olympics in Germany, a country under great international pressure at the time over its suitability to host the Olympics and a country then given to lavish quasi-barbaric rituals.

The infamous Joseph Goebbels put the first Torch Relay into the modern Olympics, and we still mindlessly repeat it.

It has no connection to the origins of the Olympics, and, indeed, the entire modern excess called the Olympics has no relation to the ancient, relatively simple event.

Vancouver, as was China, is a gigantic, immensely expensive Las Vegas show, a glitzy, vacuous temporary temple to sports not even paid for by the people enjoying it.

LAWRENCE MARTIN SAYS THE LIBERALS ARE GOING TO LET IGNATIEFF BE HIMSELF

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY LAWRENCE MARTIN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Let Ignatieff be himself?

God, what a treat that will be for voters.

Let him drone on in his drab tone.

Let him display his arrogant and stand-offish attitude.

Let him display his striped trousers and silk stockings while crossing his legs on podiums across the country.

Let him speak about relatively trivial points while the great issues of the sweep past him.

Let him blubber about the democratic values his entire sordid little political career in Canada has worked against.

Let him smile his sardonic smile and be self-satisfied about his changing his mind about past support for torture and mass murder in Iraq.

God, I wish the Liberal Party would come to its senses and dump this political albatross.

CLIVE CROOK DISPARAGES J. K. GALBRAITH'S ARROGANCE - AND RIGHTLY SO

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

I too have read a number of Galbraith's books, and there is no doubt that he is an interesting writer, and while I disagree with a good deal of his thought, I welcome the thoughtful views of those who go against the academic establishment.

I have also met Galbraith, briefly, and heard him lecture, and there is equally no doubt that he was one of the most arrogant people I have ever met. He literally dripped arrogance. Not a pleasant experience.

Further thought.

It is not widely appreciated that Galbraith came from rural Ontario. His first academic work was at what was then called the Ontario Agricultural College (since changed into the University of Guelph).

I've always thought, in view of Harvard and the top Washington establishment, that he hid his embarrassment at that humble beginning with practiced arrogance.

Perhaps.

CLIVE CROOK CAPTURES THE ECONOMIC ABSURDITY OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT BUDGETS - AND AMERICA'S GROTESQUE MILITARY EXPENDITURE

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Yes, exactly.

Whether in war or foreign affairs or economics or trade, the basic problem is the American attitude of "I want it all, and I want it now."

Another word for this is entitlement.

I think there really is no cure for this sickness, just as it is virtually impossible to undo the damage to a person raised by parents who behaved as though they were his servants.

The only time we saw some deviation from this obsession was in the Great Depression, a learning experience comparable to repeatedly hitting one's head into a wall.

But, as we've seen, even depressions have been banned in America now. You can buy your way out, and go back to just what you were doing.

____________________

Yes, Wendell Murray, the American military expenditure is actually cancer-like in its growth, and only recently we were assured by the good Mr. Gates that there would be still more coming.

American politicians today sometimes harangue about China’s military expenditure, which at somewhere between 10 and 15% that of America’s (with four times the population), seems almost miniscule.

There is no rational explanation for this.

Consider the countless billions squandered in Vietnam - inflate it to present dollars and the sum is immense - and to what end?

Trillions were spent on the Cold War, almost all of it wasted. The Soviet Union finally collapsed based on the flaws in economics and logic embedded in its very foundation and structure, not owing to America's military might.

I think the practice reflects a combination of the American entitlement syndrome (we are entitled to make all others fear our might) and the Moby Dick obsession with chasing the white whale.

There always seems to be a white whale for America.

Spain’s remaining North American Empire of the 1890s, Communism for decades going back to the 1920s (when Hoover first showed his obsession with getting rid of anyone who could be regarded as a Communist), to Islam in recent times.

Does that reflect a basic paranoid trait in a good portion of the population, the legacy of the horrible Puritans? I’ve long thought so. I think Australia was lucky to get the convicts rather than the Pilgrims.

I do believe the world needs seriously to start re-thinking the role of the American dollar as reserve currency in light of the county’s proved record of irresponsibility. That role for the currency leaves Americans with an option no one else has in paying for its lack of control. Look what it did after Vietnam.

NORMAN SPECTOR MAKES SILLY CLAIMS ABOUT IGNATIEFF USING DUCEPPE

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY NORMAN SPECTOR IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

I have no use for separatism, but I think it more than fair to say that Mr. Duceppe is by a good measure the more statesmanlike of the three, comparing him with Harper and Ignatieff.

Duceppe also has demonstrated a solid concern for the kind of values most Canadians are comfortable with.

Harper is a nasty political accident, an extremist who has managed to enjoy power only owing to a set of circumstances beyond his control.

Ignatieff is not worth discussing. The man represents no values whatsoever. His voice is never even heard on important matters. And his past is a disgrace, whether speaking of his support for torture and mass murder or his receiving his position through anti-democratic manoeuvering. And to put the cap on it, he isn't even interesting to listen to, rather drab in fact.

The press, and columnists like Norman Spector, actually make far more out of the separatist affiliation of Duceppe than is warranted. He has no chance ever of achieving separation, the majority of Quebec’s people not supporting that end. But he has been a more respectable and, in my view, responsible member of Parliament than Ignatieff or Harper.

A FITTING RESPONSE TO A PREVIOUS BIZARRE COLUMN BY ANTHONY JULIUS

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MELANIE MCDONAGH IN THE TELEGRAPH

Melanie McDonagh, you have captured perfectly a sense of Anthony Julius's piece.

The tone of Julius's piece actually struck me as a bit bizarre and off-the-wall.

Why, of all the things you could discuss would you choose this insignificant little remark?

Especially, when you consider the fact we understand today that the charming Diana was a very disturbed person. Are the little confidences of disturbed people to a professional the stuff of publicity? Of course, they are not.

His anecdote just touches the filth which floats around today like stuff on a waste pond: the endless shrill accusations that every critic of Israel is anti-Semitic.

It represents an obsession and a desperately unpleasant effort to cover Israel's atrocities.

THE RETIRING OF ANDY BARRIE FROM HIS MORNING CBC RADIO SHOW

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Andy Barrie certainly is a man of intelligence and some talents, but I think this very interview reveals why it is a good thing that he is leaving the morning show.

This interview focuses on personal matters, and that is precisely what Mr Barrie does on his show.

I know more about Andy Barrie's personal life and personal views than I do about anyone else on CBC Radio, indeed likely more than all the other people on CBC Radio together.

I know almost nothing personal about such outstanding CBC talents as Anna Marie Tremonti, Eleanor Wachtel, Bob McDonald, or Michael Enright.

But I know about Andy’s religious views, I know about Andy’s late brother, about his history in Montreal, about his history in the U.S., about Andy’s mother, about Andy’s late wife, about Andy’s health, and a good many other things.

I know too much about Andy, and especially his views. He cannot conduct a serious interview without making it almost as much about views or comments of his as the person being interviewed.

He inserts his views into almost everything, and I regard that as something of an abuse of listeners. I believe it was the third or fourth time he started in with the “I’m an atheist” stuff that I wrote in saying if I heard it once more, I’d puke. Not because I care in the least about atheism, but simply too much of the self-indulgent boy doing his adolescent bravado act

There is too much in Andy of the old Larry Solway days, the aggressive, opinionated telephone-in show host.

I like to hear the morning show for events, but I think it can only improve without the really huge ego.

ON THE FINAL CHAPTER TO CANADA'S AFGHANISTAN MISSION - WHATEVER THAT IS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ROLAND PARIS IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

The final chapter of our Afghan mission?

And just what was our "mission"?

I doubt anyone in Canada can give a coherent definition of that so-called mission.

The government has blubbered again and again, as have some of its supporters, about making the purpose clearer to people, but they never have.

That is simply because there is no purpose, at least in the conventional meaning of the word.

The United States went there for vengeance and to kill as many people it regards as hostile as it can. It dragged along all the “help” its vast resources of finance, aid, and military could extract from the world, hoping to make the business look like something other than it is.

Even then, most countries, except for Tony Blair’s Britain, sent only token help to this supposedly world-important “mission.”

There never has been any other meaning, except in the columns of propagandists.

Canada's only purpose was to placate a mindlessly angry and paranoid United States with the knowledge that we'll help hold your overcoat while you're busy doing all that killing. We accidentally got assigned to a place where our troops suffered disproportionately

No other definition of our "mission" fits the facts. It is a dark and brutal and pointless chapter in our history.

________________

"...should have realized that the mission since the German Conference was to rebuilt Afghanistan and provide the necessary security for its people."

It doesn't get more unthinking and uninformed than that.

Afghanistan is not being "rebuilt."

The place was never a country in the sense that we understand it. It is simply a remote place which is the home to a number of tribes. There is traditionally no central government - and there effectively still is not - and there are no roads to speak of, and relationships are governed by a set of ancient tribal rules.

You cannot undo that in even a lifetime.

Because the economy is so primitive, it is little more than window dressing to build a lot more schools too. There is no employment for more educated people in a tribal society like that.

If we could by a wave of the hand, suddenly educate all the people of Afghanistan, all we would achieve is producing a lot of people who want to go somewhere else. The primitive economy cannot absorb them.

The "German Conference" was just one more in a long line of American tools to manipulate world opinion.

Had America cared the least about developing Afghanistan, it would have dropped dollar bills, not bombs.

How few people are even aware that the Taleban originally was created to provide clean government, at a time when the country was under the warlords of the Northern Alliance, who in their internecine fights were killing tens of thousands of people after the Russians left.

The Taleban’s original purpose had absolutely nothing to do with fighting the West.

Yes, they granted Osama's people a place to stay, but Osama had before that been someone who served American purposes, indeed, someone who visited the United States and received assistance.

After 9/11, the Taleban would have extradited Osama's people had the US offered one shred of evidence concerning his guilt, something they refused, and to this day, we've still not seen any.

America has managed the feat of making an enemy of the Taleban. Pointless because, whether we like it or not, they are part of the fabric of that country.

America’s total achievement, apart from killing tens of thousands more, includes the poppies, which the Taleban had suppressed, now blooming like wildflowers, and the Northern Alliance warlords rule their respective areas with all the corruption and violence and anti-progressive behavior as always.

A total disaster.

ON THE NOTION OF A MADE-IN-CANADA SOLUTION TO THE BURKA

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY SHEEMA KHAN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Ms. Khan, there is to my mind only one made-in-Canada approach to this matter.

That is, let people do as they wish in their private lives and as they feel their religion directs them.

Anything else is state interference into private lives and religion, an abhorrent concept in which I am sorry to see France becoming involved.

I don’t like burkas, but I didn’t like nun’s heavy habits of only a few decades ago either. Some of them were godawful outfits, covering from head to toe and pinching the face in heavily starched material. I’m not too fond of the grotesquely ugly clothing strict Mennonite women wear too.

But it is all none of my business.

We had no complaints about those excesses. The complaints today reflect raw anti-Muslim prejudice, and we have no business accommodating that.

Over time, as people adjust to a new society, they or at least their children, will give up these ancient customs. It just takes time.

It was only a couple of generations ago that women from Eastern Europe, and actually many others, wore babushkas routinely. In the World War II period, it was stylish for women to wear veils on their hats. In Victorian times, women covered themselves in heavy dark clothing and wore hats with large heavy veils. All just common fashion, and all of it has disappeared.

If people out there are concerned about women’s rights, then look to the world’s many true horrors and do something about them.

Three million women a year undergo sexual mutilation in Africa. It is routine practice also in many parts of Africa for older men in a village to rape young girls.

In India, we have bride-burning and honor killing. We also have a ghastly tradition that marries off little girls to rich old men, so the family can get a little money. This horror is compounded by the fact that when the old man dies, the girl is left a widow, and there are terrible rules which apply to her for the rest of her miserable life, including never marrying again and even the clothes she must wear and the food she must eat. Tens of millions of widows in India live under this tyranny.

The world is full of genuine horrors and abuse, never mind what someone wears by custom.

SUPREME COURT DECISION ON THE TERRIBLE CASE OF OMAR KHADR - AND THE IGNORANT SAVAGERY OF SOME COMMENTS

POSTED RESPONSES TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Do the right thing?

And just when in his entire career - except for events in Haiti where he would have appeared a fiend had he not responded - has Mr Harper done the right thing?

The Supreme Court had no choice here, and I think their decision a wise one.

The government has been complicit in denying a boy his rights, and in so doing, they assisted the buzz-cut thugs at Guantanamo in torturing a boy. (I remind readers that this poor boy had been shot, twice in the back, by American soldiers. He was tortured while these ghastly wounds slowly healed.)

The ethical and legal issues are clear here. There are no ambiguities.

But legality and ethics mean little to power-driven, compulsive personality like Harper.

Had the Supreme Court attempted to order a remedy, it would have pitched the country into a constitutional crisis.

They have done what they can in making it as clear as it can be that Harper has denied a Canadian the most basic rights.

That's the kind of man we call our prime minister, a politician who has done more than any other in memory to shame Canada and lower its former fine reputation in the world.


__________________

"Your boy's buddies DELIBERATELY targeted their own children."

That is simply ignorant beyond belief.

Since when are the acts of an accused judged by those of anyone else, whether known or unknown?

And, Good Lord, if we're talking about targeting children, Israel just killed 400 of them. Has any Israeli soldier or general or politician been charged with anything?

This young man was fifteen when he was shot, arrested, and tortured.

And we now have evidence to a certainty that he did not even do what he was accused of.

But even if he had, so what?

America has sent thousands of mercenaries and idealists to various wars over the decades, going back to the Spanish Civil War.

Were they all to be tortured and held indefinitely in prison for their acts?

Moreover, he was a child, one pressed by ideological parents, and the United States and Canada are signatories to international conventions on child soldiers.

Clive G, no wonder you don't sign your name to your opinions. That's pretty well what one expects from the cowardly with savage ideas.

BRITAIN'S RELATIONSHIP TO THE U.S.

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE TELEGRAPH

The UK I always so admired seems largely to have faded to a memory.

What we have today - and have had for the last thirty or so years - is a parody of Great Britain.

No country can operate independently of the US, of course, because it is such a great hulking mass.

But that doesn't mean you have to act as its loyal household servant.

I am sorry, but a loyal household servant is an apt description of contemporary Britain.

That silly phrase "special relationship" is literally a
euphemism attempting to lend dignity to a relationship which has none.

Much of the disgust felt towards Tony Blair is owing to his completely obsequious relationship to a mental defective like George Bush.

Obsequious...and profitable. Blair has all the wealth he, and that ghastly fish wife of his, could ever have dreamed of now, most of it showering on his head from Americans or American-created institutions in gratitude for his service.

And what did Britain get? Dead soldiers, depleted finances, and a bad reputation.

THE SUPREME COURT DECISION ON CAMPAIGN FUNDING: AMERICA'S DYSFUNCTIONAL GOVERNMENT

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

The American Supreme Court has always, except for a brief few decades during the 20th century, been an institution for freezing progress.

This view of corporate spending as free speech is, in many ways, comparable to the Dred Scott Decision before the Civil War.

Runaway slaves were still someone's property and needed to be returned.

So far as this decision goes, it's back to the political jungle, although, in truth, American politics never quite left it behind since even the spending reform was not that awesome.

Money in America simply overrides democratic process on average.

When America was founded, a privileged local aristocracy ruled. About 1% of people in Virginia could vote (only white males of a certain wealth). The Senate was appointed (till 1913). The President was elected by the Electoral College, an elite of those with money. The “popular” vote – the 1% - did not even matter, the College elites did (they still do, but at least their votes are apportioned).

Well, some of that has changed, but along the way, American politics also has adapted to maintain a political reality not far from that of 1789 in many ways: the way that is done is with money for marketing and advertising and “exposure.” Tons of it.

In economics, with imperfect competition, we know barriers to entry of a market are vital, and barriers include tons of advertising, paying stores “shelf money” to pack the shelves with your line of products, and slightly differentiating your product from someone else’s – all making it near impossible for upstarts.

American national politics, effectively a duopoly between two parties through many rigged local regulations, exploits all of these practices.

Of course, the money also buys “face time” after elections. In any large American state, it is literally impossible to meet a Senator, much less have some time, unless you are a large money-supplier.

ON A COLUMN COMPARING AMERICA'S LEVEL OF ASSISTANCE TO HAITI WITH CHINA'S - A FOOLISH EXERCISE IN UNTHINKING PROPAGANDA

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY FRANK CHING IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Frank Ching, this piece represents little thought and no analysis.

A waste of your keyboard time, I'd say.

It's the kind of nonsense one expects to hear from an American Secretary of State blubbering about the behavior of other countries.

China has a per capita income a small fraction of America's despite its new wealth in limited regions.

It has all the immense headaches of looking after 1.3 billion people, many of them still very poor.

Besides, Haiti, as one comment has noted, is America's "backyard."

America has worked for two hundred years in countless ways to keep Haiti at arm's length. It does not want hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees.

That is the reason for its large assistance, not compassion or caring or anything else. Just power politics.

______________________

Actually, while people seem to be dazzled by the size of American assistance to Haiti, it is not a reaction which could follow from America's overall level of giving.

On a fair comparison basis with the rest of the world, it is simply a fact that America actually comes out rather stingy.

It gives far less than many others, and much of what it does give has nothing to do with helping people.

It gives its largest single assistance to the relatively advanced state of Israel, about $3 billion a year, mostly for military purchases.

It gives another roughly $2 billion to Egypt to keep it friendly towards Israel and prop up the dictator-president of thirty years there.

And so it is down the list.

Also, much of its foreign assistance to other poor countries is just a subtle way of buying votes in the UN and other international institutions.

Relative to its wealth, American foreign assistance is rather paltry.

__________________________

Further, have readers noted that part of America’s “assistance” is a large landing of heavily armed troops? There are ten thousand the last I read, and this was expected to rise to twenty thousand.

Can you imagine, just in terms of displacement of Haiti’s very capacity for landing supplies and distributing them, what a burden this must be?

How many Haitians did without fresh water or food or beds while this massive operation took place?

Ten thousand troops who expect hot pizza and Budweiser and showers each day, to say nothing of ammunition and technical gear?

The intention is clear to anyone who bothers to think about it.

ON THE PROSPECTS FOR A DEAL WITH THE TALEBAN

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

It's about time.

The Taleban need never have been our enemy, regardless of what we think of their religious behavior.

No Taleban were involved in 9/11.

Saudis were. And they had valid U.S. visas.

The Taleban government would have extradited Osama had the U.S. supplied any genuine evidence of his involvement, but, no, the U.S. refused to supply any, in what is a universal practice for extradition requests.

No, America just had to invade and get some vengeance.

Well, you've had it. Time to go and let these people get on with their lives.

The Northern Alliance guys you put in place are mostly just as backward as the Taleban.

Only long-term economic growth will change Afghanistan, and you don't get that from bombs.

STEPHEN HARPER TWO-FACED? ACTUALLY NOT IF YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT HIS HAITI BEHAVIOR VERSUS HIS USUAL

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

I must say it is a bit delusional to draw conclusions about Harper's character from the Haiti disaster.

The fact is, and has always been, the United States works hard to keep Haiti at arm's length from American shores, and there's no compassion or humane sympathies involved.

Now if Stephen Harper is one thing it the most spineless of leaders towards the United States.

He is, by all reckoning, a card-carrying affiliate of the Right Wing of the Republican Party, a Gingrichite with a darker, less expansive personality.

So when he speaks about long term commitments to Haiti, he's just doing what the U.S. State Department expects, just as we're doing what the Pentagon expects in Afghanistan.

In the sense about which Jeffrey Simpson is talking, he actually is not two-faced. He is absolutely consistent.

Harper is very much two-faced in another sense. His is a deeply flawed character, taking no direction from anything other than his desire for power. That means his ethics in all things remain completely flexible, so much so as to be meaningless. His smiles are all deeply phony as are his compassionate words.

We have seen this quality expressed in him countless times now, and his proroguing Parliament to cover up his human-rights failings in Afghanistan is utterly devoid of ethics. The Sponsorship scandal, involving money misused out of patriotic motives, almost looks good compared to Harper’s disgusting ways with human beings.

REMEMBERING THE HOLOCAUST AND THE NOTION OF INCREASED ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE FACT OF ISRAEL'S BRUTAL BEHAVIOR

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MICHAEL GOVE IN THE TELEGRAPH

I certainly do not wish to speak against remembering The Holocaust, but I do believe, as with all titanic and ghastly historical events, it is the natural (and proper) human tendency to eventually consign them to our history texts and a few monuments.

You cannot constantly remember horror: doing so works against innate human tendencies. In our private lives, we have, most of us, a built-in capacity to allow horrors to fade gradually. Otherwise, many could simply not function. Perpetual mourning is not the way Nature built us.

Of course, I’m not in the mainstream of thinking about this, being one of those who believe that war remembrance ceremonies in general have outlived their usefulness, and they are associated with events which extinguished twenty million lives in WWI and fifty million in WWII. But some distinguished old veterans have expressed the same sentiment: it is war which causes or induces our greatest horrors and society should start moving beyond glorifying it.

The Holocaust itself was only possible under the cover of the invasion of the Soviet Union, itself the most destructive and murderous event in all of human history.

I do not believe claims that genuine anti-Semitism is on the rise in the world, and I’m not sure what legitimate procedure could even be used to accurately collect statistics saying otherwise. What we have today, however, is a great deal of criticism of the state of Israel, but that is not the same thing as anti-Semitism, and any statistics which support the notion it is must be viewed as spurious.

I wouldn’t want to live in a society where inexcusable brutality such Operation Cast Lead did not produce revulsion: a society not revulsed by such treatment of others provides exactly the set of conditions which allow barbarism like The Holocaust to occur.

Sadly, Israel in its desire to leave the possibilities of a repeat of barbarism has also managed to leave behind a great many other things, including any consideration for its neighbors.

And every time someone dares to criticize, he or she is immediately accused of anti-Semitism, a shabby trick to shut honest people up.

In a roundabout way, Michael Gove joins this unpleasant practice in this piece.

Israel is a state, and if it is to be treated as any other state, then it must behave as we expect other states to behave.

When you start making exceptions to ethics and humanity, you have started down the road to God knows what. After all, Hitler’s early anti-Jewish activities during the 1930s, before the Wannsee Conference, consisted of beating up people in the street, burning down their homes and businesses, depriving them of equal rights, stealing their property, excluding them from many privileges in society, pushing for their emigration, and even declaring who was fit to marry whom.

Does that all not sound familiar to those who follow events in the Middle East?

GOOGLE AND CHINA AND BEING "SOFT ON CHINA"

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Oh, please, Mr Rachman, "too soft" on China?

That's pure Richard Nixon circa his first run for office in California, a contest he won by suggesting a fine congresswoman was soft-on.

He along with intellectual and ethical giants like J Edgar Hoover built entire careers on this kind of nastiness.

Let China be China. It is the most remarkable phenomenon of our lifetimes, a miracle perhaps short only of the Internet. China will become a democratic state, with democratic values, just as all Western nations became democratic states. The huge growth of the middle class assures that.

You really have no choice anyway, it is too big and important, although many Americans with a tendency to want to control others still think they can say some words and change a fifth of the planet. Delusional.

And I remind you that the Google business is rather trivial stuff compared with matters like invading a nation and killing a million people.

The United States is almost laughable in the words it uses to defend companies like Google, just as when it makes its ridiculous annual pronouncements about the human rights and democratic behaviors in the world’s other countries, as though it were somehow entitled to pass judgment, which, given its record over the last half century abroad, it most certainly is not.

Google needs to be Google too - leave China if you don't like it. Don't go whining back to mommy at the State Department about the bad boys in the school yard.

In a hundred places in this world, the United States stands for abuse and its own privileges, not rights or decency or democracy. Guantanamo continues. Diego Garcia continues. Bagram in Afganistan continues. Every week Hellfire missiles kill innocent people in Pakistan, and in Afghanistan for that matter. Now, in Yemen too. Oh the list is too long to place here.

MORE ON MASSACHUSETTS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY PAUL CELLUCCI IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

The Tea Party is just one more in a long list of American right-wing political fads, just during my lifetime.

For some reason they always use words or names that are suggestive of revolution or revolt - words like manifesto.

I guess that serves to disguise the basically retrograde nature of their movement.

Of course, I recognize that America is an extremely conservative country.

A genuine liberal there is rather like a rose blooming on the desert.

But Americans are given to fads and impatience in all aspects of their lives - after all, that's a good part of the reason for the financial crisis ('I've got to have it all and have it now').

The Tea Party, as with all of its predecessor fads and clubs and movements, will be forgotten in just a few years.

_____________________

Why on earth is the Globe publishing the comments of Paul Cellucci?

Cellucci surely qualifies as the most obnoxious, intefering-in-our-internal affairs ambassador of all time. A truly unpleasant man who loyally represented America's first certified moron President's interests.

As for Brown, he's another empty shirt spouting synthetic slogans.

The Democrats' candidate, Ms Coakley, proved a disaster.

In a six week campaign, Ms Coakley started by taking a week off around Christmas. Simply politically stupid.

She also did not use television to any extent. Again politically stupid.

And she made several blunders during that short time.

While I agree there is now impatience with Obama in America - after all, these are people ready to kill over a late pizza delivery - Obama would have had to be miracle worker to save her.

Sadly the voters had no third choice, because the empty shirt who won is no prize.

Here's an example of Brown's silly gibberish:

"I didn't mind when President Obama came here and criticized me - that happens in campaigns. But when he criticized my truck, that's where I draw the line."

"I'm Scott Brown, I'm from Wrentham, I drive a truck, and I am nobody's senator but yours. Thank you very much."

Pure Sarah Palin. Pathetic pseudo-humility.

Oh, sure, "nobody's Senator but yours." Do Canadians realize that U.S. Senators spend on average two-thirds of their time soliciting money? That a big Senate race can cost $15 million for each candidate's election? You don't get that kind of money from "folks."

Well, you do get pretty much the government you deserve.

Of course, the main trouble when America elects bad government is the rest of the world is made to suffer.

TONY BLAIR'S GREATEST CRIME NOT LISTENING TO CABINET?

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CHARLES MOORE IN THE TELEGRAPH

Oh, I wouldn't go so far as saying that.

Starting a war which ultimately killed a million people and set a society back for at least a generation ranks pretty high in my book of crimes.

If I wanted to be flip, I could say Tony's greatest crime was heeding George Bush, but I think that falls in the category of mental illness, not crime.

I think too we should never forget how opposed the British people were to Bush's evil idea. London had the world's greatest peace parade.

But Tony managed to manipulate and crawl and lie his way to dragging Britain into that pointless mass killing.

NEED FOR LEGISLATION AGAINST PRIME MINISTERIAL ABUSE IN PARLIAMENT

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Agreed, but then what do we have a Governor General for?

Isn't her job to exercise sober and unbiased judgment in such matters?

This surely is the most dictatorial-leaning, one-man government we have experienced in modern times.

And it is that very government - i.e. Stephan Harper - which is responsible for the decline in debates, respect, and general behavior in Parliament.

She should never have granted this because the government had no legitimate reason for doing it.

And that is the second time she has seriously failed us, letting this ethically-threadbare government - i.e. Stephan Harper - escape the consequences of his failings.

Indeed, Harper had a very bad reason for this one, hiding from a genuine ethics scandal, the most important kind of ethics, those dealing with human life.

THE MASSACHUSETTS SENATE CONTEST AND OBAMA'S SITUATION

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

I think you make too much of this.

Yes, the loss of a Senate seat will hurt Obama, but that loss had little to do with Obama despite some glib generalities in the press.

The candidate, Ms Coakley, proved a disaster.

In a six week campaign, Ms Coakley started by taking a week off around Christmas. Simply politically stupid.

She also did not use television to any extent. Again politically stupid.

And she made several blunders during that short time.

Obama would have had to be miracle worker to save her.

Sadly the voters had no third choice, because the empty shirt who won is no prize.

"I didn't mind when President Obama came here and criticized me - that happens in campaigns. But when he criticized my truck, that's where I draw the line."

"I'm Scott Brown, I'm from Wrentham, I drive a truck, and I am nobody's senator but yours. Thank you very much."

Pure Sarah Palin. Pathetic pseudo-humility.

Well, you do get pretty much the government you deserve.

Of course, the main trouble when America elects bad government is the rest of the world is made to suffer.

CAN AMERICA RISE AGAIN? ASKS A COLUMNIST - THE REAL QUESTION IS: CAN AMERICA GOVERN ITSELF?

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GARY MASON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Rise again?

You mean as in "The South will rise again"?

This is a silly piece.

First, no matter how badly hurt the US is, a place of that size and wealth is not disappearing. Will it be diminished? Yes, to a certainty.

Second, all of America's problems are self-inflicted. The wars, the financial crisis, the healthcare mess.

The real problem in America is its inability to govern itself, and it is truly starting to show like elbows through a frayed jacket.

In this it is very much like a huge corporation. When times are good and the operations side of the business is healthy, management appears good and is full of praise for itself.

But when unexpected twists come, when technological leaps forward have made your operations obsolete, or when your main source of wealth is depleted (as oil), management generally is revealed for what it mostly is: a set of well-paid strutters upon a stage.

Despite the horrific fears of financial disaster, amazingly few steps have been taken by the American government to assure a smoother future. Contrast to its insane over-reactions to every hint of terror.

And there are tons of problems yet to resolved. The defaults on mortgages are still going on. The huge cash payout to the financial industry served only as a temporary fix. The very payments to the investment banks really only were a dose of more of the same, spend now and don’t worry about tomorrow.

Obama has waited too late to limit the big investment banks, a step he has just announced. He should have promptly gone after increased regulation when they were down and shamed.

Now they will fight him every step of the way with tens of millions of dollars in lobby money and advertising.

And just look at the Supreme Court decision the other day, rescinding the last campaign-finance reform. It’s back to the jungle.

________________________

“Paraphrasing Lincoln, America is still mankind's last great hope. What could replace it? Eurabia? China? Let's have a dose of reality.”

Lincoln was a sentimentalist, or at least indulged in sentimentalism while he built a throbbing war machine and crushed the South’s right to self-determination.

No one, including Americans, regards the country in that way anymore. It is a giant imperial complex with a veneer of democracy. Lincoln was, if you will, the father of what we call the military-industrial complex.

THE HORROR OF HAITI: WHAT THE PRESS COVERAGE TELLS US

It is relentless, the pictures of terror-stricken people, broken limbs, and bloated dead, and many of us cannot stand to see or hear more.

One has to ask: what are we to do with such information?

Create pressure on governments to keep the assistance flowing? Perhaps, but there is no shortage of assistance being sent to Haiti. There is however a huge problem in Haiti’s limited ability to absorb the assistance.

Whether it’s small and inefficient sea ports, one small and inefficient airport, a lack of decent roads, and a lack of government direction – all aspects of any place as poor as Haiti – it takes time for outsiders to come in, unload their cargoes, and organize a distribution network from scratch.

Certainly the disturbing reports and pictures are useless from the point of view of prevention. It was a natural disaster, not to be predicted, not to be prevented. One could argue that post-disaster investments could ameliorate events the next time there is an earthquake. But the kinds of images and reports being broadcast will be long forgotten if and when the world’s governments get around to re-building.

So the question for me remains, what are we to do with such information?

I am reminded of another disaster, one that happened in the last few years. It was not a “natural” disaster but the deliberate work of the immensely powerful.

In this other disaster, roughly a million people died, about five times the current estimate of death in Haiti. I don’t know how many were crippled, but it must have been a great number. This other disaster created more than two million refugees fleeing for their lives. Most of them fled to poor but generous countries, not being welcome by the rich and powerful, and especially not by the country responsible for the mayhem.

As far as pictures and reports, most of them seen in North America were sanitized. Many if not most of the reports were dishonest, clearly not informing people of the magnitude of the horror as it happened. There was a brave group of reporters who produced images every bit as terrible as those we see from Haiti, including scores of hideously mangled children.

But those pictures were not broadcast in North America, were not published in The New York Times or other newspapers “of record.” Indeed, the reporters taking these images and writing tough reports actually became targets of the forces causing all the horror.

I’m referring, of course, to the invasion of Iraq, an event whose toll of killing and damage easily compared to the dropping of a thermonuclear bomb on a good-size city.

Of course, the great and bitter irony is that that disaster was both preventable and could even have been stopped once it had started. One could almost guarantee that publication and broadcast of pictures and reports comparable to what’s now coming from Haiti would have stopped that demonic brutality. Here indeed gruesome, truthful press coverage could have made a difference, but not in Haiti.

And there was another, smaller disaster recently, smaller but still terrible, and it was completely preventable. In this one about 1,400 people died, including 400 children, and a great deal of the infrastructure of a relatively poor people was destroyed. The damage cannot even be repaired because those responsible for the horror maintain a siege on the victims, allowing no material assistance to be delivered.

Here too you likely will not have seen the kind of pictures or read the kind of stories coming out of Haiti. Some were available – I recall one of poor people trying to avoid stepping in a stream of blood flowing down a narrow street - again the work of amazingly brave reporters, but their work could only be found at not-widely known sites on the Internet. None were published or broadcast by the establishment press in North America. These events occurred in a place called Gaza.

If you think the press is objective, if you think the press does not slavishly serve the interests of the powerful, you just might want to think again.

GAY RIGHTS AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

I am very proud of the fact that Canada has moved about as far a country can go in the matter of genuinely equal rights.

We have had gay marriage - not gay unions or some other unequal substitute, but marriage - for a few years now, and all forecasts of doom by the Religious Right have proved utter nonsense.

It took little time for this change to settle into the accepted social norm. Today in Toronto - a city that maybe four decades ago was so repressive in tone that it was known by some as the Belfast of the North – the Gay Pride parade is a major event, as big as the Santa Claus parade, with families and public officials attending, a turnout of a million, a big, happy party.

That’s a good measure of how human rights matters can change if some leadership is shown, as it was by our Supreme Court and Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and Paul Martin.

The horrible case in Uganda is interesting for two reasons.

First, the proposed laws were so extreme, involving the death penalty, that a world-wide protest was started. The proposal now at least has had the death penalty withdrawn.

The second reason the Uganda case is interesting is the influence of some of the most extreme Religious Right people from the United States.

A certain American fundamentalist has been very active there in promoting opposition to homosexuality with lectures and meetings.

America itself has a profound problem on this issue, as it does with so many genuine issues of human rights. A large and noisy portion of the population confuses human rights with religious standards, a go-nowhere situation.

But the Religious Right is fighting a rearguard action, just as it does on evolution or abortion rights. It is caught, like a deer in the headlights, by centuries-old notions in a constantly changing world. The direction of human rights in advanced societies has only one path to follow, and sooner or later, all must accept the fact.

HAITI'S TRAGEDY AND AMERICA

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

There has always been a strong distaste for Haiti in America.

When Napoleon sent a French army to put down the revolt of the slaves, Thomas Jefferson actually extended American assistance to him. It was an extremely bloody event, and the French, of course, lost, which Jefferson much regretted.

It was only one of many episodes in Jefferson’s career exposing an extremely dark character under the glossy front of words on liberty.

Jefferson, as was true of so many life-long slave-holders, was terrified of slave revolts. A great many Southerners slept with pistols or daggers near their pillows.

In the earlier decades of the twentieth century, American Marines invaded Haiti and occupied it for a fair time. Its affairs were run by the US.

Only in recent years, the U.S. effectively invaded Haiti and deposed its elected president. The true reason: policies which led to too many Haitian boat people heading towards American shores.

As for Pat Robertson who has made an idiotic comment on Haiti, his career contains a long string of idiotic statements, much in the fashion of that late bulk, Jerry Falwell After terrible hurricanes in the U.S., the good Rev was saying America’s decadence, especially with respect to the behavior of gays, had aroused God’s wrath.

Imagine, this man, Robertson, took a serious run at the Republican presidential nomination.

But then so did Bush.

And there’s that chicken running around the barnyard without a head, Sarah Palin.

Of course, we also have Rush Limbaugh making a tasteless comment. For some reason, mainline media have never held that "big, fat idiot" accountable for his words. Only now, there seems to be some effort to hold his unqualified nastiness up to the light.

ON AL QAEDA'S "ABUSING" BRITAIN'S FREE SPEECH AND "THE ENEMY WITHIN"

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

No, you have it wrong.

It is not that Britain's reputation for free speech has been "ruthlessly exploited."

It is now that is the genuine test of free speech.

Pieces like this one are in fact saying free speech is fine when times are fat and easy, but free speech needs control when they are not.

I could not agree less.

People are in fact never hurt by speech (genuine liable excluded), they are hurt by acts, acts which include the diminution of free speech.

And your use of the words, “enemy within,” is very revealing. That was a catch phrase during the American witch hunts of the 1950s.

THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF GOOD PARENTS IN BRINGING UP KIDS - RESPONSE TO A DEBATE BETWEEN BRITAIN'S DAVID CAMERON AND POLLY TOYNBEE

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

This is an old set of arguments.

In the United States over the last half century, versions of both views have been given time and time again.

What seems intuitively clear is that poverty and poor parenting do not automatically go together.

Indeed, some of the best parents are those who struggle against difficulties to do their best for their kids.

These are people often who are, for one reason or another, trapped in a temporary poverty: they and/or their children will almost certainly rise out of it. There are many cases of this, especially among immigrants without the language or who have lost all their resources in some tumult back home or who have difficulty getting their professional qualifications recognized in their new home.

But what is also clear is that some portion of poverty is owing to the lack of any marketable skills, relatively low intelligence, and perhaps mental disorders of one kind or another. Then, too, there is addiction to drugs, but we might put that down to mental disorder.

There are parents who see their children only as unpleasant burdens, accidents they did not want to happen, types which occur both in the well-off and the poor.

In the case of some wealth, the wealth of the family gets the child through, as do perhaps native gifts. Winston Churchill was a perfect example: his mother was almost completely indifferent to his existence while his father actually disliked him.

But in cases where there is both poverty of resources and an indifferent parent or parents, the die is pretty well cast.

Nothing guarantees having even one good parent, having even one must be regarded as a blessing, the luck of the draw, much the same as having good looks or special talents or being born into wealth.

Nature is utterly indifferent to the inequalities doled out at birth, a reality quite the opposite to the cozy, warm notion of a benevolent God.

And while society needs to do what it can to intervene, the task of completely making up for having terrible parents and no resources is beyond its capacities. In terms of sheer time, let alone resources, it is impossible to make up for all the bad parents in society.

Of course, therein resides the heart of the matter with the David Cameron view: if you just say parents need to love children, you often are blowing hot air and passing the blame for not even trying to help.

We have a whole generation of school teachers, for example, I’m sure in Britain as in North America, who insist parents must be involved, some knowing full well that there are parents who are hopeless, ignorant, and even vile. So their mantra about parents becomes effectively an excuse for not rolling up their sleeves and helping the child.

THE SINE QUA NON OF DEMOCRACY

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

I agree with most of what you write here, Gideon Rachman. It is a counter-intuitive approach with considerable merit.

I take exception to part of one of your statements however - this one:

"The two biggest and most beneficial geopolitical stories of the past 30 years – the spread of democracy and of globalisation – were driven by a succession of states finding their coffers empty."

Democracy is not a precursor to economic growth, as the case of China, plus many others in history, shows. Indeed, in early stages of "take-off," democracy can be a genuine liability.

America's Founding Fathers certainly thought so, because early America was not even modestly democratic. Even of the pool of white, free males, only a small portion - those of a certain means - could vote. Those who had the franchise reflected roughly the same percent we see today as members of the CPC.

Also, much of the early government was not elected. The Senate was appointed until 1913. The general poll for president effectively did not count: only the votes of the Electoral College - again propertied elites - counted.

Globalization itself is ultimately a force for democracy. The rise of globalization - the result of a set of technologies and costs - causes explosive economic growth which in turn creates middle classes. It is the existence of a large middle class which is the sine qua non of democracy.

THEATER OF THE ABSURD: THE DETROIT UNDERPANTS "BOMBER" AND PARANOID OVER-REACTION

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY RICK SALUTIN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

The gigantic, costly over-reaction to this event is like theatre of the absurd.

A mentally unbalanced man from Nigeria with a pathetic firework squib of a bomb, about the size of a "lite-days" sanitary pad, sewn into his underpants.

If he said he was in contact with Napoleon or Hitler, his words would not even been reported, but he said, or it is claimed he said, al Qaeda.

Whoa, deadly stuff: the Arab word for toilet which a former British Foreign Secretary has already told us does not exist, being just a collective term for Muslim extremists.

We have not even been given a clear understanding of what this tiny pouch of powder in his underpants was, but no explosive of that size in that location could ever bring down a plane.

In any event those passengers were never in serious danger, except perhaps the man's seat mate getting his/her leg burned too.

So what's the answer to this deadly, deadly threat?

Why, bomb the crap out of the poor people of Yemen, of course.

That's the American way.

Oh, and demand everyone in the world buy expensive scanners from an American company.

And I wonder how many readers know that before this incident, the US was bombing people in Yemen?

Makes sense to me.

Just about as much sense as burning witches.

THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX AND DELUSIONAL AMERICAN THINKING ABOUT ITS POWER UNDER OBAMA

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

"Republicans, who see themselves as his mortal enemies, with their only goal as that of destroying his presidency and putting what President Eisenhower presciently called the "military-industrial complex" fifty years ago back in total control of this country, as was the case under Bush."

A perfect example of delusional American thinking.

Under Obama, the evidence couldn't be clearer that the military-industrial complex is still running things as it has for the last half century. Power that great and concentrated does not ever fade away, and the vast contracts being spewed out in America since 9/11 have fed the voracious beast.

Troops are still in Iraq.

A great many more troops are going to Afghanistan.

American missiles regularly kill villagers in Pakistan.

Far, far more civilians than "bad guys."

And the same is true in Afghanistan, families are regularly killed by American air attacks.

And now Yemen is threatened, and it has been bombed.

And just today we have the news from General Petraeus that America has contingency plans to bomb Iran.

Guantanamo is still not closed.

Even worse, dark holes like Bagram Air Base in Iraq and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean have who-knows-what going on, certainly involving large numbers of extra-legal prisoners.

Israel ignores Obama's reasonable words. It continues with its relentless seige of a million and half refugees, and it continues to use cheap tricks daily to steal homes in Jerusalem.

All the silly "Detroit bomb" incident did was renew fears of people who do not think clearly and effectively instantly produce vast world-wide set of orders for an American company's expensive body scanners, a business bonanza.

By the way, carefully conducted tests of the scanners in Canada shows them failing 70% of the time, but we will all be forced to buy them.

AMERICA IS "LOSING" THE WESTERN WORLD?

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Gideon Rachman,

Yours is a very careless way of writing.

How can you lose what you never had?

I am reminded of the paranoid talk within the United States after Mao took power in China.

It was commonly said that certain people had helped America lose China. Indeed, it was used as a serious accusation in the witch-hunts.

Of course, America never had China.

Setting aside that annoying use of language, there is a phenomenon here worthy of study: America clearly is losing prestige and some influence in the world.

There are several things at work in this.

First, America since World War II has made an intense effort at building a world empire, almost dropping its one-time belief in itself as the good scout who stays out of other people’s affairs. The last half-century or so is dotted with American colonial wars, none of which have anything to do with the defense of America.

Indeed, in recent years, the neo-cons in America actually preached the philosophy of dropping the pretences about empire and just using all that military and economic might to shape the world as it wished.

De facto, this is pretty much what America has done, and despite the empty rhetoric of a Bush or even an Obama and the officious stuff from the State Department about who is or is not performing adequately with regard to human rights and democracy, everyone recognizes the fact.

The holocaust in Vietnam (3 million killed for no purpose justifies the word), the pointless invasion of Afghanistan, the slaughter of a million in Iraq, plus countless coups and interventions, including against genuinely democratic governments such as those in Iran, Guatemala, ands Chile, hardly qualifies America to continue as spokesman for rights and democratic values in the world.

And there is the ugly, suppurating wound of Israel-Palestine which only the United States possesses the power to remedy, power it refuse to use – surely a wound that all critically-minded people know is at the heart of the grievances of many Muslims today.

Then again, if we look at the three genuine attempts at genocide in the world since WW II, where do we see the position of the United States?

In Indonesia, after Sukarno’s fall, when the rivers were running red with the blood of half a million people whose throats were cut and bodies dumped, American State Department officials were burning the long-distance lines submitting names for inclusion in the slaughter.

In Cambodia’s killing fields, where was the United States? Its intense secret bombings and armed incursions (much as in Afghanistan now) had toppled the neutral government, effectively bringing the monsters to power. Then it stood by and attacked the Vietnamese who actually helped end the slaughter for proving the domino theory true by entering Cambodia.

In Rwanda, as the best part of a million people were hacked up, the American government pretended nothing was happening: Clinton and the State Department did not want to talk about it.

It is not a very admirable history, to say the least.

And how about America’s other postwar abuses? The devaluing off the American dollar after the Vietnam War? The great recent financial failure which threatened to send the world into another Great Depression? The result of Americans not being able to govern their own affairs, of spending and experimenting mindlessly at the expense of others?

To my mind, these are all just aspects of the decline of the American empire. Imperial over-reach and the demonstrated inability to govern its own affairs, let alone those of others.

The voting population of the United States – less than one percent of the world’s population – is losing its privileged position as de facto world aristocracy. And that is not a bad thing. A multi-polar world is emerging.

ROBOTS AND THEIR FUTURE RIGHTS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Robots will do what humans have done through history, seize their rights.

And perhaps a bit more than their rights.

Oh brave new world when humans are no longer running things.

The reign of the chimpanzee's cousins will come to an end.

So will wars, starvation, stupidity, school boards, and politicians.

GANG OF CIA THUGS TORTURE THEIR LAST VICTIM - EIGHT KILLED BY BOMB NEAR PAKISTAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

I guess this is one group of CIA thugs who have tortured their last prisoner and guided their last Hellfire missile into some poor village in Pakistan.

This reminds me of reading a report about some group of Mafia guys killed during an internecine struggle for power and ill-gotten gains.

ON OBAMA'S CALLING THE RECENT SQUIB OF A TERROR EVENT ON AN AIRLINER A "SYSTEMATIC FAILURE" OF INTELLIGENCE

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Obama has called the recent incident a “systematic failure” of intelligence.

What else was the original 9/11 attack but a "systemic failure"?

What else was the assassination of John Kennedy but a "systemic failure"?

During the Cold War, it is a legendary fact that CIA's estimates of the Soviet Union were consistently failed.

The CIA didn't even forecast the final collapse of the Soviet Union.

America's bloated intelligence agencies have never been effective.

Big Intelligence simply does not work.

But they sure can eat resources and make things miserable for ordinary people.

And the good old CIA sure knows how to torture people.

____________________

Readers may enjoy my piece of a few years ago, "Why The CIA Will Always Be A Costly Flop."

You'll find it at:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/why-the-cia-always-will-be-a-costly-flop/

_______________________

"A senior taliban leader in Pakistan stated, very clearly, that islam and democracy are incompatible. Muslims do not need democracy, as the koran should be used as an example of how a muslim should live his life.

"Notice that it's 'his' life, as a woman has no standing in muslim society and is only a commodity"

This person should know the words to the music before getting up to sing.

What a complete load of uninformed nonsense he/she has written, contributing only to the huge pile of propaganda and ignorance we see about Muslims.

Those statements apply precisely to economically backward societies always and everywhere.

Women were commodities in Europe only a few centuries ago.

Wealthy men can today still buy a wife in India.

Indeed, the practice of “bride burning” is still common in India.

Twelve year old girls are often married off to wealthy old men making payments to the “bride’s” family. Then when she is a widow at a very young age, she is treated like a social outcast and must conform to many terrible rules of behavior. Her life is as good as over. Millions are affected this way.

Women in Africa, to the tune of 3 million a year, suffer the horrors of genital mutilation. And in many parts of Africa, young girls are routinely raped by older village men.

Women in Canada could not have bank accounts without their husband’s written permission well into the 20th century.

Democracy is incompatible with all old societies. It took the United States two hundred years AFTER its revolution to achieve something even vaguely close to democracy.

It is estimated that about 1% of the population of Virginia could vote. Even white males could not vote because of property requirements.

The Senate wasn’t even elected until 1913.

Women couldn’t vote until 1920.

Great masses of black people couldn’t vote until the 1960s.

And today, because of an outdated, anti-democratic provision of the Constitution, Americans still do not directly elect their president: this has produced a number of minority presidents plus a number of political farces like the 2000 election.

AMERICAN HEATHCARE REFORM AND THE QUESTION WHETHER AMERICA CAN GOVERN ITSELF

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Govern themselves badly indeed – this is fundamental truth that comparatively few appreciate.

But Jeffrey Simpson may not appreciate how conditioned Americans are to accept poor government.

The widespread hatred of all government and taxation works towards this: as in, do what you like, but do not raise my taxes.

So does the artificial hyper-patriotism constantly drummed everywhere in the society play an important role of immense social pressure.

The drumming has several effects. First, there is a general propensity to see critics of any major policy as unpatriotic.

In the Vietnam era, critics were widely told "to love it or leave it," a disgusting thing to say to another citizen, but decades later, the same filthy, divisive words are heard concerning the fantasy-induced war on terror.

The Washington establishment - the Pentagon, the CIA plus about thirteen other intelligence agencies, the ancient, almost unchanging Senate, and the major military contractors - almost form a government within a government, Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, a genuine breathing presence in American society and not just a turn of phrase.

Obama - as humane and intelligent a man as America can produce - already has been captured in its tentacles. It is hard to distinguish what is going on abroad today from what went on under the ghastly Bush.

That is to say, national elections do not change much today in America.

And this complex eats money, leaving not a lot of room for programs like national heath.

And in such a society, the penetrating sense for so many is one of always living on the edge, just getting by, one step removed from financial chaos, and that sense of things works to the benefit of the Washington establishment’ s demand for resources.

WHAT IS MISSING FROM ONE COLUMNIST'S LIST OF 2009's FIVE TOP STORIES

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Gideon Rachman,

On the whole, a very perceptive column.

I believe two changes, both quite significant, are needed however.

Concerning the election in Iran, I do believe you have it a bit wrong. Yes, the election made Obama’s wishes more difficult, but no, the election was not illegitimate nor is there yet reason to believe the government is insecure.

You are following the common wisdom of corporate newspapers, a wisdom which seems little more than consistent support for American policy, however wrong-headed it may be on any topic.

"...left a permanent impression of the instability and illegitimacy of the Iranian government."

We have absolutely no solid basis for saying that the election was illegitimate. Several observers, very knowledgeable about Iran, including one scholar whom I heard interviewed at length, say that result was accurate. A lot of poor people in Iran like the current president.

The disturbances in Iran's streets have been at least in part fomented by CIA money. Have you forgotten that Bush earmarked $400 million in his late term for inciting trouble in Iran?

I believe that if I gave those who disagree with the government of any country - including certainly Britain or the United States - $400 million dollars towards subversion and propaganda, we would see trouble in any of them. Many Western governments represent minority opinions.

The story you missed, which I think marked a genuine historical turning point, is Israel's Operation Cast Lead.

Revulsion at the killing of about 400 children is worldwide, and the act further calls into question Israel's entire structure of unwarranted siege, apartheid, and slow-motion ethnic-cleansing in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Even the support of some American Jews is beginning to crumble for what is so clearly a brutal government with absolutely no intention of ever seeking genuine peace with its neighbors.

BRITISH APOLOGIST FOR BLOODSHED, CON COUGHLIN, SAYS ISRAEL IS A DIFFICULT ALLY BUT ITS LEADERS ARE HARDLY WAR CRIMINALS

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CON COUGHLIN IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

Well, if the leaders of Israel are not war criminals, just who in the world qualifies?

Murdering 400 children in Gaza? Deliberately targeting UN observers bravely doing their job in Lebanon? Laying a blanket of nightmarish, barbaric cluster bombs across Southern Lebanon? And refusing to cooperate in removing them?

Keeping a million and half souls in Gaza under siege, even after killing 1,400 of them? Institutionalizing slow-motion ethnic-cleansing in Jerusalem and the West Bank? Stealing homes and farms from families who have lived there for centuries to hand over to immigrants from London or New York?

Over forty years of humiliation and abuse for the people of the territories occupied in 1967, captured in a war which Israel is known to have engineered to this very purpose? Many thousands held in prison with no proper legal procedures? Building a new Berlin Wall and building it on the property of others?

Arresting the members of a cleanly elected government – far more so than was the case for Mr. Bush - because you disagree with their party? Refusing even to talk to those you disagree with?

Assassinating scores of individuals with no charges or trial or legal procedure, an exact copy of the bloody activity of juntas in South America who made people disappear?

The only reason Israel’s leaders are not all severely dealt with by the Western world is the immense, smothering influence of the United States whose foreign policy in many parts is virtually written in Israel.

A United States, by the way, whose last president was the world's reigning living war criminal with a million dead souls to his credit.

_______________

Footnote on the USS Liberty attacked by Israel in the 1967 war. Previous comments have made some ridiculous claims about bloody event.

The ship was extremely well marked. The lead pilot of the Israeli attack force made low passes over the ship before the attack, exchanging waves with sailors on deck.

Then, suddenly, a savage two-hour assault with every weapon the Israeli planes had - guns, bombs, and torpedoes. The lame claim made afterward: it was a mistake.

Of course, Israel was trying to get the US into the war. It would have blamed Egypt for the attack.

There is also speculation that Israel was destroying the recorded evidence – the ship was a sophisticated spy craft - of its atrocities in the Sinai where Israelis murdered hundreds of Egyptian troops who had surrendered rather than be burdened with them in advancing.

TIGER WOODS AND COLOSSAL DISHONESTY AND THE MEANING OF CELEBRITY PRIVACY AND THE GOOFY CULT OF SPORTS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Woods is a disaster of a husband indeed.

And, truth be told, something of a disaster as a human being, apart from his charming smile and sports talent.

The truly disturbing fact in all of this is his level of dishonesty and deception. Colossal.

In general, I agree about private lives of famous people.

But just who here has made things so public?

Woods himself.

His dishonest, shabby behavior has intimately affected the lives of dozens - at least fourteen women at last count plus his wife and children and other family members.

If you choose to share your intimate thoughts and privacy with a long series of cocktail waitresses, you can hardly claim privacy anymore. You’ve literally tossed it to the wind.

The cocktail waitresses do have the right to share what they know with others if they choose – it is now part of their lives - and they most certainly have done so, each enjoying her fifteen minutes of fame and possible book contract.

God, one of his bimbos even released comments of his that he wished he had met her before his wife.

How could you ever again enjoy a mate who talked that way to someone else?

The story does tend to confirm my longstanding belief that sports as a builder of character or sportspeople as heroes is simply ridiculous.

Sports figures do what they do because it is the only skill they have in which they may excel and prosper, not out of any set of principles. Many of them could only hold down jobs as clerks without the fantasy world of high level sports.

Single mothers working hard for their kids are in many cases greater genuine heroes than the often pretentious and over-paid people in sports.

Just think of all the thugs in professional football. The NFL is said to run a significant quiet operation just to hush up and cover the scores of assaults against women, both sexual and brutal physical, by its gang of privileged thugs.

And look at the violent temper tantrums, including threats to officials, of a Williams sister or a John McEnroe.

And professional boxing? Hard to tell most of the cast from inmates at a super-max prison.

Coaches? Countless angry, frustrated men who encourage violence and displays of violence and frequently even humiliate those in their charge.

Sport is about anything you like, but it is not the stuff of heroes.

And Woods has about the same claim to privacy as a drunk arrested on the highway.

_________________________________

"Your post smacks of a deep seated resentment and, for me, casts a dark shadow over anything else you might choose to opine upon."

Deep resentment?

No, I’m just tired of all the hoopla over swinging a stick or running fast. After all, in the scheme of things, they are pretty inconsequential activities.

Indeed, I don't recall ever hearing an interview with a sports figure who says much different to, "We're gonna give it everythin’ we got; we're goin' for gold."

Hardly worth printing or broadcasting.

“And your point is?” would actually be an appropriate response to such mush.

People should enjoy their games, but that is all there is to it, games. Hopscotch or Tiddlywinks for grown-ups.

Trying to make moral or ethical or philosophical points about games really is silly. Yet we still get the rubbish about heroic efforts, about going the last mile, about showing real character, about digging in deep, etc, etc., ad nauseum.

And just what else would someone do whose entire existence is wrapped up in swinging a stick or running fast or throwing a ball, someone who has spent much of their life earnestly training to swing a stick or run?

Opine?

I think that word was last seriously used by John Keats.

Sorry, but in all honesty, your approval or disapproval of my views means about as much as the hum of a fly ten miles away.

RICHARD COLVIN STRIKES BACK AT THE GOVERNMENT'S EFFORTS TO COVER UP ITS INCOMPETENT BEHAVIOR AROUND TROOPS IN AFGHANISTAN

POSTED COMMENT TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

"What happened over there that he has become so bitter against our troops and freedom."

How many times have we read a variation of this completely uninformed comment?

It originated with that great bulk of twisted ethics, Stephen Harper, the very man who is entirely responsible for the behavior of the government and its representatives abroad, including troops.

What are the facts?

Armies are disciplined to do what they are told - that is a major part of their often humiliating basic training, always saluting and saying “Sir.”

Armies, in every modern democracy, are under the command of an elected government.

Armies' policies are all set by civilian overlords.

Armies go nowhere and do nothing without civilian direction.

And we would not have it any other way.

So, who are the civilians responsible for what happened in Afghanistan?

Stephen Harper.

This is Harper's shabbiest performance to date.

He's blaming others for his own failure and trying to sound patriotic while doing it.

I do recall him doing other very similar things. It clearly is a basic part of his character. After Israel's savage slaughters in Lebanon and Gaza, he attempted to pin the label of anti-Semite on honest Canadian critics.

Our own prime minister calling us names because we say things with which he disagrees.

What a disaster he is as a national leader.

How far we have fallen.

ORAL ROBERTS: THE GREAT OKIE FRAUDSTER HAS FLEECED HIS LAST FLOCK AND AMERICA'S GREAT INVENTION OF THE INHERITED MINISTRY

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

The Great Okie Fraudster has played his last confidence trick.

He will, perhaps, be best remembered by his stunt of locking himself up in "the Prayer Tower" at the college campus he named after himself. The great man refused to eat until someone came through with a fresh ten million bucks for the Oral Empire.

And it worked. Oral got his gift from God, even if only by way of some eccentric Oklahoma oil billionaire.

Oral used to start his pitches - err, I mean, sermons - by assuring the crowd that "something GOOD was going to happen to YOU."

And, just as in the picture accompanying his obituary, he used his long, husky fingers like someone playing a musical instrument in the air. It reminded me of Harpo Marx doing his melodramatic musical gig in the old Marx Brothers’ movies.

In true Christian fashion, he left his flock – said to be good for an annual fleecing of around five million bucks – to his son, a sort of look-alike without the magic medicine-wagon voice and rough hands of the Master: a meat-substitute burger instead of the bleeding slab of sirloin, if you will.

Sadly, the Good Lord often sends sons to these great Christian Entrepreneurs who prove something of a disappointment. Maybe it’s just that old business of pounding-fist fathers bringing up rather feeble sons. Still, you’ve got to keep the money in the family.

Certainly that seems to have been the case with Franklin Graham, inheritor of Rev Billy’s Dazzling Empire, for Franklin is a man who proves that in America you don’t need any brains to be rich.

Then there’s that Venerable Pomposity, the Rev Robert Schuller, and son, Rev Robert Jr, a dysfunctional pair if ever there was one. Because the princeling proved unworthy, the old Rev had to hand over his Chrystal Cathedral Business Empire to a daughter – Heavens! – Rev Sheila, and word has it that now the Chrystal Cathedral can’t meet its weekly bills for vandalized windows.

It’s called inherited ministry, one of America’s more original contributions to world culture.

But the one thing about Rev Oral you had to admire: he had great hair.

TZIPI LIVNI AS WAR CRIMINAL AND THE PAINFUL TRUTHS OF THE 1967 WAR

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

Tzipi Livni is a war criminal, plain and simple.

Indeed, she is no different to some of the old Nazis we sometimes see put on trial for killing a thousand people or even a few hundred.

She was instrumental in Israel's slaughter of 1400 people in Gaza, including about 400 children.

Of course, that horror came only a short time after 1400 were slaughtered in Southern Lebanon, and a ghastly minefield of cluster bombs deposited over a huge area of the country.
___________________________


"In 1967 Israel launched a pre-emptive attack only AFTER it became KNOWN that the Arabs were about to launch a war of EXTERMINATION against Israel. I think this fact alone demonstrates the way in which you distort history. Tell me, are you under the impression that the tiny country of Israel provoked a war which wouldn't have otherwise happened against all its Arab neighbours in the face of their overwhelming military superiority? Did they do this for a laugh do you think?"

No, it is the writer who does not understand history.

Israel engineered the 1967 war. We have that from some world-eminent sources, including the late Charles de Gaulle.

Even Israeli historian Avi Schlaim hints at this in his
monumental history of Israel's first half century of foreign policy.

And the Arabs most assuredly did not have “overwhelming military superiority.” Israel did, with its front-line American weapons and ferocious training. The Arab countries were pitifully disorganized, and Israel knew this since it has the best intelligence in the Mideast. It really was a low-stakes gamble for a very big prize.

The prize, clearly, was the West Bank and Jerusalem, which more than forty years later Israel still holds in bondage. Indeed, a process of slow-motion ethnic-cleansing of these places has been active for decades.

Israel even tried to embroil the US into the war by the sinking of the USS Liberty, an American spy ship in the Mediterranean, hoping to pass it off as an Egyptian effort.

It has never explained that near-sinking in which dozens of American sailors were slaughtered in an extremely well-marked ship, a ship that the lead Israeli pilot made a low pass over - and was waved at by crew members - just before the relentless two-hour attack.

We also have it on good authority that Israel killed hundreds of Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai after they had surrendered, just so prisoners wouldn't slow their progress.

Some ally.

BUSH HANDLING RETIREMENT? HARDLY A FIT SUBJECT ABOUT WHICH TO WRITE A STORY

POSTED RESPONSE TO COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

Why would you bother with a story like this?

Bush was a disaster, and stupidly laughable to boot.

We can all only be glad he is gone.

Long before he was appointed as President, he was a boring, spoiled, and arrogant man who never did one meaningful bit of work.

His achievements in every sphere, except the destruction of a million people, are zero.

You might just as well do pieces about the declining years of a murderous drug dealer or a big-time madam.

THE UNITED STATES DECIDES ON A PRISON IN RURAL ILLINOIS AS A PLACE TO KEEP MANY GUANTANAMO PRISONERS

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

This is just one more stupid, blundering injustice by the United States.

They kidnapped these men and have held them illegally for eight years, torturing and abusing them.

There are no proper charges against any of them. There is no court competent to try them. Any evidence is utterly worthless, contaminated by American torture and illegal procedures.

America has held them for most of that time without lawyers, without family visits, and without access by the Red Cross.

International law has been broken, as well as important international conventions.

These men should be released.

They are a danger to no one, even the ones who might once have been.

They are completely compromised. Everything which could be known about them is known.

They are of no use to any terrorist organization, even if there were one called al Qaeda, which there is not.

Apart from all the other things one might say about this illegal imprisoning of men in a remote part of Illinois, it is, above all, meaningless public relations.

If he is not going to free the innocent - which is what they are under our law as well as that of the United States - Obama might just as well leave them at Guantanamo now that that the torture and abuse have stopped.

Cuba is a far more pleasant place than Illinois in the winter.

And can you imagine how they will be greeted by a general prison population after eight years of relentless propaganda about how terrible they are?

WHY QUOTE A PROPAGANDA MILL LIKE THE CATO INSTITUTE? AND PEOPLE WHO USE PEJORATIVE TERMS LIKE "LEFT-WING RANTS"

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

I don’t know why you would quote anyone from Cato Institute.

Cato is a propaganda mill much like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, or the Hoover Institution.

While designed to superficially resemble an academic institution, only one kind of viewpoint ever comes from Cato, as well as the other places.

They are financed by some of the most right-wing corporations and individuals in America.

And they serve to provide sinecures to retired professors or government officials who can contribute significantly to what are essentially boiler room operations.

Opinion on demand is provided on almost any issue of concern to America’s Right Wing.

Finally, the Constitution is used by every group wishing to stop progress in America.

It is itself a largely outdated document, full of concepts which have proved mistaken over time.

Any student of American history knows full well it has been ignored countless times when that was convenient for the establishment.

Indeed, for years, the very concept of the Bill of Rights was unenforceable because it was felt by people like Jefferson that a federal court could not pass judgment on state activities.

Still, the Court is a weak institution on the whole, generally not daring to go beyond the most timid interpretations.

Nations are, like all of nature, ever-evolving things. To remain rigidly married to words set down by a few rather provincial men two and a quarter centuries ago much resembles Catholic Church doctors arguing over nonsense.

Indeed, words themselves are constantly evolving in their meaning, something we experience keenly over the last half century and something which will only speed up in future.

Sticking to certain meanings of certain words in a certain document is a perfect formula for little social progress.

Indeed, the establishment uses the Constitution for exactly that purpose.

Genuine freedoms and important institutions only survive over the long term because of general good will and consent in any society, not because of a piece of parchment.

________________________

algasema,

"Left wing rants" is a genuinely pejorative phrase. It is also inaccurate.

I am a classically-trained economist, rather traditional in his views, in my retirement also a teacher of micro-economics of which Milton Friedman would approve.

However, when it comes to the defense of human freedom and decency or attacking arrogance and pomposity, I like to think of people like Samuel Johnson or Graham Greene or George Orwell or Jonathon Swift (‘A Modest Proposal’). To my mind, there is no room for compromise in such matters: they are not simplistic matters of left- or right-wing, except to simplistic people or ideologues at places like the American Enterprise Institute.

What I write is well-written (I am a published author, former corporate chief economist and speechwriter, and once had a weekly metropolitan newspaper column), well-informed, but it is highly critical in defense of human rights, democratic values, and decency.

Calling my comments “rants” is the typical response of someone who does not have the same commitment to these values. It is a noun used a few times towards me by apologists for America’s murderous post-WWII rampage in the world or Israel’s ghastly record of abuse and brutality.

I suspect my views on both of these contemporary barbarisms click a switch somewhere back in your consciousness.

Of course, such descriptions as yours are used in an effort to reduce the person with whom you disagree, an old and genuinely puerile (since you love Latinisms) technique, one shared I am sorry to point out by those of a quietly tyrannical temperament everywhere and always.

I do take credit or blame for everything I write, hardly a shabby quality.

I do not rant, but you, my anonymous name-caller, do expose what I can only call a rather afraid-of-your-own-shadow quality.

That’s surely what you are doing by prefacing comments, somewhat in agreement, with name-calling.

It also is obvious in those countless typo-corrections of yours: they remind me of the nervous schoolboy looking down at his new wing-tip shoes to see if they are adequately shined, a young, desperate-to-please Richard Nixon with a sad smile and beads of sweat on his brow.

TONY BLAIR SAYS HE WOULD STILL HAVE INVADED IRAQ

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

What do you expect a certified war criminal to say about his past activities?

Napolean spent years on St Helena justifying his murderous wars.

Even Hitler, I'm sure, would offer an eloquent rational for his ghastly behavior.

Apart from being a war criminal, Tony Blair has always suffered mental problems too.

Look at his idiotic religious activity.

Look at his ridiculous marriage to a woman who was the most embarrassing spouse in British history since George IV's wife, Caroline.

And look at his work in the Middle East for which he collects a fat salary and privileges. He's afraid even to land a plane there.

I do not understand why he is taken seriously enough to quote in the press.

WILL OBAMA'S SURGE WORK?

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Mr. Simpson, you are right on these details.

People who criticize you on this simply do not know what they are talking about because they are part of America's obsession with great white whales, an obsession closely shared by Israelis and Israel’s apologists.

The most fundamental realities are the following.

The Taleban is not an invading guerilla force. The word "insurgents" nicely hides the fact that they are natives of the land we have invaded.

Moreover, they are a substantial portion of the population, not a small group.

And they attacked no one.

The 9/11 bunch were mainly Saudis, almost certainly on a secret CIA training program in the U.S. that went very sour (they had valid American visas, and they were being followed closely by Mossad).

Osama bin Laden has been dead since the horrific bombing of Tora Bora. The extent of that bombing has been kept secret, but it was earth-shattering by first-hand accounts.

Al Qaeda, as a former British Foreign Secretary admitted a few years ago, does not exist. It is a Pentagon nickname to cover a group of disparate fundamentalist Muslims who hate American policy. The word means toilet.

America has worked to keep alive the idea of both bin Laden and Al Qaeda because they serve as focuses for the lunatic “war on terror.”

You cannot have a war on a technique or a set of attitudes: it’s a pure nonsense, rather like Israel’s mantra about there being no such thing as a Palestinian people.

America went to Afghanistan, dragging others along, for vengeance, which it got in spades. Now, it does not know what to do.

In a sense, it is the victim of its own propaganda. As well, there are now huge entrenched interests in the Afghanistan effort, everything from Blackwater Corporation to the manufacturers of Hellfire missiles. America’s Israel apologists, too, never saw a war against Muslims they didn’t like: put them in their place, so to speak.

A very great assembly of forces for a newcomer like Obama to oppose, and, truth be told, he has already buckled.

But he cannot win his war. Absolutely, he cannot hold down a huge country of 30 million people, a land of mountains and deserts and sweltering heat and hardscrabble poverty; moreover, a place where millions deeply resent America’s arrogance and brutality.

One hopes that Obama intends only to make a show and to reach a compromise with the Taleban from a position of increased strength and then get out with a shred of dignity. It is starting a system of payoffs – successful short-term in Iraq – hundreds of millions for opponents to lay down their arms temporarily.

But I am not optimistic. The Afghans are some of the toughest, hardest people on earth, largely because they live in an extreme part of the world with almost no wealth.

NEW "DRONE ATTACK" KILLS "AL QAEDA" - EVEN USING THAT PHRASE "DRONE ATTACK" HELPS HIDE EVIL TRUTH

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

It truly is dishonest to always write about "drone attacks."

Drones don't attack anyone. Gum-chewing thugs sitting in an office chair at a computer terminal do.

These drones are armed with American Hellfire missiles, the same ones Israel uses when it typically kills a dozen innocent people in a bloody horror trying to get one target, some man who has never been charged or tried or condemned.

The guy at the terminal somewhere in a locked room in the Pentagon basement undoubtedly pumps his arm as the missile explodes, killing God knows who.

Then he goes out for some lunch in Georgetown.

Disgusting.

An absolute lack of ethics, only praised by the apologists for Israel's bloody excesses.

Misery likes company, and the same goes for miserable criminal behavior.


_________________

Carrying the Olympic Torch would sure be a suitable suggestion, although I doubt the writer making this suggestion even understands why.

Few Canadians seem aware that the Olympic Torch relay was invented for the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, invented by no less a figure than Doctor Joseph Goebbels to distract world attention in a very controversial Olympics from the stuff going on in Germany.

Yet we blindly carry on this stupid marketing scheme as though it were a hallowed tradition.

And we get brainless suggestions like this one concerning it.

JEFFREY SIMPSON CORRECTLY WRITES THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD HAVE HUGGED MR. COLVIN INSTEAD OF DEMONIZING HIM - SIMPLY BAD INSTINCTS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Yes, in a world run by the kind of rules we were taught as children by traditional parents, churches, and schools, that’s what would happen.

But that world, a world in which the good guys always win and where honesty always counts, is just a hopeful dream as most of us sadly learn after being buffeted about by the brutal realities.

These events provide us, those who are paying attention, the perfect definition of what Harper’s government truly represents.

Harper, a man of supposedly conservative principles (which traditionally are thought of as standing for old-fashioned stuff like honesty and responsibility) in fact is an ugly opportunist willing to do almost anything to cover the blundering stupidities of his cabinet.

Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People" was always a favorite play of mine.

Here we see Mr. Colvin as the good Dr. Stockman, and Harper as one of the backroom leaders of the mob ready to run the doctor out of town for telling the truth that the town's public baths are dangerous to health.

Well, we can't change the fundamental opportunism and dishonesty of Harper and MacKay, but we can all celebrate the bravery and honesty of Mr. Colvin.

Doing so makes Canada at least a little better place.

OBFUSCATION VERSUS SIMPLY TELLING THE TRUTH GENERALLY SERVES TO DEFEND INCOMPETENCE

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Obfuscation is an old tactic of intelligence services and, as in the recent investigation into four RCMP officers’ criminal incompetence at Vancouver’s airport, police forces under investigation for gross failures.

It is used most often to cover up, not so much genuine secrets as the facts of blundering incompetence and poor judgment.

The principle is simple: it is better to be considered one who is being obviously less than transparent than one who is a laughable incompetent.

That is precisely what is happening here.

Harper's cabinet in total likely sets something of a national record for incompetence and blundering in a single group of people.

This undoubtedly was another case of sending body bags to reservations as preparation for H1N1.

But the leader of these political buffoons, Canada's own Newt Gingrich (that wonderful family-values man who asked his wife, dying of cancer, for a divorce), gives this sad story a new quality with his filthy suggestions that critics are blaming the forces.

ON THE DELUSIONAL IDEA OF EVEN A TALENTED MAN LIKE OBAMA "REMOLDING" AMERICA

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Sorry, this article is delusional.

Remolding America is an imaginary concept.

Despite changes over the last two centuries such as universal franchise, America manages a great deal to be what it was two centuries ago.

An aristocracy of wealth and influence, where only a small number of people's views genuinely count and one bent on imperial expansion.

The entire political system is stacked against serious change.

Congress is the best money can buy, and that goes for both parties.

The two parties are an opportunistic duolpoly representing almost no principles at all.

The Washington establishment of the Pentagon/CIA/NIA/FBI actually form an unelected continuing government behind the elected government.

The last president who tried challenging that unelected government died in Dallas November 22, 1963.

Obama is personally an enlightened man of considerable depths, but he is ambitious to be and remain president. That wish is virtually incompatible with "remolding America."

American exceptionalism is now everywhere and always the rule, whether it is making a war crime/ invasion into legitimate foreign policy or the Sceretary of State putting pressure on Italy over a woman, one from a well-off family, fairly convicted of murder.

MORE ON THE SHAMEFUL FAILURE TO PROTECT AFGHAN PRISONERS FROM TORTURE: THE INCOMPETENCE AND DISHONESTY OF HARPER'S GOVERNMENT

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

I believe in this case, as in so many others, Harper's government has demonstrated sheer incompetence.

I doubt they set out to give men – mostly innocent farmers – over to torture. But as we’ve seen time and time again, the cabinet functions like a gang of Keystone Cops, from dropping top secrets in various places to sending body bags to native people’s reservations as preparation for the flu.

That tendency towards incompetence is exacerbated in its practical effects by a truly slavish admiration, almost a boy-scout devotion, to American government policy, something which of course induces very little use of independent thought. And we all know America has not been the least squeamish about human rights and filthy torture.

Some of the evil involved here is in Peter MacKay's preacherly waving of hands and ranting when he knows perfectly well that he is lying through his teeth to protect his incompetent party.

But of course, Peter MacKay’s entire national career in politics has exhibited dishonesty, from his affair with a party subordinate to his lying about calling her a dog in Parliament and to his original broken word to a competitor for the leadership of the former Conservative party.

Peter MacKay is a proven ethical nullity.

But the true low note in evil here has been struck by Harper, with his filthy accusations about critics of a human-rights nightmare in Afghanistan blaming the brave soldiers.

Pure Rush Limbaugh. Is that the stuff now of Canada’s national politics, stuff dredged from the intellectual cesspools of American politics?

That is the kind of stuff which surely earns you a special place in hell.

RIDICULOUS BOB GELDOF NOW PREACHES THERE IS A NEW STORY OF AFRICA RISING

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY BOB GELDOF IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Bob Geldof is a parody of the concerned pop artist.

He has abused his musical popularity to preach and preach and preach.

Not only is his preaching hypocritical - Mr Geldof has a fortune which could relieve more poverty than a million normal contributors to charity - but he says things which are simply not true. As in this case about a new story of Africa rising.

All evidence is that Africa is an utter mess with no promise for the future.

Almost every country in Africa is poorly governed, has corruption as a national policy, and is steeped in levels of violence we can scarcely imagine.

South Africa, for example, now liberated from the ugliness of apartheid, experiences an orgy of murder and rape, truly world-record levels.

A truly stupid South African government has for years refused the fact of science that HIV is related to AIDS, refusing even to treat HIV babies. Only now, after endless efforts, have they relented in this last regard.

And still the populations grow, beyond the societies' capacities to sustain themselves. This crowding and poverty induce the countless civil wars, revolutions, and mass killings we read of without pause.

I'm not sure it is possible to find a greater depth of human irresponsibility and hopelessness anywhere.

STEVIE CAMERON ASKS: HAVE WE FORGOTTEN HORRORS LIKE THE MONTREAL MASSACRE? A BIZARRE PIECE OF WRITING

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY STEVIE CAMERON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Sorry, this is a bizarre piece.

First, no one has forgotten these horrors, and outfits like CBC spend time every year playing the record again.

Second, the world is so filled with horrors - a million killed in Iraq, two million refugees, tens of thousands killed in Afghanistan, American torture and assassination, Israel's running an endless gulag for millions of innocent people, Africa a vast continent of brutality and mass murder - that the Canadian cases almost do not stand out.

Third, it is the normal brain's function to forget savage events and try to resume normal life.

Fourth, we have a lumbering, destructive Harper government owing to the majority not getting its act together. The man slashes and burns on the support of thirty-odd percent of Canadians.

________________________

"Great article. The truth stings for some. Rape as a war crime in Darfur, Congo etc. The subjugation of women in countries around the world (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia to name just a few), the denial of education to girls in some countries - just what are men afraid of in education? Power perhaps?"

The complete ignorance shown in postings like that is itself a serious danger to society.

If we proceed in our affairs out of ignorance, we get nowhere.

Rape in war has been a constant of history. As the Soviets entered Berlin at the end of WW II, there was an orgy of rape, not typically discussed in history texts. Literally hundreds of thousands of German women were raped, often gang-raped.

And what about the “comfort women” for the Imperial Japanese Army in WWII? And the orgies of rape and murder in places like Nanking? Tens of thousands killed and countless rapes.

And just what does the writer of that nonsense think is behind the words, read countless times in ancient history, "and the city was sacked with all the men put to the sword."

You read of the horrors of Abu Ghraib in Iraq, but we know from the world’s greatest investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, that in fact the worst stuff has been suppressed, pictures and recordings of boys being raped.

Indeed, some of our soldiers in that hellhole of Afghanistan have seen boys being raped, to the point of blood running down their legs, by those assisting us as translators and guides. It is a common practice in such repressive and backward societies, just as it is in prisons.

Such events only tell us that war is stupid and savage beyond telling, for war is just a time when sick people get to carry out whatever twisted and savage dreams they have with impunity.

After all, likely a quarter of us is mentally ill, as clearly M. Levine was. You just need the right conditions to set them off.

Because men are in general physically stronger and loaded with hormones promoting aggression, they are the perpetrators by a ratio of about 10:1 compared to women.

We need to stop promoting war, and we need to treat people in normal society who are unbalanced. Those are the real lessons here.

The denial of education to girls? God, American propaganda for the Afghan War.

Go look at countless millions of boys in India and Africa and other places who get virtually no education. Boys go to work in places like India or Pakistan doing things like sewing soccer balls or working on carpets as young as seven years old.

And in Afghanistan, are you telling me that the men of the Northern Alliance or the Taleban are educated? The entire society is unbelievably backward and poor. Even if you got a good education in Afghanistan, there would likely be no place to use it. You would have to emigrate unless you were very fortunate.

Think before you write, and go seek some knowledge before you even think.

A GROUP OF BRITISH DOCTORS QUESTIONS THE FINDING AROUND DOCTOR KELLY'S DEATH - AND WHO BENEFITED?

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

Doctor Kelly was almost certainly assassinated.

And who benefited?

The Iraq invasion served Israeli purposes hugely.

Its most implacable opponent was eliminated, his country reduced to ruins.

And the doctor was a threat to the lies that helped create that vast war crime.

Israel has bragged of its many assassinations - scores of them - in the past. It has been shameless on this utterly unethical behavior.

A truly disgusting record for those who care about human rights or justice.

MORE FLATULENCE FROM CANADA'S PRESTON MANNING: THIS TIME IT'S THE FUTURE ALBERTANS "DESERVE"

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY PRESTON MANNING IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

"Let's give Albertans the future they desire and deserve"

Why do Albertans "deserve" a different future than the one they now have, one which by world standards is pretty exceptional?

More flatulence from Canada’s Sunday School teacher of Right Wing politicos.

Though I have to say: Gee, Preston, I do like the new, cool-guy look in your official photo.

Does it indicate, perhaps, you are undergoing the Middle-Age Crazies?

MORE ABSURD WORDS FROM HILLARY CLINTON: 24 NATIONS SEND 290 TROOPS EACH FOR A WORLD CRISIS?

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN ARTICLE IN THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

Clinton is simply out of her mind.

Two dozen countries sending seven thousand troops?

And many or most not for combat?

That's an average of about 290 troops per country.

290 cooks, guards, and orderlies each.

Some world crisis.

Everyone clearly sees what a mistake Afghanistan is, except the government of the United States.

Of course those eager not to offend American sensibilities, or those whose assistance or favors from America are under threat, send their token contingent.

This whole matter is like one of those slightly absurd British comedies of four or five decades ago.

World crisis, civilization in peril, so we better send 290 troops.

The press should be embarrassed to even report such press-release fantasy as an event.

Clinton should be embarrassed to utter a word about these 24 mice roaring, but this woman is long ago beyond any possible embarrassment, having said countless absurd things in recent years or quickly backtracking what she has previously said, making absolutely no sense in most of what she says.

Were a major business run the way America runs wars and foreign policy, the economy would collapse.

A RESPONSE TO HILLARY CLINTON’S ASSERTION THAT ALL NATIONS SHOULD PLAY A PART IN THE AFGHANISTAN MISSION

December 4, 2009

A RESPONSE TO HILLARY CLINTON’S ASSERTION THAT ALL NATIONS SHOULD PLAY A PART IN THE AFGHANISTAN MISSION

John Chuckman

Hillary Clinton, in a just-published piece on the Afghanistan mission (see note at bottom), offers us nothing helpful or enlightening, only boiler-plate American slogans, the kind of stuff you’d hear from some provincial Congressman giving a Fourth of July speech in a place like Muncie, Indiana.

Indeed, her use of the question-begging word “mission” in the title to describe what has been the pointless conquest and occupation of a people signals the vacuity of the words that follow.

“The violent extremism that threatens the people and governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan also undermines the stability of the wider region and threatens the security of our friends, allies and interests around the world.”

No government in Afghanistan or Pakistan was threatened until the U.S. became involved. Yes, they are poor regions with much backward fundamentalism, but those governments knew how to handle the difficulties of their own affairs before the U.S. bombed and machine-gunned its way in.

No matter what the U.S. does, short of exterminating an entire class of people (for the Taleban is not an invading guerilla force but a substantial portion of the population), the fundamentalism is not going to go away in our lifetimes.

It would take decades of very healthy economic growth to bring these places forward, and so far America’s only contribution has been to kill tens of thousands of people and destroy a great deal of the meager physical assets in these places.

I would remind Ms. Clinton that it was only as recently as the 1930s, and into the 1940s, that families in the American South, likely considering themselves good Christians all, would attend picnics to watch the lynching of some black men. I am not exaggerating: such events were common even in Franklin Roosevelt’s day, and he never spoke out against them, despite prodding from Eleanor, for fear of losing his political support in the South.

Yet that grotesque horror has come to an end. How did it happen? The answer is decades of strong economic growth bringing jobs, wealth, and fresh air to America’s once-fetid South.

How much larger is the problem in a land that lives, to a considerable extent, in the 17th century? Immensely larger.

How is the security of the world threatened by these people? It’s not and never has been. The very fact that NATO countries have made such almost laughably small contributions is the strongest possible evidence that Ms. Clinton is not believed by any of them.

Imagine a genuine world threat in which the many countries of NATO each sent the troop equivalent of the police force of very modest-sized cities?

They have only indeed sent those owing to constant American browbeating, cajoling, and, in some cases, threats: the U.S. colossus can summon a great deal of economic and political force in getting its way.

Which fact brings us to the question of why the U.S. did not use those great non-lethal powers in Afghanistan after 9/11.

It simply demanded the extradition of people without supplying a shred of proof to the Afghan government, the Afghan request being the normal procedure for extradition anywhere.

Then the U.S. invaded while lining up a façade of support from the U.N. and NATO, everyone at that time being under both pressure from the U.S. and only naturally feeling sympathy over 9/11 .

What was America’s purpose? No person in the American government today, not Clinton and not even Obama, can give you a lucid and reasonable answer, because the truth was that there was nothing lucid or reasonable about the invasion. The purpose was blinding white-hot rage for revenge.

Once the U.S.got there, beyond its early cheap victory over 17th century people, it did not know what to do, and it still does not know what to do. Its victory consisted of displacing the Taleban with warlords of the Northern Alliance, supported by a level of horrific bombing perhaps not seen since America’s holocaust in Vietnam.

Eight years later, there is no democracy in Afghanistan, elections being pretty much a sham. The burka is still worn by most of the women in Afghanistan: after all, many members of the Northern Alliance are just as backward and vicious as the Taleban. General Dostum, for example, is a certified mass murderer, a man whose ghastly, brutal excesses were winked at by Bush and Rumsfeld, if indeed not quietly encouraged.

I heard an interview recently with the only woman elected to the Afghan legislature - since tossed out by the warlords – who says that nothing really has changed and, indeed, some things are even worse than they were under the Taleban.

I have heard from other sources that schools for girls are closed almost as soon as they are opened because no money flows to pay salaries and because of the threats from local authorities. The openings of such institutions are often little more than Potemkin village photo-ops. The Bush people used women’s rights as a propaganda tool to gain domestic support for their invasion, and, like all good propaganda, it worked because it was based on truth.

The truth is that Afghanistan is not even a country in the sense that we understand it. It is a remote, impoverished land of about 30 million where tribes live hardscrabble lives with almost no economic progress, steeped in superstitions having the same force they did in 17th century Spain with its Holy Inquisition. Even its border with Pakistan is artificial, never properly defined with the same tribes living on both sides.

You simply cannot change these realities, and certainly not with bombs.

The world is full of awful places. They burn brides in India, force child marriages, and treat young widows who were married to old men in horrible fashion.

The great irony is that the Taleban need never have been an enemy. No Taleban invaded anyone. No Taleban was involved in 9/11. That atrocity was committed by a group largely of Saudis. Importantly, they virtually all held valid American visas and were almost certainly part of secret CIA training program that failed terribly.

By the way, to this day, there is not one shred of valid evidence that Osama bin Laden did anything like the U.S. claims he did. Yes, he was a guest of the Taleban, but then he also was a past CIA operative, something that only enhanced his status for many in the region. Does that mean the CIA is responsible?

The entire Afghanistan invasion and occupation is an unqualified disaster.

One can only hope that Obama intends to use the next year or two to come to a reasonable modus Vivendi with the Taleban and then to withdraw.
________________________________

Note: Ms. Clinton’s piece may be read at:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/6722751/Hillary-Clinton-All-nations-must-play-a-part-in-Afghanistan-mission.html

THE VOICE OF AUTHORITY FROM ONE OF AMERICA'S GREAT PROPAGANDA MILLS ON THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT IN THE ECONOMY

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MICHAEL BOSKIN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Boskin’s home, the Hoover Institution, is little more than a glorified propaganda mill, much like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute.

It serves as a cozy sinecure for right-wing economists who've retired from true academics to spend their last years in leather armchairs offering up ready-made phrases and stock answers for right-wing causes.

Boskin's "government can't pick winners" is a really tired cliché, much like a tire with almost no tread which has been worn thin by overuse in the United States for over forty years. He, or anyone, should be ashamed of such unoriginal and largely meaningless language.

The larger truth is: no one can pick winners, certainly including private enterprise. There are countless examples of major corporations becoming train wrecks only recently, let alone over decades.

The truth is, and always has been, that intelligent government policies help reduce risk to business and promote growth.

In everything from property rights to zoning regulation and from infant-industry protection to regulating financial institutions, government is indispensable.

The early United States used many broad and deep forms of government protection, and it still does in a great many industries, especially in agriculture. And we see the creative arts there demanding all kinds of protective and even excessive laws for their digital products.

That despite the fact that much of early United States publishing was built on theft of European material. Dickens, for example, was furious the way American publishers regularly stole his works and paid him nothing. Those same publishers are some of the big American houses today.

And if you think government is unimportant just look at the economic explosion we call China.

A POOR INTERVIEWER ON A GREAT SHOW - PLEASE NOT MORE DUMBING-DOWN AT CBC - THE ABSURD BUSINESS OF TYPING FACILITATORS

RESPONSE TO A BROADCAST ON CBC RADIO ONE'S SHOW, THE CURRENT

That was a terrible job of interviewing by Susan Ormiston in the item on typing facilitators.

She got across to the professor at Syracuse none of the essential criticisms by the lucid magician, a man from whom I first heard years ago.

The professor never answered her only meaningful question, and she let him slide off the hook with his silly, pompous "we don't engage in that kind of thing."

The fact is that the rigorous procedures of modern science can be gamed by people like those at the University of Syracuse. They may be a non-profit institution, but that doesn't mean they have no motives to engage in unscientific research.

It brings money to the university and enhances the positions of people like the professor internally. Sadly, the money comes from desperate parents of autistic kids seeking miracles.

This facilitation business is an old fraud, going back some years, and it should surprise no one who knows some history.

We've had past unscientific fads galore, for example Mesmerism about two centuries ago or Krebiozen for cancer in the 1960s.

Or the years of "experiments" at Duke University - otherwise a perfectly respectable institution - on people's psychic abilities with cards and other silliness. Millions were spent for nothing.

One can only conclude Ms Ormiston did not understand the magician's points or she was unable to summon the skills to challenge the professor.

In either case, she has no business hosting a show like The Current.

I do hope, using her is not a sign of things to come on the show, pointing to the general trend of dumbing-down on CBC Radio which has been so painfully apparent in recent years.

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE: CANADA'S CONSERVATIVES PUT ON A NEW VERSION OF THE PLAY ATTACKING A MAN OF GENUINE CHARACTER - ALSO THE BANALITY OF EVIL

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY RICK SALUTIN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

It is in such an ugly struggle that we often see the true characters of people who normally manage to keep a relatively benign face to the world.

Richard Colvin is calm, articulate, brave, and clearly someone who took his responsibilities towards others seriously.

Peter "my word ain't worth spit" and "my Ex is a dog" Mackay once more displayed his deeply flawed character.

His sputtering, arm-waving attacks on an honest man truly had the tone of accusations from the prosecution at a witch trial.

But we already knew Peter lacked the ethical stuff we teach our children.

A new and unexpected actor in this orchestrated passion play of attack bowed in with an astonishingly nasty performance a couple of days ago.

The high-water mark in sewerage overflow was reached a couple of days ago, on CBC Radio's show The Current, when Pamela Wallin gave an interview on the subject.

Her words simply dripped with the noxious stuff of obtuse dishonesty serving politics, truly enough to induce nausea, including her much-repeated claim she just simply could not fathom Mr. Colvin's motives.

Ms Wallin apparently lacks the moral radar to perceive when other people act bravely out of decency, ethics, and humanitarianism. Either that or she was flat-out lying on national radio to attack a decent man whom she regards as a threat to her party.

Hers was another version of kicking someone who is down, ironically enough put to the service of a matter involving the torture of prisoners.

She convinced me only of one fact, one for which I needed no convincing, and that fact is the banality of evil.

And that phrase, “the banality of evil,” best characterizes the entire matter from the original acts in Afghanistan to the efforts to throw dirt at those revealing them.

WIFE OF CANADA'S FORMER LIBERAL LEADER DION (MS. KREIBER) SPEAKS OUT ON FACEBOOK ABOUT THE DISASTER OF IGNATIEFF'S LEADERSHIP

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Thank you, Ms. Krieber.

You've spoken the simple truth.

Ignatieff is a disaster.

A disaster by every possible measure.

He has no political skills.

He has no idealism.

He has no charm.

He is simply dull and uninteresting as a speaker.

There is no spark in the man.

He is a dry academic observer, and an academic of not especially outstanding abilities.

And he carries a record of views that are unacceptable to all ethical Canadians.

Dion is a good and intelligent and perceptive man, but he made a serious political mistake with his Green Shift going into an election.

Had the party allowed him to recover in the normal fashion, I think he would be embraced by many Canadians.

Instead, the blind people running the party shoved Ignatieff down our throats.

Ignatieff's record for his few years in Canadian politics reads like something from the old Poliburo.

Parachuted into his riding. Parachuted into the leadership. Uninteresting to the people.

BLUBBERING BY MICHAEL VALPY ABOUT THE PROUD RETURN OF WARRIOR CULTURE TO CANADA

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MICHAEL VALPY IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Oh, sure, Michael Valpy, we sure have done ourselves a great service.

Serving as loyal minor satrap to the Pentagon in its pointless quest for vengeance in Afghanistan – now, there surely is a fine thing.

The lives of hundreds of Canadian soldiers destroyed or now driven by mad hideous memories of abominations like the very common rape of boys tolerated in Afghanistan. Again, surely, a fine thing.

And the proud achievement of our handing over prisoners for torture. Now, that is an exceptionally fine thing.

Warrior culture is a stupid term for Canada to adopt. We have no enemies who can seriously threaten us, except if you count the United States.

In that case, I'm afraid our "warrior culture" wouldn't buy us one day's success against their military Frankenstein monster.

Warrior culture and great standing armies are among the world's great outdated and dangerous traditions. They rank with burkas and holy inquisitions and heavy nuns' habits and meaningless superstitions. Indeed, warrior culture is a form of superstition.

When genuine threats occur, no one needs to tell Canadians about outdated nonsense like “warrior culture.” We would all respond. But that is a very different thing than going for adventures abroad, a very different thing than killing and being killed as part of lunatic crusade.

Powerful armies constantly seek outlets for their dark powers. The record of the United States since WW II is proof of that, and a shameful record it is.

Stupid pointless war after stupid pointless war.

Overthrow of government (even democratic ones) after overthrow of government.

It's a terrible record which has only kept turmoil going in the world and achieved almost nothing of worth.

Historians rank as one of the most important causes of WWI, a pointless bloodbath if ever there was one, Europe's great standing armies and military competitions of the time.

And, of course, WWI was only the warm-up for WWII, an even greater bloodbath which need never have happened but for WWI.

One last, terribly important point about “warrior culture.”

Even were the people of the United States to come to believe they were under a form tyranny, with the country’s vast occupying armies and National Guards, equipped with awesome weapons, there isn’t a chance they could rebel, despite all the silly talk about private arms keeping tyranny at bay.

FROM THE PEN OF A FATUOUS ACADEMIC: WE SHOULD SET OBJECTIVES FOR AFGHANISTAN - NOT DEPART IN DEFEAT

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DAVID BERCUSSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

"The West should set an objective, not seek a way out, which would mean defeat..."

Sorry, but that is an absolutely fatuous statement.

Why are forces in Afghanistan in the first place if they have no objective?

War is a pretty damned serious and costly thing - no project society ever does normally compares to its consumption of resources to say nothing of lives - and you really should have a sound idea of what you are doing before you set off on one.

The United States never understood what it was doing there, and it still does not. Yet it continues to pressure others to commit more resources to its pointless and destructive campaign.

Second, there is nothing wrong in government or world affairs in admitting you've made a mistake and correcting it.

Indeed, to do the opposite is sheer lunacy. Lives and treasure are being squandered every day to no purpose. Canada made a ghastly mistake committing to Afghanistan, and I think most ordinary Canadians understand that.

Defeat? That concept is not even relevant in Afghanistan. Emphasizing that blowhard term is just what the brutal pride of the American establishment emphasizes. Keep killing and bombing for pride.

When you undertake a wrong-headed project, "defeat," as it were, is implicit from the beginning.

Thus was the American holocaust in Vietnam. Thus was the American intrusion into Somalia. And thus was America's crusade for vengeance in Afghanistan.

By the way, the thought here is so unimaginative, it just makes me wonder about the University of Calgary in any area but the hard sciences. Of course, it's home too of Tom Flanagan, a tiresomely regular idiot-savant on the Globe's pages.

A COLUMNIST WRITES THAT OBAMA MAY INSPIRE BUT SARAH PALIN CONNECTS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY REX MURPHY IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Connects?

She connects with a fair number of male couch beer-swillers who consider her a "hot babe."

She connects with the gun nuts.

She connects with the trailer-park and fuzzy-dice set.

She connects with the lobotomy cases of the religious right.

She connects with all the xenophobes in America who have no use for "damned fureigners."

God that's a lot of people in America, and she is a very dangerous woman.

_______________________________

Apart from Sarah Palin's dozens of ridiculous errors and misstatements plus a demonstrated tendency towards abuse of power, two facts stand out like the great rocks of the Straits of Gibraltar for me.

One, Sarah took six years at five different colleges before she finally earned her BA in a bird subject like "communications."

Two, the woman quit her elected job as governor of one of the least populated states in America, yet told us she was not a quitter.

The woman is simply a joke, but then so was Bush, and look what that moron gave the world.

America seems to have a boundless appetite for this kind of insipid daytime-talk show politics.

WHAT IS AT STAKE IN AFGHANISTAN?

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Nothing is at stake in Afghanistan.

That is, except for American pride in once more having invaded a country, killed a great many people and achieved nothing.

America didn't know what it was doing from the beginning, and it still does not know.

But it sure knows how to kill people, and the American establishment is always ready to do more killing and bombing rather than be embarrassed at its own foolishness.

It chewed up human beings in Vietnam for ten years to no purpose whatsoever beyond regard for its own violent and stupid pride.

No one else regards Afghanistan as a serious threat, else why are NATO countries constantly browbeaten by American officials into making larger commitments?

The facts of Afghanistan are rather simple if you open your mind to them.

It is not a democracy - never was and still is not - and you can never create a democracy at the barrel of a gun. Moreover, America’s own problematic claim to genuine democratic government makes it among the least suitable of instructors.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest regions on earth, affording only a hard-scrabble existence to most of its people – it always has been poor and it remains so. America has done almost nothing to turn around its economy for a brighter future, but it sure has killed a lot of people and created a lot of damage.

Like all poor, backward countries, Afghanistan remains prisoner of ancient customs not understood by modern societies, and nothing, except long-term serious economic growth, America can do will change that.

Consider even a healthily growing third-world country like India. It still has bride burning, forced marriage, and horrid treatment of widows, plus many other ghastly ancient customs it will not shake until after generations of growth.

Imagine going to 17th century Spain and telling the people they must give up the Holy Inquisition, Jews and Arabs must be tolerated as full members of society, and nuns must stop wearing hideous gigantic habits? To pose the question is to know the answer.

How much more so Afghanistan?

The warlords that now are deemed the government of Afghanistan are, most of them, no better than the Taleban in terms of modern values. Horrible acts continue all over the country, and the burka is still worn in most of the country. Some, like General Dostum, are nothing but mass murders.

Rape of boys is common everywhere, often done by translators and other helpers of Americans right in front of the eyes of troops. The Americans and others tolerate these hideous acts, for the sake of keeping allies and helpers, acts which would earn their perpetrators long prison sentences and public hatred anywhere in the West.

Alliance with those warlords is the only thing that allowed America its cheap “victory.” Cheap in American blood, that is, not Afghan blood.

The Taleban never was America’s enemy, the perpetrators of 9/11 were mostly Saudis, and they were mostly in America on legitimate visas, being part of a secret CIA training scheme that backfired badly.

Most of the terrorist incidents since the invasions – like the London underground bombing - are just the work of homegrown men angry and frustrated at the injustice of what has happened, at the tens of thousands of their fellow Muslims killed with no thought or care.

The CIA never took any responsibility for 9/11. America never took any responsibility. But Afghanistan was invaded – according to experts, just the deaths in Kabul from bombing were at least 50,000 – and the Taleban was dispersed. Some achievement.

Now America bombs and kills regularly in Pakistan, claiming, just as it claimed about Cambodia during its bloodbath in Vietnam. People under no charges are regularly assassinated along with any family members and bystanders, a la Israel’s regular extra-judicial killings, activity indistinguishable from that of former South America juntas who regularly made people "disappear."

America is only making enemies and de-stabilizing still another land.

RICHARD COLVIN A CANADIAN HERO & PATHETIC PETER MACKAY'S EFFORTS TO QUESTION HIS TESTIMONY ON THE TURNING OVER PRISONERS TO TORTURE IN AFGHANISTAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Richard Colvin is a genuine Canadian hero.

How rare it is to find an honest man in government, and rarer still to find one who puts his career at risk for hard truth.

What Colvin's words say for the characters of the people who surround Harper is very unpleasant.

But what else would you expect?

Harper always supported America's ghastly war crime of invading Iraq, and we know from countless examples in recent years that Harper's idea of ethics almost define the banality of evil.

And Harper has no qualms about Israel's several mass murders in Lebanon and Gaza. He's gung ho for a state openly practicing ethnic-cleansing and apartheid.

Following America into the mire of Afghanistan has been terrible for Canada, squandering our nation's reputation as well as lives and money while achieving nothing of worth.

As to Mr Peter "My word ain't worth much" and "I call my ex a dog" Mackay's attempts to throw dirt, well consider the source.

Apart from all his other accomplishments, MacKay has demonstrated his intellectual weakness in several poorly-handled jobs.

His word carries no weight weight in any balance of arguments.

Particularly when he is aiming to undermine a man of distinguished achievements, substantial intellect, and genuine honor.

Good God, Mackay, is just plain pathetic.

Harper's crowd has brought us a stinking copy of right-wing Republican shabby politics.

The stuff about the letters to certain constituents deemed Jewish and containing suggestions about opposition of anti-Semitism is right from the gutter. So too any attack on Colvin

AUNG SAN SUU KYI, OMAR KHADR, AND BARACK OBAMA: A DREADFUL TALE OF WHAT AMERICA HAS BECOME

November 16, 2009

AUNG SAN SUU KYI, OMAR KHADR, AND BARACK OBAMA: A DREADFUL TALE OF WHAT AMERICA HAS BECOME

John Chuckman

During his trip to Asia, President Obama called for the government of Burma to release Aung San Suu Kyi, a noted dissident who has spent years under house arrest.

It made headlines, a fact which tells us more about the role of media as an outlet for government press releases than in communicating genuine news.

Obama’s was hardly a brave or innovative act when you consider that it is a universally-condemned military junta keeping Aung San Suu Kyi penned up.

But when you appreciate the full context of Obama’s call, you may agree with me that it was more a cowardly act than anything else.

A year ago, after eight years of mind-numbing stupidity, countless public lies and bloody war crimes, Obama’s arrival on the American political scene thrilled the world. His intelligence, his grace, and his sense of decency were striking. His like as an American politician, quite apart from his race, had not been seen in the lifetime of many.

But the hopes raised by Obama, like so many flickering little candles in a fierce wind, already are largely extinguished. This polished, educated, liberal-minded and decent man, after only one year in office, has been overwhelmed by America’s military-industrial complex, a terrible machine which grinds on night and day, chewing people in its gears, no matter who is elected ostensibly to be in charge of it.

Much as I resent Burma’s treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi, it shines as genuinely humane compared to America’s treatment of Omar Khadr.

The key facts in the case of this young man, a prisoner at Guantanamo, are easily told.

Omar Khadr was born to a fundamentalist Muslim, highly political family whose father knew and died fighting for Osama bin Laden. In an era whose ruling myths are a clash of civilizations and a war on terror, Omar would seem to have been doomed from birth.

Under intense pressure from his family, fifteen-year old Omar went to fight in Afghanistan when America invaded it. In doing that, he was doing nothing that tens of thousands of Americans hadn’t done, both as idealists for causes and as soldiers of fortune in countless wars from the Spanish Civil War to the Cuban Revolution or the turmoil of the Congo.

Omar’s experience reminded me a little of American Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, a story where the need for maternal approval helped drive his destructive participation in America’s Vietnam holocaust (three million Vietnamese slaughtered, many hideously with napalm, and the legacy of soil saturated with Agent Orange and littered with millions of landmines more than justifies that term).

The American claim against Omar is that he shot an American soldier, a medic no less, a fact seemingly almost designed to increase his infamy.

The story, as I heard it in an interview a few years ago with an American soldier, a friend of the dead medic’s, was that after a small firefight, Omar hid himself, then leapt up, heartlessly killing the medic whose only interest was the wounded. Omar was then captured and eventually sent to Guantanamo.

Even were that story true, and it is not, there would still be no excuse for sending a fifteen-year old child to Guantanamo. That act violated all international conventions on the treatment of child soldiers, but then almost everything America has done over the last eight years has violated international conventions, international laws, common decency, and the spirit of its own Bill of Rights.

For years, Omar, like hundreds of inmates at Guantanamo, was held incommunicado: he was allowed no contact with his family, he was allowed no visits from the International Red Cross (again in contravention to international conventions) and he was allowed no legal counsel. Omar was allowed no rights of any kind: being kept shackled in a secret prison ninety miles offshore was considered adequate to efface the entire spirit and meaning of America’s own rights and laws.

We now know that the soldiers who captured Omar, in fact, shot him twice in the back as the frightened boy tried to run. Despite life-threatening wounds and his young age, Omar was consigned to years of imprisonment and torture at Guantanamo. Indeed, his worst torturer, a soldier with a reputation at Guantanamo as perhaps its most vicious interrogator, deliberately contrived his sessions with Omar so that the boy had to sit in a position which pulled at his slowly-healing and painful wounds.

We also know now, evidence having just been published in Canadian newspapers, that Omar could not possibly have killed the medic: Omar was photographed hiding under a pile of rubble as the soldiers passed.

So who killed the medic? One perhaps should recall the case of Pat Tillman, an American football player killed by his own forces in Afghanistan, a case at first covered up the military, but even now full of unanswered questions.

And why did the Americans shoot Omar, twice, in the back? One simply cannot avoid the suggestion that the American soldiers involved acted with cowardice and savagery.

Some readers may object that American soldiers are incapable of such behaviour, but let’s go back to that time in Afghanistan, reviewing some things we now know as facts, and think about what they suggest about the ethos prevailing there when a fifteen-year old was shot in the back and sent to be tortured.

America’s carpet bombing in Afghanistan was destructive beyond anything Americans have ever been told. Just as was the case in the First Gulf War when uncounted tens of thousands of poor Iraqi recruits were bulldozed into the desert after having been literally pulped into tailing ponds of human bits and fluids by B-52s, the true horror of what massive bombing did in Afghanistan was understandably not well advertised..

The public has been led to believe that, compared to the horrors inflicted upon Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan was almost bloodless. But I learned recently from an expert journalist – an American no less - with many years of experience in that country that a great deal of blood was shed. In Kabul alone, fifty to sixty thousand Afghans died in America’s brutal bombing and artillery cover for its Northern Alliance proxy army, itself a gang of thugs many of whom are not one wit more ethical or civilized than the Taleban.

We knew too, those who cared to search, of the brutal tactics of American special forces in the mountains after the initial “victory”: tales of heavily-armed goons marching into remote towns, throwing stun grenades, breaking down the doors of homes, holding women and children at gunpoint while their male family members were marched away with no explanation. The men were often kept for considerable periods to be “questioned.”

At the least suspicion, air strikes were called in, and in dozens and dozens of cases, those air strikes wiped out whole families or groups of villagers who had done nothing to oppose Americans. They were the victims, thousands of them, of young Americans filled with irrational resentments over 9/11, anxious to prove how good they were with their high-tech killing machines, and let loose on someone else’s country.

And we knew, at least again those who cared to search, the story of America’s hideous treatment of Taleban prisoners in the early days of occupation, of Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld’s Nazi-like public demand that all prisoners should be killed or walled away forever. One of America’s ghastly allies of the Northern Alliance, General Dostum, took Rumsfeld in deadly earnest: he had his men round up three thousand prisoners, seal them in vans and drive them out onto the desert to suffocate in the heat. The bodies were then buried in shallow mass graves. All this was watched by American soldiers who somehow failed to act the way Jimmy Stewart did in war movies. Instead they picked their noses or smoked cigarettes as they gawked.

We also knew of the terrible tales of boys being raped while American troops never lifted a finger to help them. In a strict fundamentalist country like Afghanistan, where young women are kept guarded and almost hidden, the sexual behaviour of men often takes on the character of that common in prisons everywhere: that is, young and vulnerable men are brutally raped and often treated as “bitches” by older, tougher prisoners.

Only recently, I heard the horrible stories of a Canadian soldier with post traumatic stress who told of seeing a boy with blood running down his legs as two Afghan allies raped him. The soldier could do nothing and was told later only to buck it up. He told too of a translator, a hired Afghan, gleefully relating to him about the way he liked to use a knife on boys he raped.

We all saw the ghastly pictures from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Only now we know far uglier pictures and recordings have been suppressed, images and sounds of young Iraqis being raped and sodomized by American soldiers at the prison.

Those facts give us some realistic sense of the atmosphere in Afghanistan when American soldiers shot Omar in the back, falsely accused him of killing a medic, and sent a fifteen-year old boy off to years of torture.

Omar remains a prisoner in Guantanamo, although the torture mercifully has stopped, but it was announced only a couple of days ago that he would be among those who would stand trial in New York.

Trial for what? For trumped-up charges of murder? Trial for acts in war? Trial for being an abused child soldier? Trial under American laws which never applied to Afghanistan? A trial where every scrap of government evidence is tainted with years of torture and human-rights abuse? Where the government doing the trying itself has acted against countless laws and treaties in invading and occupying two countries?

If there were one breath of decency left in America’s establishment, Omar and the other abused prisoners would all be released and allowed to live the rest of their lives in peace. They are no threat to anyone, most did nothing deserving imprisonment, and those who may have committed something we would regard as a crime have been viciously punished already.

Only days ago, Obama’s White House Counsel Greg Craig was let go. Craig, an old friend of the President’s, had promised to make his administration the most transparent in history. Craig was the main force behind the Obama’s promise to close Guantanamo in one year.

Well, there is no sign Guantanamo is to be closed any time soon, and the policy’s chief advocate is gone. But more importantly, when we speak of American torture chambers, it is easy to forget that Guantanamo is only the most publicized of many. What horrors go on at places like America’s secret base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean or at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or in a number of other locations, all part of the CIA’s vast international torture gulag, is anybody’s guess.

Obama has not uttered a whimper about the CIA’s euphemistically-named extreme rendition, a practice whereby thousands of people have been kidnapped off streets and sent bound to some of the world’s hell-holes for months of torture. Afterwards, having been discovered innocent of anything, they find themselves dumped in some obscure place like Bosnia without so much as an apology for their treatment.

Obama told people repeatedly during his campaign that American forces in Iraq would be withdrawn promptly, saying “you can bank on it,” and people believed him because Obama did not vote in the Senate for that illegal war, but most of America’s soldiers remain there still.

Obama appointed a commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who has a background swirling with suggestions of black operations and dirty business, and now that ghastly man has said he needs forty-thousand more troops.

American Predator drones, guided by buzz-cut, faceless men with computer screens in locked rooms in America, now frequently invade Pakistan’s airspace. One can just imagine them hooting and pumping their arms like young men playing a computer game when one of their terrible Hellfire missiles strikes its target, the home of someone not legally charged with anything, killing everyone who happens to be nearby.

No, I only wish the ugly stain on America’s flag was keeping a dissident under house arrest.

WAR ON TEROR NEEDS TO EXAMINE EVENTS IN YEMEN?

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY RICHARD SPENCER IN THE TELEGRAPH

Richard Spencer,

Anyone who uses seriously the phrase "war on terror" immediately loses my attention as being someone with little worth saying.

You cannot have a war on ideas or techniques.

But you can very much have a war on a group of people whose religion or politics you do not like.

If people like you spent your time combing through the local mutterings of politicians and others in various countries, you could make just as superficially extreme-sounding a case.

Every day in the backward parts of that vast sprawl called America, you can find the most appalling things being said by local political or religious leaders.

In the backwoods of India or Africa, some of the statements made and practices done daily would curl your hair.

And in Israel, orthodox rabbis regularly say and do the most horrific things by the standards of the 21st century.

BORIS JOHNSON'S SHABBY APPEAL OF NOT BETRAYING THE FALLEN IN AFGHANISTAN

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY BORIS JOHNSON IN THE TELEGRAPH

Boris Johnson, your speaking of "betrayal of the fallen" is simply the cheapest, shabbiest old politician’s trick there is in times of war.

No logic, no facts, only an appeal to misplaced emotions. Wrapping yourself with a bloody flag is not an argument: it is the kind of thing we expect from the likes of America’s Sarah Palin, an utterly uninformed airhead.

Just because a dishonest politician like Tony Blair commits people to their deaths in a pointless cause does not mean that the nation must continue in it after people have begun to understand what has been done to them.

Imagine applying Boris Johnson's non-thinking, emotion-laden principle to past wars. The evil Lyndon Johnson committed the United States to the most destructive and utterly pointless colonial war of the 20th century in Vietnam: his only real reason being fear that Nixon would “out-Commie” him in the next election. The United States would still be slaughtering people if governed by Johnson's principle.

Johnson's thinking reminds me of General Earl Haig, the incompetent, strutting commander who sent half a million men to their deaths in the summer of 1917, achieving nothing.

THE NEWS THAT ABBAS IS ABOUT TO STEP DOWN AS PALESTINIAN PRESIDENT

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
It cannot come too soon.

Abbas is a pathetic figure, representing a Palestinian version what in the United States used to be called a Step'n Fetchit, indeed there was a minor black comic actor who went by that name in early American films.

He has never served his people well, not through any bad intent on his part, but through a complete lack of the skills needed for his position.

It has at times been genuinely embarrassing watching him quietly swallow the garbage Israel regularly pitches in public, claiming it is working on the "peace process" while stealing more of other people's land almost daily.

But, of course, one must also take account of the long line of assassinations of Palestinian leaders by Israel, including quite likely Arafat, who was probably poisoned in the same secretive way as an early attempt on Sheikh Yassin before he was finally blown up in his wheelchair by a Hellfire missile.

_______________________

stpnlll,

I applaud your sentiments, but they are just that sentiments, and sentiments have no role in the ugly game of power politics being played by Israel.

Israel has made it abundantly clear that it will never accept this outcome. Many prominent Israelis are on record as saying not only is a one-state solution unacceptable but also a two-state solution whether federated or not.

The continuous march of settlements and slow-motion ethnic-cleansing taking place in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem is in keeping with long-held beliefs by Israeli leaders that all of the parts of Israel from 2,500 years ago must be Jewish, and that certainly includes the West Bank.

As long ago as the Camp David talks with President Carter, Begin, an old Irgun terrorist, kept telling Carter that Israel must have Judea and Sumaria, ancient names for areas where millions of Arabs live.

That idea is such a fixation for many Israelis that indeed there can never be meaningful peace without U.S. intercession against it.

And what are the prospects for that?

HILLARY CLINTON "CLARIFIES" HER COMMENTS ON ISRAEL'S SETTLEMENT - JUST ONE SAD PART OF OBAMA'S ALREADY-FAILED NEW MIDEAST POLICY

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Well, how nice to find Ms Clinton has caught up with the world's people.

Despite what their governments may say under various kinds of pressures, most people in the world know Israel's policy of settlements is not legitimate. Indeed, it is outright theft, besides breaking international agreements on occupations.

It is disheartening to see the way Obama - starting with a fresh mandate, a good mind, and the knowledge that there can be no peace without real pressure on Israel - has given in to the relentless efforts of the Israel Lobby.

There seems to be no hope for a rational and humane settlement. Israel just carries on with apartheid and a gradual, relentless ethnic-cleansing while it stands in contempt of dozens of UN resolutions, any one of which could have been used as a reason for UN military intervention.

And we are to simply pretend it is not happening and never criticize Israel for fear of being called anti-Semitic.

A true nightmare for human rights and freedom.

AFGANISTAN AND WHY CANADA IS THERE AND RICK HILLIER A NAIVE AND WHINING GENERAL

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

I have heard Rick Hillier speak at some length recently on CBC Radio. Naturally, he is out promoting his book.

I thought he largely came off as a whiner, rather naïve about the realities of war and politics.

Hillier went into Afghanistan literally barking about doing some killing, arrogantly tossing aside Canada's sense of itself as a peaceful and peacekeeping place.

His words rankled many people, and naturally a control-freak like Harper put limits on Hillier's mouth.

I tend to agree with Chantal Hebert’s assessment that Hillier’s book, unintentionally on his part, will only contribute to Canada’s not continuing a military commitment in Afghanistan beyond its commitment.

The entire Afghanistan adventure is nothing more than a demonstration of America’s ability to behave much as it pleases in the world. In the aftermath of 9/11, it pulled out all the stops in finance and diplomacy to get UN and NATO recognition of what essentially was vengeance.

The invasion never made any sense, and after America’s superficial “victory,” it had no idea what to do, except to let its brutal special forces loose on villages all over Afghanistan. Its “victory” amounted to a pact with the devils of the Northern Alliance – monsters like the mass-murderer General Dostum being as bad or worse than the Taleban - and it achieved nothing but a great deal of killing and the dispersal of the Taleban.

No NATO country – especially powerful ones like France or Germany - has made a commitment of troops that is in keeping with America’s paranoid assessment of the world dangers of Afghanistan – that fact is telling beyond anything else.

Canadians should never forget that the only reason we sent troops to Afghanistan was a decision in Ottawa that “we owed one to the Pentagon” after having refused to participate in America’s missile shield and its even more disastrous and murderous adventure in Iraq.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF HOW NOT TO WRITE A BOOK REVIEW - THIS ONE BY CHARLES MOORE ON ANDREW MARR

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CHARLES MOORE IN THE TELEGRAPH

This is a truly silly review which fails on its own terms.

I haven't read the book, but nothing said here confirms the title of the review.

Indeed, Charles Moore, through his use of parentheses after quotes or assertions only indulges in exactly what he accuses the author of.

If you have a critical point to make you do not need a nudge-nudge, wink, wink.

Histories, even great histories, are full of judgments.

Just read Churchill or Gibbon or Tacitus.

It is always the responsibility of critical readers to examine several books on a subject of interest to get a feel for the variation in assessment of a period or individual.

Just as witnesses at a trial can each give different accounts of something they actually saw, so it is most certainly with history or biography. The “truth” is only ever vaguely indicated in a cloud of doubts and differing assessments, much the way, at the sub-atomic level, the Uncertainty Principle makes it impossible to define at once all the variables of a particle.

I should have thought that fact elementary for anyone claiming to have such a grasp of history that he can call an author “ignorant.”

AFGHANISTAN'S KARZAI DECLARED WINNER OF ELECTION - NOW THERE'S A CAUSE TO FIGHT FOR

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

A declared election winner, no less.

And after all that ballot-box stuffing.

Now there's the kind of democracy heroic young people are ready to die for.

I guess Americans have taught the Afghans this much: how to run an election Florida-style.

THE LIMITS TO THE USE OF HARD POWER - OR ANOTHER ACADEMIC WRITES WITHOUT THINKING USING LANGUAGE FROM THE BANALITY OF EVIL

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GORDON GIBSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Sorry, Gordon Gibson, as soon as a writer uses a term like "hard power," I stop reading, knowing full well he has nothing to say.

The phrase is the creation of Pentagon consultants on expense-account lunches.

Bullying and ruthless violence - a million dead in Iraq, two million displaced - may not be summed up as "hard power" except by a person who is not thinking about what he is writing.

PETER MACKAY, RIGHT DISHONORABLE GENTLEMAN, TO WED CTV EXECUTIVE

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

And if she leaves him, will he call her a dog in public?

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_NtgXlrcvXZA/SrkrN_v2mPI/AAAAAAAAg9M/O8PVQZtwrFM/s1600-h/CHUCKMAN+-+MACKAY+-+PIG+-+DISHONOURABLE+GENTLEMAN.jpg

MORE SILLINESS ABOUT THE PRESS NOT LIKING IGNATIEFF BECAUSE HE IS AN AUTHOR - GOD, DO PEOPLE LIKE THIS HAVE EYES AND EARS?

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY TOM FLANAGAN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

"I think the media hate Ignatieff because he is a successful author."

That kind of comment indeed confirms Churchill's sarcastic view on the average voter in a democracy.

Oh, please, it has nothing to do with books.

Ignatieff has simply proven a dreary public persona. Anyone with ears and eyes understands that.

He has no charm and sparkle like Chretien.

He has no piercing intelligence and commanding presence like Trudeau.

He has no sense of being a man of the people, a la Pearson.

He is almost totally unsuited to the job he has taken on, and it has nothing to do with this or that member of his staff.

The sooner he steps down - from a job he did not even get democratically - the better off our country will be.

We need an admirable, sparkling leader to stop that creature Harper, that walking assemblage of pieces of corpses, who is wrecking much of what most Canadians hold dear.

Ignatieff's little political career by appointment is nothing more a continuation of the disastrous split in the Liberal Party when Martin pushed out Chretien.

If Harper gets a majority, we are all going to be very sorry.

The ghastly crew of creatures who are Harper's loyal legion - ever see Tom Flanagan's picture? Unsmiling tight thin lips, he could have a career doing roles like Silas Marner or a remake of the Night of the Living Dead - are just getting going in anticipation of Harper's being able to sweep away everything they hate.

RICK SALUTIN ADDRESSES CBC'S DUMB NEW APPROACH TO THE NEWS

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY RICK SALUTIN IN TORPONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Thank you, Rick Salutin, I agree with your sentiments, except that I would use stronger language.

CBC is simply being dumbed-down everywhere. I very much fear that it will, before long, reach the point of no longer being worthy of public support as a true quality national broadcaster.

Perhaps the worst example is the lukewarm-dull Jian Ghomeshi, a man who is basically a pop recording promoter with nothing interesting to say – Dick Clark forty years later - taking up the venerable morning slot of Radio One. Simply ghastly for those who appreciate intelligent talk

Hip-hop – the ultimate dumbed-down music, and not infrequently a form of genuine hate-speech or insipid anti-hate, is now pushed on almost every show.

I spent one half-hour with the new Evan Soloman political show, replacing Don Newman’s outstanding Politics. It is a disaster of quick takes and flashing signs, resembling one of the crasser sites on the Internet.

My wife and I absolutely hate it. Don Newman brought a subtle, penetrating intelligence to quality interviews with national figures, and he had people capable of replacing him, notably the astute Susan Bonner, but, no, this pop guy was slammed in ahead of them with a goofy Sesame Street format.

Perhaps the most depressing thing about CBC Radio – always in the past a beacon of excellence not equaled by the television network – is the now generally low quality of the news broadcasts.

First, it often presents stories as brief headlines which immediately raise more questions than they answer. You just have to say to yourself, is there no editor thinking about what’s being said?

Second, it is just unblinkingly stupid about matters like illness, spreading foolishness and fears instead of hard facts. During SARS – a disease that killed 44 people when ordinary flu and pneumonia kill thousands every year – the network was turned into a morning-to-night source of poor information, containing no perspective.

Later, all we heard about was bird flu, despite the fact that bird flu never became a serious threat.

Now, it’s H1N1 morning until night, almost never with anything new or truly helpful being said.

The only exception I’ve heard was on The Current with the superb Anna Maria Tremonti in a piece where we learned of important research showing that it is likely opportunistic bacterial infections on top of H1N1 causing deaths, not just the flu virus.

I actually hear ungrammatical language at times on morning news casts out of Toronto, language which would never have been tolerated in the past.

CBC Radio still has some genuine treasures: Eleanor Wachtel, Kathleen Petty, Bob McDonald, Bernard St. Laurent, Bill Richardson, Michael Enright, Rick Mercer, and others, but what is notable about the list is the average advanced age. What happens when they retire? More (ugh!) Ghomeshi and (yuck!) Soloman and (gasp!) Stroumboulopoulos.

There will then be absolutely no reason for a “national broadcaster.”

_____________________

Radio 2 has a case of the same chronic acne afflicting Radio 1.

There are some exceptions, but the disease has ravaged a fair portion of the network's public face.

I just do not understand why the public broadcaster has to ape the worst of commercial broadcasting.

The whole point of a public broadcaster is to offer thoughtful talk and excellent music not found other places.

It is just a fact that such broadcasts will never be wildly popular, but they are there for anyone to turn to.

Becoming pop and dumb is like turning the opera into just one more rock band. There's no point.

AFGHANISTAN OBAMA AND DITHERING - THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX ON THE BACK OF A DECENT MAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

I believe Obama is dithering, although their may be some truth to the idea of putting pressure on the Mayor of Kabul.

There is a basic conflict at work here: Obama's decency and humanity versus an American establishment which never hesitates to kill people over pride.

Obama has the weight of the entire military-industrial complex on his back - the half trillion dollar a year industry of professional war-making in the Pentagon, the vast parade of defense contractors who've made countless billions from the war - plus the pressure of the Israel Lobby, always in favor of war against Muslims with talk about being soft on terror.

This mission is pointless. You cannot remake the institutions and customs of a nation of about 30 million in a few years.

Imagine invading seventeenth century Spain and telling people that the Holy Inquisition must end, nuns must give up the habit, Moors and Jews must be admitted as full members of society, and women must have equal rights?

Yet that is a close parallel to what the U.S. at least claims it is doing in Afghanistan.

Americans have failed in Iraq and they failed in Afghanistan, just as they failed in Vietnam and Somalia and a number of other places.

You can't bomb people into democracy or into modernity, but you sure can kill lots of innocent people.

America's only clear-cut victory goes back to WWII and that required sinking to complete barbarism, using the atomic bomb on civilians.

The basic problem is that ideologue Americans seek the wrong victories.

They are always fighting imagined devils, whether communists or Muslims, instead of dealing in practical terms with the world. And the truth is they don't really want to fight if it means they suffer real losses. So they bomb. This is a formula for guaranteed failure.

Dropping dollar bills instead of bombs would have been a more sensible policy.

Just dumb.

Now America's Captain Ahabs risk repeating their insane experience of the killing fields of Cambodia, a neutral country that was secretly bombed and invaded for the same lunatic reasons that Pakistan is now being bombed and driven to kill its own people. With the toppling of a neutral government, Cambodia dropped into the hands of true madmen, and America shares full responsibility for what happened.

But the lessons are never learned by America's jingo set.

There's always a new dawn for these ideologues when enough bombing and brutality will get the desired results, even if the poor country on the receiving end is reduced to rubble.

The great irony is, of course, the Taleban never had to America's enemies. They were not international terrorists, and they attacked no one outside their land. They offered to extradite bin Laden and others if the U.S. just provided some evidence for its claims over 9/11, the normal procedure for extraditions everywhere.

But the U.S. just angrily refused, and it prepared to attack.

The assault on Afghanistan was about absolutely nothing but vengeance. The participation of the UN and NATO was just a diplomatic nicety arranged through the cajoling and threats behind the scenes.

What NATO countries really think of Afghanistan is clear from their response to repeated calls from the U.S. for more forces. The psychology of immediately post-9/11 had been right for governments not to refuse, something they did do a little later with the vast war crime of invading Iraq.

They simply do not regard Afghanistan as a serious threat, and it is not.

But the U.S. is stuck there after getting vengeance - at least 50,000 died just in Kabul from America's invasion - with no idea of what to do next, and no idea of how to make a graceful exit, and the American establishment's idea of a graceful exit is what was done to Japan.
_____________________

Some interesting statistics on Afghanistan were released the other day.

From one Afghanistan's own ministries, it was announced that 12 million people, including 3 million children, out of a total population of 30 million, live in serious poverty. so much so that many of the children are malnourished.

My, what an achievement, America, after 8 years of invasion and occupation and tens and tens of billions spent on killing and destruction.

LEONARD SAX AND MORE ON SEGREGATED EDUCATION AND THE ENTIRE MISDIRECTION OF "PROFESSIONAL EDUCATORS"

RESPONSE TO A CBC RADIO ONE PROGRAM ON THE CURRENT

Your guest, Leonard Sax, only proved how little genuine scholarship and hard thinking often go into discussions of education.

First he told us of research showing the differences in brain development between boys and girls at a young age – actually pretty fatuous research since the difference is a practical reality that any person of moderate observational powers, having passed through public education at any time over the last century or so, took for granted.

When your interviewer remarked that such research would seem to say that segregated classes might then be necessary in general, we got a cotton-mouth response typical of the education establishment, “No, I wouldn’t go that far in making a generalization.”

Of course, the sad truth is much of what passes for scholarship in education is extremely feeble stuff.

I remember when I was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto reading announcements of PhD theses at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. There was always some genuinely comical stuff, virtual parodies of serious scholarship, Monty Python does educational research. Many professors then at U of T actually objected to the University’s granting degrees for OISE because of its poor standards of scholarship.

And I’m afraid this is a general condition. Even at a world-class institution like Harvard, a prominent member of the education faculty expounds a notion of multiple intelligences, a notion having absolutely no science to it. Many public schools in the U.S. actually have posters in classrooms proclaiming the notion of multiple intelligences as though it were education’s equivalent to Maxwell’s Laws on Electromagnetism.

Of course, for years, education faculties quoted the University of Chicago’s Bruno Bettelheim as though he were an authority - that is, until we discovered the famous child psychologist was a fraud and an abuser of children.

There are endless examples of this sort of thing in education, all tending to point to the fundamental truth that teaching is neither a profession, in the sense that there is a basic body of knowledge and standards, nor a science. It is a skill, and the way to hone a skill is to get on with it, not to talk about it.

Ontario’s public education establishment has done nothing but flip-flop decade after decade, going from one half-considered notion to another.

First, tests were important, then they were not so important. First, plenty of homework was vital, then it was not so vital. First, there was zero tolerance for violence, then not really. First, report cards were important means of summing progress, then they were reduced to bland phrases from a computer. First, failure was an important tool, then everyone passed. First, teachers were authority figures, then they were mere facilitators. One could actually write an embarrassingly long list of such complete nonsense.

Any other institution which behaved in such a wildly erratic manner would become the butt of jokes and would fail utterly.

The only difference for our schools is that no one is allowed to say they are failing, but they are, because Canadians are not genuinely competitive in international comparisons, and, in a globilized world, there really is only a world standard for our children’s future opportunities.

One suspects that all this meaningless arm-flapping represents an ongoing effort by “professional educators” to avoid true responsibilities and the hard realities of education, regularly announcing a new notion as a solution, much like still another new elixir from yet another quick-money quack rolling his travelling road show into town.

Fill the classrooms with competent teachers – there are many, but there are also many incompetents protected by their union.

Give them a reasonable curriculum – the current one in Ontario is also right out of Monty Python - and the resources they require, especially libraries and computers.

Then give them the authority they need – authority against the many politically-correct principals and, importantly, against whining, overly-interfering parents.

Stream kids according to their proven abilities, kids having no talent for academics only clog the classrooms and themselves miss alternate forms of education – e.g., shop - that might excite them and give them something of value for their futures.

Open teaching up to all talented and interested people – retired professionals, artists, musicians, businessmen, and others wishing to teach full or part-time – without the need for that most discreditable of all academic documents, a degree from an education faculty which is a guarantees of no hard knowledge or skill or even affection for teaching kids.

Those and a small number of other measures would increase the effectiveness of our schools immensely. As trite as it sounds, we really do need to emphasize basics.

THE TORONTO SCHOOL BOARD'S CHRIS SPENCE PROPOSES AN ALL-BOY SCHOOL

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Sorry, but this is a hopeless, go-nowhere idea.

First, Chris Spence, who is a very pleasant man but a truly ineffectual executive, displayed his obsession with boys' performance - there's no other word for it than an obsession - for all his years in Hamilton, where his genuine academic achievements were almost non-existent.

Second, every failed school in Chicago – where I grew up and attended a variety of terrible and excellent schools depending on the neighborhood we lived in - was long ago renamed an “academy.” It's a meaningless gesture, and the schools that were failing are still failing.

Third, this amounts to a back-door approach to the even more meaningless afro-centric school idea. To a great extent, the boys with which this is a concern - that is those dropping out in large numbers - are black Canadians. Something more than a form of segregation is required.

The real problems of these boys could be handled in the existing system, were the School Board to show any genuine thinking or imagination.

Serious research shows that putting failing boys on a treadmill for a vigorous effort in the morning yields maybe three hours of much improved docility and learning. Hyper-active black American boys who could not read actually were able to learn to read doing this.

Something along these lines is one of the real solutions to the problems of failing boys.

Another approach to the same problem would be a soccer league that would see boys spending a little time every morning in a demanding practice.

These approaches must of course also be combined with efficient teaching, using only teachers who have some insight into these problems. A good many of our existing teachers simply would not qualify.

AMERICAN FALLACIES IN AFGHANISTAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JOHANN HARI IN THE INDEPENDENT

Thank you, Johann Hari has told the truth succinctly and accurately.

Of course, the Taleban - never the same thing as al Qaeda, but constantly blurred together in American popular media and by dumb national politicians like John McCain - never attacked anyone.

9/11 was the work of Saudis, and the dead perpetrators were virtually all in the United States on valid visas, almost unquestionably part of a secret CIA training program which backfired. There was an American diplomat at the time who raised the issue of great pressure from the CIA for certain embassies abroad to issue visas expeditiously.

The Taleban never had to be an American enemy. They were even willing to extradite those guilty for 9/11, provided that the U.S. offered some evidence for its extradition request, a normal procedure everywhere in the world, but one with which the United States angrily refused to comply.

The United States invaded for vengeance and no other reason, and it got plenty of it with about 50,000 killed just in Kabul.

From the beginning, the United States used propaganda about things like women’s rights to justify its extreme violence, the best propaganda always being based on truth.

The United States only quickly succeeded in its “victory” by using the brutes of the Northern Alliance on the ground fronted by the same kind of carpet bombing it so loved in Vietnam.

It worked, at least dispersing the Taleban, if not producing a genuine victory.

And who were these fine allies in the Northern Alliance?

Brutes like Genreral Dostum, a torturer and mass murderer absolutely. It was likely his troops, under American auspices, who conducted the atrocity of killing 3,000 Taleban prisoners in the early days.

They were put into sealed vans, driven out onto the desert to be suffocated (a la early Nazi experiments with mass killings), then dumped in mass graves – all done while American soldiers watched.

Today, after all those years of occupation and brutal American tactics, outside Kabul virtually all women still wear the burka, and even in Kabul, an estimated half of women wear it.

America’s Potemkin village schools in the countryside for girls are often closed as soon as their photo-op opening is over. The government is unable to fund the schools and pay the teachers, and the local warlords do not want them anymore than the Taleban does.

Imagine going to seventeenth century Spain and trying to force Catholics to give up all their bizarre practices from self-flagellation to nuns’ cumbersome habits or The Inquisition? Ridiculous, of course, but that truly is a parallel for what the U.S. claims it’s doing in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is simply not a country as we are used to thinking of countries. It is collection of tribes living hard-scrabble lives in mountains and deserts, and it is demarcated by arbitrary and historically-meaningless boundaries vis-à-vis Pakistan.

Many people understood the invasion was a mistake before it happened, but the vicious idiots then running the United States ignored them.

The United States spent ten years in Vietnam, killing an estimated 3 million people with their barbaric tactics and throwing Cambodia into instability and “the killing fields” to achieve absolutely nothing.

And that precisely – albeit with a smaller pile of bodies – is America’s achievement to date in Afghanistan.

And note that it is well on its way to de-stabilizing Pakistan with its killer-drones and demands that Pakistan attack its own people, just as it once did Cambodia, and for the same sorry excuse that there occupation troops are affected by activities in the other county.

The real answer is, of course, to swallow its pride and get out.

Note that I only refer to America, and not to NATO or the UN. That is because in the early days after 9/11, the U.S. was able to brow-beat or cajole the appearance of international support for this violent folly. Its influence in these international bodies, heavily financed by the U.S., is great, and it often uses them to cover its unilateral desires.

The reality is that no NATO nation believes that Afghanistan is a genuine threat: we know this from their pitifully small commitments there. Only Captain Ahab America sees Afghanistan as the great white whale that must be killed.

AFGHANISTAN AND REFLECTIONS ON A PBS FRONTLINE DOCUMENTARY

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

I stopped watching Frontline years ago.

There were too many tame programs with no real analysis, the documentary content-equivalent of PBS’s nature specials, as that on apes narrated by Charlie Sheen.

And, several times, more hard-hitting items were removed from their schedule. Shameful.

Since the rise of Newt Gingrich, PBS executives started wetting their pants and reducing the network to fluff. Their anchor news show, the News Hour, was reduced to arguments between political party chairmen saying nothing and tame news coverage.

However the scene you describe, Clive, is strong stuff, and should tell Americans something, but there are none so blind….

Of course, there is the reason why there can be no victory in Afghanistan.

I'm not even sure what the Military-Industrial bureaucrats mean by "victory." Afghanistan reduced to an Illinois suburb with shopping centers and SUVs in the driveways of homes?

The U.S. went there for vengeance, and that is what it got. It killed tens of thousands, including an estimated 50,000 just in Kabul.

It did this with horrible weapons and carpet bombing, and to minimize American casualties on the ground, it let the nasty people in the Northern Alliance do most of the legwork. It also participated in horrible war crimes against Taleban prisoners, as the 3,000 who disappeared, buried in the desert after having been suffocated in vans, a la early Nazi experiments with mass killings.

Once the U.S. had a technical victory - actually nothing but dispersing the Taleban to the hills - it did not know what to do, and it still does not.

Its troops have used brutal techniques - never likely to be shown on Frontline or any other American television. Years of special forces thugs going from village to village, knocking down doors, holding guns on families, and taking away men from households.

And every time it calls an air strike, civilians die.

Now it is spreading its horror into Pakistan, having quietly intimidated the Pakistan government into cooperating in matters that are not really their interests.

I, of course, recall that wonderful achievement of America's during its pointless holocaust in Vietnam of de-stabilizing the neutral government of Cambodia and helping pave the way for the "killing fields" which it did absolutely nothing to stop.

Indeed, when the brave Vietnamese went in and stopped the horror, American bureaucrats stood, arms folded, saying I told you so, it's the domino theory at work.

Colonial wars are not legitimate "policy" in the 21st century, and, as good students of history know, wars generally solve nothing.

The great irony is that the Taleban never attacked anyone, had nothing to do with 9/11, yet the U.S. has made them into an enemy.

They are, of course, a major part of the population of Afghanistan, an absurdly poor and backward place, while the U.S. military with all their shiny G.I Joe equipment are occupiers. No one likes occupiers ever, except those who profit by trading with them, as the prostitutes of Paris in 1941.

Afghanistan is a hopeless disaster of America’s own making, and the soldier you describe, Clive, is a perfect symbol of the hopelessness of the entire crusade.

TOM FLANAGAN BLUBBERS ABOUT THE BLOOM BEING OFF ALBERTA'S GOVERNMENT OWING TO THE WILD ROSE PARTY'S RISE

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY TOM FLANAGAN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Bloom?

Ed Stelmach?

Flanagan's use of language is just as poor as the rest of his thinking.

This is another piece of poor analysis, calling into question both the basis on which Canadian university tenure is granted and the Globe's judgment in publishing academic commentary.

Alberta, in fact, is experiencing two powerful things.

One, Alberta is adjusting to the painful reality of its economic balloon having been pricked, and with that pricking went a lot of pretensions to greatness we heard and read about when oil was $140 a barrel.

Two, Alberta has always been a place of American settlement. A great portion of the early farmers were Americans moving over the border for Crown Land grants.

That process has only continued. The giant capital-intensive projects of the oilsands have brought a steady stream of American money and American executives from ultra-conservative places like Oklahoma and Texas.

This process is helped by having Harper in Ottawa, a politician who makes no effort to diversify investment in Alberta, Indeed, Harper has tried to restrict diversification of investment by countries like China.

Harper has also contributed to a lack of diversifying markets for Alberta hydrocarbons.

The results are what we see: a large faction for which it is almost impossible to be too conservative.

NATO AND AFGHANISTAN - MORE UNINFORMED COMMENTARY BY LEWIS MACKENZIE - COMMENT ON A COMMENT

POSTED RESPONSE ON A COLUMN BY LEWIS MACKENZIE IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

"NATO's purpose, now long vanished into history, had been to exist as a counter to the WARSAW pact and the threat of Soviet hegemony.

But now the Soviet Union and the WARSAW are gone - and so should NATO have disappeared"

Absolutely.

But NATO has another important purpose, and it is this other purpose that keeps it going.

The U.S. uses NATO as a kind of theatrical costume for events like Afghanistan. Instead of the world's seeing America acting as lone bomb-dropping lawgiver to the world, it sees the somewhat more benign face of NATO, benign only because the organization carries the suggestion of plausibility with a number of nations agreeing on some objective.

The reality is, of course, America’s NATO allies do not genuinely regard Afghanistan as a serious threat: their relatively small commitments and refusal to expand them effectively are screaming this truth at us.

NATO is also used by American policy to keep Europe from becoming a genuine competitor on the world stage, a role Europe’s economy, the largest in the world, fully justifies.

American policy uses all kinds of subterfuges towards this goal, as for example keeping alive the many decades out-of-date conception of “a special relationship” with Britain, a game, appealing to the feelings of a declined imperial power, which keeps Britain from fully integrating into the Europe which is clearly its destiny.

As for MacKenzie’s silly way of talking about the Taleban, let’s remember they are a major part of the population, not some foreign invader like the United States. And they never attacked anyone in the past. American policies have made them an enemy. Just as American policies are driving Pakistan towards disaster.

Remember what America achieved in Cambodia during its holocaust in Vietnam.

ON OBAMA'S NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

It’s not been a pretty history for the Peace Prize.

At least, Obama gave the world something to celebrate and have some hope about.

Does anyone remember that he replaced the most ignorant and vicious man ever to hold the office? The world was morally exhausted after eight years of that cretin.

A man who killed maybe a million people?

The Peace Prize in general has an odd history and is surely the most ambiguous and inconsistent of prizes.

I think Al Gore’s prize was more than a little odd.

Well, then there’s the just plain shameful horrors of the prize.

Henry Kissinger, certified war criminal?

Menachim Begin, old Irgun terrorist?

Shimon Peres, political father of Israel’s nuclear weapons?

Theodore Roosevelt, imperialist extraordinary?

A few awards in recent decades meant something for sure, as that to Doctors without Borders or that to Jimmy Carter.

But, in general, it’s not a proud history.

THE IDEA THAT THERE MIGHT WELL BE MORE THAN TEN COMMANDMENTS OWING TO PUNCTUATION

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Maybe Moses just couldn't make up his mind how many commandments to chip into the stone?

This is right in line with all the folly and the absurdity of that Book.

Indeed, what do we even mean by "that book"?

The Old Testament? The first five books of the Old Testament? The New Testament? The Apocrypha? The Dead Sea Scrolls?

And which translation? Which revision?

As Mark Twain so aptly said:

"It [the Bible] is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies."

ROMAN POLANSKI AND THE DANGEROUS CLAIM THAT ARTISTIC STATUS GRANTS ALLOWANCE FOR VIOLENT CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE TELEGRAPH

Polanski, of course, did not only have sex with a 13-year old girl, what Americans call “statutory rape.”

His lawyers at the time managed to cop a plea for that much lesser charge (plea bargains are an everyday ugly fact of American "justice"), and, still, he ran from justice.

Polanski is a real coward as well as a serious criminal.

A man who drugs a 13-year old girl and rapes her - sodomizing her - clearly deserves jail.

There always was a very dark side to Polanski, perhaps best exhibited in his early film “Repulsion.”

France's long protection of him from justice has likely hurt a number of people over the years. Violent pedophiles are never reformed. It's in the genes.

I have been an admirer of Polanski's work, but the claim that being a creative figure exempts you from punishment for ugly deeds is an extremely dangerous one.

You can be a creative force and a criminal, and Polanski is a perfect example of the fact.

MORE ON IRAN'S SECOND NUCLEAR ENRICHMENT PLANT - IRAN AGREES TO INSPECTION

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

The real question for the world is: when is Israel going to allow inspection of its Dimona nuclear facility?

The answer is, of course, never.

Dimona is a working factory for the production of nuclear weapons components.

Israel doesn't just have a vague possibility of making nuclear weapons - the charge against Iran - Israel makes and deploys them.

And - unlike Iran which has attacked no one in its entire modern history - Israel has proved to the world, over and over, it is ready to use brutal force whenever it chooses.

It did so twice in Lebanon. It has done so many times in Gaza. It has done so in the West Bank. And it engineered the Six Day War so that it could seize the land of the people it still holds in subjugation more than forty years later.

It deliberately attacked the USS Liberty, an American intelligence ship, in an effort to pull the U.S. into its war. It was a bloody business lasting two hours against a well-marked ship.

Or was that attack - never explained properly - to cover up the war crimes Israel was carrying out in the Sinai, where it is known to have executed hundreds of Egyptian prisoners who had surrendered?

Please, just who is the greater threat to world peace?

______________________

"I have heard no credible argument that a Japanese surrender would have resulted from anything other than a full-scale, D-Day style invasion against the Islands."

Sorry, this is just ignorant.

The evidence is there for anyone who reads.

The Japanese made a number of backchannel offers of surrender. They had only one proviso of importance, that they be allowed to keep their emperor.

The U.S. just ignored them. It insisted on absolute, unconditional surrender.

So, the U.S. obliterated two non-military target cities, than took the Japanese surrender and allowed the Japanese to keep their emperor.

And, in doing that, it set a terrible example for all time.

All that horror and destruction was for nothing.

It represented the same poor judgment and ugly Puritan attitudes we saw in Vietnam, Iraq, and still see in Afghanistan. We want it our way, or we will obliterate you.

The use of the atomic bombs on Japan also deliberately considered, in the highest councils of the American government, the strategic value of setting a terrible marker against Stalin.

The story of the losses owing to land invasion was just that, a story, planted in a deliberate propaganda effort to white-wash one of the 20th century’s most criminal acts.

Of course, soldiers would have died, but the story leaves out the fact that an invasion was completely unnecessary to get a surrender.

It was all an inexcusable horror, and the United States has no business telling anyone what it may or may not do. It is simply playing God.

____________________

"Our gratitude goes out to John Chuckman for the unrequested, off-topic history lesson on the Japanese surrender and yet another expected anti-Israel rant - neither of which has anything to do with the subject."

Sorry, Mr Foonman, that too is just ignorant. You have only to scroll through the posts to see reference to America's use of atomic weapons.

It used them twice, both times on civilians.

So how in God's name do they have the moral authority to demand Iran behave in this or that way?

Plus, of course, they've just killed a million people in Iraq - a next-door neighbor to Iran - in a completely illegal invasion.

Where is their moral authority on such issues?

They have none.

And as far as "rants" about Israel and "anti-Israel" statements, perhaps those are the words you like to use to demonize those with whom you disagree.

It is, after all, a favorite tactic of Israel's apologists to call everyone who doesn't agree with them names.

All I've done is set out some raw facts.

How can anyone who is rational and not a pathetic propagandist claim that Israel's illegal nuclear weapons have nothing to do with this issue?

Iran is virtually surrounded by nuclear powers, two of which have very belligerent records of behavior.

Doe it not have the right to look after its defense?

THE ANNOUNCEMENT THAT IRAN HAS A SECOND NUCLEAR ENRICHMENT PLANT: SO WHAT?

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Even if Iran were working towards a weapon - something that is not at all clear - why would that be so terrible?

Israel has had a nuclear weapons program since about the 1960s.

That program is totally illegal and has always been hidden. Only gradually, with bits and pieces of information, do we understand the Israeli program.

Israel has abused its nuclear weapons status in several ways over the years.

It has frequently threatened its neighbors, using its weapons to intimidate virtually the entire Middle East. For example it has fitted its small fleet of German Diesel-powered submarines with American Harpoon missiles adapted to carry a nuclear warhead.

Israel participated in proliferation, a case as bad as anything done by Pakistan’s renegade scientist, in its strategic agreements with former apartheid South Africa, which briefly became a nuclear power thanks to Israel.

Israel has used secrets around nuclear weapons, stolen by spies from the United States, to trade with places like the former Soviet Union. That’s why Jonathon Pollard likely will die in prison, the American intelligence and military establishment considering him the worst spy in American history.

Israel has initiated wars and conflicts with every neighbor that it has.

Iran’s entire modern history is peaceful. It was forced to fight a bloody war with Saddam Hussein who was helped by the United States – and possibly secretly Israel - in that terrible war.

Iran is surrounded by nuclear powers, including of course America’s occupation of Iraq after killing a million people there.

Europe grew for decades under MAD, and today represents a great and thriving set of societies.

A form of MAD in the Middle East would also help peace.

I see only two likely scenarios for Israel ever to agree to what the rest of the world calls peace, to stop attacking everyone, to cease its apartheid, and to treat its neighbors with respect.

One is for the United States to stop subsidizing Israel and make some demands. This is a virtually fantasy scenario. Israel’s carefully-groomed influence in Congress makes it impossible.

The other scenario is for Israel to have a competitor that reduces its ability to behave the high-handed bully that it now is. A large state like Iran having nuclear weapons could have just that effect. MAD in the Middle East would be beneficial, not harmful – at least from the viewpoint of anyone other than Israeli Imperialists and their supporters.

And with all the noisy propaganda we read and hear around Iran's extremists (this is actually if anything a very conservative government) everyone should remember that the only country ever to use nuclear weapons was the one represented by Obama, using them twice, both times on civilians.

HARPER'S IDEALOGUES GET UP AND LEAVE WHEN AHMEDINEJAD SPEAKS AT THE UNITED NATIONS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

George Bush was allowed to speak.

He killed a million people in Iraq and made refugees of another two million.

Ahmadinejad has killed no one.

Bush killed many tens of thousands in Afghanistan - at least 50,000 just in Kabul.

Ahmadinejad has killed no one.

Israel just killed 1400 people in Gaza and still keeps them penned up like animals.

Ahmadinejad killed no one.

Israel killed 1400 people in Lebanon, including a Canadian officer doing his duty.

Ahmadinejad killed no one.

Israel steals more homes and land and water every day in the West Bank.

Ahmadinejad has stolen nothing.

I do think it fair to ask whether we indeed live in a rational world or one governed by mindless ideologues like Harper?

The game that is being played here with the “agree” and “disagree” buttons couldn’t tell us more clearly.

A gang of mindless supporters of Israel’s every bloody excess works the buttons to create large and meaningless numbers.

And just so with the general behavior of Israel and her mindless supporters like Harper. The tide of world opinion is so clearly against them and growing more so in the face of so much injustice and brutality, yet they insist on shouting against the wind.

As the CIA has reported, Israel has maybe another 20 years before its own contradictions collapse it.

PROPAGANDA POSING AS ANALYSIS - THE CASE OF TOM FLANAGAN AND GENOCIDE

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY TOM FLANAGAN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

When I read this piece by Tom Flanagan, I can only wonder at the basis of tenure in our universities, for, truly, here are bits of weak observation, clichés, and half-truths pasted together and offered as analysis. Worse, there is a thread of partisan propaganda holding the bits together like a string of beads.

“Harper announced that his Conservative government would adhere to the national interest in formulating Canada's foreign policy…”

I am sorry, but anyone who genuinely understands history and foreign affairs knows that that has, everywhere and always, been the basis of foreign policy. To say anything else is a declaration of just plain ignorance.

Genuine national interests do change over time – after all, your interests are different when you are exporting, say, fighter planes than when you are exporting wheat. But also, and very importantly, yet something Flanagan conveniently leaves out, people’s and government’s perceptions of what are the national interests change, often for no more reason than political ideology.

The authors of the report Flanagan pretends to analyze are “not mushy-headed idealists obsessed with soft power…” so they deserve some attention. Is it usual for a professor intending to be taken seriously in what follows to use the kind of pejorative language and straw-man argument we’d get from Rush Limbaugh?

Yes, if you are a neo-con propagandist.

“These people deserve out attention when they talk about genocide.”
Good God, “genocide” is one of the most over-worked words in our contemporary language, and, far more importantly, concern about it is always used by people like Mr. Flanagan as a tool for other purposes. This is no small point.

No power or great power ever goes to war over perceived genocide.

Most importantly, has the US, a Frankenstein of military power if ever there was one, ever opposed genocide, other than in words? It is the US which holds political and economic sway over international agencies like the UN, and it is the US which has the military power to do something.

We have had several authentic genocides in the modern period.

We had a genocide in Rwanda (around a million killed). The US simply refused to use the word internally so that they could ignore it.

We had a genocide in Cambodia (over a million killed), caused by America's de-stabilizing of the once peaceful country with its bombing and secret invasion. When tough little Viet Nam went in to do something, the US stood back and said, 'See, we told you, the domino theory at work!'

We had a genocide in Indonesia with the fall of Sukarno. Five hundred-thousand people, vaguely identified as communists, had their throats cut and their bodies dumped into rivers.

Not only did the US not react, there were officials at state department phones late into the night transmitting names of candidates.

I would argue, too, that America's slaughter in Vietnam was a genuine genocide. About three million were killed, mostly civilians, for no reason other than embracing the wrong economic system.

Many aspects of Bush’s “war on terror” have assumed aspects of genocide. Ever heard of the three thousand prisoners in U.S. care who were driven out to the desert in sealed vans to suffocate by General Dostum’s men while American soldiers watched, picking their noses? This came after Secretary Rumsfeld publicly declared Taleban prisoners should be killed or walled-away for life.

'Never again' is a slogan - we've proved that - and, like all slogans, it is selectively applied to sell something, just as Flanagan does here.

Great standing armies have virtually no record of doing worthy things.

They do, very much, have a record of fighting pointless wars, intervening where they do not belong, and even intimidating or overthrowing governments.

Flanagan’s “beyond our power to fulfill” is nothing but a plea for more militarism and closer association with a United States which has overthrown governments in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and a dozen other places as well as killing millions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq for absolutely no good purpose.

Great power like that is something to be very wary of, not to embrace.