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.

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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.

AMERICA'S GHASTLY GENERAL MCCHRYSTAL CALLS FOR MANY MORE TROOPS IN AFGHANISTAN

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

Vietnam, here we come again.

The simplest truth in military matters is you always fail when you seek the wrong successes.

You cannot convert a fourteenth century, economically depressed land into a modern society.

There is simply not enough resources on the planet to do that.

The US went there for bloody vengeance, and as soon as it killed enough people, it did not know what to do with the place.

And it still doesn't know, except to keep killing and spread the killing into Pakistan.

McChrystal is a true "dog of war."

The guy's entire background is in secretive operations involving assassination and torture.

Anyone who would take the word of this psychopath for anything is a fool.

THE TIRED NEWS THAT OBAMA IS TO HAVE A MEETING WITH ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS

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

This does seem a tremendous waste of time.

Israel clearly has its own agenda, and that agenda does not include what any fair-minded person calls peace.

How can you have "peace" while you continue daily to steal the farms and homes and water of those with whom you are supposed to be making peace?

Of course, there's also Israel's re-creation of South African apartheid in all its unrelenting fury, treating millions as less than equal humans.

And what additionally do we have in Gaza?

A brutal blockade stopping assistance to a people who have done nothing other than elect a government Israel doesn't like, and that act of war (for so blockades are considered in international diplomacy) comes after a savage attack, killing hundreds and hundreds of civilians, including a great many children.

Israel insists it is a victim, but the claim is ridiculous on the face of it.

Israel is unrelentingly aggressive, and demonstrates no guiding principles of democracy and human rights towards others.

That ugly Israeli stance can only change if the United States finally shows some courage and stops sending a gigantic annual subsidy to a state that takes its money and then sneers back that it will do exactly as it pleases.

And, considering Israel’s supporters’ fine-tuned art of constantly lobbying Congress with targeted contributions, what does any realistic person believe are the chances of that?

IGNATIEFF: CAN YOU TRUST THIS GUY?

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DENIS SMITH IN TORONTo'S GLOBE AND MAIL

'“Can I trust this guy?” And he hasn't given us the answer.'

I disagree with that point in your otherwise excellent article, Denis Smith: he very much has given us the answer.

The truth is Ignatieff has always been a politician, and a rather shallow one. Anyone who listened to him carefully years ago knows that.

Most importantly, Ignatieff’s stuff on human rights has always seemed more of a cocktail-party view than a bred-in-the-bone characteristic: it is precisely the kind of stage persona shallow politicians assume.

He reminds me of a rich blue-haired Boston matron attending a dazzling gala to benefit some cause somewhere out there in the third world. She doesn’t much care in about the nitty-gritty of the cause, and perhaps even knows little about it, but she is concerned with her reputation among a certain social set.

Ignatieff has always given us words with little or no substance, and different words to different audiences, nicely calculated to appeal to each with half truths.

I believe there is no center, no “there,” to Michael Ignatieff, and that has always been the case. His writing and lectures betray that. They are characterized by mannered ambiguity and not particularly insightful or exhibiting the thirst for justice.

The Liberal Party has made a terrible choice in Ignatieff, and it was not even a democratic choice.

The fact that he accepted the leadership in this fashion speaks volumes.

God, we desperately need a genuine leader, a person of eloquence and driving concern for justice. It is regrettable to have to say that Gilles Duceppe displays these characteristics immensely more than Harper or Ignatieff.

That great thumping political cretin, Harper, is shaming our country in a dozen ways, from handing out orders in Foreign Affairs to have the term “child soldier” not used to condemning the UN for deaths of observers in Lebanon murdered while bravely doing their jobs.

THE IDEA THAT WE HAVE SUCH AN IMMENSE AMOUNT OF INFORMATION

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

I’m sorry, but these are silly pop ideas.

The notion that there is such a vast amount of knowledge is almost childish.

The truth is virtually the polar opposite. We are only at the first beginnings of real knowledge, and a bit of humility would be most appropriate because false assumptions and arrogance are behind so many of humanity’s miseries.

In area after area of human knowledge, we are only the most rudimentary stages of development.

Think of the human brain and how little we know despite the posturings of psychologists and educators.

We do not understand why some people are extremely violent or why some people are sexually attracted to children.

We do not understand the cause or even the full nature of conditions like schizophrenia or manic-depression.

We do not understand the cause or full nature of conditions like autism or psychopathy.

We are nowhere near to understanding how the brain develops and learns, although some half-educated educators would have you believe that they understand.

We do not understand many ordinary natural processes, including notably the earth’s cycles of climate change and the sun’s cycles of change.

We do not understand the basic building blocks – if one may use such a term – of the universe, despite our wonderful achievements in relativity and quantum mechanics.

We do not even understand the basic nature of time.

We have no idea, beyond speculations, of how life arises in the universe.

We have no idea of how to square the basic notions of randomness in nature and cause and effect.

SHOE-THROWING MUNTADHAR AL-ZEIDI RELEASED FROM JAIL IN IRAQ: A HERO FOR OUR TIME

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

Muntadhar al-Zeidi will always be a genuinely heroic figure.

Bush was never in any danger from the shoes, but that brave man spoke eloquently for a great part of the world with his one brief act.

Think of all the cowards in "the Land of the Free" who never made any genuine, meaningful protest against mass murder in their names.

And here, in a country that remains anything but free, a country shattered by American military brutality, one man made the only meaningful gesture in eight years against a genuine war criminal.

PLENTY OF REASON FOR DOUBTS AROUND 9/11 AND WHEN GOVERNMENT FAILS TO BE HONEST IT INVITES SUPERSTITIOUS NONSENSE

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

The government of the United States has only itself to blame for the beliefs of Charlie Sheen and, indeed, millions of other Americans if sites on the Internet are any indication.

For whatever reasons, the American government has withheld important information, and many understand that much. When a government chooses withholding information in such a dramatic event, it literally is inviting speculation and superstition to flare up.

The official version of 9/11 is certainly incomplete, and I say this without believing that government was involved in plots.

There are the clearest bits of evidence.

The towers‘ collapse is a completely unexplained matter: it resembled precisely the kind of controlled explosion and collapse used in tall-building demolition.

A number of engineers have also pointed out the melting point of the kind of steel used in construction: it is twice the temperature (3000 degrees versus 1500) at which aviation diesel fuel (aviation fuel is a refined diesel) burns.

There is a well known picture of a woman standing in the wreckage of the building façade a short time after a plane crashed. She shows no signs of heat discomfort, and stands right next to the building’s crumpled metal.

It is likely then that the scheme was larger than just the 19 or 20 on the four planes. After all, there had been a previous attempt to bring down the Trade Center with controlled demolition.

The authorities do not want to acknowledge the size and success of the scheme. It is a confession of the utter incompetence of intelligence and police services.

Little noted by the mainstream press is the fact that the skyjackers had valid American visas. One senior American diplomat, after 9/11, complained in the press about an inordinate number of visas issued abroad under pressure from the CIA for rapid issue.

It is virtually certain that there was some kind of CIA operation under way, training people from the Middle East for God knows what purposes. Mossad was aware of this, thus the involvement of a group of its agents (below) in following some of the skyjackers in the U.S. Also, former American intelligence agents use the term “blowback” to describe the entire set of events.

The fourth plane over Pennsylvania was certainly shot down - just the extensive nature of the wreckage field (spread about three miles) says this to a certainty.

Cheney undoubtedly ordered it shot down - he is a totally ruthless man – and naturally they do not want to tell the world this ugly fact and be deluged with law suits. So we get mythical nonsense about "Let's roll."

There is also the documented matter of a group of Mossad agents, under cover of a moving (removal) firm, who were aware of these plotters and were following them around inside the U.S. They were arrested, questioned, and deported a short time later.

Just the fact that there was a sizeable group of an ally’s agents operating inside the U.S. and that this group was on to the plotters further emphasizes the complete incompetence of an American intelligence establishment chewing its way through tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money every year.

Of course, the entire thing could not have happened had the simplest precautions been taken in aviation security, such as cockpit doors that lock securely from inside and the
upgrading of boarding procedures, too.

There had been years of skyjackings – many like that of D. B. Cooper still unsolved - and the U.S. Congress continued to refuse to spend this small amount of money on real security. It is only generous when it comes to bombing people in the colonies.

So now we suffer from a ridiculous degree of over-kill in American security. We all are paying a price for the incompetence of American government, and no government wants to be thought incompetent.

MORE ON THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP PLUS COLD FUSION AND ANGELS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY IRWIN STELZER IN THE TELEGRAPH

Irwin Stelzer does not seem to realize that just because we have a name for a concept does not make the concept valid.

The "special relationship" is as meaningless as cold fusion or angels.

It is a concept which dates back to the days when dominance in world affairs was perceptibly shifting from Britain and its Empire to the United States, an evolutionary process completed by World War II.

I find it difficult to believe that any clear-thinking and informed adult defends what is a name with no content, but I also know that there are other (unexpressed) reasons for doing so.

Already at the time of the Suez Crisis, the concept was pretty much dead on its feet.

Since that time, there have been countless demonstrations that the United States takes no account whatever of Britain's views in critical areas.

It listens, I'm sure, but listening is cheap, particularly when the payoff is the kind of foolish loyalty Britain has demonstrated in recent decades.

When America tried to pressure Britain to join its pointless holocaust in Vietnam (about 3 million killed by America justifies the term), it was told no.

A few decades later, pathetic Tony Blair enthusiastically joined in another meaningless war, responsible for the deaths of a million and a couple of million refugees.

What did Blair get for Britain?

Absolutely nothing. His views on a number of subjects were listened to and politely ignored.

Tony personally benefited, softening the blow to his ego. He is loaded down with sinecures in the gift of the American government.

Blair goes down in history as pretty much a paid fool who degraded his office with countless lies to become wealthy.

Americans - and I spent half my life in America - simply do not care what others think. Indeed, generally they regard others with skepticism and even contempt as "foreigners."

British people are often thought of as amusing, but there is a huge reservoir of dislike underneath for everything from monarchy and manners to accents and customs.

Please, always remember, it was Americans who supplied the IRA with arms and money. Collections were taken in bars in large cities countless times, and there was little sympathy when buildings in London were blown up. Why? That wasn’t terror, it was fighting for freedom.

Britain’s best opportunity to influence world affairs is as an important member of the EU. America’s policy towards Britain also has the object of keeping that from happening.

IGNATIEFF'S HOPELESS SHORTCOMINGS AS LEADER OF THE LIBERAL PARTY

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

Yes, indeed, Jeffrey Simpson, but I think the problem goes deeper than that.

Ignatieff was parachuted into his seat.

Ignatieff was parachuted into the party leadership, and indeed over the heads of better men than himself.

He is an “insiders’ leader,” a backroom boy, not a people’s leader, and I think the public “gets” it.

No man who genuinely respects democratic principles could have accepted those terms of having a political career in this era. It might have been acceptable in the 1950s, but it is not today.

The trouble is Ignatieff's whole background is replete with such contradictions in ethics and principles.

He was always touted as an academic who represented human values, but the reality was glaringly at odds with that claim.

I cannot imagine one of our great humanitarian writers - say a Graham Greene - ever doing what Ignatieff did in supporting torture and Nazi-like invasion of a country, an act which ended in a million deaths and a couple of million refugees.

I heard Ignatieff interviewed on several occasions years ago, saying things which were totally at odds, at least to my sensitivities, with strong humanitarian values.

He virtually worships American power and influence in the world. He actually warned Canadians against opposing American excesses, and, as we all know, he so identified with that imperial power that he went around there bragging of being an American.

He actually competed in his first bid for leadership by attacking the party’s achievements, providing Harper with film clips to use against Liberals.

Now, of course, other past statements of his own are used against the party.

Ignatieff is a disaster. The faster he steps down, the better.

Sadly for my country, Harper is an equally unfit man to represent Canada.

A political nightmare, surely.

TORONTO SCHOOL BOARD OPENS ITS NEW AFRO-CENTRIC SCHOOL

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

What an absurd, regressive step this is.

There is no sound case for this, none at all.

Are we to divide up into separate schools for the scores of ethnic identities that now constitute our society?

No, no one is asking for that.

So how are children of African descent so different?

If you cannot succeed in our schools as others do, how can you expect to succeed in our society at large?

One is tempted to suggest that any grade improvement seen here will be the self-fulfilling efforts of teachers and administrators needing to prove they were right.

Extra Afro-centric grade inflation on top of the already inflated grades of our public schools?

Are we then to have Afro-centric high schools, colleges, and universities ready to accept the inflated-grade graduates?

Will they train students for Afro-centric corporations and Afro-centric professional careers?

Or for diplomatic careers in an Afro-centric world?

__________________

"It's amazing to me that none of you seem to grasp the concept that it isnt a BLACKS ONLY school... ANYONE is welcome to enroll."

Oh, please, this tired point has been made a thousand times, and still it is meaningless.

Of course, the school could not be funded otherwise.

But no one else is going to enroll.

Indeed almost no black children have enrolled. It is a group about the size of two or three normal classrooms.

HARPER TO REVEAL DEFICIT-CUTTING PLAN

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

Does it really need to be revealed?

I think it's pretty clear what Harper's course will be.

Cut, cut, cut.

The recession has actually provided a dream scenario for Harperites.

They first get to look concerned over national welfare in the recession, throwing out tens of billions.

Then to cover the deficit, they get to cut every program they ever hated, and that includes a lot.

It's just a version of what the Republicans have done for decades in Washington.

They cut taxes and cut taxes to the point of irresponsible, massive deficits.

Then they get to attack the deficits by attacking the things they've always disliked.

Harper & Co are so predictable.

On almost any matter of national interest - from international trade to defense to budgets - they take their cue from Washington's right wing.

MORE MEANINGLESS ACADEMIC BLUBBER: THIS TIME ON HARPER'S PATHETIC SOUTH AMERICAN TRADE AGREEMENTS

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

Douglas Bland serves up a bland piece of propaganda.

Harper's efforts in South America have nothing to do with empty geopolitical clichés like no longer a "North Atlantic nation."

Harper is simply slavishly following the lead on U.S. foreign policy, a policy aimed at things other than the benefits of free trade.

The nations with which Harper has signed agreements are virtually insignificant to Canada's economy, as is even more the case for the U.S.

However, from the U.S. geopolitical point of view, they are significant. This is a new American approach to the power politics of imperialism.

The U.S. has signed these silly agreements with economically insignificant places simply to keep them in line, to have something valuable to them with which to threaten them.

The smaller nation, as any economist will tell you, always gains the most from a free trade. Having such a prize over the heads of these countries is a powerful tool to command compliance with matters having nothing to do with trade.

I wouldn't write this had Harper signed a free trade agreement with an important country like Brazil, but he has not. He's given us jokes like Panama because that is what Washington wants.

There is no other rational explanation for this behavior.

AMERICA'S FIRST CERTIFIED MORON PRESIDENT APPOINTS HEAD OF HIS "ACTION-ORIENTED" THINK TANK

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

Gee, I wonder what an “action-oriented think tank” is?

Would it be anything like the Bush appointments in federal agencies which gave us his heroic achievements in New Orleans?

Would it be anything like the efforts leading up to the war crime of invading Iraq?

Would it be anything like people that gave America torture and assassination as part of its day-in-day-out policy?

Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure I know.

It's an outfit that works overtime to blur and bury the truth in all these matters.

ON FORMER ONTARIO ATTORNEY GENERAL MICHAEL BRYANT'S KILLING A BICYCLIST: ONLY ONE PERSON CONTROLLED THE GAS PEDAL AND THE BRAKE

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

Why is the Globe and Mail giving free public relations efforts to Mr Bryant?

At the same time, you have joined in the general effort to blacken the reputation of the victim.

It is shameful.

How nice that he has the money to have a high-price lawyer to defend his irresponsible actions, but I would feel better as a citizen of Ontario if I saw some fairness at work in this ugly business.

No matter what the victim is said to have done, there was only one person who controlled the gas pedal and the brake, and that person was Mr Bryant.

He committed a terrible act, no matter what extenuating circumstances he claims.

The poor judgment he showed during this episode only makes me glad he has not achieved a greater office. There is a fundamental flaw in the man.

If indeed the victim seemed to be trying to grab the wheel, he was only following a fairly common practice of couriers who have been abused by a car driver: they reach for the keys and extract them and toss them down a drain.

Not nice, but not something you kill for, or even risk killing for.

Mr Bryant had his wife and a cell phone - which he used after killing the man - and could easily have stopped and called police while the victim harangued them.

AFGHANISTAN IS NOW OBAMA'S WAR

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

Yes, sadly, it is Obama's war now.

But Obama chose to be President of a country that his keen intelligence had to know is addicted to war.

The Puritan genes - with their bizarre gift of making recipients always seeking for the evil one and ready to damn what are considered the enemies of God and tons of smug self-satisfaction - absolutely dominate modern America's identity.

The trouble with the modern version of God's New Model Army is that it is a world-straddling monster with the power to destroy the earth or, alternately, to assassinate someone on the other side of the planet by a bureacrat playing at a joystick.

And it is backed up by an intelligence house of horrors - at least a dozen agencies, some secret, and all receiving more money than they know what to do with.

There are few statements ever made that belong in my personal secular bible, but one is Lord Acton's dictum.

Who is able to resist the lures of such hellish power? Who is able to stand against it?

Obama is a fine human being with virtually all the talents of a great leader.

But he is surrounded, even at the mercy of, individuals who subscribe to the thoughts of Milton's Satan, it is better to be a prince in hell than serve in heaven.

CANADIANS PLAN FAKE AFGHAN-ATTACK STUNT IN WASHINGTON TO REMIND AMERICANS OF CANADA'S ROLE

POSTED RESPONSE TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

This is simply the ultimate demonstration of how meaningless the war in Afghanistan is.

You have to put on a P.T. Barnhum stunt to remind Americans you are even there?

The pathetic Canadians responsible for this, apart from lacking any judgment, clearly are completely ignorant of history.

Americans know they are responsible for every victory everywhere, and even manage to fantasize victories from their losses.

The British breakthrough of cracking Germany's WW II codes was portrayed in a Hollywood movie a few years ago as an American achievement.

Ask any American who won WWII, and you'll never ever hear about the Soviets’ four years of agony and 27 million dead.

Indeed, of the more than 50,000,000 people slaughtered in WWII, America lost less than 1/2 of one percent, yet every American knows America won.

You'd be hard put to find a single American who knows Canada entered WW II two years before they did.

It's the same for WWI. The two sides lost about 18 million in four years of bloodshed. America entered the war in its last months, just tipping the balance enough to ensure a defeat for Germany.

But any American will tell you America won WWI.

And, God, just look at that holocaust of Vietnam, that criminal enterprise in murder in which America killed about 3 million Vietnamese and managed to lose the war.

But you'd never know America lost the war if you see movies like Rambo or go to the Wall in Washington.

AMERICAN JET JOCKEYS KILL 90 CIVILIANS ATTACKING HIJACKED FUEL TRUCK

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE TIMES

That’s the way to win hearts and minds, America.

There are many, many instances of American pilots wiping out whole families during their time in Afghanistan.

In their early days, they, several times, wiped out trucks full of friendly village leaders.

How many wedding parties were wiped out just for practicing the old Afghan custom of firing guns into the air to celebrate?

One brave American pilot killed four Canadian allies and wounded eight others trying to prove what a daredevil he was.

It is rather misleading for the press to characterize these strikes as being by NATO. The air attacks are virtually all by Americans.

I think the air attacks symbolize the entire filthy enterprise in Afghanistan, full of killing and no meaning.

AMERICAN SENATE MAY INVESTIGATE LOCKERBIE RELEASE - YES, THE AMERICAN SENATE THAT TUSSAUD'S WAX TABLEAU OF POLITICAL HORRORS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE TIMES

Oh, my, the U.S. Senate is such an august and dignified institution, the very symbol to the world of scrupulousness and honesty.

It is a fact that U.S. Senators, on average, spend two-thirds of their time chasing campaign donations from rich donors.

It is peopled largely by men past their retirement age who hold on to their seats as though they were personal property - owing in great part to all those campaign funds and the favors done in return.

It has featured a cast of characters who easily could be made into a Tussaud's tableau, The Hall of Political Horrors.

And their last effort to attack someone - the redoubtable George Galloway - turned into a laughable farce.

Have at it, boys.

CANADA'S JOHN MANLEY CLAIMS WE OWE THE PEOPLE OF AFGHANISTAN SOMETHING FOR BRAVELY VOTING

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

More bilge from John Manley.

How does Manley have any idea of turnout to make the statements he makes? We haven't had a single good report, except that it was very low.

We owe nothing to Afghanistan. It has a crooked government, despite seven years of occupation. Drugs flow like water. Women still wear the burka through most of the country.

Credible reports say that the government's handling of the election was atrocious with ballot boxes removed from some areas and ballot boxes stuffed in others.

I heard an expert witness on CBC Radio, a woman AP reporter who has a couple of decades of experience in the area.

Considering she is from an American organization, her testimony takes on extra force.

She spent many days talking to people in the street. Many expressed utter disgust with the government. Others actually expressed the notion that if the Taleban came back, maybe they wouldn't be so extreme.

The tone was overall one of the election really won't change anything, and I am sure that is right.

Just before the election, the president brought back one of the world's most evil blackguards, General Dostum, a mass murderer.

And the good General, among many other ghastly acts, is directly responsible for executing about three thousand prisoners early in the occupation, under American supervision.

3,000 men driven in groups in locked vans out to the desert to be suffocated and buried in mass graves, while American soldiers looked on.

And Dostum is not Taleban, he is one of America's allies of the Northern Alliance.

And of course there is that wonderful piece of legislation passed by the government regarding women's rights in marriage.

Afghanistan is no more a democracy than Cuba.

It is stuck in the 14th century.

Does the pathetic Manley actually believe we have accomplished anything except kill people - according to the expert AP reporter, 50,000 died in Kabul alone - and set up some Potemkin villages for photo-ops?

THE AFGHANISTAN ELECTION NEWS REPRESENTS NO NEWS AT ALL

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

Nearly half the votes are counted?

We get almost no reports on the actual turnout of voters, nor do we get much information on what seems to have been very corrupt election management.

I suspect the U.S. is working hard to control the information that tells the real election story.

Fifty percent of, say, a ten-percent turnout, plus heavy corruption, makes an utterly meaningless election.

Afghanistan after more than seven years of occupation and force-fed institutions is no more democratic than Cuba.

HOW NOT TO WRITE A BOOK REVIEW: LAURA PENNY'S INTELLECTUALLY IMPOVERISHED REVIEW OF CHRIS HEDGES' EMPIRE OF ILLUSION

POSTED RESPONSE TO A BOOK REVIEW BY LAURA PENNY IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

What an intellectually impoverished effort Laura Penny serves up here.

I've not read Chris Hedges’ book yet, but I have heard him interviewed at length.

He is a thoughtful, intelligent, and educated person with something to say. Ms. Penny’s few, carefully selected quotes do not represent the sense of what Hedges has to say at all.

Like all writers on political and international affairs, he sometimes over-speaks himself, but that does not subtract from the freshness of his voice and the acuity of his intellect.

Sorry, Ms. Penny, but our mainline press almost never deals with the issues over which Hedges is concerned. It does offer large servings of stuff like your tired, mannered, “I’ve seen it all” vacuous comment.

Let’s first take Ms. Penny on her own ground, literacy, sadly a word our public education establishment has rendered close to meaningless.

“This claim is a fairly good litmus test….”

God, why didn’t Ms. Penny toss in “level playing field” or “peace process’ while she was at it? This misuse of the nasty, over-used “litmus test” is a perfect example of the decline of literacy over which Ms. Penny claims to be concerned: “test” is all that is required for such a statement.

“I don't recommend taking it to the beach, lest you pull a Virginia Woolf and seek refuge in the cleansing waters.”

Good God what an awkward remark, and Ms. Penny’s prose is an awkward combination of a pop cliché expression – “pull a [something]” – and a classical, almost-obsolete word - “lest” - a combination which comes off as just silly.

But it isn’t just public-school teacher literacy from which Ms. Penny suffers.

“Don't get me wrong: I'm not one of those future-drunk techies who thinks the Internet solves everything and that blogs can replace book learnin' or the old journalism that many sites currently cannibalize. Those techies are just as fervent as Hedges, the optimistic Pollyannas to his outraged Cassandra.”

What an irrelevant comment to insert in a book review on this topic. It’s as though Ms. Penny felt like spouting this notion, and took this opportunity to toss it into the review.

And, please note, the return of clichés – Pollyannas and Casandra – to Ms. Penny’s writing. I might point out the clichés again include the pop and the classical – perhaps indicating Ms. Penny notion of breadth of learning?

But it gets worse, I’m afraid.

“The filthy heart of the beast is the military-industrial complex. Hedges contends that “war is the most dangerous drug of all,” and the United States is well and truly cracked out.”

What an absolutely trivial and pretentious way for Ms. Penny to write about one of the world’s great problems. Ms. Penny offers the tone of a person mainly educated by advertising and marketing and “communications,” the last being Sarah Palin’s major in her six-year, five-college B.A. odyssey. I’d almost bet Ms. Penny sounds like a Valley girl in her accent. What a shabby approach to a deadly serious subject, militarism.

“Most profs are good little careerist lickspittles, or poorly paid part-timers who cannot afford to rabble rouse.”

What a shabby generalization, again having nothing to do with the book’s ideas, and please note the genuine tone of contempt for part-time professors. Why? Ms. Penny is unwittingly revealing her own sad, narrow perspective: a lucky second-rate academic with a university sinecure.

God, we have few enough genuine critics in our society, and few enough of them worth hearing out. Chris Hedges is one of these few.

The truth is that Laura Penny is simply not up to the book she tries to review, and tries covering the fact with a bizarre tone that is both world-weary and flip.

MORE ANTI-MUSLIM PREJUDICE - NOT TO BE TAKEN TOO SERIOUSLY COMING AS IT DOES FROM CHEESY POTBOILER NOVELIST SEBASTIAN FAULKS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY SEBASTIAN FAULKS IN THE TELEGRAPH

I really cannot understand the kind of behavior Sebastian Faulks has displayed outside of his suffering from serious anti-Muslim prejudice.

Why pick the religious literature of one faith to attack?

Remember what Mark Twain said of the Bible? That it was full of blood and gore and upwards of a thousand lies?

Of course, it is hard to take Mr Faulks too seriously in any case.

He is a writer of novels packed with clichés, sentimentality, cheap cinema-derived scenes, and inconsistencies, but they do appeal to the mob.

And so does his brand of prejudice.

THERE IS NO SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP, BUT THAT'S LIKE TELLING A CHILD THERE'S NO FATHER CHRISTMAS

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY IRWIN STELZER IN THE TELEGRAPH

The Special Relationship?

Oh, I believe Irwin Stelzer means by that expression the arrangement whereby Britain waits around to serve as a convenient tool to be picked up or tossed away as need arises.

Britain made it possible for the U.S. to call its international-law breaking murderous effort in Iraq a "coalition" effort.

There is no Special Relationship, but it is hard to communicate that to writers like this, too blind to see.

It's like telling a child there is no Father Christmas.

Blair joined in America's war crimes and demeaned his office in a hundred ways with dishonesty for the sake of the "Special Relationship."

What did Britain get for its disgraceful efforts? Nothing.

It was treated as a mouse squeaking near Uncle Sam's boot. None of Britain's views were even considered on any international issue.

Of course, Blair personally got plenty in return for his dirty work.

He's a wealthy man today with many ill-gotten sinecures from American or American-controlled foundations.

Perhaps Mr Stelzer is hoping to enjoy a bit of the same one day?

AFGHANISTAN'S PROSPECTS - SURELY AN OXYMORON EXPRESSION

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

"Afghanistan" and the word "prospects" in the same sentence are pretty much an oxymoron.

This is one of the poorest regions on earth, a vast sprawl of deserts and mountains with few valuable resources.

The U.S. always had the option of dropping dollar bills rather than bombs, but that's just not the American way.

Afghanistan will have "prospects" after decades of economic growth and not before, if that ever comes to pass.

The U.S. went there to kill (something it did plenty of), not to help anyone, but the world's press picked up on all the propaganda and seems to pretend it means something.

The culture and backward ways of the people are the natural adaptations of countless centuries and are, in that sense, normal.

What the U.S. is trying to impose is definitely abnormal, not fitting the land and its people at its stage of their development.

Of course, the stupidity of making the Taleban a bitter enemy was foolish.

No Taleban ever attacked the U.S., a point so easily glided over by the press in the last eight years.

Yes, they housed bin Laden (a Saudi) for a time, but then so did the U.S. for a time.

They offered, eight years ago, to comply with extradition if offered some evidence for the accused, the completely normal behavior of any government, but the U.S. rejected the request and proceeded to attack, as useless and mindless an act of destruction as Israel's assault on the giant refugee camp called Gaza.

To this day, by the way, we have never been given a single piece of evidence that bin Laden himself was responsible for anything. I'm not claiming his innocence, just pointing out how irrational and lawless all this has been.

General McChrystal is a nasty killer, of the type that carried out that shameful Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, a man absolutely without a larger view. What else would he do but ask for more troops?

Well, there's light at the end of the tunnel apparently.

Wait, now, I believe I heard that somewhere else. Was it Vietnam?

Good luck, Obama, you are now being squeezed on all sides by the Military-Industrial Complex.

HOW FAR TO GO IN PROSECUTING THE CIA OVER YEARS OF TORTURE?

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

Far.

My God, it is only sixty-odd years ago that we declared absolutely that following orders is not an excuse when the orders violated basic laws and rights.

The entire Bush/Cheney era is black hole of abuse of authority, murder, and torture.

No one who made these things happen should feel free. We read of Hitler’s willing helpers, did we not?

There are always excuses for abuse and abusive orders. The CIA is not unique in that. In the mind of every tyrant - from Stalin to Pinochet - there were strong and fearful reasons for their acts.

The only way we can be protected from such people is to hold them accountable in each and every instance that we get the opportunity to do so, which itself is rare enough. So few abusers ever are held accountable in the world at large that it makes almost every ethical and moral lesson we learned as children a pleasant fantasy: the evil do prosper, and bad men regularly step over the bodies of good men.

How easy it is - Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld showed the entire world - to take hold of a society of laws and defined rights and complex international obligations and just ignore them all, paying only lip service while carrying on in the darkness in contempt of every principle of decency.

Many observers in the world, including myself, actually believe the United States has tipped over an edge or threshold into a new equilibrium and cannot reclaim any prestige and honor it had.

The promise of that charming, intelligent man, Obama, already is badly faded. The vast forces around him cannot be easily be changed and, perhaps, cannot be changed at all. This is a test of that reality.

Democratic societies are not exempt from the terrible abuse of democratic values: it is a silly myth to believe so.

The U.S. with high-sounding words on paper went a couple of centuries with human bondage and vast abuse. The Confederacy was a democracy for those with the franchise. South Africa under apartheid remained a democratic state for those with franchise. France, inflicting its horrors in Algeria, was a democratic state. I could go on: there is a long list.

Dedication to human rights and democratic values requires America to root out the people who made these ugly acts possible and punish them.

Otherwise, I genuinely believe American democracy is on the wane and the country well on its way to being Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex, ruling a vast empire with abuse and state terror from an elite establishment of military and intelligence and the driving fists of industry.

Power is power, no matter how granted. And Lord Acton's dictum remains one of the most accurate observations of human society ever uttered.

THE SO-CALLED SUPER-NOTE ONE-HUNDRED DOLLAR COUNTERFEITS AND THE IDEA NORTH KOREA IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THEM

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

The story of North Korea's producing the so-called super-notes, one-hundred dollar notes of near perfect quality, is an old one, but it is not necessarily true, as the author of this piece assumes.

There is another story that says it is the CIA manufacturing these super-notes.

Such an intelligence operation would serve two ends.

One, it is a new source of untraceable funds for the CIA. We know that in the past the CIA has used drugs and armaments as ways to obtain off-the-record funds.

Two, the notes, combined with the story this author repeats, provide one more excuse to beat-up on North Korea.

Just ask yourself whether it is likely that North Korea has the immensely complex technology for producing notes of this quality.

Then ask yourself whether this is the way the United States would behave if indeed it knew North Korea was the source of the bills.

ANSWERS TO SOME ILLOGICAL RESPONSES TO CRITICISMS OF AMERICA AROUND LOCKERBIE RELEASE AND THE CAUSES OF 9/11

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

Good God, what a lack of logic we see below.

Saying something was vengeance does not communicate approval, but how rarely we see the word “vengeance” used in all discussions of this matter. Americans prefer to play the innocent victim, and it is an act that has grown tired, unconvincing, and even offensive.

The point is clearly that the constant bellowing about mass murder from America completely ignores America's own blood-soaked record of murder.

Indeed America's record is unquestionably the bloodiest of any state or organization since the death of Stalin. Vietnam, Cambodia, Somalia, Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and so many other, perhaps lesser, horrors over the last half century.

America has killed millions and millions with its Frankenstein military, almost all of it to no good purpose, and Americans accept that all this carnage is for their defense and thump their chests when anyone questions it.

For the writer who seems not to understand the attack of 9/11, it had several completely obvious causes (and, please, causes are not the same as justifications), all of which, from the perpetrators point of view, represent an aggressive assault on the Muslim world.

What's more, these were all avoidable. They reflect that poisonous cocktail of American arrogance, ignorance of others, bullying, and bombing those they don't like.

First, there was the US moving its troops into territory viewed as sacred by conservative Muslims. Putting women in army fatigues into Saudi Arabia was the rough equivalent of having a naked go-go dancer on the stage at a Baptist revival meeting.

America’s horrific past treatment of Iraq everyone seems to have forgotten.

The first Gulf War was engineered, Hussein having got a wink and a nod about reclaiming the territory of Kuwait, much as Israel’s Six Day War was engineered, and the locals understand that even if our press treats these events differently.

The U.S. assault with B-52s killed a vast number of poor Iraqi conscripts in their pitiful sand castles. The bodies on the desert were in such huge piles they reportedly resembled the discoveries of the first Nazi death camps.

Concerned about public relations, the US hid the facts, bulldozing the bodies into mass graves (much as was done, by the way, when 3,000 prisoners were murdered and buried in Afghanistan by the bloodthirsty General Dostum under U.S. approval and control).

Still, with the end of the brief but bloody war, Iraq's agony was not over.

The heavy restrictions the US heartlessly kept on Iraq killed a vast number of innocents over a decade, thousands and thousands of children. The details were largely suppressed in the Western press, but hardly in the Middle East.

The CIA’s secret war against the Russians in Afghanistan played a major role. All knowledgeable intelligence people use the term “blowback” to describe what happened in 9/11. Local fighters were equipped and given intelligence to the tune of several billion dollars, all the while feeding the conservative Muslim fighters with propaganda that the Russians were infidels invading their lands.

The CIA’s connection with some of these people continued right up until 9/11. That is why the men who destroyed the buildings had legitimate U.S. visa, again something never emphasized in our press. There was a complex, unknown program of training certain of these people in the U.S., and it backfired.

Unquestionably America's one-sided support of Israel and its bloody excesses - Israel behaves as an exact geo-political miniature of the US in the Middle East, having attacked, often more than once, every neighbor it has – contributed to immense anger and frustration.

The horrors of Israel’s big invasion of Lebanon were also downplayed here, but not in the Middle East.

Of course, in the background, there was the overthrow of Iran’s democratic government, a joint American-British project, and the installation of that torturing vampire, the Shah, whose Savak used to pull prisoners’ finger nails out in their basement torture chambers, something we never heard any complaints about from that human-rights loving land of America.

And later, the U.S. actively encouraged the Iran-Iraq War so that Iran would be worn down (they lost a million men), assisting Iraq with weapons and intelligence.

Later, of course, the U.S. invaded a neighbor with a major border with Iran and still occupies it.

The U.S. has never stopped bashing Iran, and today allows Israel to threaten this country that has never in its modern era attacked anyone.

There is a far more complex record than I can summarize here, but any clear-thinking person knows exactly why 9/11 happened.

They also know that the U.S. has taken such savage revenge – killing more than a million people and ignoring all international law and order – that the original crime is fading in significance.

How immensely uninformed, or just plain dishonest, it is for anyone to claim they do not understand what caused 9/11.

THE TIRESOME CHARGE OF ANTI-AMERICANISM OVER CANADIAN RESPONSES TO THE LOCKERBIE RELEASE: JUST A FORM OF REVERSE PREJUDICE AND HATRED

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

"Typical santimonious [sic] Canadians who hate Americans with a vengeance. Any decision which affronts Americans is applauded. This to the nation that buys 75% of your products. I never touch Canadian products and lose no opportunity to tell others of your hatred."

The logical and emotional confusion exhibited in that post tells the entire story of why Americans earn the dislike of so much of the world.

No, Canadians do not hate Americans, but many do hate the ugly actions and words of Americans.

Indeed, that is the case for the entire planet. Few people have affection for the poisonous cocktail of arrogance, ignorance of others, bullying, and bombing those you disapprove of.

Speaking of mass murderers, how about the captain and crew of the warship, USS Vincennes, which, during its observations of the agonizing Iran-Iraq War (a war US policy worked to prolong), managed to shoot down an Iranian civilian airliner with 300 souls aboard.

There was no mercy, no apology, and no proper compensation - just a cowardly avoidance of responsibility for the atrocity committed.

Lockerbie was clearly vengeance by someone, and no one truly knows who. The man Scotland released was almost certainly fitted up by the CIA in response to the immense political pressure of unthinking people like the author of the quote above.

There are serious issues with American behavior in the world outside its borders, and when Americans stubbornly refuse to recognize that ugly reality, and indeed insist that they are victims of hate and terror, they earn everyone's sound disapproval.

That isn't hate, that's human decency and ethics at work.

THE FBI DIRECTOR SPEAKS OUT ON SCOTLAND'S MERCY TOWARDS THE MAN CONVICTED OF LOCKERBIE AND ONLY ADDS TO THE FBI'S LONG, SHAMEFUL RECORD

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

The blubbering of the head of the FBI only adds to America's shame, for the FBI has an immensely long record of being a costly flop in almost every major task it has undertaken, besides functioning as a kind of political police.

From the assassination of John Kennedy to 9/11, the FBI has been a disaster.

Under J Edgar Hoover, the FBI in its early days illegally rounded up and deported migrants that it chose to believe were unreliable.

In Hoover's later days, the agency functioned sometimes as an out-and-out terrorist organization itself.

It conducted thousands of illegal wiretaps. It illegally opened people’s mail. It threatened and intimidated anyone Hoover did not like.

One of its efforts was dedicated to spying on Martin Luther King and shaming him with his family in hopes that he would commit suicide. Imagine, a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Its investigation into the crash of Flight 800 off the East Coast of the U.S. was long and its findings simply not to be believed, being contradicted by many witnesses and sound evidence like radar tracks.

It basically covered up the truth, which almost certainly was the mistaken release of an American Navy anti-aircraft missile (much like the Navy’s destruction of the Iranian airliner with 300 souls aboard).

The FBI conducted a relentless effort to destroy Dr Wen Ho Lee, an atomic scientist, of espionage for China. They used papers like the New York Times to leak false leads and ruined his career, but Wen Ho Lee was a completely innocent man and they never found credible evidence to the contrary.

The thugs at the FBI spend their time on garbage like looking up what people have been reading in the public libraries.

It was widely known that in bars in Chicago or Boston or New York, the hat was passed regularly for supporting the IRA's terror.

I'm sure the bulk of the IRA's funding came from the U.S.

It reflected sentimental Irish attitudes combined with powerful anti-British attitudes, something still easy to discover in the U.S. despite Blair's pathetic efforts to win American approval through joining in their war crimes.

I've never read a single expression of shame or sorrow over that dark history.

And certainly the FBI never lifted a finger.

WALRUS BULLS BELLOWING ON A BEACH

August 22, 2009

WALRUS BULLS BELLOWING ON A BEACH

John Chuckman

I am disappointed with the view of some knowledgeable commentators over Scotland’s release of the dying man who was convicted of the Lockerbie-airline bombing.

From a purely power-politics point of view, of course, they are right: judging by the ugly noises echoing across the oceans from America, Scotland has done itself no favor.

But if all affairs are to be carried on in every country from that point of view, it seems to me that it is acceptance of America's right to dictate every matter over the planet, including such intimate matters as how individual countries interpret justice and the government of laws.

This is the acceptance of a de facto aristocracy running the world since American voters - and only about half of eligible Americans bother to vote - represent only a percent or so of the planet’s population. It is remarkable how many Americans do not understand the basic point that not everything a democracy does is democratic or decent or even acceptable, especially things done outside its borders.

Democracies abuse power just as surely as any other form of government, and a democracy with the immense military power of the United States – a power virtually cancerous to genuine democratic values - provides a case study in the inexorable workings of Lord Acton’s dictum.

It would also represent a repression of all the better motives from which individuals and societies act now and then, surprising us and raising the standard of human behavior from the violent-chimpanzee standard that tends to hold for much of humanity and is especially notable in America’s international affairs.

That is unacceptable to most people who are not Americans or who are not dedicated flatterers of America seeking leftovers being dropped from its groaning table.

You only have to ask yourself how Americans themselves would react to others telling them how they should run their court system. The sound would be deafening, like the bellowing of walrus bulls on a stony beach in mating season, which is actually pretty close to the sound of some of America’s professional-victim families today.

Mercy is never misplaced, and I think Scottish justice has reached an admirable decision despite the bellowing of the unthinking American families we have heard from for years.

Apart from that, and a very important consideration, it is almost certain that al-Megrahi is innocent, having been fitted up by American intelligence desperate for a scapegoat with the relentless political pressure of the walrus-bull families.

I have to say, also, I always find it troubling to read the press repeating the lines about 270 victims for the thousandth time. It is an American mantra, emphasizing the special and precious nature of American lives over all others, at least, that is, the lives of upper middle-class Americans.

Rarely do we read an accurate perspective on the Lockerbie event.

The United States Navy stupidly shot down an Iranian airliner with 300 souls aboard as it observed the devastation of the Iran-Iraq War, a devastation America had an important hand in extending.

Those 300 innocent men, women, and children received no mercy, and their horrible deaths certainly never saw any justice. Their families never received compensation. And no apology was even offered by Americans, a disgusting set of behaviors, entirely.

Lockerbie was absolutely clearly revenge, but no one knows who actually committed
the act of revenge.

I might offer the observation, too, that it is the same bellowing Americans always ready to use capital punishment or torture and assassinate opponents or, indeed, to invade the lands of those with whom they disagree, bombing and killing countless innocents – three million just in Vietnam, another million or so in the Cambodia they de-stabilized, and another million or so in Iraq.

The whole pattern of the two acts of wanton destruction explains the basis for the so-called War on Terror. It is simply America's saying, “I can do to you, but you can't do to me.”

ON A RIDICULOUS COLUMN ABOUT CANADA AND AFGHANISTAN: HOW WE WILL LOSE ALL THE THINGS WE GAINED IF WE LEAVE ON SCHEDULE IN 2111

SERIES OF POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY STEPHEN SAIDEMAN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Stephen Saideman has given us a disgusting piece of analysis which I can only describe as a foreign-policy version of gutter literature.

The quality of thinking here is stunningly impoverished and utterly lacking in ethics.

This makes you wonder just how some of our universities grant such sinecures.

But then I remember the baffling case of Margaret Somerville, perhaps Canada's most tedious and irrelevant academic.

And then I consider the case of the ghastly Michael Ignatieff, a man who blubbered stuff about human rights at the same time he advocated torture and NAZI-like invasion of another country.

Clearly, holding a position as a professor at a major university today is no guarantee of original thought, nor even of clear thought.

_________________________

"Canadians don't appreciate or understand what we have here in our country, we just see the cost, not the rewards of helping others."

A ridiculous observation.

The author is blinded by his immediate experience and lack of broader knowledge.

The fact is that the world is full of backward abuse. Take your pick.

In rural India they still burn brides, and forty million widows in India live in misery because of the way the culture treats widows.

And many of those forty million are teenagers or not much older, having been child brides married off at 12 or 14 for financial considerations of a family, often to a much older man who dies a few years later.

These women cannot even eat certain food, cannot remarry, must wear only certain colors, and are left alone to eventually die in poverty.

Shall I go on about rural areas of South America? Or Pakistan? Or Bangladesh?

God, American propaganda has been so effective, it is still quoted as a reason for squandering billions and killing the citizens of a country where we do not belong.

Women are abused throughout the poor and backward world, and that includes several billion people.

America did not go to Afghanistan to free women or any other Don Quixote nonsense.

It went there to kill, something which it has done a great deal of, including killing children.

_________________________


The behavior of other NATO countries is the sharpest argument about this pointless war.

No one will commit troops and equipment in any significant numbers.

Do they not understand what a terrible place Afghanistan is? Of course, they do, but they also know the West has no real strategic interests there.

And they know too that the "mission" cannot succeed, except in killing people and creating Potemkin village projects.

They make only token commitments to give the Pentagon a fig leaf of "coalition forces" and to keep Washington from taking reprisals.

You cannot remake a society with an army. Indeed you cannot remake a society at all.

The best we can ever do is give well-thought-out assistance, monetary and technical, and offer trade concessions.

A backward place must outgrow its backwardness. And B-52s sure do not help.

America went to Afghanistan for vengeance, and then realized it didn't know what to do beyond terrorizing the local population.

We can only hope Obama is able to reach some kind of theatrical arrangement that covers his inevitable backing out, soon.

____________________________

“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

"I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

"I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."

Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, 1933

TORONTO PUBLIC SCHOOLS' QUALITY OF EDUCATION AND RATINGS

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

The Board should be required to post on an Internet site detailed stats of performance in each school for which it is responsible.

This is something we are slowly approaching in parts of medical care, but it is an essential tool for the future of all publicly supported institutions. The people being served and paying the bills have a right to know.

We do not need a study to tell us our public schools are a mess. There is all kind of evidence, easily discovered.

The basic problem is a system in which no one is responsible for anything. Literally no one.

Once a teacher is hired, no one ever examines his/her work.

And the principals of our schools are just teachers, in many cases people tired of teaching.

And the Board Superintendents are generally, too, just old teachers.

Teacher education is almost a joke: the details of classes at our teachers' colleges would not stand public scrutiny. It is that intellectually poor.

Students today are subjected to a ridiculously complicated curriculum while important skills are ignored. The schools are full of kids in grade five who do not know their times tables. And we have kids in grade eight who cannot read. School libraries are, many of them, a mess and outdated.

We have ongoing frauds like the “literacy test,” something with which I am quite familiar having served as the “home-stay” for a very bright Chinese student now studying a branch of applied mathematics at University College.

That test tests nothing, and those failing it only have to attend a bird course with a bored teacher next term to get a pass. The teachers write and mark the silly thing, and may easily make results rise, giving an empty blowhard like McGuinty something to talk about in speeches.

We seriously need new blood and new ways of doing things if our schools are to improve.

ROGER EBERT AND THE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

Roger Ebert is absolutely right about the dumbing-down of America, but he is moaning over what I believe is unavoidable.

Perpetual childhood has become perhaps the key aspect of American culture.

It explains not only why Hollywood only makes amusement-ride movies but also why older Americans pour out the cash for rock concerts by former stars in their sixties who resemble bad jobs of embalming.

The Protestant notion of eternal life in a childish paradise has fused with the financial ability of a large number of Americans to pay for costly skin cosmetics, regular plastic surgery, and a great many other reality-avoiding activities.

It is precisely the childish-fantasy nature of American culture which makes it a nation so unsuited to play the deciding role in world affairs.

It has the resources to destroy the world combined with a people who enjoy navel-gazing and display impatience over a late pizza delivery.

The national government only has to blubber some silly lines about good old Americanism and democratic values to have the population support the most horrible bloody excesses, the invasion of Iraq and the Vietnam holocaust (3 million Vietnamese killed justifies the word) being outstanding examples.

The media comply by not showing the real effects of what is done – the dismembered children, the charred remains - although television pictures of distant explosions are popular on America’s couches, eliciting excited hoots and roars between mouthfuls of buttered popcorn.

DYING "LOCKERBIE BOMBER" IS NOT RELEASED OWING TO AMERICAN PRESSURE

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

This is a shame because al-Megrahi is likely innocent, having been fitted up by American intelligence who were desperate for a scapegoat.

This shows what money can do. The affluent American families carry a lot of weight through the American government.

I have to say, also, I always find it troubling to read the press repeating the lines about 270 victims for the thousandth time.

Rarely do we read the accurate perspective of the Lockerbie event.

The United States Navy carelessly shot down an Iranian airliner with 300 souls aboard as it observed the devastation of the Iran-Iraq War.

Those 300 never saw any justice. Their families never received compensation. And no apology was offered by Americans.

Lockerbie was absolutely clearly revenge.

The whole pattern of the two events explains the basis for the so-called War on Terror: America's saying, 'I can do to you, but you can't do to me.'

NEWT GINGRICH AND SARAH PALIN AND THE EMPTINESS OF AMERICA'S RIGHT

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

Newt Gingrich's comments show how devoid of any content the American Right is.

Here is a woman who could not finish one term as governor of one of the smallest-population states in America, and yet she is spoken of in the same sentence with the presidency?

Palin's real reason for quitting as governor may never be known, but the two most likely explanations are a scandal-prosecution suppressed by a secret promise to resign or her recognition she just could not handle the pressures of the job.

In either case, she is about as qualified to run for president as Bozo the Clown.

HARPER'S SHABBY GOVERNMENT AND THE TERRIBLE ORDEAL OF SUAAD HAGI MOHAMUD

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

Events around Suaad Hagi Mohamud's ordeal seem to me the most shameful episode of Mr. Harper's often shabby record in government.

Her lawyer is receiving calls from Ottawa officials asking questions about "her file," a file which he is not permitted to see.

There is a clear implication here that an effort is underway to attack the victim, Suaad Hagi Mohamud, rather than set the record straight, much the way the RCMP tried to blacken the name of the man they needlessly killed in the Vancouver airport by snooping into his background in Poland and suggesting he was a drunk and other things.

This kind of activity is not the Canada I know and love: It sounds like something alien and deeply unpleasant. I do not understand why there is not a public outcry over what representatives of Harper's government did to this woman.

Her problem started with a Kenyan border official, almost certainly fishing for a bribe by telling her that her lips did not resemble her valid passport picture. Such corruption is common there and in other places.

What is most hurtful is the response of Canada's High Commission there when this Canadian citizen sought the help to which she is entitled.

Her valid passport was voided, and the Canadian High Commission in Kenya notified the local government that she was an imposter. Thus her ghastly treatment.

Clearly, this was pure incompetence, if not vicious behavior based on racial attitudes.

Those responsible at the High Commission should be dismissed immediately. Harper should apologize.

This woman's ordeal threatens every Canadian who travels abroad and indeed threatens the meaning of Canadian citizenship.

Harper’s public statement that Canada doesn’t control events in places like Kenya is unacceptable, and even cowardly. Kenya wasn’t the problem: Canada’s High Commission very much was.

IQALUIT'S MEAN STREETS: A REPORT ON SOME SAD CONDITIONS OF NORTHERN YOUNG PEOPLE

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

Many of us might be reduced to such hopelessness if we lived the way these people live.

There are no good prospects for jobs.

There is little opportunity for education.

There are limited opportunities for recreation.

There is isolation.

There is rapid population growth, quickly reducing the housing stock to utter inadequacy.

Canada desperately needs an enlightened policy to encourage and assist remote young people to leave the reserves for an opportunity at real life.

Only a relatively small population can be sustained by hunting and fishing, and only a relatively small population is even interested in it.

___________________

Poor parenting only contributes greatly to the problems.

I'm not blaming the parents but just stating an unpleasant fact.

Parents who already are demoralized and hopeless cannot possibly provide sound parenting.

Even in places like Toronto we see the effects of this. Our buck-passing teaching establishment constantly plays the nasty game of stressing the parents' responsibility, Instead of rolling up their own sleeves to make sure kids are better than their poor parents.

But the ugly truth is many people are parents only by accident and themselves have no skills, no education, and no great hope. The kids may have been conceived in drunkenness, and there may be a number of fathers, each of whom takes no responsibility.

This certainly describes the root problem of Toronto's poor urban areas experiencing mindless violence, areas like Jane and Finch.

For all the chest-thumping stuff we've heard recently about residential schools - and there were ugly abuses - we miss the fact that likely most of the people involved meant genuinely to help, and likely did in many cases. The idea behind the schools had merit, but the execution was flawed and poorly overseen.

We need a 21st century, enlightened program to offer hope and progress. There really is no other logical answer.

No country can afford to equip hundreds of remote communities with all the modern advantages, communities moreover where the facilities will be outgrown in one generation with explosive population growth.

WOO CHINA WARILY: ANTI-CHINESE RUBBISH WITH NO PERSPECTIVE ON TODAY'S ECONOMIC REALITIES

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JAMES MANICOM AND ANDREW O'NEIL IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

This is pure anti-Chinese rubbish.

Look at our glorious relationship with the United States.

They deport our citizens to dark places for torture.

They never honor their business agreements when it is to their advantage not to do so: as we see in everything from softwood lumber to pork.

They launch savage, illegal wars like that in Iraq or Vietnam, and then accuse us of not being good neighbors when we don't join them in the bloodshed.

They persist in dangerous ignorance about us, as only shown recently by both the Secretary for Homeland Security and Senator John McCain claiming the 9/11 crew or some of it came through Canada.

They now fill the border with rude, ignorant people, destroying a once-civil relationship.

They refuse to recognize our Northern border, sending ships as they please and even leaving their official maps altered, constituting in fact the greatest single threat to sovereignty there.

They pressure us like a bully on almost every trivial issue they care about.

Their various ambassadors talk down to us like missionaries teaching savages about the Truth.

Unfortunately, we have a shabby government that swallows it all and just smiles, doing their bidding on matters like foreign investment dutifully - including importantly, keeping out Chinese investment that could greatly help our economy.

THE MATCHLESS FOLLY OF MARGARET WENTE ON COMPARISONS OF ISRAEL WITH APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

RESPONSE SENT TO MARGARET WENTE ON A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL WHERE COMMENTS WERE NOT PERMITTED

If you truly believe what you say, then you should be open to public comment.

It is actually, in this day, rather pathetic to write a piece like yours and hide from comments.

Apart from what the overwhelming majority of humane people feel at seeing and hearing regularly Israel's ghastly behavior, we have the words of two men of shining credentials in the matter, Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela, who have said on more than one occasion that Israel has re-created apartheid.

That excellent man, Jimmy Carter, has said much the same. Of course, he was instantly labeled an anti-Semite, a favorite shabby trick of the apologists for Israel's ugly behavior.

About three thousand souls - including 400 children and a fine Canadian doing his UN duty - have been murdered in the last couple of years in Lebanon and Gaza by Israel. Gaza is treated like a Middle Ages city under siege, not even being allowed the products to rebuild Israel's destruction.

People who have had homes and farms for centuries in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have their families destroyed regularly as their property is seized by people born in New York or Toronto or London, and the behavior is simply called "facts on the ground."

Walls are built on the land of others, water is diverted, people living in their own place are abused endlessly by numberless checkpoints and humiliations.

The reasons many people focus on Israel's behavior are simple.

One, we cannot avoid hearing and seeing it constantly while we do not see what goes on in rural India or parts of South America. We hear of every election, every cabinet change, and every violent act. This is not the case with a place like Ecuador, a country of roughly the same population.

Two, Israel constantly represents itself as a modern democratic state, but its behavior towards its neighbors is that of a ghastly third-world country. We all expect more of modern states than we do places like Ecuador.

Three, Israel's behavior seriously threatens peace in the world, having as it does its own illegal nuclear weapons and the thermonuclear support of the United States. There is no other way to look at Israel's many calls for Iraq to be invaded (answered by Bush), Syria to be attacked and Iran to be attacked.

Checkpoints, walls, computerized machine-gun towers, invasions, sieges, mass arrests, kidnapping, torture, assassination, abuse of power over regulations in building and utilities, and constant threats - there is no rational defense of all that ugliness.

All Israel has to do is accept its borders and respect its neighbors to have genuine peace, but it does neither of these things. Its borders expand like ooze over the land of others, and it treats its every neighbor with contempt.

You simply defend what is indefensible.

CANADA WILL NOT ABANDON AFGHANISTAN DECLARES OUR OWN COLONEL BLIMP FROM HIS MEN'S CLUB ARMCHAIR

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

"Canada will not abandon Afghanistan!"

Sounds like some Colonel Blimp sitting over a large gin fizz in one of the leather armchairs of his men's club.

Lewis MacKenzie was a failed general, and we have no reason to put any credibility in his words.
________________

"we love freedom, but we're afraid to risk our lives for it? we love freedom, but we don't want anyone else to experience it? why are canadians so selfish?"

What planet is the author of those laughable words living on?

Afghanistan is NOT about freedom. Full stop.

It is run by a crook, placed there by American invaders, and the real powers, the regional governors, are a bunch of thug warlords no different to the Taleban.

Afghanistan is, and was, about American paranoia. Americans don't, and never did, give a damn about "freedoms" elsewhere, especially in a backward place where they have never existed.

You cannot hurl a vast nation from the Middle Ages to modernity. It cannot be done.

That's like saying you could go to 14th century Spain and tell them they should live like 21st century North Americans.

Ridiculous, and you would soon find yourself burned at the stake.

Of the 200 or so countries in the world, many of them with backward economies, poverty, and ignorant superstition, Afghanistan was about the least likely ever to have caught Canadians hopes or imagination.

We are there only to please the Pentagon, America's having undergone a form of national insanity over the last eight years.

It has killed more than a million people over a criminal act in which all the 19 perpetrators died.

CANADA'S RCMP WATCHDOG ON POLICE INVESTIGATING THEMSELVES

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

Watchdog?

The man is rather a toothless pup whimpering.

But what would you expect of a Harper appointee?

Just the case of the four thugs at Vancouver Airport screams at Canadians that the RCMP is out of control.

Four men who cannot peacefully arrest a distraught man? Who kill him by misusing both the Taser and a choke-hold position? Who failed in their human duty to seek fast emergency help?

Who then did everything they could - aided by the rest of the force - to delay and impede investigation? And who clearly lied on the witness stand?

I feel sure most Canadians would rather take their chances with a distraught man like poor Mr. Dziekanski rather than police like that.

There are many civilians who would show more courage and compassion under the circumstances than those shabby men.

One can only guess how many of these other cases are comparable in nature, but they were not documented the same way.

The man who was shot in the head during a struggle at an RCMP outpost surely was a case of the same thing.

I think the toothless watchpup should just be quiet and go away. He has no contribution to make, none at all.

MASS MURDER BY BUZZ-CUT THUGS PLAYING COMPUTER GAMES

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

America is reduced to brutal savagery, no different to that of any terrorist.
What we have here is the deliberate murder of a family - with no charges, no trial, no defense, no legalities whatsoever.

Indeed, it is worse than that.

This is the work of buzz-cut employees of the Pentagon sitting at computer terminals, over coffee, murdering people on the other side of the planet by joy-stick remote control, as though they were playing a computer game.

I wonder do they go to lunch down in the cafeteria after a morning’s killing?

DO AMERICANS SHARE OBAMA'S DREAM? A QUESTION I REGARD AS NAIVE

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JUSTIN WEBB IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

America is a very conservative country. That is why the great journalist William Shirer, covering events in NAZI Germany, asked whether America would not itself become a fascist country by election.

'Right-wing' has characterized its entire history, except for a brief period of the Franklin Roosevelt era.

The nation’s history is characterized by conquest - although its victims were weak compared to those taken on by, say, Germany, including native people, Spanish settlers, and Mexicans - and extreme acquisitiveness. Those are facts largely glossed over in general histories, and few abroad truly appreciate them. They are facts also glossed over in all Fourth of July speeches by local Congressmen and Senators looking for campaign funds.

The higher-sounding words of America’s main founding documents have always been treated the same way most Christians treat the Gospels - that is, they are recited, praised, engraved on monuments, and immediately ignored in day-to-day matters.

And, after all, it is the most superstitiously religious advanced nation on earth, and nothing good comes out of superstition, except fear and killing of every description, killing of devils, killing of communists, killing of Muslims, killing of native people, and killing of any threat perceived by religious paranoia.

And further, the U.S. establishment – really a government within a government, including the CIA, the FBI, the NIA, the Pentagon, and at least a dozen other intelligence agencies not generally known – is not going to permit drastic change. It has things the way it wants them and works daily to keep them so.

The Pentagon alone spends the entire GDP of some countries each year, and it has on many past occasions obstructed presidential policies. The CIA spends a fortune and makes a significant part of its occupation the overthrowing of governments, the interfering in elections abroad (as its doing in places like Iran today), and the getting rid of unwanted foreign leaders. And these powerful institutions are supported by America’s immensely rich Borgia-like families. Does anyone seriously believe such forces will tolerate any real shift in American goals and budgets?

Obama cannot possibly change those circumstances, and without changing those circumstances there is no way he can take significant measures towards creating a more humane and decent America. Kennedy was probably the last president hoping to achieve such huge changes.

Obama has put a pleasant and intelligent face on a government that for eight years was guided by thugs and ignoramuses, and he established a precedent for people of color that gives the U.S. further bragging rights about principles.

Going beyond those modest achievements brings an American leader into highly dangerous territory.

BRITISH FORCES IN AFGHANISTAN "UNDERMINED AT HOME"? SOUNDS LIKE HITLER'S "STAB IN THE BACK"

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ALLAN MALLINSON IN THE TELEGRAPH

Allan Mallinson, this is simplistic, uninformed propaganda.

"Undermined at home" smacks of charges of "defeatism" or "stab in the back" or "fifth columnists," and in using it, you demonstrate a lack of clear thought.

Morale always suffers when you send armies to do the wrong thing, and Iraq and Afghanistan were colossal mistakes.

The British public had overwhelmingly shown its opposition to the invasion of Iraq, but Tony Blair managed to abuse the immense power of a modern prime minister by joining in that pointless mass murder.

Afghanistan cannot be "won" because you are fighting a major part of the population itself, and you are attempting to foist institutions and customs on a people mostly not ready for them.

The invasion of Afghanistan was the product of Bush/Cheney/ Rumsfeld paranoia. The fact that major NATO nations refuse to seriously engage there is owing to the simple fact that they do not perceive a threat there. As well, they do not see how anyone can "win."

The Bush administration was the most shamefully ignorant and brutal in memory for any Western society. Blair's having slavishly followed that troika from hell speaks for itself. The man is an ethical nullity.

Given those facts, your words ring oddly uninformed and, indeed, rather dangerous.

SILLY BABBLE ABOUT THE BORING JOHN MANLEY AND HIS NEW SINECURE AT THE CANADIAN CHIEF EXECUTIVES

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

Lawrence Martin,

This piece is silly babble.

The Canadian Chief Executives is a tiresome organization: a lobbying group for large American corporate interests and a place for political wannabes like Manley to spend some time in expense-paid comfort while schmoozing potential campaign contributors.

Either that last or it serves as a cozy sinecure for has-been or never-were politicians with strong American sympathies to have a title, some press time, and an expense account.

Just look at its last long-term head, an almost silly man who liked to go around in hair resembling Sir John A., absolutely his only point of reference to Canadian interests. Canada's version of Ichabod Crane.

John Manley is, and always has been, a boring man with American wannabe tendencies. He is a reformer of nothing. He actually could put an audience to sleep with one of his speeches.

And on top of it all, he resembles a slightly demented and overweight chipmunk.

Come to think of it, he is in just the right place to hibernate into his decline.

HATE AND STUPIDITY ARE NOT NEW TO THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MATTHEW NORMAN IN THE INDEPENDENTNow?

Where has Matthew Norman been the last thirty years or so?

The Republican Party has long been a breeding ground for hate and stupidity.

Spiro Agnew's many ridiculous and shabby words at a time he was taking brown paper bags of money in his vice-presidential office?

Phil Gramm and all his dumb talk about what his mama used to say about “gettin' down outta the wagon to he’p push the wagon”?

Nixon and wife Pat's "Republican" cloth coat and their little dog?

Nixon’s filthy, vicious first Congressional campaign won by insulting an honest and capable woman?

Every word ever uttered by that dense chunk of sod, Bush?

Dick Cheney's organized programs of murder, hate, and denial of rights?

Rumsfeld's murder of 3,000 prisoners in Afghanistan?

Dan Quayle and everything he ever said?

The late Senator Roman Hruska and his claim that the Supreme Court should reflect all groups, including mediocrity?

Lamar Alexander and his ridiculous custom-made red lumber-jack shirts and his ideas about having a part-time government?

The absurd former Senator Bob Smith and his claim that Clinton was running a "damned concentration camp" when they rescued that poor Cuban boy Elian from his hateful kidnappers in Miami.

Tom Delay and his name-calling and spitting venom while all the time running a crooked fund-raising scheme?

Pat Robertson's claims that natural disasters were God's vengeance on America for immoral ways plus just about everything else ever uttered by Robertson?

Newt Gingrich and his "family values" crap while divorcing a wife dying of cancer?

AFGANISTAN IS CHRETIEN'S LEGACY? TWISTED LOGIC FROM A MAN WITH LITTLE CREDIBILITY

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

This is just a shabby hatchet job, Norman Spector.

All thinking Canadians know why Chretien agreed to send some troops to Afghanistan: they hardly require your efforts at twisting the facts.

Chretien was the last worthy Prime Minister we had and, from the looks of things in the national parties, the last we can expect for some while.

He kept us out of the mass murder of Iraq: a million dead, two million refugees, and an economy destroyed for a generation.

He had a fair and balanced view of the Middle East unlike our current Prime Minister, and he would never have done what shabby Harper did, questioning the UN observers in Lebanon during Israel's ugly invasion, brave people doing their duty including a fine Canadian officer, all deliberately targeted by Israel.

Knowing something of your unbalanced views on the Middle East, you likely think the war crimes in Iraq were a worthwhile effort.

And your only public legacy, Norman Spector, is insulting a woman in public. This piece appears to originate from the same nasty little dark place.

Oh, and there’s a few laughably ridiculous statements about events in the Middle East to your credit.

HITLER AND WINTER AND THE INVASION OF RUSSIA

POSTED RESPONSE TO A BOOK REVIEW IN THE TELEGRAPH

Hitler suffered several setbacks to his invasion, including the Greek situation. These were important, and might have made the difference, but there were other essential ingredients to the failure of Operation Barbarossa.

Hitler unquestionably believed that his army would wrap up the campaign in three months, and he might have been right under ideal conditions. After all, his victories in the West had stunned the world, and he genuinely believed the Russians were untermensch, incapable of competing with Germans. And, as it proved, Stalin went into a drunken stupor after the initial success of the Germans, and no Russian general dared make a major move not approved by Stalin.

Hitler started the invasion believing in a fantasy idea of the abilities of Russians, and anyone who undertakes a great destructive task motivated by fantasy usually fails, just as the Crusaders centuries before. But it is important to keep in mind that Hitler’s racial fantasies were perhaps no sillier or less factual than the religious beliefs of many: he was not mad – several psychiatric studies have said so - but he had a foolish, superstitious, and destructive faith.

Germany's taking over the best Russian lands - without their people or with the people reduced to slaves - was unquestionably Hitler's great mission in life. All else was prologue. He believed he was a kind of savior for the German people in achieving their destiny.

Germany’s destiny, as he saw it, was to be able to do what America had done in building a vast empire that ultimately created the kind of economies of scale in its markets to be a great economic force in the world. Hitler understood these principles, and he knew America had had a relatively easy time of it, facing weak opponents like native people and Spanish settlers.

That is why he insisted on absolute ruthlessness in the Russian invasion: while he had contempt for Russians as people, he knew the numbers were not on his side.

He knew the invasion would be very bloody, and that is why he used it as a cover for the beginning of the Holocaust. He not only believed that the death camps would be lost in the noise and horror of the greatest battle of all time, but his strange religion caused him to believe that, with young Germans dying in the East, it was somehow right that the Jews’ numbers should be reduced.

Hitler’s underrating of the Russians included military technology, but, while Germany was in many areas more advanced, the Russians produced some very effective weapons, including perhaps most importantly the T-34 tank. Stalin also kept vast armored reserves hidden in the East, reserves of which Hitler was not fully aware. They proved decisive when the Germans had expended their first great energy.

Winter played a role in Hitler’s defeat of course, but the fierce heroism of the Russians stunned the world as well as Hitler.

ISRAEL AND MIDEST PEACE AND IRAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE TIMES

Israel has always been the main obstacle to a fair peace, and the reason for that is its desire to absorb the West Bank and Gaza without the people living there, as well as its desire to control events for a thousand miles around.

Israel's idea of negotiations - under every government, left or right - has been that the other side should make every major concession before "talks" can even begin, a rather ridiculous position for any negotiation.

With the threats against Iran, Israel's desire to control events everywhere for a thousand miles around has reached its most dangerous period.

An attack on Iran, a country which has attacked no one in its entire modern history, would be absolutely destabilizing to the world. In constantly threatening this, Israel is beginning to resemble a black hole absorbing everything around it.

It has attacked at one time or another every neighbor it has. It has violated international law and agreements again and again, including building its own threatening nuclear force and, in the past, assisting nuclear proliferation through its arrangements with apartheid South Africa.

It isn't satisfied that Bush destroyed Iraq, in large part for Israel's benefit, it wants a list of other places neutralized or destroyed. Sharon asked for attacks on Iran and Syria too.

A nuclear Iran would actually benefit peace in the region, just as MAD kept peace in Europe through decades of turmoil. Israel would lose its absolute threat over all its neighbors and might even become amenable to a realistic peace.

ART AND SUBSIDY

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GILL HORNBY IN THE TELEGRAPH

"The best books and songs and poems and plays do not get written, nor works of art crafted, because of state subsidy."

This is an old and tired argument, especially popular in American right-wing circles.

It is superficially true if you imagine a kind of Monty Python post-office official doling out grants to struggling artists.

But reality is far more complex.

History gives us a much more sophisticated view about the creation of art and subsidy.

Without the patronage of the great dukes and cardinals (the government of the day), the Italian Renaissance would have been a far more sparse artistic period.

Great writers and composers in Britain and Germany benefited from the same kind of sources. Shakespeare had a lordly patron, and both Beethoven and Mozart benefited from patrons and trusts set up by admiring men of influence.

Even in America, we have evidence to the contrary of this proposition. The WPA during the great depression subsidized many artists, and in American cities you can still find some of the very handsome results in public monuments, buildings, and photographic collections.

Simplistic propositions, I'm afraid, always reveal simplistic minds.

REACH FOR THE STARS? APOLLO 11 NONSENSE

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

Reach for the stars? What does that mean?

This piece is a pile of tired newspaper clichés.

Stunning as it was, the landing on the moon was in many ways the least important event of the space age.

I am a great fan of science and exploring space, but the moon landing was a gigantic, unbelievably costly public-relations stunt.

The robot missions Europe and the US have sent to the planets in recent decades have made astounding discoveries, as have the magnificent telescopes and other exotic instruments placed into earth orbit.

We have completely revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos with these missions.

Apollo was a one-off dead-end project, immensely impressive like a gigantic fireworks display, but the actual hard science of the Apollo mission(s) was minimal, nothing that robots could not have done far better and far more cheaply.

When I was a boy I loved stories of traveling to planets, but Apollo turned out to be nothing like those stories, and with my adult understanding I realize how immensely more our limited resources can achieve by robot technology and new sophisticated instruments in space.

The notion of sending men to Mars any time in the foreseeable future only makes me think of the early-astronaut expression for flying in earth orbit, spam in a can.

WIND POWER LUNACY INDEED

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMNBY CHRISTOPHER BOOKER IN THE TELEGRAPH

The author makes some very good points.

Here's another very important one he missed.

Wind turbines provide intermittent power, and they are completely incapable of ever replacing what energy analysts call base-load power.

Base-load power comes from nuclear or coal or hydroelectric: it is power that is produced and may be called upon twenty-four hours a day.

Wind turbines operate - like 17th century sailing ships - only when there is sufficient wind. In most locations this is only a fraction of the day.

Another important point: wind-generated power costs about twice as much per unit of energy as some of our conventional sources.

So wind power is both unreliable in the timing of its availability and costly for what you get. Indeed, some research starting to emerge seriously questions the economic rationality of massive wind turbine projects like those in Germany.

IS IT OKAY FOR AMERICA TO MURDER ITS ENEMIES? A DAMNABLE QUESTION TO ASK IN A FREE SOCIETY

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

Sorry, Mr. Gibson, there is no moral debate here.

I find it stunning that anyone living in a free country could even pose this question seriously.

The example of Israel is perfect. Israel has secretly, as well as in public, murdered those it calls enemies for decades.

And where has this taken Israel? Israel has no peace. Israel today has the worst reputation in the advanced world as a place of fairness and decency. And Israel gradually sinks lower and lower into a murky abyss of ghastly ethics and democratic values.

We have the witness of Israeli soldiers as to the horrible Nazi-like words with which they were prodded in advance of the Gaza invasion.

Indeed, it is a legitimate question whether Israel as we know it can long continue. The CIA only recently predicted that it would change in 20 years into something else, with many of American and European dual-nationals returning to the lands of their birth.

There is simply no question about these results. That's why Israel's defenders constantly today lash out at what they call anti-Semitism, calling the critics of human abuse haters.

You cannot have a society of laws and justice when you are unwilling to live by such laws yourself. The US has fallen into this same moral pit with its international torture gulags and its assassinations.

This kind of murder is absolutely no different to some rogue cops secretly executing the people they regard as criminals. It is no different to the ghastly work of death squads in Brazil going through poor areas of cities murdering children at night. And it is no different to the past several juntas in South America who made thousands “disappear” by kidnapping them and dumping them out of planes over the ocean.

God, the most precious thing we have achieved over countless centuries of ghastly murder and conflict is a society of laws and defined rights. How damnable that anyone would even toy with the idea of destroying that.

NEW YORK TIMES' ASSERTION THAT CIA HAD ASSASSINATION PLAN AGAINST AL QAEDA BUT DID NOT IMPLEMENT IT

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.

We know perfectly well that America has been using drones and Hellfire missiles to kill many people, without charge or trial or conviction of anything.

Remember, too, Rumsfeld's bloody Nazi-like words about killing or walling away America's al Qaeda prisoners in Afghanistan.

It wasn't long after that that 3,000 prisoners disappeared.

They are said to have been loaded into trucks and driven out into the desert to suffocate, then being buried in mass graves. This was done by one of the warlord's men while American soldiers watched and picked their noses.

And let's not forget the war crime of the Iraq invasion. A million killed, a couple of million refugees created, a modern society set back for decades. Results no different to having used a few nuclear weapons against a people who did absolutely nothing against America.

So why would there be any hesitation over this? The American establishment has demonstrated a lawless disregard for international law for eight years.

Of course, there wasn't, and I'd bet it was that ghastly Dick Cheney who headed the operation and perhaps the new commander in Afghanistan who managed it.

America has no claim to any kind of ethics or democratic values in light of recent years.

The election of Obama has not changed this position at all, other than offering a friendly smile and a good mind in place of a pathetic lump.

A great deal of effort will be required to restore America's tattered reputation, and I see no efforts indicating that effort is underway.

AMERICA’S STRANGE POLITICAL CULTURE OF GRIEF AND DYING

Note to readers: this was written some years ago, but somehow I missed it when posting older pieces.

AMERICA’S STRANGE POLITICAL CULTURE OF GRIEF AND DYING

John Chuckman

Death in America does not come easily. That is, unless you are homeless or live on an Indian reservation or in one of the nation’s vast urban ghettos or are one of tens of millions of working poor with the kind of health insurance that features exceptions instead of coverage. In all these cases, likely few will note your passing. Losers don’t count in America, except at Fourth-of-July speeches by congressmen in tight races.

Anyone living in the United States must acclimatize to massive public displays of grief. Actually, “public displays of grief” is an inadequate term, for, apart from their Hollywood production values, they seem often to have a starkly political character.

But the subject is complex, and some of its ridiculous aspects reflect a society where beauty contests for five-year-olds in mascara and half-time football shows are cultural events. There is also a business aspect, for grief like everything in America serves the greater “entrepreneurial spirit.”

And there is, amidst all the mess and clutter, a sense of loneliness and anger that comes through, the echoes of life in a society of flourishing Social Darwinism. This last aspect will be the subject of a future essay.

Have you ever noticed the way Americans refer to any event involving death as a “tragedy?” This usage reflects the attitude of people who think they’ve banished death in their child-like enjoyment of measureless entitlements. Death must be really special, and so it is always a “tragedy.”

This word usage also reflects the political correctness that muffles all discussion of serious topics in America with a dense, fluffy coating of euphemism. It’s callous to talk honestly about something like death in America. Such talk may even qualify as being unpatriotic.

Now, “tragedy” has a very specific meaning, and it has nothing to do with accidents or unhappiness or even tears. It has to do with heroic attempts at something worthy despite the fates having ruled that one must fail. All sense of this powerful word is lost in contemporary America.

When first built, the Vietnam memorial was a remarkably dignified statement of grief, that seemed, with its low profile, simple design, and dark color, to speak to both the shame and loss of a pointless war. It was a miracle that anything so thoughtful came out of those years of insane violence.

But the dignity couldn’t last long. Clumps of statues – including figures carefully representing every identifiable marketing segment of the voter population, always excepting gays and Arabs – are springing up like toadstools after a period of warm rain. And, of course, there has to be an “information center.” Dignity is gradually giving way to the ambiance of a Niagara Falls gift shop.

Endless photographs of people rubbing names onto paper or touching the surface with tremulous fingers or leaving teddy bears, an entire small library of coffee-table books full of such pictures, have almost turned the wall into an official national how-to display center for grief.

The private acts of individuals grieving are, or should be, just that, private. Overly-photographed, overly-televised, overly-written-about acts are not private, they are public – and not the public of solemn ceremony, but the public of performance or advertising. Americans often no longer seem to understand this distinction, or, as with so many things, they want it both ways.

We also have a fake wall that tours the country on a truck, as well as several hundred local mini-walls and fake walls in cities, towns, and states that feature subsets of the names on the wall in Washington. I am sure there are people who imitate what they’ve seen repeated over and over in magazines, movies, and on television when the fake wall pays a visit at the local Wal-Mart parking lot. Tremulous fingers rub names on a plastic wall inside a truck.

To placate veterans of another hideous, pointless war, “the Korean conflict,” yet another wall was built – this one far less subtle or interesting, perhaps reflecting its being a rushed after-thought. This one unfortunately resembles a huge Russian-gangster tombstone with faces etched on dark granite. It comes with an army of life-size aluminum soldiers, “Joes,” (wasn’t that the name used by the cute little Korean lads always asking the generous Americans for chocolate in all the “B” movies about Korea?) grimly trudging along.

Soon we will have the grandest memorial of all – a gigantic pile of rock slabs and flags and men’s and ladies’ rooms honoring World War II. The artist’s renderings suggest a bowling-tournament trophy built on the scale of Egypt’s Great Pyramid. This eyesore is to be assembled after fleets of Sikorsky helicopters drop the required eighteen million pounds of granite dead center of The Mall in Washington.

Support for this one came right from the grass roots, from the sale of t-shirts and baseball caps at Wal-Mart and smoky beer-socials at veterans’ posts. The resulting memorial has everything you’d expect short of beer-bellied figures in baseball caps and XXX t-shirts labeled “Proudly Made in the U.S.A.,” but, who knows, that may come over time.

Building ugly, expensive memorials is not limited to Washington. Nor is their subject matter limited to war. Walls of names at one time threatened to become as commonplace as fried-chicken outlets. Several airline crashes have their own versions.

Now, other conceptions have come into vogue, perhaps inspired by the massive aluminum “Joes” of the Korean-conflict memorial. For example, we have a memorial with scores of concrete posts down in a Florida swamp in memory of an airline crash.

If we were to build something like this for every victim of every crash (about 50,000 Americans die in automobile crashes alone each year), memorials would soon represent a serious pedestrian hazard, with people tripping over them or banging into them while talking on cell-phones.

But the strangeness of America’s public grief goes far beyond strange memorials. We have people who gather, in Busby Berkley re-creations of 1970 flower-child scenes, to throw flowers into the ocean years after the crash of an airliner or to light candles in bottles along miles of shore – not private, spontaneous acts of grieving, but choreographed displays, carefully documented on film to become spots on the evening news or the covers of magazines. Grieving here becomes an avenue to Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame.

Being a victim – or part of the subset, survivor – opens new prospects for even the humblest. Victims are interviewed, photographed, appear on day-time talk shows, travel, have books written about them, and often go on lecture circuits. They may even have agents. It’s pretty heady stuff, and it sure beats what most people do for a living.

Indeed, there is an almost irresistible movement in America to raise being a victim to the status of a profession. It is already an occupation.

Soon one or two dozen of America’s countless weird little colleges – places like the Bull Connor Memorial College for Christian Gentlemen, or the New Jersey Turnpike Drive-Through College for the Performing Arts – will offer courses and even degrees in victimhood and survivorship. Why not? You can get a degree in circus in America. Or a degree in recreational leadership. Or a degree in nothing. Four-year B.V.s just seem too good a business opportunity to be missed.

Most people in the world, following the loss of a loved one, seek peace or solace or some other definite and recognizable state of being. But in America, people seek “closure.” The quest to find an acceptable personal meaning for this undefined, self-help-book term is the starting point for many a career as victim or survivor.

Closure may come quickly or never – it is a very flexible concept, allowing for short, meteoric careers or more sustained, long-term ones. Some captives of the American embassy in Iran went on for more than a decade talking and writing about little more than being on the receiving end of what American armed forces are doing to Al-Qaeda prisoners in Cuba.

For about a year or two, every relative of every person affected by the Oklahoma City bombing was interviewed so many times that every ounce of pathetic remembrance was drained from them. I used to wince as soon as I heard the lead-in for another of these on National Public Radio. There was this awful mental image of reporters squeezing the ragged, pulpy scraps of an exhausted lemon to get a last drop of juice.

Of course, there are Oklahoma City victim support groups and associations of every description plus survivors’ reunions and home-coming events. Grief counselors – another field for combining grief and profit in America -streamed in for weeks, jamming the town’s airport and bus station. And probably upwards of four hundred books were published by and about victims. Victims can spend the rest of their lives just reading about themselves.

Again in Oklahoma City, there is the unavoidable colossal memorial – this time, it consists of a fleet of giant, ugly chairs that look as though no one would ever have wanted to sit on one.

Undoubtedly, the terrorist attack on New York will top all previous grief-events for intensity of as well as endurance. This promises to go on for decades. We already have decals, official logos, baseball caps, t-shirts, shorts, lapel pins, books, videos, electronic games, and framed prints. It is well on its way to spawning a major new industry of survivor-souvenirs and memorabilia. And a stupendous memorial is almost certainly in the works. Perhaps Disney will do a plastic copy to minimize the diversion of tourists to New York.

Now, don’t misunderstand. When the terrorists attacked, America deserved the world’s sympathy and help, and she richly received it. But now, quite apart from its being well past time for a grossly self-indulgent people “to get a life,” the country’s brutal, stupid response – undoubtedly killing more innocent people than died in the attack itself and causing more misery than can be imagined in such a poor land – means she has relinquished further claims to the world’s sympathy.

It’s hard to sympathize with people who insist on the very special, precious, eternal nature of their own loss, while failing even to notice what they do to others. The moral values here closely resemble those of certain survivors or victims in Texas who parade outside the prison during an execution and excitedly talk to newsmen about the closure someone’s death is bringing to their lives.

Closure on this one is going to be right off the scale and probably will take generations. At the heart of the matter, as someone perceptively noted, is that Americans want to be liked and just cannot understand why someone dislikes them so much. They could easily learn why if they only would listen to others, but that will not happen.

Not listening is something of a national characteristic, and there’s almost a sense of pride attached to it. But then, Americans are proud of a lot of loopy things, like the fact that B-2 bombers are such neat-looking, high-tech planes – totally ignoring the fact that each copy costs them about forty top-quality, well-equipped high schools and requires maintenance for every hour’s flying equal to the total annual salaries of several teachers.

Besides, the entire workforce of government and corporate media labor mightily day and night to keep emotions on the boil. CNN stupidly blares from every office and public place much like the tele-screens in 1984 reporting approved details of Oceania’s endless war. Outsiders are certainly not welcome. At all. Unless, of course, they’re sending troops or money.

There is simply no perspective in any of this. Every four or five years, Americans killing Americans generate enough names to fill the Vietnam memorial in Washington. They murder the same number of people who died in the World Trade Center every few months.

Indeed, until a recent, not well-understood decline in American homicides, this figure was enough killings just-over every two years to fill a new wall. Enough killings to equal the carnage of the World Trade Center about every six weeks (just a few years ago, murders ran at 1800 a year for New York city alone). That rate of killing created the equivalent of ten Vietnam walls in the first couple of decades after the war – all filled with names of Americans killed by Americans.

In the same state where tens of millions were spent on the Oklahoma City memorial, there is no memorial to, nor even much memory of, twice as many black Americans slaughtered in Tulsa by insane white mobs and dumped into mass graves during a rampage in the 1920s. Even their property was stolen, just as was the case for Japanese-American internees of concentration camps about twenty years later. Nor is there a memorial in the state of Florida where a similar event occurred.

The colossal brutality of American slavery receives no adequate memorial. The re-creations of slave auctions at colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, actually help soften the image of slavery, but even these silly play-acts by summer students in gingham are quite recent. Slavery at virtually all national historic sites was simply ignored.

Imagine the real auction blocks with slaves stripped naked to display their muscles. Or, in the case of females, to show other assets of interest to isolated plantation owners. Imagine the chained slaves defecating like horses as they are driven to or from the market in gangs. Imagine the stinking holds of ships where they were packed like cord wood, with the substantial numbers who died or got sick in shipment being tossed overboard as they were discovered. America has never come to terms with the immensity of slavery. Where’s the huge and piteous memorial owing here?

Something like two thousand kids a year are killed by child abuse in the United States – that’s another wall full of names since the end of the war in Vietnam – all children. But there is no wall provided.

Of course, the deaths of children and the documented abuse of literally hundreds of thousands more every year, doesn’t stop “pro-life” folks from weeping over fetuses. Never mind all those real kids in pain and difficulty, never mind all the homeless, never mind all the runaways and child prostitutes, and never mind all the families whose lives are no more than emotional vacuums – they’re murdering fetuses!

The bizarre outer limits of grief culture were reached when dozens of Americans gathered in Washington to weep over stem cells. Most of the mourners likely wouldn’t be able to offer a coherent definition of a stem cell, but that fact didn’t get in the way of their much photographed and televised grief. It wouldn’t surprise me if these people announce a special memorial to stem cells killed in New York labs by the terrorist attack.

Now, the discovery that a few middle-class children accidentally were killed each year by air bags created waves of publicity and demands for change. And change in the regulations came quickly. But the murder of an American child every few hours (until the recent decline, but the number is still shameful), often at the hands of another child in urban ghettos, generated only a flat-line graph on the monitor of national concern.

Executions in the United States elicit sympathy from some, but the death penalty is popular. Candidate Bush saw no political risk in making sophomoric remarks about people waiting to be executed in Texas. And there’s a well-known picture of him smirking during a remark about the upcoming death of a particular inmate.

America is still the only country to have used a genuine “weapon of mass destruction.” Twice. On civilians. Not much grief is ever expressed over that.
Actually, quite the opposite, as we are reminded at every commemoration of Pearl Harbor that the few thousand Americans killed in an attack on a military base more than justified the mass incineration of women and children, hospitals and schools.

One especially sensitive American reader recently wrote to tell me that the entire Middle East should have been reduced to radioactive glass after the attack on the World Trade Center, and that I should just mind my own business about it. Needless to say, such expressions of grief are touching.

Three to four million Southeast Asian people perished in the insane orgy of killing Americans call the Vietnam War, three hundred thousand went missing, and, over the years since, thousands of farmers have been crippled or killed by the mines and unexploded bombs left behind. Not to mention the unholy effects of an ocean of Agent Orange bubbling and gurgling its way through the water tables of Southeast Asia.

And yet, a quarter-century after that holocaust, there were news stories about whether the Vietnamese were being sufficiently cooperative in finding sets of American remains. Remains that by that time and in that place were surely nothing more than dust, buttons, and dental fillings.

This was just one of many demeaning rituals the American establishment put the Vietnamese through because of their intense rage at losing the war. But this absurd ritual of digging for dust and buttons was possible and took meaning precisely because Washington could exploit strange American attitudes towards death – virtually encouraging the pitiful, hopeless belief by a portion of the public in the survival of missing men – to support a vicious policy.

Every three days, cigarettes kill as many Americans as died in the World Trade Center. Does the Congress take serious action to suppress or better control cigarette smoking? Not really. Other countries have been far more imaginative and aggressive.

America’s courageous legislators leave most of the responsibility to the courts with state lawsuits whose very settlements presume continued heavy smoking and whose proceeds often are not even spent on smoking or health.

Now compare the daily, genuine menace of cigarettes with the threat of terrorism.

Despite the World Trade Center, an American’s chances of dying from terror are just about equal to slipping on a banana in the bathtub during a thunderstorm. Almost nonexistent.

Here was one event involving three thousand people out of a population of two hundred and eighty million, one event spread over a period of many decades of America’s controversy-filled dominance in world affairs. And that one event involved a series of unrepeatable favorable circumstances for the perpetrators, circumstances which actually reflect on the same glorious legislators’ unwillingness to attend to business before by mandating such simple measures as locked cabins and more professional inspection staff.

Yet after that one event, the good old boys in Congress instantly passed police-state legislation, negated many Constitutional protections, launched an undeclared war, ignored the Geneva Conventions, and stand ready to spend countless billions more.

It truly does make a remarkable difference who dies and under what circumstances in America.

THE DEATH OF ROBERT MCNAMARA

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

McNamara may be the greatest modern example of the banality of evil.

He was, in his heyday, a dry, boring man with the appearance of a corporate executive who taught Baptist Sunday School classes.

He was very bright and energetic, but dry and boring, driven by an insane need for success and with no evident ethical standards beyond those associated with the ferociously ambitious.

The United States, under his advice and that of others like McGeorge Bundy, created the greatest holocaust since that of World War II.

An estimated three million Vietnamese were killed, many of them suffering horrible deaths from napalm and early versions of cluster bombs.

Carpet bombing by B-52s made parts of that poor country resemble the surface of the moon.

Left behind were millions of pounds of the hideous Agent Orange oozing through the ground to cause birth defects for perhaps centuries.

Left behind too were hundreds of thousands of land mines to cripple and kill farmers for decades after.

The reason for this horror? The Vietnamese were fighting a civil war and the side with the wrong economic beliefs was winning.

Of course, it also relates to America's penchant for obsessions, its Captain Ahab drive to chase and kill the great whale.

In the 1960s, it was communism.

Today it's Islamic fundamentalism.

In his later years, McNamara was a sad figure. He very much did come to regret his role. He was almost driven by the ghosts of all those dead souls.

THE LIKELY TRUTH BEHIND PALIN'S RESIGNATION AS GOVERNOR

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

The latest word is that Palin resigned so abruptly owing to a new, yet-undisclosed scandal brewing.

It is said that an Alaskan building corporation called SBS was given the contract for building the arena in good old Wasilla, and in return it helped to build her rather impressive home.

A separate report indicates that the costly supplies were delivered from SBS while others actually built the home.

It is clear to anyone who has seem pictures of her home that it is beyond the means of this woman's meager achievements and large family and the high costs of building in Alaska.

No one who is thinking clearly believes her bizarre act was a political strategy. It simply is not the way politics are done in the U.S.

Candidates running for nominations virtually always retain their existing offices until the last possible moment.

Palin likely reached a secret deal with a prosecutor behind the scenes. We may never learn the full truth.

But we know from other events that her ethical standards are extremely flexible. The case of her wildly spending two hundred thousand dollars of other peoples' money during her campaign on designer clothes is the clearest example of many.

She was given an account for a modest topping up of her wardrobe, and promptly went on an insane buying spree buying stuff for her entire family.

McCain and establishment Republicans were outraged behind the scenes, but they managed to keep it reasonably quiet. She had to return the clothes and has no friends in that wealthy wing of the party.

THE IDEA THAT PALIN'S QUITTING AS GOVERNOR IS A POLITICAL PLOY

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

“If I had to bet right now, I think we just saw the opening statement of the 2012 presidential race.”

Unbelievable, you quit your public post early, and that means you are running for president?

There must be something we do not know that has happened in her private or official life behind this.

It remains stunning that in such a powerful, rich country as the United States this woman would be taken seriously for even five minutes by any group larger than her immediate family.

Every time she opens her mouth a cliché falls out.

“It would be apathetic to just hunker down and go with the flow.”

Go with the flow? I think it’s called doing the job for which you were elected.

And her tiresome whimpering about “the real America.”

Haven't we had enough of the “the real America,” from every huckster and professional rustic in the Republican Party for decades?

"A recent CNN poll had Ms. Palin running neck and neck with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney."

Good God, the late freak Michael Jackson's name inserted into a poll in America would produce comparable results.

Besides, Mitt Romney is a stiff, cold, and unappealing man who spent twenty million dollars of his own money promoting himself and still failed.

“We are not retreating, we are advancing in another direction.”

Quoted from the lips of the very Douglas MacArthur who was ready to bomb China with nuclear weapons and whose drive to the border with China - despite many warnings - brought a million Chinese "volunteers" into the war.

Wasn’t eight years of the first certified moron president enough?

________________________________________

Phil Gramm and what his momma used to say about “getting’ down outta” the wagon to help push it?

Deadbeat Bush and his never having read the international section of the newspaper? Lamar Alexander and his rustic lumberjack campaign shirts (custom made)?

Nixon and his wife Pat’s “cloth Republican” coat? Privileged, spoiled flyboy McCain, son and grandson of admirals, and his regular guy look?

Dan Quayle and his “potatoe”?

Former Sen. Roman Hruska and his plea that members of the Supreme Court should reflect all qualities, including mediocrity?

LAWRENCE MARTIN ON THE BIZARRE NOTION WE SHOULD CELEBRATE THE FOURTH OF JULY BECAUSE THERE IS A CANADIAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE

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

Lawrence Martin, this piece is a little pathetic.

I like Obama and wish him well, knowing full well no one can seriously alter the course of America's paranoid imperial policies.

After all, the combination of all the vested interests of the FBI, the CIA, the dozen other intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, America's Borgia-like wealthy clans, and its immense corporate interests reduce the voice of the people in an election to a little squib.

It's nice to see that charming smile at the White House, but it hardly compensates for all the things that are terribly wrong.

The Iraq withdrawal has turned into a game of words.

Fighting has intensified in Afghanistan.

America is busy interfering in Iran and lying about it.

Guantanamo continues, as do horrid places like Bagram Air Base.

The ugly laws of the Patriot Act continue.

Some military bureaucrat daily sits down to a control panel somewhere in the US and lines up a Predator Drone to fire Hellfire missiles down at some poor people in Pakistan who are promptly incinerated with no arrest, no trial, not even any proper charges. Then the operator happily goes to lunch, having done his morning’s work.

Israel got away with mass murder in Gaza, and now it continues to block entry even of building materials to help clean up the mess. More than a million tortured people and Obama doesn't say or do anything so far as we can see.

ONTARIO CONSERVATIVE HUDAK'S VERSION OF SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER

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

Hudak blubbering about Mike Harris sounds like the Ontario politics version of "Springtime for Hitler."

MORE HOT AIR ON THE WORKINGS OF PARLIAMENT FROM PRESTON MANNING

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

Preston Manning is personally responsible for bringing up Harper as his political protégé.

So far as I know, it is the only political act of substance for which Preston Manning can claim any legitimate credit in his entire lamentable career.

And it is precisely Mr. Harper's mean spirit, his divisive political practices, and his selective ethics that have altered our Parliament for the worse.

Now, that good old Preston is endowed with a pseudo-academic, mini-institute of his own - a personal propaganda platform, courtesy of oil money - he can play the philosopher, above the fray.

What a bad joke this man is.

THE GOVERNOR OF BIBLE-BELT SOUTH CAROLINA AND HIS GLANDS

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

This is just standard stuff in the Bible Belt.

Tiresome, really tiresome.

This idiot actually told us how he went to tell his mistress it was over, accompanied by "a spiritual advisor."

The problem, Dear Governor, is not in your spirit, it's in your glands.

AHMADINEJAD WON INDEED AND THE REAL SOURCE OF INTERFERENCE IN IRAN’S ELECTION IS LIKELY THE UNITED STATES

June 27, 2009

AHMADINEJAD WON INDEED AND THE REAL SOURCE OF INTERFERENCE IN IRAN’S ELECTION IS LIKELY THE UNITED STATES

John Chuckman

A recent article called “Ahmadinejad Won, Get Over It” by Flynt and Hillary Leverett is not the only source with serious credentials offering reasonable, non-sensational explanations for events around Iran’s presidential election.

Kaveh Afrasiabi, a scholar who once taught at Tehran University and is the author of several books, says many of the same things.

Close analysis of the election results gives absolutely no objective basis for making charges of a rigged election. Mousavi’s expected win – expected, that is, by the Western press and by Mousavi himself - never had any basis in fact.

Afrasiabi also tells us that Ahmadinejad is extremely popular with the poor in Iran, a very large constituency, and he tells us further that Ahmadinejad spent a great deal of time traveling through the country during his first term listening to them. Ahmadinejad is himself a man of fairly humble origins with a good deal of genuine sympathy for the poor.

Of course, the public in the West has been treated to a barrage of propaganda about Ahmadinejad, conditioned by countless disingenuous stories and editorials to regard him as the essence of evil, ready to stir up trouble at a moment’s notice. These perceptions, too, have no basis in fact.

Ahmadinejad is a highly educated man, ready and willing to communicate with leaders in the West, although given to poking fun at some of the shibboleths we hold to. His office as president is not a powerful one in an Iran where power is divided amongst several groups, just as it is in the United States. He has no war-making power.

Even his infamous statement about Israel – mistranslated consistently to make it sound terrible – was nothing more than the same kind of statement made by the CIA in its secret study predicting the peaceful end of today’s Israel in twenty years or the statement by Libya’s leader, Gaddafi, saying Israel would be drowned in a sea of Arabs. Unpleasant undoubtedly for some, the statement was neither criminal nor threatening when properly understood.

The post-election troubles in Iran definitely reflect the interference of security services from at least the United States and Britain. We have several serious pieces of evidence.

First, Iran discovered and arrested just recently a group with sophisticated bomb equipment from Britain. They were caught red-handed, although our press has chosen to be pretty much silent on the matter. Of course, we all recall the arrest of a group of fifteen British sailors a couple of years ago, an event treated in our press as the snatching of innocents on the high seas when in fact they were on a secret mission in disputed waters claimed by Iran.

Robert Fisk recently wrote an excellent piece about photocopies of what purported to be a confidential official government report to the head of state, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, regarding the election results. It attributed a ridiculously small share of the vote to Ahmadinejad and was somehow being waved by Mousavi’s followers all over the streets. It seems clearly invented as a provocation, much in the fashion of the famous “yellow cake” document before America’s invasion of Iraq.

We know that Bush committed several hundred million dollars towards a program creating instability in Iran and that Obama has never renounced the operation.
Iran, surrounded by threatening enemies and the daily recipient of dire threats from Israel and the United States, has absolutely no history of aggression: it has started no conflicts in its entire modern era, but naturally enough it becomes concerned about its security when threatened by nuclear-armed states.

Such threats from the United States are not regarded idly by anyone, coming as they do, from a nation occupying two nations of Western and Central Asia, a nation whose invasions have caused upwards of a million deaths and sent at least two million into exile as refugees.

It is a nation moreover that definitely threatened, behind the scenes, to use nuclear weapons against Afghanistan immediately after 9/11, helping end that threat being one of the main reasons for Britain’s joining the pointless invasion in the first place.

In assessing the genuine threats in the world, please remember what we all too often forget: the United States is the only nation ever actually to use nuclear weapons, twice, on civilians. It also came close to using them again in the early 1950s hysteria over communism – twice, once against China and once in a pre-emptive strike at the Soviet Union - and again later considered using them in Vietnam.

As for the other regular source of threats against, Israel, it is a nation which has attacked every neighbor that it has at one time or another. In the last two years alone, it has killed more people in Lebanon and Gaza than the number who perished in 9/11. It is also a secret nuclear power, having broken every rule and international law to obtain and assist in proliferating nuclear weapons.

Of course, there are many middle class people in Iran who would like a change of government. Such yearnings are no secret and exist everywhere in the world where liberal government is missing, including millions of Americans under years of George Bush and his motivating demon, Dick Cheney.

But saying that is not the same thing as saying that a majority of Iran’s people want a change in government or that the election was a fraud.

And remember, too, Iran had a democratic government more than half a century ago, that of Mohammed Mosaddeq, but it was overthrown in 1953 and the bloody Shah installed in its place by the very same governments now meddling in Iran, the United States and Britain.

THE FANTASY OF FIXING WHAT IS WRONG IN EDUCATION BEFORE IMPLEMENTING ONTARIO'S DAY CARE-KINDERGARTEN PROPOSAL

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

Government pretty much is incapable of correcting the serious problems of our public schools.

Only a dedicated, tough, and highly intelligent premier – an Obama type – could make anything real happen, and I sure do not see any prospect of such a politician coming to power.

The right wing tried reform and utterly failed: Mike Harris and the boys made a series of totally ineffectual changes, including that bad joke we call the literacy test, something McGuinty has kept only because it is a useful political tool manufacturing statistics that seem to show progress.

McGuinty has done nothing but literally throw money at the teachers' union to buy peace for his government while we pay the bills. He has asked and received nothing in return, and he is too weak a character to demand anything real.

The teachers’ union is responsible for the extremely high cost of running our schools, costs which mean there are few resources for improved facilities and expanded services.

Just one tiny example of many I could cite: substitute teachers in Ontario are paid the same rates as regular teachers, a totally excessive and unnecessary cost. Further our teachers in many places are entitled to nearly a month of sick days – this on a 9-month work year – and it is a common attitude to routinely take them, leaving taxpayers paying two salaries for one poorly-taught classroom.

Even McGuinty’s weak minister has commented on the huge costs of sick days in Ontario.

The only way to improve public schools is to make teachers accountable. Accountability is a basic principle we accept in almost all our institutions except public education.

We have some wonderful, dedicated teachers, but we have a great many poor, unmotivated, even unintelligent ones, and the entire structure of administration in education, from vice-principals to superintendents, pretty well comes from these ranks.

Most have never had serious management experience, and most have no concept of accountability. That is why we have a mess.

The kindergarten/day care proposal is a sound one – the first meaningful thing McGuinty has come up with for education, but it won’t happen. The teachers’ union is already attacking it, and if it gets its way, the program will be costly and ineffectual.

SLEAZY SARKOZY TELLS PEOPLE HOW THEY SHOULD DRESS - WITH HIS EMPHASIS ON ONE GROUP HE DISPLAYS CLEAR ANTI-MUSLIM PREJUDICE

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

What right does the president of a country have telling people how to dress? Or disparaging how they dress?

Since when in Western society is it acceptable to attack people for their religious practices?

Sarkozy is intellectual sleaze, playing up to widespread, ignorant anti-Muslim prejudice.

Would Sarkozy have opposed the French nuns who wore the most oppressive outfits only decades ago? Indeed, some still do.

Would Sarkozy oppose elaborate bridal gowns with veils?

What about the popular styles of the 1940s which included huge hats with veils, often large and elaborate veils?

Is he going to oppose Mennonite women for their backward clothing?

How about the dress of certain ultra-orthodox Jews whose outfits look like something from several centuries ago?

To see images of some of these things, here are some sites to give perspective:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_NtgXlrcvXZA/SdOdvLUhEfI/AAAAAAAAc6E/JQPP-9wqokk/s1600-h/nun.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_NtgXlrcvXZA/SaF4EqbXfuI/AAAAAAAAbgo/lIoS4v34VY4/s1600-h/Mennonites_R.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_NtgXlrcvXZA/SOUVIK_Yk6I/AAAAAAAAP8Q/HjPVxlDzHbE/s1600-h/MARY+WITHOUT+WORDS.jpg v

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_NtgXlrcvXZA/SIiw63c6GlI/AAAAAAAAO2s/7wiAsalGPCg/s1600-h/HEAD+SCARF+-Andrea-BeretScarf.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_NtgXlrcvXZA/SIixRnqWFCI/AAAAAAAAO3E/DfZZ4YlKGYw/s1600-h/NUNS+-+TWO.jpg

http://www.bestweddingdresses.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/singletier-20bridal-20veil.jpg

THE END OF KODACHROME

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

I too loved Kodachrome.

My picture library includes about 4,000 images on Kodachrome.

While long a holdout against digital photography, I finally went over to it when I thought the quality had reached a high level.

So I made my little contribution to Kodachrome's passing.

Still it is melancholy to see the end of such an extraordinarily fine product.

Kodachrome had a longer life in the finished slides than just about any other color film.

It was comparable to Technicolor for movies. Movies shot in Technicolor survived many decades for restoration, while other film stocks literally faded away, losing forever certain images.

Historical slides in Kodachrome from the 1930s are still good images. Other color films after only a few decades faded away.

IGNATIEFF'S MISSING THREE DECADES NOT EVEN THE GREATEST THING HE IS MISSING

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

Three decades in Canada is only part of what Ignatieff is missing.

Perhaps more important is his lack of any real contact or bond with people.

There is something, not just aristocratic, but almost autistic about Ignatieff.

He just does not reach the emotions because he just does not feel them.

Contrast him with a wonderfully earthy and charming politician like Chretien, and you feel there is nothing there.

Even in the sphere of the intellect, supposedly Ignatieff’s great strength, I find him surprisingly wanting.

Again, compare him to Trudeau whose brilliance shines in every photo and is burned into memory, and there is little there but mannered words and the indulgent remembrance of a well-connected family.

Ignatieff is altogether an unimpressive politician.

If you add his absence and long lack of interest to Canada, he becomes even more unappealing.

And if you add his past defense of torture, mass murder, and imperial brutishness, there is nothing there worth talking about.

This sad situation is made sadder still by the utterly soulless Harper, a robot with no personality and no sense of ethics, giving us nowhere to place a comforting vote of trust.
_______________________

"Whether Canada ends up as one national government or two national governments or several national governments, or some other kind of arrangement is, quite frankly, secondary in my opinion."

- Stephen Harper

Many thanks to the person above for posting this. Of course, we must also rememmber Harper supported America's mass murder in Iraq, and wanted us to join in the slaughter.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/chuckmancartoons/56297395/

NETANYAHU HAS SOFTENED HIS STANCE ON TWO STATES? I DON'T THINK SO

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

"Softens his stance" is inaccurate.

Obama has backed Netanyahu into something of a corner. Those who want genuine peace have always believed it can only come when the U.S. makes demands of Israel for all the immense subsidies it has poured into that state and all the unpleasant risk it has assumed in doing so.

Netanyahu's response is to say, "Okay, I'll mouth your phrases, but I’ll make them meaningless."

It’s a nasty game various governments of Israel have played a long time. The decades-long “peace process” has been only a way to gain time to absorb more Palestinian homes and farms and water minus the Palestinians. It really is a ploy which covers what may fairly be characterized as slow-motion ethnic-cleansing.

Netanyahu’s conditions are ridiculous to any fair-minded person.

First, you cannot speak of negotiation when you set a precondition like recognizing Israel.

Withholding recognition is one of the only bargaining chips the poor Palestinians have: it is a perfectly ordinary tactic in international affairs.

You cannot tell Palestinians they must give it up before negotiations.

Or rather, you can tell them that, but it amounts merely to another way of saying you don't accept a two-state solution, another way of buying time to grind away at the poor Palestinians and what little they have.

Besides, how do you recognize Israel when its borders change almost weekly? Where is Israel?

It certainly is not the Israel of the various 20th century agreements underlying Israel’s birth, all documents showing two roughly equal states. Nor is it the Israel of the Green Line.

Perhaps most important, how do you recognize Israel as “the Jewish state” when nearly 20% of its population is not Jewish?

It is an absurd demand, and deliberately meant to be absurd.

To all fair-minded thinkers, the genuine barrier to peace just could not be clearer.

ONTARIO'S PROPOSED SYSTEM OF COMBINING DAY CARE WITH KINDERGARDEN IN SCHOOLS

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

This is a great idea, but it won't happen.

First, for now, Dalton the Magnificent has spent Ontario silly on GM and Chrysler.

Second, and more important for the long term, the teachers' union will never let this happen on its turf.

Already, the head of the teachers' union has spoken against it.

The burdens the teachers' union would place on a program like this would make its costs impossibly high.

Until a politician is ready to take on our Public Teachers' Guild, education can show no growth and imagination, precisely what this program promises.

____________________________

"...let them be with their moms (or dads)."

Comments like this show no understanding outside the writer's very limited life experience.

You might think it was 1954, and Ozzie and Harriet were hanging around the house all day, just waiting to make Kool-Aid and help with homework.

Seventy percent of women work today.

We also have "families" where children are almost things tolerated rather than precious objects, mothers who've had children with three or four men and are not prepared to devote themselves to mothering. This is a major problem in neighborhoods like Jane and Finch where so much hideous violence has happened.

A program like this would help them all.

__________________________

"I'm stunned....."

Yes, Mike, you are.

ON OBAMA'S NEED TO LEVEL WITH AMERICANS ABOUT THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

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

Jeffrey Simpson,

This is one fine piece of writing.

You have stated the situation with remarkable clarity.

Were I to sum the American situation up, I would say it is necessary for that tired old political bromide, the centerpiece of so many bloated speeches by local Congressmen at Fourth of July picnics, the American Dream, to be put into a well-earned retirement.

I think it safe to say, problems so long in their creation, with habits of thinking so deeply ingrained, are not going to be solved in a brief period.

The so-called green shoots we see may be nothing more than fragile plants, force-fed with fertilizer, destined to shrivel.

We may well be in for a long, dark period of adjustment.

Unfortunately, as with its many pointless bloody wars, the U.S., owing to its sheer mass, necessarily drags the whole world into the mess it has created for itself.

Any solution pumping countless billions into the economy and pushing banks and others to make credit available is just more of the same decades-long behavior.

Rather than taking the hit necessary to wring out the economy, a huge platter of more of the same is being served up.

I'm not sure this is the right thing to do, but the right thing is too painful for any politician to make policy.

In a sense, I think this points to an even larger issue, and that is the question over the very ability of a people like Americans to govern themselves sensibly, rather than a constant lurching this way and that, both in domestic and foreign affairs.

HATE SPEECH

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

The very concept of hate speech is a dangerous one, smacking of Maoism.

It is so clearly an Orwellian concept open to endless abuse and no generally agreed definitions.

The expression can be used as a fair casual description: it is one I use to describe the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter.

But what it represents should never be regarded as a crime.

At the point when hate speech actually becomes threatening or dangerous as opposed to unpleasant and ugly, we have the entire criminal and civil law to deal with it.

Those who advocate the increasing criminalization of speech are always found, upon examination, to be acting out of special interests, not out of society’s great interests.

The very idea that you could jail someone for saying something is repellant to a free society.

To avoid having the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter assuming too great an influence in Canadian society, our schools need to do a proper job of teaching, by words and example, what it is to have a civil and humane society. I am afraid, increasingly, they fail in this task.

CONSERVATIVE MINISTER LISA RAITT'S ABSURD APOLOGY

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

It was an unpleasant melodrama.

It is simply idiotic to appeal to people on the basis that your relative died after you've shown such insensitivity.

If Ms. Raitt's personal experience had been so moving, why did it not inform her future speech?

Ridiculous.

This is American bathos politics at its worst.

And Ms. Raitt is an unpleasant narcissist.

No wonder Harper likes her.

A SILLY COLUMN ATTRIBUTING AFRICA'S PROBLEMS IN GETTING INVESTMENT TO NONSENSE ABOUT THE DARK CONTINENT

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

First, Moyo is right, aid almost never helps.

There are many reasons why this is so, including the fact that much of aid is consciously given as an ongoing bribe to get votes in international forums, to bribe corrupt officials into keeping business interests safe, to support the vast waste of militaries, and to supply good jobs to careerist aid workers from the West.

There are good aid projects, but they are always led by dedicated people and they usually are under-funded. The reality of politics just does not support such efforts over the other projects serving the purposes above.

But more importantly, I completely disagree that investment doesn't go to Africa because of some nonsense about the "dark continent."

That is just excuse-making.

Investment avoids places with poor government, places with backward laws, places with overwhelming corruption, places with instability, and places with civil disorder.

Those are circumstances that prevail through much, if not most, of Africa.

Would the writer invest substantial personal savings in enterprises in any of these places as opposed to investments in stable Western economies?

Of course not.

AN INAPPROPRIATE DEFENSE OF SARAH KRAMER AT ONTARIO'S E-HEALTH

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

There is no defense for this woman who abused her responsibilities.

You cannot call yourself a manager if you don't question some of the ridiculous expenses she did not question.

Also, her excuse for the exorbitantly-paid consultants ($3000/day in a number of cases) was the idea of getting up to speed rapidly.

But that approach - throwing money at something - is the McGuinty approach to education, a guaranteed failure.

We have the testimony of one honest consultant who told us it was all so badly organized, he was sitting on his hands while being paid. He quit, but clearly most did not.

Of course, she was not alone.

McGuinty's Minister in this portfolio is a pathetic man. When he opens his mouth, you understand why things went so badly wrong.

He should be dismissed too.

In general, there are open applications on the Internet for this purpose which may be used free.

There are also other provinces already with systems. We could easily borrow or adapt.

The whole enterprise is a scandal, much like our public education system's failure to get the basics done.

WHO SAYS "GOD" MORE BUSH OR OBAMA?

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

Bush did say God told him to do several things.

John O'Farrell should do his own research on his question, rather than expecting others to do it for him. I'm sure Google would get you a hatful of such quotes in a few minutes.

In general, you cannot get at the truth of a matter like this by just adding up citations.

American presidents must bring God into their speech, going back to Washington, who was a deist, or Jefferson, who was altogether a skeptic. There is just too big a pool of Puritan descendents to ignore.

After all, only about fifty years ago, Congress added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance, itself already representing a rather obnoxious, fascist-tinged practice.

It is very clear that Obama is a sophisticated man, a genuine intellectual and one who questions things.

It was equally clear that Bush is a dull man no one would call an intellectual, one moreover whose idea of sophistication was to dance naked on a bar room table after drinking lots of beer(something he actually did).

I don't believe that Bush was any more religious than Obama, but he cheaply, very consciously exploited religious feelings of fundamentalists at every turn, having been advised that it was the thing to do.

When Obama mentions God, he clearly does it in the Washington tradition.

THE CASE OF CONSERVATIVE MINISTER RAITT'S EMBARRASSING RECORDED CONVERSATIONS

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

Sorry, Ms. Blatchford, I don't think you can convincingly defend Ms. Raitt.

You and other critics of the public's reaction miss the point entirely.

Yes, it was a private conversation.

Yes, Ms. Raitt undoubtedly knows about cancer.

Yes, Ms. Raitt may be an intelligent person.

No, use of the word "sexy" in and of itself is not horrible.

It is the total sense of this conversation that is wrong. We, virtually all of us, know that it is wrong.

It displays a truly callous monomaniacal ego at work, thinking only of the career advantages she can reap from the situation, not the kind of person most Canadians want making important decisions in government.

Ms. Raitt is not unique in politics with the narcissistic quality of her personality, but she has been caught and documented.

Even if Harper doesn't dump her and she doesn't resign, I think she will remain damaged goods as far as national politics go.