IS STEPHEN HARPER'S SANITY CRUMBLING? CANADA'S AFGHANISTAN COMMITMENT - PLUS WORDS ON CANADIANS VS AMERICANS IN PRINCIPLES AND HANDLING TRUTH

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

I think there is a real possibility that Harper’s sanity is crumbling.

First, we had his troubling ramblings about fighting anti-Semitism as a defense for his abject failure at United Nations diplomacy.

Then, we had his economically-ignorant defense at the G-20 of America's debasing its currency, truly bizarre since he has a graduate degree in economics and is known as rather a Chicago-school man.

Now, we have his claim for unilateral powers over the armed forces. I did think the Governor-General was Commander-in-Chief, and I did think Parliament always was the ultimate decision-maker in our society.

There are late-onset forms of certain serious mental illnesses from which he may be suffering, or this could just be a form of megalomania that has set in.

Whether that is the case or not, I would think he is under terrible stress, his entire political career being widely regarded as unsuccessful beyond the mechanics of holding onto office through tricks and games.

He must realize that he will never get a majority government, something I am sure he has worked tirelessly towards, and he must know most Canadians do not trust, or even particularly like, him.

He also must realize he has not managed to build a Conservative Party the population regards well, his cabinet being mainly controlled yes-men and intellectual mediocrities, each afraid of Harper’s reported ugly private rages.

And he has failed utterly to establish a Conservative brand for ethics, having been caught time and again indulging in shady and unethical and even nasty-child practices.

On the international scene, his years have sent Canada's reputation tumbling, and even he must be aware of that.

It is an unwelcome test of the strength of our political institutions if we can survive with dignity the assault on our traditions Harper represents.
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Erika from America:

Canadians "aren't that principled..."?

Oh, my, Americans are so principled.

I think we saw that at Abu Ghraib, didn’t we?

And at Guantanamo?

And when General Dostum, America's Northern Alliance friend, drove 3,000 Taleban prisoners in batches in sealed vans out onto the desert to suffocate while American soldiers watched and picked their noses?

And in all the trail of lies leading to an illegal invasion in Iraq, something which should make members of Bush cabinet subject to trial as war criminals?

Oh, and the holocaust in Vietnam reflected proudly on those principles, didn’t it?

Slaughtering 3 million. Using napalm. Torturing. Throwing men from helicopters. Sending in nightcrawler special forces to villages to cut people’s throats in their sleep: 20,000 village leaders in good old Operation Phoenix.

You sure can't beat that for principled.

How about the toppling of the peaceful government of Cambodia, allowing the Khmer Rouge to take over and murder a million more?

How about the overthrow of many democratic governments with which the US did not agree? Guatemala, Haiti. Chile. Iran. And more.

How about America's not speaking out one meaningful word as Israel slowly starves one and a half million in Gaza today?

“Canadians can't handle the truth.”

I think the writer has been watching too many Jack Nicholson movies.

It is clearly, overwhelmingly Americans who cannot “handle the truth,” including of course the fact that their sense of entitlement and poor regulation have sent the world tumbling into an economic crisis.

But don’t worry, America will climb out, not by passing reasonable measures or needed new taxes, but by debasing its currency, just as it did after Vietnam, leaving the whole world “holding the bag” as it were.

“The widespread sentiment is that it's an American war,” but dear Erika from America that’s exactly what it is, a pointless American war, one in a long string of pointless wars since WWII.

AN EDITORIAL SPEAKING AGAINST IRAN'S BEING INCLUDED ON A COMMITTE CONCERNED WITH WOMEN'S RIGHTS: MORE PROPAGANDA TO DEMONIZE 80 MILLION PEOPLE

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

Oh please.

Neither is India's common practice of bride burning.

And its common practice of arranged marriages for young girls (sometimes twelve years old) to old well-off men who give money to a poor family.

And there is India’s terrible tradition towards widows, often the same unfortunate young girls who were pushed into an arranged marriage with an old man.

The widows are treated as unwelcome living corpses, having to dress certain ways, live certain ways, and not allowed to remarry, even though they may be in the prime of life. Suicide is a common way out of this hell.

In many countries in South America we have the most horrendous treatment of women. Young migrant women in Mexico have been murdered by the hundreds with no effort to solve the crimes. South America’s machismo culture treats women in the home as virtual slaves and even in some places makes women alone on the street fair game for rape.

In Thailand, dirt-poor families not infrequently sell young girls into prostitution, a practice providing the allure for the West’s thousands of sexual-tourists there.

Women in Ultra Orthodox Jewish communities, a throwback culture to another century, are treated as possessions, not being able to divorce abusive husbands without losing their children plus suffering many more inequities.

The position of women in fundamentalist Christian communities, including the Mennonites, is an example of the same kind of throwback culture, a throwback to a time when women had no real voice in almost anything.

Then there’s the glorious working of the Catholic Church in many poor parts of the world, and even in those not so poor, a long tale of abuse and perversion.

The list goes on and on, especially for third-world countries.

It is a matter of historical record that women only receive fair treatment with sound, long-term economic development. It was only in the 20th century that a Canadian woman could vote, but even more importantly, the banks would not even let a woman have an account without a husband’s approval not that many decades ago.

You seem to have selected out Iran for purely propaganda purposes, Iran being America's flavor-of-the-month to castigate and threaten.

CANADA'S HARPER CREDITS A PHONY FIGHT AGAINST ANTI-SEMITISM TO EXCUSE HIS GOVERNMENT'S ABJECT FAILURE IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS AT THE U.N.

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

There are serious problems with Harper's statement.

First, he is trying to justify his government's failure to secure the Security Council seat we, by all precedents, should have received. In a word, he is taking no responsibility for his poor administration of foreign affairs.

Second, Harper attempts to put himself in the heroic position of having fought anti-Semitism. This is dishonest, hypocritical, and without ethics.

Just consider that Harper effectively implies that others who receive temporary seats may be anti-Semitic, and just so Canada in the past.

Is that way of explaining yourself an example of diplomacy? Or is it yet one more example of the very incompetence which lost Canada the seat?

There is yet one more flaw in logic contained in Harper's words.

He is implicitly equating one-sided support for Israel with fighting anti-Semitism.

That is not just incorrect, it is dishonest.

Israel is a state, and if it wants to be regarded as a state like any other state, it must behave by the rules which apply to the community of states.

Criticizing Israel for its often brutal and unjust behavior has nothing whatever to do with anti-Semitism.

Saying that it does is the shabby trick of Israel’s paid apologists.

Defending Israel against warranted criticism is not defending the world against anti-Semitism. It is the repugnant embrace of a dirty trick.

It also reflects an attitude with which most Canadians do not agree.

Canadians are largely fair-minded about the Middle East, and Canada’s policies and statements for decades, until this narrow-minded minority government, always have been balanced and fair-minded.

Harper has been quite ugly on the subject of Israel’s behavior. I do not know why, whether he is just so prejudiced against the rights of Palestinians or whether he is being craven to elicit campaign contributions from the powerful special interest groups which advocate a one-sided view of Israel.

Recall, after Israel’s deliberate targeting of UN inspectors doing their duty in Southern Lebanon, including a brave Canadian officer staying at his post, Harper, instead of criticizing the killings, criticized the UN for having the inspectors there.
Recall Peter Kent, second-rank minister of no distinction, announcing unilaterally in a speech that Canada was ready to go to war on behalf of Israel, making an extreme and provocative policy statement without having consulted Parliament or the people of Canada.

And recall Harper having previously asserted that Canadians who criticized Israel were anti-Semitic. Who granted the head of our government, a minority one at that, the right to call honest citizens ugly names?

Harper truly demonstrates in this matter what a twisted and deceitful person he is.
_____________________________

If we are a decent society, then it goes without saying that we disapprove of all forms of bigotry.

So why this selecting out one form of bigotry, anti-Semitism, for special mention over and over?

The very language of many who comment reflects this odd phenomenon, people often saying they are against bigotry or prejudice AND anti-Semitism.

I think this is so because of the constant effort at a form of reverse prejudice: people feel they need to cover themselves against the charge of anti-Semitism explicitly, even though they do not say they are not bigoted against blacks or against Arabs or against Catholics or anything else you can mention.

All bigotry is actually a form of superstition, and no rational, clear-thinking person indulges in it.

Bigotry certainly includes reverse prejudice.

THE DOLLAR'S REIGN IN THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END - A MAJOR ECONOMIC PROBLEM FOR AMERICA NOT EVEN DISCUSSED THERE - PLUS OTHER ECONOMIC PROBLEMS

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY JEREMY WARNER IN THE TELEGRAPH

This is an excellent explanatory piece on one of the most important economic realities facing the world.

Sadly, in the United States the level of discourse in politics is so consistently low and juvenile, people do not appreciate this looming situation, and their cowardly politicians are not about to explain it to them.

We should never forget the role that pointless and destructive wars play.

Its current two wars have achieved nothing useful to the world's economy, being essentially a kind of gigantic consumption for which America has not the legitimate means to pay. War has been America's junk food since the 1950s.

Were America functioning the way most countries must function - that is, paying for what they consume and not borrowing to pay for what they consume - I believe we would see a much more judicious use of its Frankenstein military.

Indeed, the monster would be cut down to size more in keeping with America's own defense and proper interests, not insane crusades all over the globe based solely on the prejudices of American voters and narrow special interests.

The expenses it put into killing three million Vietnamese and toppling a stable government in Cambodia decades ago were colossal at the time. After that hugely destructive and pointless war, Nixon devalued the currency.

The whole world was forced into paying for America's obtuse policies.
_____________________________

"Whatever we think of America - we know and trust her globally far more than the regime running China as a one party state with vast swathes of the country and activity closed to any sort of observer. "

I don't see any factual basis for that statement. It's purely emotional, a result of being comfortable with years of shared culture.

The fact is for all the pose of openness, American society at the top - where it counts in terms of power and influence - is not really very open.

Many secrets remain secrets virtually forever, even long after the supposedly mandated time of their release.

The motivations of America's establishment are often not clear, and we receive only fluff explanations for major actions which affect the entire world.

For example, the invasion of Iraq has not yet been honestly explained.

If you are familiar with the details of 9/11, you know that complex event has never been explained.

We still do not know why or exactly how President Kennedy was killed. The official investigations are discredited in scores of ways.

What about the very legitimacy of American governments?

Kennedy won through vote fraud.

Lyndon Johnson's career in Texas started with vote fraud.

Bush won through vote fraud in Florida in 2000.

All national elections in the US are largely decided by money. This recent Mid-term election saw mountains of cash spent, about $4 billion dollars. Those contributors are buying influence and access, things which ordinary Americans are pretty well excluded from today. If you live in any major state, you have as much chance of talking to your Senator as you have talking to the President: zero.

The American intelligence establishment now consists of at least 16 agencies. Only recently a glimmer of information about its budget was revealed. It's now at least $80 billion a year. Only a decade ago, CIA was typically said to cost $30 billion.

That dwarfs everything else on the planet, just as today America's military spending exceeds the total of all other nations on earth combined. What are they doing with that colossal amount? What is the long term effect of such immense power, especially when combined with economic vulnerabilities?

Every phone call and e-mail in America is recorded and run through super-computers. The same for Britain or Canada. The FBI has the authority to go to public libraries and check what people are reading. You can be excluded from flying by the mere adding of your name to a list, and there is almost no way to remove it. Privacy has been invaded as almost never before.

Eisenhower warned of the Military-Industrial Complex, and it has been a growing problem in a free society for decades, but today its threat has reached a new order of magnitude.

Now we have a set of super economic problems facing this top-heavy power structure. It is not at all clear that its responses will be favorable to the world. Rather, the reverse is very much likely.

We know what Lord Acton said of power. Never was there a greater test of his observation than what we see in America today.
___________________________________

“It will start a civil war in America in my opinion because the middle class is going to be wiped out in the coming dollar collapse.

“The anger and resentment expressed by the Tea Party people will be a drop in the ocean.”

The US middle class - at least the large, more modest portion of it - has been effectively in decline for decades. Real wages have steadily fallen.

America’s immense boom after WW II was based on all its competitors being prostrate and on its factories having only just become gigantic to serve a huge military. But one by one, the competitors have returned and new ones have emerged.

The myth of American economic magic spun during the 1940-50s is beginning to dissolve – what American politicians love to call “the American Dream.” The rude fact is that America is not really very competitive in many economic activities, and nothing is harder than coming down from the kind of high Americans have long been on.

People were able to offset this reality by such adjustments as both husband and wife working and moving to cheaper houses in the suburbs.

But these patches are pretty well exhausted.

Further, a tremendously important economic issue not discussed here is the future climb in energy prices once the economic downturn is over. We will see oil at well over $100/barrel again.

The growth of China and India mean nothing but immense increases in the demand for energy, as well as other vital commodities.

All those poor lower middle-class Americans out in the suburbs are going to find their adaptation no longer works.

When oil a while back temporarily reached nearly $150/barrel briefly, we saw the beginnings of a revolution in America. Large car sales crashed, and large cars - pick-up trucks and SUVs are essential parts of the suburban life formula.

When such prices are sustained, people will be dumping their sprawling suburban homes which require a great deal of energy to heat and cool and to reach from work.

America's most ferocious home growth for years has been in the American South West, but those homes require large amounts of energy to cool through semi-desert climates.

America’s military spending too has been a terrible investment. No economic activity is more wasteful than building expensive hardware in huge quantities basically to rust. And its very existence is a constant lure to its use in wars that add even more waste.

OBAMA SIGNALS HE IS READY FOR COMPROMISE AFTER MID-TERM DEFEAT - WHAT THE ELECTION REALLY MEANS: AMERICAN DEMOCRACY IS ENDANGERED

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

I just want to know what else has Obama done since day one other than compromise?

All of his policies for two years have been compromises, some quite shabby ones in my view, notably his expanding the war in Afghanistan, his health-care monstrosity, and his surrender to Israel on his early demand for genuine peace efforts.

The truth is that this election is one more demonstration that Americans simply cannot govern themselves rationally. Indeed, it provides evidence that American democracy should be on the list of endangered species. It was a huge bought-and-paid-for operation, costing billions, leaving contributors privately glowing and chuckling about their success in getting what they wanted while leaving ordinary people thinking they have actually done something for themselves.

Much of the American electorate is gullible and poorly informed with no critical press left, and they respond to empty slogans and deluges of meaningless advertising. They respond to people like the leader of the silly Tea Party or Sarah Palin who are no more informed or helpful than Jimmy Swaggert or Rex Humbard would be.

The Republican who will become Speaker of the House actually cried in front of the cameras, a pathetic performance. His crying wasn’t about anything of substance or compassion, it was about his achieving personal success. Jimmy Swaggert puts on the same act when he’s passing the collection plate. This is how a great country governs itself?

The Supreme Court gave a decision on campaign funding that is genuinely dangerous, and this campaign shows just why. Ignorant rhetoric prevailed, and genuine public discontent was channeled into directions where it can not possibly shake the nation’s establishment.

I am disappointed in Obama, although I never expected huge changes, but I am even more disappointed in America falling for tired rhetoric and giving no clear thought to the future.

Sarah Palin, the Tea Party – it’s all been done before. They represent nothing but a series of big feel-good meeting by political evangelists moving their tent crusades across the countryside, themselves paid handsomely for their efforts, the whole effort generously paid for by interests whose objectives they do not even understand.

How many times in my lifetime have I heard the ridiculous pseudo-radical expression "We're taking back the country!" rehashed? Well, in this election, it was the forces of wealth and militarism who took the country back from the threat of widespread popular discontent.

Of course, the taxes needed in America are now out of the question. Taxes are un-American, even when you are literally swimming in debt.

Never mind buckling down to hard work and sacrifice. Never mind recognizing the needs of the future. “You can have it all, and have it now because you are an American!” is the message embraced.

Stupid, surely, and on a grand scale.
____________________________

“The People of America are now back in control of their Congress, it is no longer controlled by special interest groups with hidden agendas.

It was funny watching the Dictator being humbled by the People. Obama will learn he has no power at all. It was a great day when FREEDOM came.

I wonder how the turn out was . I bet it was way over 90% of US voters!”

That is an unbelievably uninformed comment, but it does nicely demonstrate what the election represents: slogans with no content and complete lack of genuine information.

Actually not only was the turnout not high, it is a different pool of people to those who vote in presidential elections, as it always is for mid-terms.

The Dictator?

Well, using that term is pretty much a confession by the writer to an adolescent mentality or just plain paranoia.

By the way, the good old American people lost control of their Congress ages ago to the moneyed lot who pay the campaign bills.

One fact is certain, this was the most expensive election ever done.

Corporate and special interest money poured into this election as never before thanks to an idiotic, anti-democratic ruling by the Supreme Court about campaign funding.

The moron Tea Party itself was funded by the billionaire Koch brothers. It is anything but a grassroots movement.

A WRITER SAYS AMERICANS ARE NOT STUPID BUT ANGRY FOR MID-TERM ELECTIONS : I BEG TO DIFFER

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN ARTICLE BY TOBY HARNDEN IN THE TELEGRAPH

There are two basic kinds of stupidity, Mr Harnden.

There is the original sense of the word, meaning a lack of intelligence.

There is no reason to suppose that the frequency distribution of IQs in America is much different to that anywhere else.

So, in that sense, yes, Americans are not stupid.

But the word has at least one other basic meaning, and that pertains to the holding of beliefs or views which appear to thoughtful people to have been devised by those who are stupid because their full implications are destructive.

America, having spent countless billions of dollars on two pointless wars and having caused the world financial crunch through a lack of any financial discipline in their laws, the last a reflection of the "I want it all and I want it now" attitude which dominates the society, is, very much, in this second sense characterized fairly as stupid.

Millions of lives disrupted all over the Western world because Americans insisted on buying their three-car garage homes with no down payments and with the legal ability to walk away from the mortgage when the price fell after purchase.

An entire generation of people in Iraq having their lives ruined with no jobs and even still many with no clean water or dependable electricity. A million dead, two or three million refugees, and countless cripples – all to no good purpose? Now that must be regarded as extremely stupid.

And how will America pay for a great deal of this destruction and havoc? Certainly not by reaching into its pockets for additional taxes.

My God, taxes are un-American. No, America will exploit its unique position as having the world’s main reserve currency. It will inflate and default on its obligations to billions of people, just as it did after the equally pointless war in Vietnam, and just as it did in the financial crisis.

Now a man of extremely mediocre intelligence was responsible for a great deal of this, and today we have a woman, not even of mediocre intelligence, barking at podiums, being paid millions, and being talked about as a candidate for the presidency.

That surely reflects a kind of profound stupidity.

I am disappointed in Obama, although I never expected huge changes, but I am even more disappointed in America falling for the same tired rhetoric and giving no clear thought to the future.

Sarah Palin, the Tea Party – it’s all been done before. Its nothing but a big feel-good meeting by political evangelists moving their tent crusades across the countryside.

Never mind, buckling down to hard work and sacrifice. Never mind recognizing the needs of the future. “You can have it all, and have it now!” is the message embraced.

Stupid, surely, and on a grand scale.

RAPE IN IRAN'S PRISONS IS THE CRUELLEST TORTURE ? AN UNINFORMED WRITER OFFERING MORE DEMONIZATION OF IRAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN ARTICLE BY KATE ALLEN IN THE TELEGRAPH

Sorry, Kate, you only show how uninformed you are.

Rape is the common experience of prisons everywhere.

If you want to dig into the facts, rather than making meaningless comments, you will find men are raped regularly in British prisons, those especially holding the hard criminals.

In the United States, rape is the unspoken part of the sentence.

The establishment has always used the fear around that fact to intimidate prisoners rather than working to solve the problem.

But I'm sure you don't really care to get at the facts because your article is intended as just one more piece of propaganda to demonize Iran.

THE NEED FOR SEPARATING THE ART FROM THE PERSONAL VIEWS OF THE ARTIST: THE CASE OF DIRECTOR GODDARD AND HIS SPECIAL OSCAR

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN ARTICLE BY LYSIANE GAGNON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

One does not like to read such clear statements of prejudice as those quoted for Goddard, but this article completely misses important perspective.

In the arts and creative fields, extreme temperaments and eccentric views are perhaps more common than not.

Richard Wagner, the great composer, was an extreme bigot, but we still honor his music.

American poet Ezra Pound was also an extreme bigot, and his poetry is still read.

Winston Churchill in the course of his long career said some truly hateful things about other groups.

Martin Luther, translator of the Bible and religious revolutionary, wrote things as vicious as anyone in history, but his name is honored in countless churches.

Abraham Lincoln - yes, the great liberator - had a low opinion of blacks.

And just so Thomas Jefferson, author of the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.

What are we to say of great figures like Sergei Eisenstein or Dmitri Shostakovitch who worked dutifully under Stalin, murderer of millions?

We even make heroes of some figures whose hatreds we've forgotten: one such was Sir Thomas More, a man who actually fiercely enjoyed burning alive those who did not agree with his views.

The list is almost endless.

Goddard was a great director. I do not see how honoring the body of his work says anything about his prejudiced views.

ARE WE LOSING THE BATTLE AGAINST BULLYING IN SCHOOLS? ANOTHER INSIPID AND USELESS ARTICLE ON THE SUBJECT

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

I truly do not know why anyone writes anything about bullying anymore, except for personal publicity or reward or just taking credit for being on the side of the angels.

Almost all of the stuff purchased at considerable expense and robotically disseminated by the school boards is of that nature.

This piece of pulp fiction by Erin Andersson is just one more large serving of the same unhelpful stuff. It is filled with arguable assertions and incorrect statements which reflect the dogmas of the Church of True Believers in Public School Ethics.

“Zero-tolerance policies on fighting, as cases in Canada have shown, do not solve the problem either, often leading to punishment without investigation, and little follow-up.”

An absolutely false assertion: zero-tolerance on violence was an excellent policy whose effects would make our schools safer places and benefit society in the long term.

It was dropped for one reason only: a disproportionate number of those treated under the policy came from a particular ethnic group, the false assumption for dropping it being that the policy was unfairly employed.

Dropping the policy made teachers and innocent students immediately more vulnerable to the small percentage of people who are violent.

“Research consistently shows that bullying is linked to depression, poor school performance and anxiety, for both victim and perpetrator.”

Here is the classic use of “research says” to bolster a pathetic argument. Of course bullying is related to mental problems, but then so are almost all forms of crime. Tests have repeatedly shown that prison populations are full of people with serious mental and emotional problem.

So do we stop arresting and imprisoning people for crimes? Of course not.

And just so, violence and bullying in schools.

“When left unchecked, bullies can destroy lives…”

Another insipid bromide. Of course violence destroys lives. Isn’t that the very meaning of violence?

The problem in our schools is easily understood, but not so easily corrected: no one is responsible for anything. No one even wants to assume responsibility. Acts of bullying occur every day in plain sight and are ignored. Teachers and principals and superintendents are afraid of parents who are themselves bullies.

So they set no enforceable standards and speak with the kind of psycho-babble terms and meaningless educationese with which this article is replete.

When a robber assaults you in your home or store, you want the police, and you want the courts to dispense justice. And that is just what the victims of true bullies want, only they do not get it, learning from their painful experience that there is no justice nor agreed-upon way of behaving in society. That is a mighty poor lesson to be teaching.

I think if we are not prepared to do what it takes to protect students from bullies, we should just shut up. It truly is tiresome to read useless, thoughtless stuff like this article.

THE BLOODY AND POINTLESS IRAQ WAR AS LIBERAL INTERVERVENTIONISM? GOOD GOD WHAT A SHABBY EFFORT TO DISGUISE MASS MURDER

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

"The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 is a classic case of doing bad by trying to do good. We can’t rescue people from themselves."

Another thoughtless piece, packed with frightful ethical concepts, from Ms Wente, the Globe's reigning champion in churning out such stuff.

"Liberal interventionism" is a created term to make America's unacceptable behavior seem more appropriate.

There can never be anything "liberal" - in the truest historic meaning of the word - about dropping cluster bombs on people or using white phosphorus on people or torturing prisoners.

You cannot bomb people into democracy. Just steady economic growth and a growing middle class are the requirements for democracy as centuries of history clearly demonstrate, and Iraq was on that path with one of the most prosperous and advanced economies in the Arab world. Now, instead, it is a shambles.

America's intention never was to "rescue" Iraqis.

Iraq was invaded to eliminate Israel's most implacable foe, hardly the business of the United States. The invasion decision was unquestionably influenced too by Bush Junior’s psychological need to top what Bush pere had done – a lifelong theme for the pathetic Bush and the kind of motivation that all serious readers of history know plays a role in events.

There was the matchless opportunity of the cover provided by the invasion of Afghanistan too, offering an opportunity to blur facts and operate in public confusion. After all, Hitler used the chaos of the invasion of Russia to begin the Holocaust.

The invasion was covered also by the Nazi-like ideas of Condi Rice with her “We’re hearing the birth pangs of a new Middle East,” amidst the screams of hundreds of thousands dying and their country and culture being destroyed.

An entire generation of Iraqis are doomed to live with no jobs, little electricity, and poor water plus a million pounds of depleted uranium dust.

All thoughtful people knew they were being lied to at the time.

Ms. Wente herself was very much a booster for the bloody effort, a big booster, and you’d be hard put to find any columnist who like her is a regular apologist for Israel’s excesses who didn’t sing hymns to America’s blood bath.

All as pointless as the three million murdered in Vietnam.

Again, for readers who've nor seen it, here is the reality of Ms. Wente at the time of the mass murder in Iraq:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/the-iraq-wars-trashiest-piece-of-propaganda/

OMAR KHADR AS A LUCKY YOUNG MAN? ONLY A MORALLY-OBTUSE BRUTE COULD WRITE THAT

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

"Omar Khadr is a lucky young man. He is lucky to be entitled to Western justice..."

Even for Margaret Wente, this is perhaps a new low.

Lucky young man?

Ideologue parents push him into war at fifteen?

Shot twice, in the back, by Americans?

Taken to Guantanamo against all international conventions?

His first years in isolation without any contact or representation?

Tortured many times?

Part of his torture consisted of making him sit in uncomfortable positions with raw wounds?

Being forced to appear before a kangaroo court, which has no proper jurisdiction?

Being forced into confessing to something he did not do?

More than one-third of his life in that hellhole?

A bright boy deprived of education?

His country's government too afraid of Washington to insist on his rights?

Ms Wente has a very odd idea of lucky.

I should remind readers of how bizarre Ms Wente's thoughts about children have been in the past, just so long as they were Islamic children:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/the-iraq-wars-trashiest-piece-of-propaganda/

ROB FORD'S VICTORY AS TORONTO MAYOR PART OF A LARGER ZEITGEIST? NO - JUST LOCALS TIRED OF BLOWHARDS AND COSTS

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY GARY MASON IN THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

Mr. Mason offers up a steaming plate of political garbage: there is no larger zeitgeist involved in Toronto’s election.

The impetus behind Ford's victory was local: people were tired of years of empty windbag talk, many new taxes, and a city that in terms of what cities are about pretty much went down instead of up.

Fleets of garbage trucks burn diesel fuel down the 401 everyday carrying away Toronto’s garbage - now there's something to be proud of.

Most of Toronto's high-rises have no recycling program - another source of pride.

A windbag mayor who wasted time on pet schemes like killing the island airport - a perfectly good enterprise creating jobs and services and making the waterfront more complex and interesting.

Violence in the streets with people - unprecedented in Toronto - being shot downtown, and a mayor who wonders ineffectually about kids becoming killers. There are genuine born killers and we have some now, dangerous morons carrying loaded guns to school and to parties.

An expensive new garbage collection system that leaves Toronto's thousands of tiny semi-detached homes with sets of stupid-looking wheel-bins permanently on the front porch or in the front yard - a truly ugly and costly solution when there were far more elegant ones. Plus a fleet of costly new trucks so collectors don't even have to lift bags.

An ineffective police chief who has more than once been treated with contempt by his own officers, who then received no proper punishment for doing so. This included their showing up at a city hall rally in uniform, against orders, creating a clear threat to civilian government. It also included out-of-control cops during the G20 who were never corrected or reprimanded. Where was the mayor’s voice on the G20 fiasco?

A mayor full of puff-piece stuff about "vision" who in fact has left dirty streets, potholes everywhere, and many sad episodes of incompetence - all the while taxes raced upward.

There is no meaningful project in the city displaying the fabled vision. Vision-level stuff would include things like taking down the Gardiner, solving the garbage problems, or creating a magnificent waterfront.

The excesses of City Hall, especially in flagrant expenses, have long been criticized by Mr. Ford, and the people have now given him his chance to show what he can do. It’s called democracy.
__________________________

While there may be some like your neighbor who rejected Smitherman for his sexual identity, the truth is Smitherman is a rather nasty piece of work just as a human being.

He has an ugly temper.

He is aggressive.

He has no record of achieving anything, other than favored status with Dalton the Magnificent.

He copied Ford right away on costs, showing no originality.

He played at the role of hero for the progressives and the art set, but he has no record of representing such interests.

Smitherman strikes me as a political hypocrite, as I'm sure he does many others.

He wouldn't even reveal his campaign contributors. Some progressive.

He took unwarranted help from Dalton's flaks.

The man was simply a poor candidate.

Nothing to do with being gay.

DRONE ATTACKS - A WRITER SAYS THEY ARE LEGAL BUT ASKS IF THEY ARE MORAL? WHERE THIS BEHAVIOR THREATENS TO TAKE US

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ALASDAIR PALMER IN THE TELEGRAPH

I cannot understand how anyone can even consider the drone-killers legal, and I am ashamed that I ever praised the man, Barack Obama, who is responsible for this reprehensible behavior.

America's confused and bloody presence in Afghanistan and Iraq seems to have blurred the meaning of all such terms as legality and ethics in international affairs. We condemn China for keeping a peaceful protester in jail while we murder by the hundreds people legally guilty of nothing.

Just like Israel's assaults and murders and tortures of civilians and political opponents, the drones are nothing but organized murder.

First, the drone attacks have killed hundreds of totally innocent people.

Second, even their intended targets have been charged with nothing in a court of law. They are just summarily executed by a machine run by some buzz-cut thug at a computer monitor who likely pumps his arm when his death machine blows up a house which contains God knows what people, perhaps then going out for lunch and a beer. That is as far from legality and ethics as you can travel.

How is this activity any different to those South American juntas that kidnapped thousands over years and made them "disappear" - the euphemism for flying people out over the ocean and throwing them out of the plane.

This savagery represents the Israelization of American foreign policy - just kill anyone you claim is a threat to you, behavior which represents the absolute lack of ethics and utter lawlessness.

You cannot make a better, law-abiding world through such moral horrors.

Indeed, Israel and the United States have set examples of such outrageous and unacceptable nature that over the long term they have given potential terrorists a new standard for their work, besides producing countless new young people with grudges, keen on future vengeance.

Are we going to continue into the black hole of Stalinism on a world scale where someone’s wrong look or word gets them liquidated?

That really is the logical outcome of these horrors.

Of course, the claim that it is democracies engaged in this bloody work proves only that democracies are just as capable of murder and torture as tyrant states. There is nothing automatically moral or ethical about being a democracy.

And it tells us we should be glad there are not more such democracies.

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE - COMPARISONS TO ROME - AND REMARKS ON AN INTERVIEW WITH HISTORIAN PAUL KENNEDY - MILITARY DANGERS TO A FREE SOCIETY

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN INTERVIEW WITH HISTORIAN PAUL KENNEDY IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

“I think that the U.S. is the only imperial power in history to deny that it has an empire!”

Mike Sumners,

Actually Rome long maintained the fantasy of a republic (S.P.Q.R.) after it had become an empire with an emperor.

There are many parallels with the US.

I believe, contrary to Kennedy, that the immensely powerful US military may well assume effective control there. Indeed, it already has to some degree.

The last election did nothing to change American policies. Obama is pretty much a creature today of the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, and establishment interests.

His early stand on Israel-Palestine has disappeared. He has increased the war in Afghanistan. He keeps 50,000 troops plus airfields and a huge intelligence complex in Iraq. And he is killing hundreds of civilians in Pakistan with his drone-killers.

This is precisely the threat of gorilla-sized military to a free society anywhere at anytime: they not only get mired in costly foreign wars, they wear down the freedoms and values of the society that nurtures them.

Please note that today in America, not only does the FBI look into what people read, but every phone call and e-mail is recorded to be scanned by supercomputers. And the Pentagon desires to be able to switch off the Internet.
___________________

Kennedy's recommendations for America, so far as they go, are spot on: balance budgets, curtail the trade deficit, and cut back on an overextended military. You might just sum it up as America’s giving up the insane idea that it can do everything at once.

It is most interesting, considering that he is essentially a supporter of American empire.

How interesting, too, that the term empire slips into his references, and those of so many others now: once that would have been taken with bad grace by many Americans.

I did find his book rather dull years ago, greatly padded with a not huge message.

Maybe he is a better talker than writer.

THE DREADFUL CASE OF SEAN BRUYEA - THE HARPER GOVERNMENT AND POLICE-STATE TACTICS

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


I have heard Sean Bruyea (a veteran and critic of Harper's policies towards veterans)interviewed on CBC's The Current.

He is a powerful and convincing speaker, intelligent and informed.

What government did in his case - his confidential medical files passed to hundreds of bureaucrats with summaries made suggesting they could be used to discredit him - is truly frightening, the most atrocious activity I can recall in Canada in a long time.

Genuinely the stuff of a police state.

There is no defense for such behavior. It is beyond unacceptable.

The Globe, in this editorial, has joined the efforts to minimize what happened.

Just in terms of the Globe's own past stuff about stigmas and mental illness, this is reprehensible.

In terms of human rights and democratic values, it is just destructive.

No one can defend this government behavior unless they desire Canada's decline into a corrupt and backward place.

Shame on you.

WOMEN NEEDED IN LEADING POLITICAL ROLES - YES BUT THE EXAMPLES CITED IN THIS EDITORIAL ARE HORRIBLE

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

My, those are inspiring examples.

Condi Rice? Compulsive Fifth Avenue shoe-buyer and mass-murderer?

Hillary Clinton? A woman who swallowed Bill's crap for decades and lied for him in public, over and over?

And who now defends the indefensible, over and over, forgetting every decent spark she may have had forty years ago?

Oh, the list of outstanding American women in politics is breathtaking.

Sarah Palin, flop as governor of a tiny state and someone who took six years at five institutions to get a BA in a bird subject?

Elizabeth Dole whose biggest achievement in running for the Republican nomination seems to have been the way she stepped down from the platform at meetings, walking amongst the audience much like a salvation-tent preacher?

Oh, let's not forget Madeleine Albright, that horrible windbag who defended America's killing of tens of thousands of Iraqi children, over and over.

I do think, in view of the record, Madame Tussaud's has a role here. Surely, this is a wax-works gallery of female political horrors America offers the world.

I'd love to see women take their rightful place in politics, as I'm sure they will, but America's recent example is an inspiration to no one but those with a taste for the grotesque.

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF AND FACEBOOK: ANYTHING FOR A VOTE

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


Ignatieff just becomes more pathetic with each passing day.

First, he played Pa Kettle in the re-make of “Ma and Pa Kettle Take the Bus.”

Now, he's knee-deep in Facebook, one of the most trivial and meaningless sites on the Internet.

And all that comes after the clear identity of rather dull academic.

Oh, and then there's his long-term role as Defender of the American Empire.

Please, Liberal Party, you have become as trivial and tending to dumbness as CBC Radio One these days.

ISRAEL AND HAVING BEEN THERE 3000 YEARS - A COMMENT TO AN EDITORIAL SAYING THE PEACE TALKS SHOULDN'T BE BULLDOZED OVER SETTLEMENTS

POSTED COMMENT TO AN EDITORIAL IN THE TELEGRAPH

'Well the Jews were there 3,000 years ago, 1,600 years before Islam even existed.'

That is typical of the kind of uninformed statements repeated over and over in defense of Israel's current brutish behavior.

First, there is no history of Jews in Israel 3000 years ago. At that time, they were likely still part of ancient Mesopotamia, lands we today call Iraq, the place where they are thought to have originated.

But even more importantly, when people write about Israel's additional territorial claims in terms of Hebrew Scripture, for most of the world's people it makes as much sense as modern Greece claiming Turkey owing to the stories in the Iliad, Homer by the way actually going back about 3000 years and singing of still earlier events.

If you can quote Scripture as authority in Middle East affairs, you can justify literally anything, including killing all non-Jewish residents, for that is what the Biblical Hebrews were enjoined to do, over and over, supposedly by God but actually by their own prophets assuming the authority of God.

Many countries could have a claim on the territory we call Israel if this cloudcuckooland approach were valid, including the Egyptians who long, long ago ruled there, the Lebanese, viewed as the descendants of the ancient Phoenicians who also ruled there, and perhaps even the Iraqis, whose antecedents conquered the territory.

Go back far enough, and you can claim the territory we call Israel for the descedents of the early people who migrated out of Africa many tens of thousands of years ago.

The silliness of this ancient-writing-based claim is made even greater by the important research of an Israeli scholar who says that the Palestinians are, for the most part, the actual descendants of the ancient Israelis.

When Rome conquered territories, it typically did not remove the inhabitants, and it did not interfere with their religion, so long as they accepted Roman rule. Just because, after two turbulent millennia of history, most of the Palestinians are Muslim does not invalidate this concept. Moreover, DNA testing is tending to support this view.

So what we are really talking about with Israel’s modern activities is removing the descendants of ancient Israel who have lived there countless centuries in favor of new immigrants from New York or London. If that isn’t imperialism, I don’t know what is.

On still another level, Biblical claims must be rejected simply because they are dangerous and de-stabilizing. Greater Israel as it has been defined by Zionist scholars – and mind you, there are no maps in the Bible – includes the West Bank and Gaza and pieces of Syria and Lebanon. Does claiming that, or any portion of it, resemble anything but a certain formula for endless war and unrest?

Personal religious views and 2,500 year-old books have no place in international affairs.

In the end, if Israel wishes to be regarded as a state like any other state, then it must behave as we expect other states to behave, and that does not include undefined borders which constantly ooze out over the property of others.

THE MISNOMER OF PEACE TALKS

I don’t know how anyone given the task could draw a map of Israel: it is likely the only country in the world with no defined borders, and it actually has worked very hard over many decades to achieve this peculiar state.

It once had borders, but the 1967 war took care of those. It has no intention of ever returning to them because it could have done so at any time in the last forty-three years (an act which would have been the clearest possible declaration of a desire for genuine peace with justice and which would have saved the immense human misery of occupation), but doing so would negate the entire costly effort of the Six Day War whose true purpose was to achieve what we see now in the Palestinian territories.

As far as peace, in the limited sense of the absence of war, Israel already has achieved a kind of rough, de facto peace without any help from the Palestinians. The Palestinians have nothing to offer in the matter of peace if you judge peace by the standards Israel apparently does.

Israel has the peace that comes of infinitely greater power, systematic and ruthless use of that power, the reduction of the people it regards as opponents to squatters on their own land, and a world too intimidated to take any effective action for justice or fairness.

Genuine peace anywhere, as Canadian physicist and Holocaust survivor Ursula Franklin has observed, is best defined by justice prevailing. But you can have many other circumstances inaccurately called peace; for example, the internal peace of a police state or of a brutally-operated colony.

Israel appears to have no interest or need for the kind of peace that the Palestinians can offer. What then can the Palestinians give Israel in any negotiation?

There are many “technical” issues to be settled between the Israelis and Palestinians, such as the right of return, compensation for property taken, the continued unwarranted expulsions from East Jerusalem, the Wall and its location largely on Palestinian land, but in a profound sense these are all grounded in the larger concept of genuine peace as Ursula Franklin defined it, something we have no basis for believing Israel is, or ever has been, interested in.

Israel wants recognition, not just as a country like any other, but as “the Jewish state,” whatever that ambiguous term may mean, given the facts both of Israel’s rubbery borders and the definition of Jewish, something which Israelis themselves constantly fight over – reformed, orthodox, ultra-orthodox, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, North African, observant, non-observant, and still other factions and divisions in what is quite a small population.

I very much think that the reasons Israel wants that particular form of recognition are not benevolent: it is the kind of term once put into a contract which opens the future interpretation of the contract to pretty much anything. After all, recognition of Israel as a state is something Arab states have long offered Israel in return for a just settlement, but Israel has never shown the slightest interest.

If recognition of Israel as “the Jewish state” were granted, what would be the status of any non-Jewish person in Israel? I think we can guess, given the awful words of Israel’s foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, or the even more terrible words of Ovadia Yosef, founder of the Shas Party, a Netanyahu ally, and Israel’s former Chief Rabbi.

After all, about nineteen percent of Israeli citizens are non-Jews, mainly the descendants of Palestinians who refused to run from the terrors of the Irgun and Stern gangs in1948. They carry Israeli passports, but are not regarded as citizens in the same sense as Jewish citizens, and there are even laws and restrictions in place creating the kind of deadly distinction George Orwell wrote of in Animal Farm, “Some animals are more equal than others.”

The new talks do not include even the most basic requirement of a legitimate voice to represent the Palestinians, a desirable situation perhaps from Israel’s point of view, one Israel’s secret services have long worked towards with dark ops and assassinations. How do you negotiate with opponents you allow no voice?

Mahmoud Abbas, an almost pitifully shuffling character who is the man supposedly representing Palestinian interests, is now approaching two years of playing president without an election: he has zero legitimacy with the Palestinians and the outside world. Even at that, his assumed authority extends only to parts of the West Bank of the territories.

Hamas, despite the shortcomings found in any leadership of a heavily oppressed population (after all, it is often forgotten that the African National Congress in South Africa was communist-affiliated), is nevertheless the elected government of Gaza territory, but Israel has pressured the United States - and through it, effectively the world - to regard Hamas as a coven of witches, ready to unleash dark powers if only once Israel relaxes its stranglehold.

It would be far more accurate to talk of a settlement or an accommodation with the Palestinians than peace, but any reasonable agreement requires intense pressure on Israel, which holds all the cards, pressure which can only come from Washington. Accommodation involves all the difficult “technical” issues Israel has no interest in negotiating - right of return, compensation, the Wall, and East Jerusalem. Israel’s position on all of them is simply “no.”

But we know that Washington is contemptibly weak when it comes to Israel. The Israel Lobby is expert at working the phones and the opinion columns and the campaign donations. It even gets Washington to fight wars for it, as it did in Iraq, and as it now is attempting to do in Iran – surely, the acid test of inordinate influence on policy.

Most American Congressmen live in the same kind of quiet fear of the Israel Lobby as they once did of J.Edgar Hoover’s special files of political and personal secrets. Hoover never even had to openly threaten a Congressman or Cabinet Secretary who was “out of line.” He merely had a brief chat, dropping some ambiguous reference to let the politician know the danger he faced. It was enough to keep Hoover’s influence going for decades.

You never heard a thing in the press about the quiet power Hoover exercised in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s, but it was there. Just so, the Israel Lobby today.

So where does the impetus for a fair accommodation come from?

Nowhere. Israel goes right on with its calculatedly-unfair laws taking the homes and farms of others, slowly but surely pushing out the people with whom it does not want to share space.

Anywhere else, this process would be called ethnic-cleansing, but not here, not unless you want to be called a bigot or an anti-Semite.

One says this about the impossibility of a settlement with a reservation. It is possible that the weak Abbas, locked in a room in Washington, could well be browbeaten and bribed into signing some kind of bastard agreement, giving Israel every concession it wants in return for a nominal rump Palestinian state composed of parcels Israel doesn’t want or hasn’t yet absorbed. It wouldn’t be worth the paper it was written on, but Israel would then undoubtedly assume its perpetual validity and in future interpret it as it wished.

After all, the history of modern Israel involves agreements divvying up the land of others without their consent, but even those historical divisions – look at the maps attending the Peel Commission (1937) or the UN decision on partition (1947), and you see roughly equally divided territory – today are ignored by Israel or given some very tortured interpretation. So what will have changed?

There simply can be no genuine peace with justice where there is no will for it.

WHO WON IN IRAQ? ASKS A DAILY TELEGRAPH EDITORIAL - THE PRINCIPLE OF THE SCHOOLYARD BULLY IS THE REAL ANSWER

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN THE TELEGRAPH

The principle of the schoolyard bully - might makes right – has been reinforced and given ugly new life. It is the only real winner in Iraq.

Saddam, for all his faults, killed only a fraction of the people America killed in Iraq.

Iraq was the most prosperous and advanced country in the Arab world in many social aspects. Its growing middle class virtually guaranteed the day would come when democratic values took hold.

Today, it is in ruins, set back for at least a generation. No jobs, no electricity in many areas, and no clean water. Depleted uranium dust blankets many parts of the country. One of the world’s greatest archeological collections was pillaged and half wrecked.

And since the main purpose of the illegal war was to benefit Israel’s position - something still not widely understood or acknowledged - we see Israel, swaggering as perhaps never before, acting the role of bully in its part of the world. It has adopted precisely the part of miniature geo-political replica of the United States.

It is a very dismal outlook we have now: mass murder and terrible abuse by the United States, and the same on a smaller scale by Israel, promise no reason and decency and human values in world affairs for years to come.

Obama has proved himself the captive of America's establishment, his full-of-hopes election now faded to meaninglessness.

Fifty thousand troops left in Iraq, new air bases, and a fortress-like new American embassy - a regional headquarters for the thugs in the CIA - plus a new level of 150,000 in Afghanistan show clearly that elections in America just do not matter anymore to change the ugly direction of American policy.

And anyone who says that the godawful waste in Iraq had nothing to do with our financial and economic disaster just does not know what he or she is talking about.

Simon Jenkins in the Guardian had it absolutely right, more so than any other mainline journalist, Iraq was "a trillion dollar catastrophe."

EDUCATION STUDY SPENDS TIME AND MONEY ON THE OBVIOUS: POOR MASTERY OF MATH IN LOWER GRADES MEANS POOR SUCCESS IN HIGHER GRADES - EDUCATION'S FAILURE

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

The shameful thing truly is that a study is needed to tell us this obvious truth.

The money and time spent on the study itself are reflections of the poor state of our public education.

Math, perhaps more so than any other subject, builds the next row of bricks on that previously laid.

I tutored kids in math, and I learned a good deal about the state of math education in Ontario.

It is terrible.

There is a ridiculously complex curriculum written in education jargon that many a math major would not understand.

The subject areas jump around far too much, proving in effect a large series of short stories rather than a novel with a good plot.

And the teachers use this stupid curriculum, their fear of not covering it all, to avoid doing what really needs doing.

I encountered a number of children in grade five who did not know their times tables, a topic that was part of grade two or three when I was young.

Those not knowing them – because the teachers do not take the considerable effort required to effectively teach them – are of course still passed.

So we end up with the most absurd situations – deliberately created – of children being introduced to things like elementary probability, which is work with fractions, when they do not know the times tables or division facts needed to work with fractions. Or try division problems with double-digit divisors without knowing the times tables.

Any reasonably bright person observing such nonsense knows we are in trouble and knows the education establishment in Ontario has failed our kids.

Good work, Dalton, handing them gobs of money and getting nothing in return but ease in your election.
_______________________

"…teach kids math using real life examples when young, cutting up pizza, dividing oranges, slicing cake…"

A totally inadequate and trivial notion, useful at the baby level, something already done by good teachers.

When it comes to multiplying or adding fractions, this notion is completely useless. Or try using wedges to teach double-digit division. Basic algebra? Solid geometry?

Not all math operations can be given easy-see demonstrations, yet they must be learned for the power of what they do.

But they can be taught by patient, methodical teachers, teachers who themselves understand what it is they are doing - something far too often not the case in our elementary schools.

Fundamental ideas like place value and what moving a decimal point left or right does must be absorbed thoroughly.

The real problem is the average poor quality of grade-school teachers and their often lack of any special knowledge. We have gym teachers teaching math sometimes or “teacher-librarians” expert at nothing handling various classes.

And, of course, going beneath that layer of the problem, we come to the fundamental one: a teachers' union which often defends and effectively promotes incompetence.

Those people form the talent pool out of which virtually all the education officials up to the minister come from. The blind leading the blind.

We'll only improve things by efforts like changing the way teachers are trained and taking recognized experts from outside of the public education establishment - as university professors recognized for their skill and expertise - to write curricula. All performance testing should also be handled this way.
_______________________________________


"I think the best way to improve education is to abolish faculties of education, thereby eliminating the affectations and pretensions that go with the limp masters and doctorates in the "discipline". Most of what passes for higher education here is not worthy of the name, and, merely debases the coinage, as evidenced by the shoddy research that only occasionally appears before the public."

Absolutely, spot on.

The best example of this I can think of is the new Director of Toronto Public Schools, a football player with a meaningless doctorate in education. Every time he opens his mouth, it is either to reveal how little he knows or to do a photo-op.

Hire people who know math to teach math, and just so every other fundamental subject.

We have a huge reservoir of talent out there in our retired professors, scientists, technicians of every kind, government specialists, astute businessmen.

Hire them on at least a part time basis with no need for vacuous degrees in education. Throw in local artists and musicians to enrich the schools.

Get rid of the deadwood, people who know nothing and have no enthusiasm.

We could improve our schools dramatically in a couple of years.

TOO EARLY TO WRITE-OFF NEW ISRAEL-PALESTINE TALKS? AN ANSWER TO JOURNALIST ALUF BENN'S EMPTY WORDS

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

Too early to write-off direct talks?

Please.

Representatives for these "direct talks" on the Palestinian side in a sense do not even exist: Abbas's election mandate timed out a year ago, and he stays in office under emergency measures – i..e,, he has absolutely no democratic legitimacy.

But even poor Abbas, a kind of Palestinian "step'n'fetch it" figure if ever there was one, wanted nothing to do with such talks while Israel continued stealing land. The American administration browbeat him for months, threatening him with loss of all aid, into attending.

The only genuinely elected government in any of the territories of Palestine, Hamas in Gaza, remains under Israel’s brutal blockade and imprisonment – that is, those elected representatives who were not illegally arrested by Israel or murdered in assassinations or murdered in Operation Cast Lead.

Representatives for these "direct talks" on the Israeli side are from the Netanyahu government, a group of people who have not the least interest in what any normal person would call peace. The “foreign minister” qualifies surely as a David Duke figure.

Now David Duke in the United States – former Klu Klux Klan chief and minor politician – is treated anytime in the press as a lowlife. Avigdor Lieberman is every bit the hateful racist as Duke, but he is far more poisonous, being the foreign minister he is in a position to make his hate wreck the lives of millions. Because he is an Israeli, Lieberman is treated with respect he does not deserve.

Does anyone but a madman believe anything can come out of that set of circumstances?

The only possibility is that Abbas is virtually beaten down into signing something utterly inappropriate for his people. In that case, the “agreement” won’t be worth the paper on which it is written.

This entire matter is utterly meaningless as statesmanship, it is brutal political theater, intended to please the Israel Lobby in the U.S. to get the Democrats through the mid-term elections without a catastrophic loss of campaign contributions.
_________________

The Six Day War was an elaborate black operation by Israel. It prodded the Arabs over and over with many aggressive acts into hostility, and then it attacked first.

The intention was to seize the lands not seized in 1948 with the terrors of Irgun and Stern - that is, to create Greater Israel, a self-defined concept that has always motivated Israel's government.

The attack on the USS Liberty, a US spy ship on station in the Mediterranean, was intended to blind the US administration while General Dayan turned around his armor to attack in the North.

It was not a "mistake." It was a deliberate two-hour attack on a well-marked ship, one moreover that Israel had been advised would be on station to guard against its ambitions.

Dayan felt that if he had the slot of time, he could achieve all Israel's goals of conquest, and he pretty much did, presenting the world with the fait accompli whose ghastly consequences we have endured since.

It was all a neat trick, wage a lightning war of conquest while getting sympathy as little David fighting off hoards of nasty Philistines, but Israel knew from its first planning it was sure to win.

And we’ve learned since that the “little David” image is a sentimental fairy tale: Israel behaves the part brutal bully in its part of the world, attacking and terrorizing every neighbor that it has, even now threatening people a thousand miles away who have never attacked anyone.

See:
http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/was-einstein-right/

ACADEMICS WORKING LIKE ACTORS IN TV ADS WEARING WHITE COATS POSING AS DOCTORS - THE CASE OF AURAL BRAUN ON RUSSIA AND IRAN AND TURKEY

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

Aural Braun’s column reminds me very much of the kind of pseudo-academic stuff churned out by those legions of scribblers working at America’s many think tanks, all of them functioning like the actors wearing white coats in television ads posing as doctors.

In other words, Mr Braun is attempting to sell us a bill of goods, but I’m afraid he doesn’t do a very good job of it.

“…the additional nuclear know-how that Iran is bound to gain from operating the advanced reactor is likely to serve a dual purpose and thereby boost prospects for Tehran’s nuclear weapons program.”

That’s simply inaccurate and question-begging. The best intelligence sources have told us Iran does not have a weapons program. Moreover, by what god-like authority are we to deny scientists and engineers in Iran the right to learn about reactor operations? God knows, Israel’s scientists suffer from no such restriction.

“Second, Russian leaders, President Dmitry Medvedev included, have pushed forcefully for Russian regional dominance, and this includes at least key parts of the Middle East.”

I thought Mr Braun’s qualification was as professor dealing with politics and international affairs? But with that flat-footed statement, he shows no understanding of what large and powerful states always do. They invariably behave in such a way that they serve as the sun to a solar system of states around them.

Indeed, that is precisely what Israel has worked towards since the Six Day War. Israel strives, with its ill-gotten nuclear weapons and bottomless military subsidies from the United States, whose government seems permanently intimidated by a relentless lobby, to become a miniature geo-political replica of the United States in the Middle East, one sharing no understanding or sympathies with the peoples over which it casts its shadow.

“The Erdogan government, which some suspect of considerable Islamist sympathies, has not only challenged Israel but has built powerful ties with Iran and Syria.”

First, I truly doubt Mr Braun would have written this nonsense before Israel’s bloody act of piracy on the high seas. Naturally, Turkey was deeply offended when its citizens were murdered, its word questioned (Turkey had officially examined the ships before they left), and a great deal of property stolen. Israel never even apologized.

Erdogen was treated as a rather exceptional leader by Israel’s apologists when he worked with Israel on a number of matters. Now, he is suddenly a pariah.

I hate to be the one breaking the news to Mr Braun, but Syria and Iran are legitimate, and ancient, countries. There is nothing wrong in having relations with them, even “powerful” ones, to use the same loaded word Mr Braun does.

There is additional news for Mr Braun: despite its Ataturk-started traditions of secular government, Turkey is a Muslim country, so Islamist sympathies are as natural as breathing. Only someone defending the indefensible (Israel’s behaviour), as Mr Braun works towards indirectly in this column, would consider that some kind of accusation.

“Third, although Moscow understands that a nuclear Iran would present a profound long-term danger, it also seems to believe it can control the ‘process’….This is an extraordinarily risky gamble and, in light of Iran’s determination and inventiveness, a foolish one.”

There is not one genuine fact in those statements, but lots of attitude and unwarranted adjectives.

“Superpower restoration for a Russia saddled with a unidimensional, energy-based economy confronting a dire demographic decline is a dangerous pipe dream.”

Apart from its mixed metaphors, that statement is ridiculous. Where is the evidence that Russia thinks it can be a “superpower”?

Russia in fact is a country of about 150 million people with an intellectually-gifted population, some extraordinary technological capability, and an economy that is “over the hump” of its great depression following the collapse of communism, and it is now starting to show potential for serious long-term growth.

WAS DEATH OF BRITAIN'S DOCTOR KELLY A SUICIDE OR A MURDER? THE DISHONEST TERM CONSPIRACY THEORIST AND CONSPIRACIES AS COMMON EVENTS

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

You do not have to be "conspiracy-minded" to believe that Doctor Kelly did not kill himself.

The associate of Doctor Kelly’s, Mai Pederson a military interpreter, who recently revealed facts about his physical state – some injured part of his arm meant he could not wield a knife and made it impossible for him to cut his own wrist – is not a “conspiracy-minded.” She says he also had been advised quietly he was on a hit list. She also tells the story of the red laser site which appeared on his forehead on a walk together in Baghdad, something which made him take the threat seriously.

The relative of Doctor Kelly who said absolutely that that just was not his temperament is not a "conspiracy-minded."

The expert doctors who've said he could not have died the way it is said that he died are not "conspiracy-minded." The vessel cut could not even have bleed him to death.

The term "conspiracy theorist" often used instead of "conspiracy-minded" is actually one that, in my view, automatically marks out its user as dishonest.

It is a way to condemn all people who question the facts of something as borderline paranoids.

It truly is a term without meaning too, displaying for those who are careful of words its user’s lack of thinking.

We do, after all, have genuine conspiracies by governments with large interests. To say otherwise is to display ignorance.

This has always been true in history, but today the stakes are higher than ever in matters of international affairs for some countries.

It is, for example, open knowledge that Israel sends dozens of agents abroad in elaborate schemes to murder those deemed enemies.

And what of the years-long cover-up in Britain of the true events around Bloody Sunday?

What of the case, a few years ago, of a half-dozen American nuclear warheads being shipped across the country? Every outside expert says that the checks and balances make such an "accident" impossible?

What of the downing of the fourth hi-jacked plane on 9/11 over Pennsylvania? It was almost certainly shot down, likely on Cheney's orders, because multiple debris fields stretched for miles, something impossible in the kind of crash claimed.

What of Israel's attack on the USS Liberty, spy ship, during the Six Day War? When Israel finally got around to explaining it, it claimed an "accident"? A two-hour attack against a well-marked ship, one Israel had been advised would be on station and when the lead Israeli pilot made an initial low enough pass slowly to acknowledge crew members waves? Taking the ship out of commission cut off American information of the battle field and gave General Dayan the time to turn around his armor to complete the conquests of the Six Day War, the effort to secure Greater Israel, the results of which we suffer to this day.

What of Israel's nuclear weapons program? Years of intense, high-level deception.

What of South Africa's nuclear weapons program?

By the way, I wonder how many readers know that Doctor Kelly was one of the technical team assigned to take possession of South Africa's nuclear warheads when the apartheid regime ended? Doctor Kelly knew many damaging secrets.

FAR OVER-GENERALIZED STUFF ABOUT HIGHER EDUCATION BORDERING ON NONSENSE - SOME OBSERVATIONS ON INVESTMENT IN HUMAN CAPITAL AND THE SITUATION IN CHINA

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY ROSEANN O'REILLY RUNTE IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Roseann O’Reilly Runte, this is very thin gruel indeed.

“Imagine a world without innovation. The best ideas emanate from thoughtful research, discipline and team work.”

This statement is demonstrably false.

Einstein did not work in a team, neither did Darwin, nor Freud, nor almost any of the groundbreaking mathematicians of the century, people like Goedel.

Creators from Mozart to Schoenberg or our own Glenn Gould were not team members.

Yes, universities use teams of people in their research, but the fact is that truly new ideas rarely come from them. In the cases where they do, there is usually an individual who has sparked the work with an idea that requires testing and demonstrating.

Education is very important, but professional educators do often tend to overemphasize the importance the role of the institution, versus the inspired teacher or theorist.

Real education should start with the very young, as one of Queen Elizabeth I’s great teachers, Roger Ascham, stated centuries ago. Identifying the talents of the young and nurturing them fully gives a society the best chance of high success.

But it is with the young that Canada perhaps most fails. Many of our primary teachers cannot even use a computer, and many of them know little or nothing about the subject they teach, from math to history.

“Tolerance and respect are based on knowledge. Fear and distrust stem from ignorance.”

Well, that sounds nice as a broad aphorism, but I am afraid that it is largely false. Many highly educated people have been destroyers of society and enemies of tolerance: just a few examples from our last century include Joseph Goebbels, Henry Kissinger, James Angleton, or Vladimir Lenin.

You might include people like Edward Teller or even, to come down to the ridiculous, George Bush (two degrees from prestigious universities, although one doubts they were anything more than “legacy” degrees granted in search of his rich family’s contributions).

And in our primary schools, there is almost no room for what I call critical education. Try teaching children something meaningful about superstition, and you will have Christian Fundamentalist parents looking to be rid of you. Try teaching children to think critically about politics, and you will have party-faithful types after your hide. Try teaching children to think critically about the distortions of advertising, and you will have corporate people making your life miserable.

“Without access to education, wealth disappears”

Again, a highly exaggerated claim, as current events in places like China and India demonstrate. But more importantly, it is the quality and nature of the education that count as what economists call “human capital,” investments which generate wealth.

Higher education has two components: one part is investment, and the other is consumption. When someone studies demanding subjects which are needed in the economy, it is investment. When someone goes to university and muddles through in a “bird” subject, it is mainly consumption, not investment leading to anything of importance to the future economy.
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"First of all, Einstein did work in a team - graduate students and other professors around the world were often consulted and contributed to the many brilliant innovations."

Einstein consulted select people, but he did not work as a team. He actually rather disliked the atmosphere of academic institutions generally.

His important papers have his name, not that of an institution.

And, I must say for someone who is ready to accuse others of ignorance, you seem unaware that he worked at the Patent Office when developing relativity by himself.

You say I cannot negate the column by a few examples, but isn't that ridiculous? Am I supposed to submit a list of hundreds? Which, by the way is completely doable. How many would you like?

This column reflects second-rate institutional academia, the very kind that contributes little to new knowledge and certainly no brilliant ideas.

“As for your dumb-headed assertion that those who take "bird" subjects; which I take you mean anything not directly beneficial to an industrial economy, are simply consuming precious resources which could be better spent pumping out scientists, engineers, doctors etc. is idiotic at best”

But that’s simply not what I said. For someone ready to hurl names, I do think you could read what you comment on before commenting.

I mentioned Mozart and Schoenberg. I could also have mentioned – again, if I were submitting lists – people like Picasso, Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Edward Steichen, and hundreds of others.

I am well aware of the changes that have taken place in the world, and, while new areas of knowledge have developed, it remains true always that there is education as investment and education as consumption.

A lot of what we see today is education for consumption, of little difference to the real economy than eating jelly beans, and I believe this has been a trend for decades.

I am reminded of Sarah Palin who took 6 years at 5 different institutions to get a bachelor’s degree in “communications.” She remains abysmally ignorant, vastly uniformed, uninterested in serious things, filled with superstition and prejudice, and could have achieved what she has achieved without ever taking a course after high school.

In general, today’s average undergraduate is no better educated than the graduates of a good high school seventy years ago. Indeed, in some respects, they are less so.

We’ve simply inflated undergraduate degrees, much the way a third-world county’s central bank inflates its currency. That contributes nothing to the real economy other than keeping specific people, like the author of the column and the author of the comment, employed churning them out like sausages.
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"The reason why I enjoy and am grateful for my university education is because students are allowed to disagree and question the supposed 'facts' they are given. This model for learning should, if anything, be introduced at a younger age. I would have done a lot better in high school if I knew I didn't have to agree with the teachers point of view."

Please, points of view are not the same as facts. You may disagree with points of view in university, but unless you are a genius with a new discovery, you cannot argue with facts.

But even granting disagreement with points of view, any classroom where a great deal of that goes on is one where education is being consumed, not where valued investment in education is underway.

Can you imagine classrooms filled with students full of attitude arguing with Shakespeare’s use of the passive voice or with the Third Law of Thermodynamics? That is a formula for a living chat room where nothing of substance is achieved.
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"John Chuckman, you have it wrong on China and India. Both are investing heavily in university-based research for precisely the reasons indicated by the author"

Actually, no, I don’t think so.

We served as "homestay" for a gifted student from China for the better part of three years.

Through him and his friends, I am familiar with the circumstances in China facing students. Apart from that, I published a book on China’s growth in 2007.

Yes, China is investing, but up until now, going to university in China was limited to only the very elite of society, and I mean intellectually elite, not just moneyed.

The number of places was, and truly still is, relatively small, and there is a very tough national exam to be admitted, one which would probably exclude three-quarters of the undergraduates in Canada.

Because of these facts, pretty much only very superior talents attend Chinese Universities today.

Many are coming to Canada's institutions precisely because of the difficulty of admission in China.

Also, a bright friend of our young man confided that they regard Canadian universities as far easier. They work you like a dog in China.

PREACHING TOLERANCE TO SWEDEN WHILE DEFENDING ISRAEL'S GHASTLY INTOLERANCE AND THE HYPOCRISY OF CONFLATING CRITICISM WITH ANTI-SEMITISM

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY RONALD LAUDER IN THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

"Even a tolerant country such as Sweden must not tolerate those who preach intolerance."

Yes, indeed, but the author certainly is being extremely hypocritical in this matter, for the government of Sweden’s responsibility can no greater than that of the state of Israel: it surely is beyond question that anti-Semitic events like those in this story are stoked up by Israel's never-ending series of brutal behaviors.

The example of intolerance and violence against victims best known on the planet is the state of Israel: invasions, murder, illegal arrest, torture, apartheid practices, and ethnic-cleansing.

Right now, Israel, for the second time, is destroying the dwellings of hundreds of harmless Bedouin on the Negev Desert, and it arrests those who oppose its police-state activities to protect their homes.

Previously the government of Israel followed the ghastly practice of poisoning the crops of these people in order to drive them away.

At the same time, not a week goes by in which Israel does not commit a new injustice in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, throwing people off their property with the flimsiest excuse and stealing title to it.

The poor people of Gaza are into their fourth year of a brutal and unjustified blockade, denying them many of life’s ordinary requirements. Israel Post has recently announced that mail will not be delivered to Gaza, in violation of international conventions.

Israel killed with impunity nine human-rights workers on the high seas, and to this day neither the ships seized nor the personal effects Israeli soldiers grabbed from hundreds of innocent people – phones, computers, cameras, wallets – have been returned to their owners. God knows what happened to the cargo which included everything from donated wheelchairs and medicines to food.

Israel weekly makes provocative moves in Southern Lebanon, from cutting down trees on the Lebanese side of the border – yes, other people’s trees - to flying its jets threateningly overhead. It never assisted in locating the countless cluster bombs it dropped to kill and maim innocent people going about their business. It shouts, day after day, for war on Iran, a country which is attacking no one.

And millions go into their fifth decade of living under humiliating and illegal occupation.

Israel freely assassinates anyone it chooses to regard as an enemy, and that likely includes prominent figures like former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri or Palestine’s Yasser Arafat.

I just wonder whether there is even one Palestinian who would not gladly trade places with a Jewish person in Sweden, despite the unpleasantness of some minor vandalism?
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"I stopped reading this article when it attempted to label attitudes about Israel as attitudes about Jews. Israel is a state, not a race or religion.

"Certainly Jews should feel free and comfortable to live in Sweden, and any other democracy. But that has nothing to do with Israel."

Absolutely.

Israel's defenders never seem to grasp this essential truth.

When spokesmen like Ronald Lauder say otherwise, I always feel I'm being told I must drop all clear thinking and sense of fairness under threat of being labeled as anti-Semitic. How is such labeling different to people who use epithets and paint ugly graffiti?

In that sense, I am sorry to say, but I regard apologists for Israel like Ronald Lauder who call critics of Israel anti-Semitic as representing the same anti-democratic and anti-enlightenment values as the unthinking thugs who break windows in a synagogue.

You cannot demand special pleading here: either you are fair and consistent in your treatment of others or you are not.

The thugs in Sweden are unacceptable, but then so are Ronald Lauder’s prejudiced words.

As for Israel’s barbarism and injustice, the day everyone is browbeaten into accepting it is the day we will know Hitler’s ugly legacy to the world lives on.
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"JOHN_CHUCKMAN_ if Sweden hates Israel for whatever reason, that does not give citizens of Sweden or Swedish government the right to abuse Swedish Jewish population that supports Israel because of their history."

I never said that it did.

The author of this comment has commented without reading the material on which he/she is commenting.

A FALSE ARGUMENT ABOUT SUPPORTING SEPARATISM USED TO DEFEND ENDING CANADA'S PUBLIC SUPPORT OF POLITICAL PARTIES

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

Jeffrey Simpson, you just could not be more wrong on this matter.

Yes, there is an unintended consequence, but there are unintended consequences in every conceivable way of financing parties.

Private financing, in palate-loads delivered to loading docks, is the American system that has given them, quite simply, the best government that money can buy.

Did you know that the average American Senator spends literally two-thirds of his or her time trying to raise money?

Mrs Clinton, in her race for the New York Senate, spent $45 million, an amount which brought a gasp even from her easy-virtue hubby.

If you remember, Bill Clinton, when President, was selling nights in the Lincoln bedroom for gigantic campaign contributions.

Those giving large amounts of money always get something back, if only privileged entrance to the Senator or Representative.

We must weigh the unintended consequences of one method versus another for their pernicious qualities.

Public financing is important, and it is very much a measure of our devotion to democracy.

The BQ is a legitimate party, representing the views and interests of a fair number of people in Quebec, and it deserves the same treatment as any legitimate party.

Tilting the finance system is a cheap idea from someone desperate for a quick fix to our current political impasse. It is worse in my view than the suggestions you recently pooh-poohed of the Liberals and NDP merging or the Liberals getting rid of that sea-anchor of a leader, Ignatieff.

Separatism is fading, as anyone may observe, slowly but surely.

Why? Because people in Quebec now see that they are treated as an important part of the country and because young people have careers to get on with and because in-migrants to Quebec do not see separatism as a reason for coming to Canada and because native Quebecois, like all the world’s advanced people, have low birth rates.

Besides all of that, the BQ has acted mostly the part of a responsible party, albeit one with geographically-limited interests. That is more than can be said of Harper’s Conservatives on many issues of importance.

I sometimes find it slightly amusing to call the BQ a separatist party, given the nature of its day-in, day-out activity.

And, last but not least, doing what you recommend would only be viewed in Quebec as a targeted policy against Quebec’s interests, and indeed that view would be completely right.

Foolish column, Jeffrey Simpson, very foolish.

THE COURT'S RELEASE OF ABDULLAH KHADR - OMAR'S BROTHER - AND THE MEANINGLESSNESS OF CALLING PEOPLE TERRORISTS

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

"The integrity of the Canadian judicial system would be better served by extraditing Mr. Khadr to face charges in the U.S."

A genuinely morally obtuse statement, that.

There is a long history of men going abroad to fight for causes in which they believed. And there is a long history of men going abroad as paid mercenaries.

Men went by the thousands to fight in the Spanish Civil War. They went in the thousands to fight in parts of Africa during the 1960s. Some went to South Africa as mercenaries during Apartheid.

Indeed, Jewish Canadians and Americans have gone to Israel to fight in that country's many wars of aggression and participate in its long occupation and abuse.

In all these cases, and in many more over time, we do not afterwards illegally arrest, imprison, and torture the people involved.

The only genuine difference here is the highly questionable use of the word "terrorist," a witches' brew of a word which truly defines nothing.

If you claim “terrorists” are evil people who kill innocent civilians for their cause, then what in God’s name are the United States and Israel? Decades of bloodshed, most of it civilians. Only last week the U.S. bombed and killed 54 civilians in Afghanistan. And we just celebrated the anniversary of Hiroshima – a non-military target in which only civilians died - an absolute black spot on America’s soul.

And we must never forget America’s glorious record of killing 3 million people in Vietnam, most of them civilians, by the most horrifying methods, and the legacy of an earth soaked in poisonous Agent Orange – a true holocaust by any definition of the word.

And then a million victims in Iraq and at least two million refugees created.

Of course, those horrors are not all. The U.S. is far and away the world’s biggest procurer of arms, supplied to everyone from dictators to murderous juntas all over the world for decades.

And the Globe frets about a judge’s correct and lawful treatment of Abdullah Khadr, a mere suspect at arms procurement who had been terribly treated owing to U.S. blood money paid out?

The editorial writer here needs, as they say today, to get a life.

And thank God for fair and decent judges.

CELEBRATING ONLY THE EXCEPTIONAL IN SPORTS? WHERE THAT ATTITUDE TAKES US

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

Rory Gilfillan's words are quite unpleasant and more than a little confused.

First, if you take his basic principle of only celebrating the outstanding, it seems to me that you must logically extend it to all areas of activity.

In schools, in the arts, and in the sciences. And that necessarily implies authorities picking and choosing who should pursue what. In the U.S. they do this with floods of money and privilege, and in China they do this with state authority.

That general attitude results in America, a true social Darwinist society.

Second, while everyone likes being astonished by the fabulously gifted, there are many small pleasures in enjoying the efforts of the less gifted.

Third, I just do not regard sports in general as all that important. For those that do enjoy them, fine, but for society to use many precious resources only to groom and praise those with talented bodies gives you the sense of contemporary China towards sports, a sense not completely different to that which prevailed under the Third Reich.

Yes, it is nice to see gold medals, but really when the Olympics or any other big event is over, two weeks later the beer-fed emotion is forgotten and a hell of a lot of money has been spent on very little of substance. It still all reduces to a modern version of Rome's "bread and circuses."

People like Mr. Gilfillan would have us believe there is more to it, but truly there isn't.

Perhaps almost better the many celebrations of small victories than the big blow-out for a few physically talented people.

CBC EXECUTIVE LEAVES UNDER DARK CLOUD - MORE ON CBC DESCENDING INTO DUMBNESS

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

Hard to know from the information given here just what Stursberg's departure means.

Executive rat leaving a ship he helped direct into sinking in a sea of dumbness?

I do think it is all rather hopeless. CBC is on a one way trip to nowhere.

New dumb shows and dumb hosts and dumb formats abound. Once the remaining quality people have reached retirement, the wreck deserves to be abandoned.

With people like George Stroumboulopoulos, Jian Ghomeshi, Evan Solomon, and now Jan Arden, CBC becomes less and less meaningful everyday, pop fluff with no core of genuine experience and broad knowledge.

God, recently, I gave a try to a CBC documentary series on World War II, hosted by Stroumbouloulos. George, dressed in his usual I’m-cooler-than-anyone outfit, appeared out of a cloud of special effects lighted mist like God descending from heaven and proceeded to make a completely inaccurate statement concerning the war. I didn’t watch another minute of this pop nonsense passing for documentary.

Good old Ghomeshi, Canada’s 2010 answer to Dick Clark’s Bandstand, has had endless promos for an interview with Paul McCartney. Oh, wow, one of the biggest egos on the planet, with almost nothing to say, whose genuine creative work was forty years ago, gives yet another interview. What’s the point and what’s Canadian about it?

Many of CBC Radios shows have become nothing more than amateur hour try-outs for pop singers – the stuff is larded into half the programs. Mary Ito’s show is simply a boring series of second-rate singers and wannabes interspersed with chat about her latest jaunt somewhere. Jann Arden sounds like the female version of Trailer Park Boys.

Who needs a public broadcaster for this kind of vacuous stuff?

BP ACCUSED OF "CARPET BOMBING" THE GULF WITH DISPERSANTS - HERE IS THE ULTIMATE INSENSIVITY IN LANGUAGE AND INSANITY OF PERSPECTIVE

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

Gee, I do think recalling what the term "carpet bombing" actually means, this use of language is utterly stupid and brutal.

BP has "carpet bombed" an oil slick with oil dispersants.

America has carpet bombed several million people to their deaths in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, sending countless thousands of others to lives without limbs.

Oh, it also left a toxic sea of Agent Orange - millions of pounds of the horrible stuff - oozing in the soil of Vietnam to cripple newborns for generations.

No daily headlines and melodramatic language was used by the press during those utter savageries.

I really think this use of words tells us something not very pleasant about Americans.

If you kill so much as some American shrimp or soil a beach, it is terrible, unforgivable crime, but America reserves the right to barbeque, blow-up, and poison all the people it wants anywhere it pleases.

And does anyone doubt the fact that because BP is a "foreign" company, it is so savagely attacked? BP certainly recognizes this: their new CEO is an American.

Of course, the final irony in all of this is that this kind of industrial accident could happen any day to any operator in the Gulf, a certain level of risk and danger being inherent in deep-water drilling.

But Americans suck up energy the same way they do drugs. If Americans stopped buying lumbering trucks and SUVs and stopped buying houses on the desert with three-car garages, you wouldn’t need these operations.