Canada’s Green Party in death throes

The Green Party of Canada is no longer about environment, however controversial their policies may be.

It is now about pronouns.

As the party is looking for a new leader, two Indigenous members of the party’s executive have called it quits. They didn’t like the idea that they would be included in a brand new and unusual row: Interim Leader Amita Kuttner likes being called “they/them.” Someone referred to her as “she/elle.” That got their (if that’s how she wants to be called) adrenaline up to a boiling point, and blood pressure through the roof.

Kuttner said, with passion unbecoming a political party leader, no matter how interim, that the mistake was “reflective of a larger pattern of behaviours that a few in the party are perpetuating.”

Green Party’s two MPs, Elizabeth May and Michael Morrice, replied with a letter calling for a “restorative process” to root out “harassment” within the party.

Political cancer

The woke culture has started spreading throughout Canada’s public square.

As soon as Pierre Poilievre became Conservative leader, a number of the Liberal Party officials started a campaign for their party to become less woke.

They have a point: their Exalted Leader – in addition to all of his other shortcomings – can hardly look and sound more politically correct. Quite realistically, they are afraid that Canadians are waking up to his idiocy and may turf them out come next election, still three years hence. Justin Trudeau’s image of a Prime Minister as woke as anybody hurts their party’s chances. They started repeating former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s mantra: “It’s the economy, stupid!”

Not that Clinton ended up acting upon his own election platform once elected. Politics today is not about promises kept.

Back to the point

The Green Party didn’t fare too well in the 2021 elections. That caused a bit of internal name-calling and demands for change. It was supposed to happen now, with the party starting the campaign to find a new Intrepid Leader. All attention was centred on Vancouver’s news conference (media event or availability in the new lingo) to kick the race off.

It was all done through the long-distance technology known as Zoom. Kuttner noticed that the caption under her name called her “she/elle.”

Excrement hit the fan: I ain’t no she/elle, the Interim Intrepid Leader fumed. She calls herself non-binary and pansexual.

Huh?

Right you are. HUH.

Kuttner claims to be attracted to all genders and orientations, making her they/them.

Using a recently newly coined expression, Kuttner called it “misgendering,” saying the typo “made me feel hurt and isolated” and hinted that it was “reflective of a larger pattern of behaviours that a few in the party are perpetuating.”

To rub her splendid anger in, she elaborated, “in moments like these I wonder — how can I ensure other people’s safety if I can’t even ensure my own?”

Amita Kuttner has a doctorate designation attached to her name. She achieved it in the field of astrophysics. Does it explain (or excuse) her ignorance of the difference between the words “misgendering” and “disgendering”?

The former indicates an honest mistake, the latter means intent.

The two Green MPs called the incident “but the latest in a number of similar behavioural patterns that Dr. Kuttner has faced throughout their tenure.”

That led to your typical domino effect. Green Party President Lorraine Rekmans resigned first. She felt some of the leadership candidates were blaming her for the typo.

The now past-President hit the nail on the head in her resignation letter: “I was surprised that the contestants would use (the Sept. 3 media event) to attack the Party they were running to lead.

“I find that some in GPC wish to cling to the image of a political party that is the same as all the other political parties in Canada, fuelled by money, and controlled by people who wield power.”

She should have added, but didn’t dare, that this trend of announcing one’s bedroom proclivities is divisive on more levels than one.

Some Green Party officials demanded that the leadership race be called off for the moment, until the incidents had been properly investigated and punishment meted out.

Doomed? Probably

First and foremost, anybody’s bedroom preferences are their business, and nobody else’s. Who cares whether tickling in their left armpit excites some (and turns off others), or whether biting someone’s right (but not left) ear leads them to orgasm?

That’s what the so-called gender revolution has turned into.

If it were only that, and if it weren’t now a government-supported train of thought, society could care less about this strange (a cautious choice of words) trend.

But it has become a must among people who have had the gall to steal the word “progressive” and proclaim it for their own.

It’s all part of identity politics, a movement designed to divide and rule.

Different ideas announced as political platforms divide societies along trains of thought that are worthy of serious debate, and let the idea that attracts the most votes prevail.

Societies divided along the lines of race, skin colour, lineage, gender pronouns (and bedroom practices) are doomed to fail. Identity politics isn’t about intelligent argument. Identity politics is about shouting matches, mutual affront leading straight to mutual slaps in faces, to destroyed careers, to cancelling progress based on merit and replacing it on regress based on identity of the day.

Green Party of Canada now have a problem bigger than they had thought they could face: It’s called oblivion.

No matter where one stands in the debate on environment, such discussion is extremely useful. Losing one important voice in this debate, again, no matter how controversial, sends the conversation to a back-burner where it doesn’t belong.

Losing it because of a gender-based pronoun is a criminal offence.

Fake border to cause WWIII?

Ever thought why Canada’s borders with her southern neighbour run almost precisely in a straight line along the 49^th parallel?

Ever thought why countries’ borders are shaped the way they are, why they get to be respected as a given?

History tells us that borders that exist today used to be different decades or centuries ago, and their today’s shapes reflect results of complex international negotiations and backroom deals. Almost never do they reflect reality. Borders, in fact, reflect territories occupied by tribes that had developed all the way from nomadic bands into what we got used to call nations.

Even that is not an absolute must. There exist countries, their borders internationally recognised, that include more than one tribe, and those either live together in peace and harmony, or spend their lives in fights for superiority, keeping records of slights caused by the other side, continuing the vicious circle.

It’s the time they’ve been in existence without change that gives borders their legitimacy.

That is Alexander G. Markovsky’s point of departure.

A senior fellow at the London Centre for Policy Research, a conservative think-tank that examines national security, energy, risk analysis, and other public policy issues, Markovsky wrote an analysis for the American Thinker website. Titled Will Ukraine Survive Intact?, this insightful article concentrates on Ukraine’s history, both ancient and recent, pointing out that what forms today’s Ukraine is a hotch-potch of recently established borders that make the country a bit of an artificial construct.

Yes, shocking news to many, to be sure.

Still, Markovsky, the author of such eye-openers as Anatomy of a Bolshevik and Liberal Bolshevism: America Did Not Defeat Communism, She Adopted It, and Anatomy of a Bolshevik: How Marx & Lenin Explain Obama’s Grand Plan, knows his history pretty well.

According to Markovsky, Ukraine faces two major issues: her real and proper legitimacy is questionable, and her extreme nationalism only exacerbates her real problems.

Trying to bully her neighbours into submission won’t help her cause, either. Neither Poland, nor Romania and nor Russia are happy with Ukraine’s current borders.

What else is new?

Many European borders created after the previous century’s World Wars were based on geopolitical engineering. The former Czechoslovakia and the former Yugoslavia are prime examples of artificial countries. And so is Ukraine.

Neither Czechoslovakia nor Yugoslavia exist any longer. The former split quite peacefully into two republics (Czechia and Slovakia), while the latter underwent cruel bombing attacks imposed by the U.S.-led NATO in an assault that circumvented neatly all procedural obstacles that could be posed by the United Nations Organisation.

As Markovsky puts it, “when Ukraine proclaimed her independence, she did not proclaim her independence from Russia, Poland, and Romania’s territorial claims.”

Markovsky doesn’t hesitate to go so far as to question Ukraine’s historical provenance. Looking over her historical records, she had never been a unified state before declaring her independence in 1991.

Today’s Ukrainian national legend Bohdan Khmelnitsky petitioned Russian czar Alexei in the 17^th century to admit what would centuries later become Ukraine into Russia. Again: geopolitical engineering.

It would take Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, to declare in 1919 Ukraine as a socialist state, occupying a part of the territory that used to be Russian Empire. In 1922, Markovsky points out, “Ukraine became Ukrainian People’s Republic with the capital Kharkov within a newly created Soviet Union. The new territory included Donetsk and Lugansk regions becoming Eastern Ukraine. In 1934 Kiev became the capital of the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic.”

After their respective foreign affairs ministers, Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop, signed the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939, the Soviets annexed the eastern territories of Poland with the city of Lvov and incorporated them into Ukraine. In June of 1940, annexation of Northern Bukovina from Romania followed, again, with the newly-gained territory to be merged with Ukraine. Today’s Western Ukraine came into existence in 1945 when Hungary’s Carpathian Ruthenia (Zakarpatia), was incorporated into the USSR and added to Ukraine.

Tragic fates

When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, Ukraine remained within her Soviet-era borders. Millions of Russians, Poles, Hungarians and Romanians were trapped.

Ukrainian nationalism took over: you all will speak and write Ukrainian, using your own language will not be tolerated.

That’s what created the explosive tensions in what is now known as Eastern Ukraine, and what keeps Western Ukrainians only too aware of their Polish, Romanian, and Hungarian roots.

Many Eastern and Central European nations call the Yalta conference that redrew European borders after the Second World War a cruel and inadmissible betrayal: Sir Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, representing Great Britain and the U.S. respectively, decided our fates without even asking for our opinion, people in those countries claim, and history is on their side. They find Churchill’s behaviour especially galling: he knew who Soviet dictator Iosif Stalin was, and he knew more about communism than his American counterpart, and yet, he gave in.

Ukraine now faces a number of referenda in which actual populations, rather than corrupt politicians, are to decide where they want to belong.

Western globalist powers are calling the forthcoming votes sham before they even happened. They are afraid, and rightfully so, that the popular votes won’t go their way.

What would happen then, nobody dares predict, but the prospect is not too inviting. Russian President Vladimir Putin did mention tactical nuclear weapons, adding that he wasn’t bluffing.

He is aware of what the entire war charade is all about. It definitely isn’t about the poor people of all kinds of previous nationalities who now live in what has become known as Ukraine only thanks to superpower generosity. It’s about what the late Madeleine Albright expressed so succinctly when she exclaimed that it isn’t fair that Russia has so many raw materials and others don’t.

That’s the same person who helped then-U.S. President Bill Clinton push through the massive bombing of former Yugoslavia.

Her spirit seems to be alive still. Given Albright’s Czech roots, she should have known better.

And all that for a country whose borders can hardly meet the test of history.

Czech government stick to their brown-nosing ways

The Czech government told the NHL to tell its member clubs not to include their Russian players on the forthcoming trip to their country.

The San Jose Sharks and Nashville Predators are supposed to open their seasons Friday, Oct. 7, in Prague’s O2 Arena, with a repeat encounter the very next day.

The Sharks have five players coming out of Russia on their roster, while the Predators have three.

The Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced they wrote to the NHL head office making this point loud and clear.

Czech Deputy Foreign Minister Martin Smolek released a statement making this point official.

“We can confirm that the Czech Foreign Ministry has sent a letter to the NHL to point out that, at this moment, the Czech Republic or any other state in the (visa free) Schengen zone should not issue visas to the Russian players to enter our territory,” Smolek told Czech publications iDnes.cz and iSport.cz.

Former goalie Dominik Hašek, owner of two Stanley Cup rings and an Olympic gold medallist from Nagano 1998, has joined the Czech government. He also demands that Czech athletes under contract in Russian leagues don’t honour their deals and refuse to play in Russia.

An Associated Press (AP) news item quotes Hašek as tweeting earlier this year: “The NHL San Jose Sharks – Nashville Predators match should take place in Prague in October. If the NHL (given the situation) wants to allow any Russian player to play in this match, I will consider it an inexcusable act.”

Hašek expanded his thought by saying that he would work hard “to ensure that this match does not take place in our country.” He would meet with top Czech government officials to make his point of view known, Hašek added.

San Jose Sharks General Manager Mike Grier’s reaction was blunt and to the point: “We’re a team, so, if they say some guys can’t go over then, either we all go or no one goes. But I’m not anticipating any issues right now.”

In theory, if the Sharks don’t appear for their games, they might lose valuable points by forfeiting, should the Czech government remain stubborn.

“I don’t know how it would go as far as forfeits and things like that,” Grier said. “That’s something for the league to handle. But I’m a pretty firm believer (that) we’re a team here, we’re a group, and it’s not the players’ fault. They didn’t do anything wrong. So I don’t think they should be punished for it.

“We stand with them and we’re all together as one in here. If it comes to that and hopefully it doesn’t — and I’m not anticipating that it will – we’ll do things as a group.”

Sharks’ captain Logan Couture echoed his GM’s view: “My view is we’re a team in here. If we go over there, we want everyone on our team to be there. All the guys that are going to make the team are part of our team.”

Meanwhile, the Columbus Blue Jackets (four Russian players) and Colorado Avalanche (two Russians) are supposed to face off in a pair of 2022-23 regular-season games at Nokia Arena in Tampere, Finland, Friday, Nov. 4 and Saturday, Nov. 5.

Finnish authorities haven’t yet said a word about letting Russian NHL players in but, being candidates for NATO membership, one wonders.

In the case of the Czech government, here’s the main issue: even many of their own country’s citizens are angry about their leaders’ brown-nosing ways so far as both NATO and the European Union (EU) are concerned.

Throughout Czech history, many had issues with politicians who demanded the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and creating Czechoslovakia in 1918.

The country also offered very little resistance to the Nazi occupation (1939-1945), and during the communist era, her main slogan was “With the Soviets for ever, and no other way,” which they changed after the so-called Velvet Revolution of 1989 into “With the Americans for ever, and no other way.”

Some claim that this ability to bow to superior power has helped the Czechs survive being surrounded by enemies throughout centuries. Considering that Poland and Hungary, next-door neighbours, have been in similar situations and never surrendered, this claim doesn’t hold much water.

And then it reaches such tragicomic scale as to make moronic bans on Russian-born NHL players coming to play hockey in their country.

Meanwhile, NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly told AP that he has “no concern” with Russian players entering the Czech Republic in two weeks. That, obviously, must have been before he read the Czech Foreign Ministry statement.

Of course, this kind of development won’t have any impact on issues that really matter.

But if it makes the Czechs ashamed of their government enough so as to kick them out, it would help.

South Africa gives us a serious lesson on pride and independence

The White House has a history of hosting communist leaders. Of course, it was always with the knowledge that American Presidents were talking to “the other side,” engaging the (relatively) freer world in conversations with their self-proclaimed enemies. These talks were aimed at forestalling live ammunition exchanges, replacing them with exchanges of words, sometimes harsher, sometimes sweeter.

It was supposed to be a far cry from the current incumbent Joe Biden hosting South Africa’s President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa.

But the meeting didn’t run as smoothly as the White House hoped it would.

The U.S. President’s office kept telling all interested parties (mainstream media, mainly) that Biden “has a long history on South Africa,” whatever they meant by that.

He used to visit when he was a Senator. He held hearings on apartheid in South Africa. He visited again as America’s Vice President.

And, of course, an obligatory ideological titbit: Joe Biden is very committed to and inspired by South Africa’s long struggle for freedom, racial equality, and justice.

Controlling the agenda

The meeting was supposed to concentrate on economic issues.

Ramaphosa, a filthy rich South African businessman and politician, and Biden’s junior by a full decade, changed the topics of the conversation so smoothly his host had huge trouble catching up and keeping up with him.

Officially, the agenda was to include trade, climate change, and energy transition.

Biden blew up on his own petard: he demanded that South Africa lead the rest of the continent out of its neutrality on the issue of Russia’s invasion into Ukraine.

Africa, he claimed, ought to adopt America’s position.

Biden should have noticed (and he clearly didn’t) that when the United Nations voted on a resolution condemning Russia for her actions, the vote passed with so many abstentions it should have triggered serious thought about the resolution’s validity. About a half of the abstentions came from Africa. The UN also suspended Russia from its Human Rights Commission, another meaningless move, what with committed human rights violators keeping their seats and votes intact.

Biden quite obviously didn’t expect Ramaphosa’s reply: and, pray elucidate, who are you to be telling us what to do and whom to obey?

Continuing ignorance

America has had a record of either ignoring the developments in Africa, or of giving the Africans advice in the form of orders.

In the case of South Africa, her African National Congress (ANC), an organisation as communist as communist can get, had for the longest time a Soviet intelligence (KGB) full colonel as Chairman Nelson Mandela’s principal adviser. Of the ANC income, some came from armed robberies, but most of it came in cash from the Soviet Union.

The Africans don’t forget this.

Another superpower, China, managed to sneak in, as well, and many African politicians are on record as saying that the comrades from Beijing would never tell what they had to do: they would only propose observations and recommendations, and they wouldn’t link Africans’ obedience to sending more assistance.

With South Africa the only African member of the G-20, her voice means something when other African countries receive thinly veiled threats from Washington that demand that they toe America’s line against Russia.

The U.S. Administration has drafted a document named Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act. It would legalise American sanctions against Africans doing business with Russian entities that are under U.S. sanctions.

South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor, undoubtedly with his President’s agreement secured, called the draft “Cold War-esque” and “offensive.”

Ramaphosa told his American interlocutor that “we should not be told by anyone who we can associate with.”

The Americans have sent a number of their politicians to visit Africa (so have the Russians), but it is the Americans who call the most important countries on the continent “sub-Saharan Africa,” a description the Africans detest.

Besides, only a few of today’s African countries are willing to hop in and use the unholy competition between America and Russia for sympathies, votes (and raw materials) for their own purposes. Most of Africa refuse picking a side. They just don’t want to be drawn back into the vicious cycle of being pawns in this superpower game that brings them nothing but a feeling of abused servants.

Laughed out of the room

A typical example: U.S. climate envoy John Kerry arrived at the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment in the capital of Senegal, Dakar, recently.

The result of his lecture was shocking: Africans present called him yet another U.S. official coming to lecture them about being green. The Pan African Climate Justice Alliance went even further: Kerry was performing a “public relations gimmick” that played with “semantics.”

African leaders have figured out that U.S. officials don’t really know it all. They are now allergic to Americans’ attempts to dictate to them. And that’s precisely what South African President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa told his American counterpart. Straight to Joe Biden’s face.

While, at home …

And, meanwhile, Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa is engaged in expropriating land without compensation as (his own words) “one of the measures that we will use to accelerate redistribution of land to black South Africans.”

White farmers are the victims of these expropriations. On top of it, one white farmer in South Africa has been murdered every five days. That’s called ethnic cleansing.

Biden and Kamala Harris, his Vice President, would fit right in with Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa. Ideologically, that is.

Except, they are on the losing side of the battle for world superiority, and they keep doing everything to keep losing. Angering the rest of the world with their ignorant arrogance won’t help them any. But they’re not aware of it.

What does it mean for us, Canadians?

Why not take a correspondence course from the Africans, to re-learn a thing or two about pride and independence?

Ignorant at our peril

The West, prodded by the globalists from the World Economic Forum, has been provoking a snake while barefoot, and the snake doesn’t like it.

The not-so-shocking result: the good old Europe as we’ve known it is about to fall apart as an economic power, her population freezing to death in the meantime. European Union’s member governments will be accusing one another, hoping against hope that their own nations won’t rise up and sweep them precisely thence they belong. This will be a pretty dangerous state of affairs, until they are thrown out and the nations, thus freed, will go after the Marxist and Maoist crowd inside the European Union’s palatial head offices in Brussels.

The United States has been in the throes of idiotically misguided policies long enough to become the rest of the world’s laughing stock. It has in no time sunk from a superpower status to zero. An economic and political zero. A dangerous zero, still, what with all the nukes it keeps, and the irresponsible guys who run that formerly rich and wonderful country, but a zero, nevertheless.

The globalists’ idea of a unipolar world led by them has gone up in flames.

And while this fiasco goes on, they will all continue accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin. To them, and to their propaganda, he’s devil incarnate. Except, if they all do believe their own words, they’re bound to fail one more time.

Who’s he?

Western propaganda keeps repeating the mantra of a mad, oligarch-supported former KGB spy, megalomaniac like no other, keen on restoring the menacingly sinister former Soviet Union and establishing its rule all over the world (and beyond).

They see in him a mirror image of themselves.

True, Vladimir Putin is no angel. He can’t be: you don’t rise to higher ranks within any intelligence service while keeping your nose clean. And hands, also.

Putin’s bloody and dirty escapades while serving his former country in Germany have become part of legend. How much of it concocted to impress the masses (and the opposition), and how much of it is true, not many know.

But, unlike his predecessors, he’s not a slave to any particular ideology. Again: whether he used and ceased to be, matters little now. What does matter is his sharp criticism of what happened in his country in the fall of 1917, and that he dared take the first communist leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, off the pedestal. That move itself took a lot of courage: many of his own countryfolk still believe that Lenin was a saint to behold.

We are being told that Putin owes his power to the so-called oligarch class, doing their bidding all along.

Facts do not support this claim. Here’s what happened, actually: former President Boris Yeltsin picked Putin as his successor precisely because he knew the ex-KGB guy will have the balls to thwart the combined oligarch and communist blackmail: Yeltsin stood accused of some illicit dealings with the Bank of New York. The oligarch alliance with the communists was one of the strangest conspiracies known throughout Russian history. In the Duma (Russian parliament), they tried to impeach Yeltsin.

In came Putin. A few unexplained (and inexplicable) deaths within both the oligarch and communist ranks later, all talk of any scandal (and impeachment) disappeared.

Was it democratic? No.

Does it remind us of similar unexplained (and inexplicable) deaths in America? Yes.

Does the pot call the kettle black? A rhetorical question.

Those still swallowing the anti-Putin propaganda campaign would do well checking their facts.

While not exonerating Putin from any of his many misdeeds, some more criminal than others, accusing him of trying to restore the Soviet Union is beyond laughable. The guy’s on the record as saying that Russia was much better off without Lenin and his nightmarishly grandiose visions. While he’s at it, he dares mention that Russia’s gold reserves used to be the largest such reserves in the world before the Bolshevik coup d’état. Where’s that precious metal gone now? Putin demands to know. The loot’s been hidden by forces unmentioned, in hopes that the Bolsheviks will never find it. This hypothesis has been circulating for years, with no real proof forthcoming.

Getting at the rich guys

Most of the Russian oligarchs have been fearing for their lives since the moment Putin took over.

They have seen it in China: the filthy rich are wealthy at the communist party’s pleasure, and should they displease someone in the Forbidden City, a public execution follows (in the best-case scenario), or they disappear without leaving forwarding addresses, and their assets are confiscated by the state.

Putin is of the view that the oligarchs plundered Russia. He also claims that the outsiders (especially those from Harvard) used to give advice on how to transform Russia from communism to capitalism with their own interests in mind, rather than really helping Russia make the change.

Putin told the oligarchs he would leave them alone, amassing their billions, if they, in return, promise to keep their noses out of politics.

Many of those who have started paying attention to Russia only after she felt provoked enough to invade Ukraine, seem to be unaware of some basics. For example: with Mikhail Gorbachev still at the helm, even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO suggested that it join.

Whether Gorbachev was willing to consider the idea, who knows, and he won’t tell us now. But: Soviet hardliners, fearing he might be inclined not to dismiss the plan out of hand, triggered the August 1991 putsch against him: joining NATO would equal Soviet surrender to the hated Americans.

We deal here with split personalities: on one hand, America was officially Enemy Number One, on the other, most of them loved spending dollars they plundered from state reserves on American luxury goods (even a washer and dryer belonged among those).

Yes, it was Yeltsin who stood on that tank, leading opposition against the communist hardliners. With good reason: he was one of those corrupt officials who actually gave the oligarchs their chance, in return for enriching himself and his family.

But it would be Putin who’d get Yeltsin out of the mulligatawny. By the time of his entry into high politics, most Russian people viewed him as neither a communist nor an oligarch. People didn’t want to lose their newly-won freedoms which would have happened with the return of communist rule, and they openly despised the oligarchs who gained their wealth using methods that stunk. That’s what gave Putin his 70-per-cent+ approval rating.

A number of western media, from mainstream to hi-tech socials, have been carrying unverified stories about Putin’s personal wealth, hinting his ways of achieving it were not really too acceptable in polite society.

Whether these stories can ever be confirmed, nobody knows. They are irrelevant, and that’s what matters.

What is much more relevant is the fact that the history re-writes originate mostly within the rather limited circle of 30 (now 32) countries that comprise NATO. The rest of the world begs to differ.

What now?

Russia has been historically split into two factions. One called for more co-operation with the West, while the other claimed, with sufficient proof, that Russia hasn’t much to gain from such co-operation, other than the West’s loose morals, decadence and social debauchery.

So far as the current conflict with Ukraine goes, one side within Russian elites says that Russia should simply crush Ukraine into obedience and be done with it. Another side calls for peace settlement.

Both proposals are inadequate: even if Russian army takes the entire Ukraine and makes her part of Russian Federation, with whatever rules and laws, the guerrilla war would never cease. And it takes two to tango to negotiate peace. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky who used to be willing to consider it is now dead set against it. All indicators show that it was the West that led Zelensky to rejecting any peace negotiations, and he seems to be entrenched in their pockets more than would be acceptable for a head of a hypothetically independent country.

Different games

As some wise people suggested, the main issue here is that the West has been playing tic-tac-toe, while Putin plays a chess game.

That is why the fairly recent Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), whose summit brought together China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, has become so important as to warrant major headlines.

Most major western media ignored it, and, it seems, most NATO and European Union politicians aren’t aware of it, either.

They should start paying attention: in addition to the powers mentioned, Iran is getting close to being admitted, while Saudi Arabia, Qatar and NATO member Turkey have associated status.

If what we call, for wont of better words, the West, and mean the European Union and NATO, continue to ignore this major shift in the arrangement of global affairs, they do so at their peril.

Attempts to recreate the unipolar world, Putin said, “have recently taken an absolutely ugly form that the overwhelming majority of the planet’s nations find unacceptable.”

To make his point abundantly clear, he added that Russia and China “stand together for a just, democratic, multipolar world order based on international law and the central role of the UN. And not on any rules that someone has invented and tries to impose on others without even explaining what they are.”

Only a totally irresponsible politician will ignore these warnings.

Going south, with no return ticket

Any country whose government is her largest employer is bound to fail.

That rule of thumb seems to be lost on Canadian propagandists who have been trumpeting forth lately that Canada’s job market has been recovering nicely, despite all of the hurdles posed by all sorts of pandemics and similar catastrophes.

Canada’s federal government have been on record as saying, with unjustified pride, that they employ the most people of all sectors of the country’s economic life.

That, in and of itself, is a horrible admission to make: government employees, known also as public service employees, haven’t been known as the most efficient, effective and useful segment of any job market. Even those who produce something other than hot air and paper-shuffling charades don’t belong to the most productive parts of society.

The reason is overwhelmingly simple: Economics 101 has proven that governments have no business being in business other than governing.

Here’s why: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

This is how British economist Cyril Northcote Parkinson opened his immortal work, Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress. It first appeared in the British newsmagazine The Economist in 1955, would become a highly successful and widely read book in 1958, and the author has made it known that the volume’s content is based on his own experience in the British civil service. Its conclusions have been on the mark since day one of their publication.

Anyone who thinks Canada’s (or any other country’s, for that matter) public service differs from that described by Parkinson, should start thinking again.

Strange numbers

Which brings us back full circle to the news of Canada’s recent job market developments.

Following up on the news about the country’s speedy recovery, the Fraser Institute checked the figures out without StatsCan (and other government) interference. They found a minor glitch of major proportions: nearly 9 in 10 jobs created between 2020 and 2021 were in the public sector.

A few figures of note: the public sector saw a 9.4 per cent job growth between February 2020 and July 2022, while private sector’s growth was as minimal as to be meaningless: 0.4 percentage points.

In actual job numbers: Canada’s economy added 366,800 jobs to the mix, but only 56,100 were in the private sector. Government jobs constituted 50.7 per cent of all jobs in Canada in 2020 (leaving 49.3 per cent for the private sector) before the so-called pandemic. Now we have 51.8 per cent of employed people working for government, and 48.2 in private sector.

The numbers continue to be telling: Canada’s economy shrank by 16 per cent during the artificially induced panic, kicking some three million out of work and sending the unemployment rate from 5.7 per cent all the way to 13 per cent.

Every economic indicator points to the devastating effect of various Canadian governments’ mandates imposed on the population.

Add to it the harm caused by the capricious orders (all government employees must be vaccinated or else lose their jobs, despite the growing evidence of the devastating effects these concoctions have on previously perfectly healthy people).

Still, the number of government employees has grown.

Even the most recent unemployment numbers aren’t encouraging, despite the governments’ frantic recruitment efforts.

Why’s that?

Government jobs, as mentioned, add little if anything to the country’s economy. They mostly involve pushing paper and coming up with new and newer and newest regulations that interfere with both the private sector and with individual Canadians’ lives.

Making sure everybody is obedient is the next step, and that requires even more government hires.

One question remains unanswered: and who, pray, guards the guardians themselves? This is a millennia old question, first recorded by the Roman poet Juvenal in Latin as Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. They obviously had that issue even then. For the record: Juvenal first used it when dealing with marital infidelities, but still, the question remains with us even today.

Killer tradition still looms

Why is this question relevant today?

Public servants have formed all kinds of union-style associations through the years of their more or less faithful service. These groups, much too regularly for the country’s economic health, engage in collective bargaining. Let’s leave aside the general question of such unions’ usefulness these days. Let’s ignore the suggestion that the concept has gone way past its best-before date.

Let’s look at the rhetoric, instead. Whenever these associations engage in such contract negotiations (disputes, mostly), they speak of their disagreements with their employer. They don’t name the particular government. They leave it at the most general form: employer.

Here’s the issue: governments are NOT their employer. Taxpayers are. This happens to be THE major point that they seem to have never learnt.

Of course, why should they? They’ve got used to the fact that they form the majority of Canada’s workplace, a fact not many dare question.

And while this country lay in increasing mounts of economic ruin, her high school substitute drama teacher cum Prime Minister causes another major international embarrassment, belting out the rock anthem, Bohemian Rhapsody, at a wake inside a fashionably expensive London hotel, remembering the late Queen Elizabeth II.

What a prospect!

Ike’s words of wisdom

Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower first warned his nation about what he called “the military-industrial complex” in his 1961 farewell speech.

He knew whereof he spoke.

For those not familiar with the name, a few facts: Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower, America’s 34^th President (1953-1961) served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II. He rose to the rank of five-star rank of General of the Army.

He would be the first military guy to be elected President and, thus far, the last one, too.

Here’s the quote: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

That’s what the 34^th U.S. President said on January 17, 1961, as he was packing, about to leave the White House, and opening the door for his successor, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a.k.a. JFK.

Which brings us to September 16, 2022 news: the annual Future Force Capabilities Conference and Exhibition is going to introduce Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Ukraine’s his minister of defence, Oleksii Reznikov will put in his few cents’ worth, too.

The National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) hosts the event that takes place September 19 through 22, at Austin Convention Center (500 E Cesar Chavez St., Austin, TX, 78701, for those who might want to attend).

Insider club

Who should attend? organisers ask in a rhetorical question, only to provide the answer themselves (verbatim): As this event combines the annual Global EOD event with that of the NDIA Armaments, Robotics, and Munitions Technology Divisions, anyone working or interested in these focus areas is welcome and highly encouraged to join us in October. (Whatever that EOD abbreviation is supposed to mean: your usual acronym dictionaries carry more than 60 definitions of the term, and they all differ from one another.) The Future Force Capabilities agenda will cover a wide range of subjects while offering unique opportunities for learning, conversing, and networking, which means that there’s something for everyone.

End of quote.

Some U.S. political insiders view askance the U.S. tax office (IRS) decision calling the NDIA a non-profit organisation. They point out that, in fact, it is blatantly lobbying on behalf of the military-industrial complex.

An interesting note on NDIA’s website announcing the details of the conference: This event is open to media but will have some Distribution D sessions that are closed to media.

Another disclaimer on that site: NDIA has a policy of strict compliance with federal and state antitrust laws. The antitrust laws prohibit competitors from engaging in actions that could result in an unreasonable restraint of trade. Consequently, NDIA members must avoid discussing certain topics when they are together – both at formal association membership, board, committee, and other meetings and in informal contacts with other industry members: prices, fees, rates, profit margins, or other terms or conditions of sale (including allowances, credit terms, and warranties); allocation of markets or customers or division of territories; or refusals to deal with or boycotts of suppliers, customers or other third parties, or topics that may lead participants not to deal with a particular supplier, customer or third party.

Which is precisely why the IRS agreed to view NDIA as a group of keen gardeners who get together to debate the colours they use to adorn their backyards while making no profit out of their praiseworthy work.

It’s the members who profit from military conflicts. Just consider this partial list: Boeing Defense, Space & Security; L3Harris Technologies; Raytheon Technologies; BAE Systems; Lockheed Martin Corporation; Huntington Ingalls Industries; General Dynamics; and Northrop Grumman. What’s their job?

Who owns the planet?

American taxpayers have already sunk more than $15 billion in weapon supplies to Ukraine. Most of these deadly tools have never seen action: the Russians have found them, often even before they could be unpacked, and changed them into heaps of scrap metal.

Well, so what, we’ll send them some more stuff, the government is gladly paying for this blatant paragon of waste anyway, and it’s none of U.S. taxpayers’ business where their cash is going, either.

Which is precisely what’s going to happen between Sept. 19 and 22. The Future Force Capabilities Conference and Exhibition event organisers fully expect (they said so quite publicly) the two Ukrainian guys to demand more weapons, trying to shame the Americans into clearing the shelves of their own stuff at whatever price. They aren’t footing the bill, after all, American taxpayers are.

The West plans to fight the noble battle till the last Ukrainian is alive and standing. Should it happen that the world runs out of Ukrainians, there are plenty other targets, with one pre-condition: Russia’s got to be dragged into the conflict. Russia, especially Russia that could care less about America’s craving for her vast reserves of all kinds of commodities and raw materials.

Poker face

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hands are definitely covered by innocents’ blood: he hadn’t been a ranking KGB officer for decades just for his blue eyes. It remains one of many serious questions whether Putin really is standing up to the globalist gang who want to rid the world of six-sevenths of its population and seize control over the rest, all in the name of the new serfs (or slaves) owning nothing and being happy, or whether he, too, is part of the equation known as the Great Reset.

Either way, he’s a thorn in America’s backside and, together with China, he keeps the rest of the world hostage. Even if he, indeed, is one of the globalists, he seems to be one on his own terms.

Is the end nigh?

Let’s-pretend social conscience: what a ridiculous lie

Torn jeans: are those wearing them making a fashion statement or are they into expressing themselves politically?
No surprise if the latter is true.
The late German communist playwright Bertolt Brecht, he of the Threepenny Opera fame, rich like only few in his profession in his time, used to wear clothing that would suit the poorest of the poor homeless people anywhere. It cost him a pretty pfennig: he had a personal tailor, who had to make Brecht’s clothing as decrepit as decrepit can that. The tailor didn’t have to make Brecht’s newest dresses stink: the writer’s habit of smoking the foulest-smelling cigars would take care if that. And, by the way, those stogies Brecht preferred weren’t too cheap, either.
Is there a parallel between today’s politically fashionable would-be intellectuals and the German communist playwright?
You bet your last currency that you still own that the answer is yes.
The good old Brecht, who shamelessly stole the Threepenny Opera idea from British 17th and 18th century playwright John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, led an adventurous life. Upon the arrival of Adolf Hitler to the top of German political life, Brecht took off and landed where he was supposed to land: in the Soviet Union. He quickly found out that the paradise of Soviet communism isn’t what he had been telling all and sundry it was. In addition, with Josif Stalin’s NKVD sending defected German communists back to their home country upon Gestapo requests, Brecht realised his future in the Soviet Union wasn’t as safe as he thought it would be.
It would take all kinds of efforts but, eventually, Brecht would end up in the United States. Thanks to his successful collaboration with such great German modern composers as Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler, Hollywood and the rest of American left-oriented intelligentsia of the time embraced Brecht with a passion worthy of more deserving people. But when the U.S. started questioning his ideological bona fides after the end of the Second World War, Brecht decided that returning to his cherished world of communism might be the most prudent move.
He returned to what would become the German Democratic Republic, get his own theatre, remain filthy rich, and continue wearing his pretentiously beggar-like clothing till his last day.
Same old, same old
Why this detour into history?
Because this torn-jeans craze is yet another proof that history repeats itself.
Mind, this craze isn’t very new. It started more than two decades ago, and it has developed into a real wave of idiocy. Paying more for ripped and seemingly worn jeans than for a pair that not only is new but also looks like it reveals sick minds.
In any case, it reveals a relatively new social phenomenon. It’s called “common sense be damned,” and it is much more dangerous than it seems to be.
While Brecht would only shock those close to him with his clothing and his stinking smoking habits, the torn-jeans wave has swept highly educated university students, including graduates. The more you look like a dirty homeless drug addict, the more socially conscious you appear to be.
Please note the last words: appear to be.
This trend is called media indoctrination, and it happens not only to drum up custom, but also to bend the minds of the originators’ targets, however subtly it may be happening.
Another angle of observation: how many colours of vehicles are car salespeople offering these days?
Used to be two. Black and white. Now? White. It looks cleaner, so the explanation goes, and its production doesn’t harm the environment as much. Any proof for that? Not one available to wider public yet.
If you dig deep enough and promise your sources complete anonymity, even under torture, here it is: the idea is to influence people’s thinking.
Some people noticed and started demanding other colours, and the industry would take several years to budge somewhat eventually. But if you think you can demand whatever colours for your new car purchase (if you can afford it), the offer will remain limited, and even then, you will have to wait for your new vehicle until the manufacturer either finds one that’s already been painted the way you wanted it, or till the moment they find time and the paint to make your wish come true.
Is the colour of your new car that important? Yes and no, depends, but it’s the wish not to be lost in the crowd that matters.
Vive La Différence!
Before you start dismissing these questions, ask yourself: does uniformity really, really, really appeal to your sense of individuality?
This is what it’s all about: it’s no longer about only keeping up with the Joneses, it’s about everybody not only looking the same but thinking along the same lines, too.
If you don’t like it, tough: the result is called total control.
And if you don’t believe that this is what’s happening, look up Klaus Schwab’s masterpiece, The Great Reset, freely available from the World Economic Forum.
Who’s he? A German engineer turned globalist, and a puppet of powers much stronger than even he can imagine. His statements and predictions are open because they can afford it. By bringing the younger crowd under the umbrella of uniformity, they are changing people into sheeple who would happily go to slaughter in the name of an idea as idiotic as it is criminal. Yes, pronouncing that there are way too many people on this planet and that one-seventh of today’s population would do quite nicely, thank you very much, equals genocide. Six sevenths of humans will have to die to achieve these globalists’ goal.
People who succumb to their calls for uniformity, no matter how couched in social equality blather, will start by helping to kill others and then will march to their own deaths with happy songs on their lips.
As a minor aside: have you noticed how many of the various recent movements aimed at ending the preposterous rules imposed on us have adopted names linked to colours?
We’ve been under attack left, right and centre for several centuries, but modern times, and modern technologies, have made this assault upon our basic human qualities close to unbearable.
The centuries of these persistent attempts to rid us of what makes us human are now beginning to take their toll. Just watch how many have fallen for the fallacy that claims that faster communication systems (G5, anyone?) make us better. Evidence shows these systems are killers, and yet, you can find schools that permit their developers to install this equipment on school property. For hard cash consideration, of course. No amount of technical piffle will protect those spending whole of their days close to the transmitters from the electromagnetic fields’ killer effects. And, just as well, no amount of sorrowful rhetoric will help those affected once those guilty realise what they had done.
We are close to crossing an intersection while the red light is flashing. We can’t go on ignoring it much longer.

What a morbid show!

Monarchy is a money-maker for British tourism industry, granted that.

It is also a money-maker for all kinds of Canadian bureaucrats and Crown corporations.

And it is a huge money-loser for Canadian taxpayers.

Why? Because it’s all about pomp and circumstance, without a single sign of any contribution to ordinary Canadians’ lives. Yet, it’s the ordinary Canadians who are paying the piper: governments have no money of their own, they only have what they’d managed to wring out of taxpayers’ pockets by way of ever-increasing taxes.

Supporters of the Monarchy would claim that this form of government is an institution that unites us all behind a certain (and valuable) set of values. Should that statement be true, then, we still belong in centuries past.

Times have changed drastically since those fairy-tale centuries. If there’s anything that should be uniting us now, it ought to be values that respect individual lives, cherishing everybody’s contribution to society. It should not involve proclaiming unwavering faith and blind obedience to a clan of unelected persons whose only claim to fame is that they were born into royalty.

Have our “constitutional” Monarchy ever respected individual lives, cherishing everybody’s contribution to society?

Have our government ever respected individual lives, cherishing everybody’s contribution to society?

A few days hence

A Monarch’s passing no longer involves dissolution of Canada’s Parliament, and civil servants and soldiers no longer must swear new oaths. Official buildings no longer must be covered in black, with flags flying at half-mast (the cheapest part of the protocol).

We have an official flag protocol. Another waste of money, too: someone had to write it, and they got paid for their efforts, and somebody had to approve of it, and they got paid for their efforts, also. It’s filled with rules in detail as minute as to be boring. Bet your last buck someone will be paid to make sure the rules are observed.

New dough?

Not necessarily. Or, hopefully, not immediately. Coins bearing Her Majesty’s likeness will be around for a while. What kind of a while? Depends. Our new nominal ruler will have to get portrayed (on taxpayers’ dime), the portrait will have to be approved. Its engraved version Royal Canadian Mint would end up using would have to get his thumbs up, too.

New year, new coins? Nobody knows. Most importantly, what kind of coins we use has no bearing on Canada’s national economy either way.

One positive: Royal Canadian Mint has been in a habit of issuing commemorative coin sets. People have been buying them like hot cakes. Yes, their design and production will set us back somewhat. The eagerness with which many would part with their hard-earned cash just to own currency not to be used to pay for anything might hopefully end up on the positive side of Royal Canadian Mint’s ledger.

Another idiotic rule

According to the Manual of Official Procedure of the Government of Canada, the Prime Minister must convene Parliament forthwith so they can pass a resolution expressing “loyalty and sympathy” to the new guy in Buckingham Palace. Declaring an official day of mourning for the day of the funeral is the second part of the resolution.

That’s all.

That would be a procedure that shouldn’t take longer than a quarter of an hour (if all of the political parties’ leaders present express the wish to speak on the occasion, and they undoubtedly will).

The coronation day, usually a few months, or a complete year later, has similar rules.

Should this happen at a time when Parliament are not sitting (summer break, for example), this is another taxpayer-supported expense.

Of course, the moniker we’ve got used to, Her Majesty, will now be His Majesty. That should remain so for quite some time: the new King has already mentioned that his son would be his heir. Frightfully kind of him.

Also, one wonders whether Canada’s delegation to the coronation beats the record established in 1952: about 10,000 Canadians crossed the Big Pond to show their loyalty (and to show off that they belonged) then.

How many of them paid their own fare, room and board?

None.

The same goes for the inevitable Royal tour that is forthcoming. The idea is to drum up more support for the Monarchy. The trend in anti-Monarchy views has become way too obvious to ignore. The countries the Monarchs have been visiting in the past have always claimed they were honoured to be the perfect hosts, including room and board.

So: why not again, right?

Eager beaver

Justin Trudeau swung into action with shocking speed. Herewith an excerpt from his itinerary for Friday, Sept. 9, 2022. The Cabinet meeting listed as the first topic must have been really smooth. It couldn’t take but a few minutes: it started at 10, and the PM had to be elsewhere by 10:30.

10:00 a.m. The Prime Minister will chair the Cabinet meeting.

10:30 a.m. The Prime Minister will join Her Excellency the Right Honourable Mary Simon, Governor General of Canada, at a ceremony to proclaim the accession of the new Sovereign, King Charles III.

Rideau Hall

Notes for media:

• Open coverage
• Media are asked to arrive at the Princess Anne Entrance no later than 9:15 a.m.
• Media wishing to cover the event must be accredited with the Parliamentary Press Gallery and are asked to confirm their attendance with the Rideau Hall Press Office in advance.
• Media contact: (address deleted for obvious reasons)
• Please note that masks are mandatory.

The Prime Minister will speak with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth Truss.

End of quote.

What a waste of time (and money)!

None of it (neither time nor money) is theirs to waste. That’s precisely why they’re wasting it: they wouldn’t spend a cent of it were it to come out of their own wallets.

And yet, they do waste it, and they find that way too many taxpayers have no issues with this kind of extravagance.

What does it say about us, their subservient bosses?

Hypocrisy, thy name is ending disinformation

Nobel peace prize winners call for action on online disinformation.

Thus a major headline in Great Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, parroted (verbatim) by America’s Editor & Publisher organisation’s newsletter the other day.

For the record, with the Nobel Committee serving as source, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded 102 times to 137 Nobel Prize laureates between 1901 and 2021. Their numbers included 109 individuals and 28 organisations. The International Committee of the Red Cross has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize three times (in 1917, 1944 and 1963). The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize twice (in 1954 and 1981). All told, there are 25 individual organisations which have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

So, also for the record, how many Nobel Peace Prize winners had been actually involved in the cry to introduce online censorship?

The headline makes it seem that all living Nobel Peace Prize winners put their pens to the paper, including the last Soviet poohbah standing, Mikhail Gorbachev, who signed on his death bed.

The fact that only eight other peace prize recipients have joined the call is hidden, in all modesty, way below the headline.

That would be disinformation like there’s no tomorrow. As mentioned, the headline makes it sound as if the room was packed with Nobel Peace Prize laureates, and they all supported the manifesto with enviably unfettered enthusiasm.

Not many other words but censorship can describe the demand that governments adopt a technology action plan to tackle the “existential threat” to democracies posed by online disinformation, hate speech and abuse.

Who, pray elucidate, defines an existential threat? And who decides what information is truthful? Considering U.S. President Joe Biden’s recent speech that described all who disagree with him and his works as danger to pedestrians and traffic, the answer to this question is obvious. And dangerous.

Hitting the alarm bell

Journalists Dmitry Muratov and Maria Ressa, 2021 Nobel laureates, presented their 10-point manifesto in Oslo, during a freedom of expression conference. They warned that the potential for technology to advance societies has been undermined by the business models of the dominant online platforms.

Here, they do have a valid point.

A typical quote from the gauntlet powers-that-be are asked to pick up: “We urge rights-respecting democracies to wake up to the existential threat of information ecosystems being distorted by a Big Tech business model fixated on harvesting people’s data and attention, even as it undermines serious journalism and polarises debate in society and political life.”

Not much wrong with this call.

So, what is wrong?

The manifesto makes three general demands.

Here they are:

• end the “surveillance-for-profit” business model that harvests users’ data to maximise engagement and underpins multibillion dollar spending by advertisers on social media companies;
• make tech firms to treat all users equally around the world;
• make newsrooms and governments support independent journalism.

Nice tears, but at a wrong funeral: they expect governments to do the heavy lifting. Here’s the issue: anything governments do for any slice of society, they demand something in return.

Besides, having governments decide what is true information and what isn’t leads to authoritarian regimes such as the one envisioned by President Biden.

It sounds great: “rights-respecting democratic governments” should demand that

• tech companies carry out independent human rights impact assessments;
• introduce robust data protection laws;
• and fund and assist independent media under attack around the world.

The European Union should:

• challenge the “extraordinary lobbying machinery” of tech companies;
• rigorously enforce the landmark digital services and digital markets acts, to ensure they end the spread of disinformation via algorithms and change tech companies’ business models.

The United Nations Organisation aren’t left out, either: they should create a special envoy focused on the safety of journalists.

To show they mean business, The Guardian conclude their online version of the story by telling this particular reader that they noticed he’s reading them from Canada, and would he consider chipping in to cover their expenses?

They explain their request as follows (another verbatim quote): unlike many others, The Guardian has no shareholders and no billionaire owner. Just the determination and passion to deliver high-impact global reporting, always free from commercial or political influence.

Incoherent or incoherent?

Playing news that demands an end to such flagrant tracking as a top-of-the-day item on one hand and, on the other, doing (as flagrantly) exactly that would be funny.

Except, they are dead serious about it.