The future ain't what it used to be

Canada will join U.S. by 2010, futurists say
(Toronto Star, July 23, 1992)

WASHINGTON (CP) - Quebec will separate from Canada in 1996 and the other provinces will join the United States by the year 2010, predicts the U.S. World Future Society.

"There are no longer any economic reasons to force Quebec to stay in Canada," write group members Marvin Cetron and Owen Davies in a book called Crystal Globe, which makes sweeping predictions about the world's future.

In a chapter titled "55 United States and Quebec," the Washington-based non-profit research group forecasts that after Quebec leaves Canada in 1996, the four Atlantic provinces will join the U.S. as a single state.

Later, the authors say, Ontario will be admitted to the U.S. as a state and the Western provinces, which will have more in common with their southern neighbors, will form two more states.

The book also predicts Cuban leader Fidel Castro will join the Western powers, Israel will give up the occupied territories to make peace in the Middle East and Japanese economic might will decline rapidly.

The concept of a bilingual, bi-cultural Canada will fall apart, the authors predict, because English Canada is not prepared to five Quebec any more powers, he collapse of the Meech Lake constitutional accord in 1990 is cited as a case in point.

Giving Quebec a veto over the rest of Canada is "a privilege that 20 million Canadians are not ready to give."

Redrawing the country into four or five semi-autonomous zones isn't expected either, the group says, because Quebec and Ontario would dominate and that would be opposed by the West and the Atlantic provinces.

An independent Quebec would be as affluent and populous as Switzerland, and three times as large, the book points out. And the new country would have no problem negotiating a free trade deal of its own with the United States.

Subprime Response

Subprime Response
US Federal Reserve meets crisis by injecting eight trillion tons of bullshit into US economy

WASHED-UP-INGTON — The deepening subprime lending crisis, up till now characterized by US President George W. Bush as "a great opportunity to build hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place", has finally been recognized by saner members of his administration for the unfolding economic disaster that the rest of humanity knows it to be. As a result, the United States Federal Reserve Board has decided to take action in the form of issuing eight trillion tons of bullshit for domestic and foreign consumption.

Assistant Secretary to the Treasury Willy Schitcha held a press conference this morning, at which he spun the administration's latest presentations. "Okay, get a load of this one," he said. "Foreclosure: a wonderful chance for your children to get to know their grandparents! Hmm? Related to that, we have: Nostalgic? Move back into your parents' basement!"

Schitcha's presentation represents a sea-change in federal policy. Up until now, the policy has been to deny that the US, and potentially the rest of the world, is heading into a recession, or worse, as a result of American banks lending trillions of bucks to people without two cents to rub together, backed by lunatics in Europe and Asia who supposedly knew something about how money actually works, but turn out not to have. The inevitable defaults seem to have caught everyone by surprise (for "everyone" read: greedy, stupid financiers with more money than brains). Now that the trend has become undeniably clear to anyone who isn't brain-dead (and even to Republican voters as well), the administration is attempting to persuade the public that the downturn is a positive thing.

"Obviously we don't want to do anything about the economy itself," Schitcha said following his presentation. "I mean, nobody's actually done anything about the economy since, oh, the Eisenhower Administration. Attempting to remedy problems in the economy almost always ends up costing rich people some of their money; and let's be honest... in a plutocracy like ours, that just isn't going to happen. ...Except, you know, to the handful of banking VPs we'll ultimately hang this on who'll wind up spending a few months in Club Fed. We have to throw the public a bone so they don't draw real blood, after all."

When Schitcha's remarks were repeated to the president, he advised potential defendants who might be incarcerated to "not pay the $50 to get out of jail... just roll doubles, it's cheaper."

Astonishing!

This came to me in email today from a friend utterly amazed that Alberta has, yet again, elected a Tory majority government...

Maybe local politics in Alberta go a long way to explaining the current crop of Conservatives in Ottawa. They can't help but govern as a majority, invincible and all powerful. I'm particularly seething that Harper has the nerve after running all those personel attack ads on Stephan Dion (for no reason, no election campaign), then threatens to sue the Liberal Party for catching them out on an old scandal. This is government by intimidation. We can crush you, but you daren't resist us. Only thirty or forty years of experience provincially can explain such arrogance.

Canada's statesman, part II

It's funny how it works out. I just blogged about Joe Clark kind of out of the blue a couple of weeks ago, and now this.

An opinion piece by Lawrence Martin in this morning's Globe and Mail suggests that Brian Mulroney might owe a lot more to Karl Schreiber than just three hundred grand and some influence. He might owe his political career to him.

Schreiber, an Austrian named Walter Wolf (chair of the supervisory board of — guess what? — Airbus Industries), and a man named Franz Josef Straus — incredibly, the premier of Bavaria at the time — orchestrated and bankrolled between them Joe Clark's fall. Why? Clark was a red Tory, and didn't wasn't the kind of guy to look after their Canadian interests the way they wanted. There's a tacit suggestion they were working elsewhere to export their 'preferred' brand of conservatism as well.

It turns out that these guys were putting money into Mulroney's sneaky little campaign to unseat Joe Clark as leader of the Progressive Conservatives in 1983, to the point that they even used to Boeing jets to get anti-Clark delegates to Winnipeg to vote against him, all expenses paid, including their wives' shopping trips. They did enough to tip the balance against Clark, who had stated before the review that he wanted a 70% mandate from the party. He got 66.9%, resigned to face a leadership campaign, and lost it to Mulroney. Our entire history turned on this.

In other places, in other times, this would be called a coup. And now it's coming out it happened here. And for nine years, this country was run by a man put there to serve the interests of rich German and Austrian investors. Brian Mulroney huffs and puffs and tries to blow the truth down, but I think this time it's made of bricks. I've hated the man for years, and I'd be loving this if it weren't so sickeningly unbelievable and soberingly chilling.

How Joe Clark managed to walk into that cabinet room every day for all those years without vomiting in that man's face, I can't imagine.

I think World War II just started! ...'cause I'm dumb as a bag of hammers

I was in the process of looking something up yesterday when I came across this:



In case it comes out too small to read, it says, "World War II December 7, 1941 – September 2, 1945". Can you guess which country this comes from?

I can't decide if this is simple ignorance, outright arrogance, or some combination of both. But it's not the first time I've seen stuff like this. Take, for example, this one:


Again, the dates say 1941-1945. This is from Ken Burns, no less. This is extremely offensive. Now, you can say his documentary was focused on the US experience of the Second World War (yeah, of course it was... I'll come back to that later). But so what? That's not what the title says. It doesn't say anything like that. It just says "THE WAR". 1941-1945.

In the movie Pearl Harbor, as the bombs are falling around him, Josh Hartnett's character Danny actually shouts, "I think World War II just started!" Keep in mind that he's yelling this in the company of a buddy who's just come back from being shot down over the English Channel in a Spitfire helping defend Britain from the Luftwaffe. (Note: according to one site I checked, only ten Americans actually took to the skies in the Battle of Britain. Compare this with tiny New Zealand, whose contribution was an astonishing 98, ten times as many. And yet, the story has to focus on an American. Why didn't they tell the story of the bombing in Hawaii from the point of view of a Royal Navy swabbie on exchange or something?)

I've even seen it suggested — by Americans — that it really wasn't a "world" war until that point, and that no one called it that until then or later. That would come as a surprise to The Calgary Herald, which reputedly used the words "Second World War" on its front page on September 3, 1939. Well... let's consider that claim.

By 1941 (more specifically, by December 7th of that year), Poland had been conquered and divided... France had been overrun and surrendered, the Allied Expeditionary Force barely escaping via the Miracle of Dunkirk... The Blitz was underway, and the Battle of Britain had been fought and won... The Battle of the Atlantic, with its massive losses of shipping and men, had been raging non-stop for over two years... Leningrad had been under siege for three months already, and people were starving... Malta had been under siege; war raged across North Africa and the Balkans... Millions had already died, in dozens of countries in myriad campaigns on a half dozen fronts. And yet, by every indication from the opinions you see above, the Second World War didn't begin until 2,350 people died in Hawaii under forty-eight stars and thirteen stripes.

And on it goes. The public perception, even the rewriting of history, is legion (pardon the pun). In the movie Saving Private Ryan, not a single Allied soldier of any other nation is seen. The only mention of them at all is an attack on the character of Montgomery, and a sly calling into question of the fighting ability and dedication of the British. In the movie The Great Escape, the story focuses largely on an American played by Steve McQueen. The real Great Escape took place in the Commonwealth section of an Allied POW camp; there were no Americans involved. The movie U-571 portrays the capture of the Enigma machine as an American undertaking; an outright revision of history: it was accomplished by a British submarine, HMS Bulldog, in May, 1941, seven months before Pearl Harbor even happened (and the US did not match this feat itself until the middle of 1944). David Ayer, the screenwriter, acknowledged this, but the implication was that an American audience would not be interested in this story if it were not "Americanized". So it's not enough that Americans will tell no one's stories but their own... now they have to steal the glory that rightly belongs to others as well. At this rate, the 7th Cavalry will be winning the Battle of Waterloo any day now.

This is not acceptable. These are insults to millions upon millions, living and dead, military and civilian alike, in other countries.

What "Support Our Troops" really means

For a long time now, I've been bothered by those "Support Our Troops" ribbons — actually just magnetic stickers — you see on the backs of cars... usually huge, gas-guzzling monstrosities. Seems to me it's always the people sucking up the most resources, and thus whipping the drive to empire, who clap the loudest when they send someone else's kid off to die for it. Make no mistake. Afghanistan is a facet of an ongoing resource war. People forget we went in there in October, 2001, to get Osama bin Laden. We still don't have him. We're still there. And scores of Canadian soldiers have died, horribly, for little more than the ongoing tarnishing of our international reputation. The civilians of Afghanistan may, or may not, have considered themselves ill-served and oppressed by the Taliban government... but now they live day and night in the shadow of war. If we were wanted there, if we were truly wanted there, this war would long have been over. We aren't, and so it goes on. This is not "peacekeeping", but peace-disrupting. We are, ourselves, the invaders.

So you spend five bucks on a sticker that makes you feel proud but does not a good goddamn thing for the troops you purport to stand behind, except to help keep them where they shouldn't be: risking their lives, ruining an already destitute country, returning us to days of empire we had long since left behind.

Over at We Move to Canada, Laura has blogged about the ribbons at the official level... the City has agreed to let fire fighters and ambulance drivers continue to display those magnetic "Support Our Troops" ribbons for another year. The post has a lot of a collateral information.

An un-Christian Christian

I was in Niagara Falls on the weekend, and there in the parking lot opposite one of the wonders of the world was this. I'm sorry indeed to relate that the gas-guzzler I saw it on had Ontario plates.

I find this bumper sticker offensive on so many levels, it's hard to know where to start.

Well, start with the obvious, I guess. What makes this clown so sure he's one of the chosen in the first place? Pride is one of the seven deadly sins. Seems to me anyone who's sure he's going to Heaven, ain't. QED.

Second, what kind of jerk would God have to be to do this? Let's break it down. First, a God who supposedly loves us all is presumed ready to let most of us roast in Hell, but scoop up a few others, and why? Because they're willing to "believe" without question. Other than that, inch for inch, pound for pound, they're probably morally no better than you or I. On top of that, once this fellow (and millions like him) have been shredded to ribbons as the Lord sucks them up through the roofs of their cars, homes, and offices in the name of conducting them to Heaven, those of us apparently condemned to Hell will be sent there that much faster by pilotless vehicles skating back and forth across our highways, city streets, harbours, and dropping out of the sky. Nothing like a loving God to make the end of the world a laff riot, huh? Nah, I'm sorry. I have a hard time believing that a loving Creator of the Universe would be a bigger asshole than I am, and a much bigger one at that. I can't be better than God. Ergo, this couldn't happen. If I'm wrong, well, then God's a prick and there's no measurable difference between "good" and "evil" except the power base (are you listening, Mr. President?).

Thirdly, what does putting a bumper sticker like this on your car say about your character? To me, it means that deep down, this guy is a smug, arrogant self-aggrandizer. I wonder what it implies for his conduct with other human beings. If you’re of a 'wrong' religion (and thus damned, no matter how good a person you are), or if this guy decides, for whatever reason, that you’re not saved like he is, how might he treat you differently in subtle, or not-so-subtle ways? Knowing you won’t be standing at the right hand of Jesus on Judgement Day, would he be tempted to treat you as unequal or less worthy? To me, there’s something nastily celebratory about this message. It presumes that he’s saved and you’re not; the warning is for you because it’s his unmanned vehicle you’ll have to deal with once God has saved him and forsaken you. Would a true Christian celebrate this? I would expect, knowing what I do know about Christianity, that this would be a source of sorrow for a sincere believer, not an occasion for an in-your-face joke.

What I’d love to see is the moment of the Rapture arrive, this guy standing there with arms upstretched, watching others lifted away while he stands earthbound with the condemned, and finally squealing, “But what about me?” And there’s Jesus — GLING! — and He says, “Sorry, no, you’re an asshole. I mean, just look at your bumper sticker. So long.” — GLING! — And the guy’s standing there with his jaw dropped, and we all laugh at him as we go to Hell.

But that’s what happens if you’re Protestant. I’m Catholic (at least officially), so I think he gets another chance. For me, Purgatory and Hell are the same thing (though that’s a personal view)… a separation from God and all those you love and all that that makes you happy, combined with a hunger, a yearning, a need for all that that increases with your distance from it. And you stay there till you 'get' all the reasons you can’t be with everyone else. The worse a person you are, the longer it’ll take you to learn the lessons; the longer you suffer. But once you’ve purged yourself (hence the name Purgatory) of your backwardness, you are admitted to Heaven.

Well, to me, this bumper sticker’s a ticket to Purgatory on the Highway to Hell. What a jerk.

Someone needs to tell Bob where to Geld Off

Apparently Bob Geldof has some marching orders for the Prime Minister of Canada...

Geldof puts pressure on Martin to increase aid

CTV.ca News Staff

Prime Minister Paul Martin shouldn't bother going to the G-8 summit in Scotland in July unless he plans to increase aid to impoverished African nations, Bob Geldof said Tuesday.

Geldof said Canada should take leadership on this issue, and up its contributions to the levels set out by Lester B. Pearson 35 years ago. Pearson set a goal of allocating 0.7 per cent of the GDP for aid.

"There is no use in your prime minister coming to Scotland, unless he is prepared to do this deal," Geldof said to a Canadian audience via satellite Tuesday.

"If he's not prepared, stay at home. Just stay at home. Don't come.

"You're not welcome unless you are prepared to do something finally and irrevocably on behalf of the poor of this world," Geldof said.

Geldof made the comments as it was announced that the Canadian Live 8 concert would be held in Barrie, Ont., north of Toronto.

Can you believe the stones on this guy (rock pun not intended)? Who died and made him King of Ireland, anyway? Sorry, I don't remember all of us electing him President of Earth or anything. I'm sure his heart's in the right place, but how does he get his shirt on in the morning? Must button up, cause he sure as hell couldn't pull it on. Hey, Bob, the Queen of England doesn't talk to her First Ministers like that. I know you feel strongly, but you are not this guy's boss. At least be diplomatic when you're telling him how to spend my money, alright?