Apparently, for dinner on Nov. 25th, we had some contaminated
romaine lettuce! I should have got my bottle of "pink stuff" but
it was dark and rainy and I was in bad shape and that bottle of
Pepto Bismol® was down in the rabbit shed. But when (not if)
this happens to you, you need to have some at hand. This was
noted in Dr. Michael Gershon's
1998 book "The Second Brain". He found that instead of simply
"coating your stomach" bismuth
subsalicylate's function is to absorb toxins. And the toxins
are the bad part of bacterial infections. Also, I have lots of
home-made chicken stock in the freezer, simmered overnight, which
is a big help.
So why was the bottle in the rabbit shed? After the Second Brain
book, I was thinking it might help with digestive upsets in young
rabbits, and a researcher in Belgium also figured that out, and
we exchanged a few notes on it, and used it ever since.
re: "What
we need in this country is less money in politics, not more"
by Andrew Coyne, Globe and Mail, Nov 1, p. O2
My reply (unpublished)
Mr. Coyne begins by saying an election is a conversation among
the citizens, we deliberate for a period of time. No, it is an
emotional rather than a rational decision and it's highly
influenced by advertising to generate "manufactured consent" and
advertising is the means that broke the relationship between
supply and demand. Mr. Coyne would like to reduce campaign
financing. But the real influence of money on politics lies
elsewhere. As John Dewey said in 1905: "Politics is the shadow
cast upon society by big business." The big money influencing
government goes through lobbying. A business person or lobbyist
can have the ear of a government person anytime, any day. What if
a business exec or a lobbyist were to be restricted to government
access once every four years, as voters are?
re: "Ottawa
urged to tie trade to human rights" by Janice Dickson, Globe
and Mail, Nov. 8, p. A2
My reply (unpublished)
Tying trade to human rights means tying it to our human rights
belief system. A belief system is analogous to a religion. Can we
understand that the many cultures on this planet have often
vastly different belief systems? Will we only trade with fellow
believers and shun all others? If we wish to be human rights
preachers to the world, the best forum for that is the United
Nations where we could be champions of developing various human
rights treaties instead of often voting in parallel with the U.S.
and Israel to quash various initiatives. Then when treaties on
various human rights have been established, we could ensure
trading partners are complying with international law if they
wish to sell here. In any case, Canada is not particularly
qualified to lecture other cultures on our notions of morality.
And moving forward in trading relations, it would be best if
Canada sold its exports exclusively in Cdn$.
re: "Country
stuck in a 'vicious circle' of low productivity, BoC says" by
Mark Rendell, Globe and Mail, Nov 20, p. B2
My reply (unpublished)
Interesting that an article is using both terms "output" and
"affordability";
Scott Sumner's latest post spoke of the direct correlation
between "Output is abundance is affordability: Why new houses and
new cars should be unaffordable." And it's true, Canada's output
(productivity) is in unrestrained decline. But a large portion of
this conundrum is due to waste at every level, and investment in
financialization instead of in production. With the BoC's
penchant for low interest rates, there are incentives for share
buy-backs instead of investments in production as well as run-ups
in prices for property assets, exactly the opposite of housing
"affordability."
re: "The
China-Canada relationship is warming again. But at what
cost?" by Preston Lim, Globe and Mail, Nov.24, p. A12
My reply (unpublished)
The author states "...it is impossible to divorce trade from
human rights issues." There is no logical connection between
trade and any moral issue. Your notion of what constitutes a
human right rises from your belief system. People around the
world have vastly different belief systems. That was an aspect of
colonialism – going to other lands and replacing their
belief system with yours. If you wish to establish a basic code
of human rights, you do that at the United Nations with a
comprehensive international treaty establishing those rights -
you don't do it by preaching. Instead, you go to the other nation
and say: "What does China need, and how can we help?"
Otherwise, stay home. And we certainly have had enough of nations
who weaponize their currency and trade relations on every whim.
As well, the world has evolved from the unipolar model, so
instead of going to China (and now India) and begging for
bilateral trade deals, probably demanding payment in US$, it
would certainly advance Canada's trading relationships and
sovereignty by joining China's and India's trading system,
BRICS.
re: "Putin's
War" a 12-page photo eaasy by Goran Tomasevic with David
Walmsley, Globe and Mail, Nov. 29, pages E1-12.
My reply (unpublished)
Thank you for this important coverage, a welcome respite from the
deluge of Atlanticist propaganda. The Akhmat Special Forces [seen
in this photo essay] are led by Lt. Gen. Apti Alaudinov, who, in
an interview in October, mentioned his approach to prisoners of
war. "... it was better to preserve the lives of your most
skilled and dangerous opponents than to take them. ... If you can
capture them, then you must treat them humanely and with honor so
that when they go home to their families they will be able to
help dispel the hate-filled propaganda that had helped fuel the
passions of war amongst the infected populations." Ref:
https://scottritter.substack.com/p/dinner-at-antons
This 12-page photo essay was (of course)
condemned by The Ukrainian World Congress.
re: "Ukraine
has earned the right to shape its future" by Michael
Bociurkiw, Globe and Mail, Dec. 1, p A12
My reply (unpublished)
This article typifies journalistic imbalance and embodies the fog
of war. Certainly the people of Ukraine deserve
self-determination. So why did the U.S. [plus UK and Israel] lead
the Euromaidan revolution chasing out a democratically-elected
president because he was a Russian "sympathizer"? Is it an
anathema for the West to have a Ukrainian leader be on good terms
with its neighbour? For cooperation between the three Slavic
Sisters? This regime-change was necessary to finally prepare for
implementation of Brzezinski's "Grand Chessboard" - a plan to
attack Russia through Ukraine, divide Russia into smaller units
and move on to surround China for the final triumph of American
unipolar hegemony. But how to make Russia look like the
aggressor? The new Ukrainian government, led by the MI6-trained
actor Zelenskyy and his Banderite neo-Nazi supporters, began
attacking the Russian-speaking peoples of the eastern Oblasts
including Donbas. This was an ethnic-cleansing operation by
outlawing the Orthodox Church and bombing villages, followed by
shelling, from 2013/2014 onward. Bombing houses is bad enough,
but the shells were fragmentary, each landing in a yard blowing
shrapnel everywhere. This was the bait to entice Russia to
respond. At the same time, over about 8 years construction, the
NATO-supplied Ukrainian forces heavily fortified the "Horseshoe"
area near the western end of these Oblasts with reinforced
concrete embattlements, forming a trap so that when Russian
forces entered this area, they couldn't swoop down into the
Dnieper Valley and cut off a Ukrainian thrust into the Russia's
Kursk Oblast, of course dismissing the memory of Kursk-1943. So
the stage was set and the Russians began their SMO in February
2022. The West, particularly the UK, rejected the peace offers of
late-2021 and the Istanbul Protocol of March 2022, because they
really wanted to proceed with using Ukrainians as cannon-fodder
in their proxy war against Russia. Enough of regime-changes
already! These activities have no place on this small blue globe.
The West (NATO) could easily end this drive for constant unipolar
hegemony - or does it really need to face total strategic defeat?
Choose wisely.
PS- the Kiev regime labelled the Russian-speaking residents as
terrorists allowing attack without guilt. See one of the videos
here.
Did someone say "MOU"? Reading between the lines of Mark Carney's
Plan, by GreenPeace.
My reply (unpublished)
A pipeline needs a 50-year window of economic viability, to cover
time to build and lifetime usage. We MUST be off fossil fuels
well before that. The intended recipient countries in Asia are
building out their renewable energy systems and eliminating oil
and coal. Since Carny is such an American-banking schmuck, he
would be selling Cdn oil in US$. An actual "Energy Superpower"
sells in their own currency, and earns the power of having a
"petrodollar." Actually, Canada should be demanding Cdn$ for all
our exports, except that Carney actually knows nothing about
economics, having been merely a figure-head at the central banks.
Better, yet, Canada should join BRICS and sell our oil in yuan,
settling through digital yuan and CIPS.
Selling off our resources DIMINISHES our overall national wealth
in exchange for some short-term forex. As well, think about the
situation 20 years from now. Canada has blown its social capital,
has built a Glorified Version of the Past on borrowed money, is
deep in debt, has done NOTHING to increase actual productivity,
therefore entering a state of social entropy. This will be a hard
landing.
Furthermore, treating Indigenous relationships as transactional,
knowing that they can be co-opted to push a project through,
thoroughly diminishes environmental integrity. Again, short-term
(possible) gain for PERMANENT environmental damage.
Natural Gaslighting: the Canada-Alberta Pipeline MOU is Built on a Blatant Pack of Lies, by Dougald Lamont.
"The MOU is crafted for one purpose – to juice returns to investors - many of them foreign - at the expense of all Canadians.
This pipeline - which may not even be feasible is supposed to be so valuable that it is in the national interest.
There's an old question people used to ask – "Who speaks for Canada?"
In this case, who was negotiating for Canada and Canadians' interests? Because it appears no one was. If a project is in the national interest, it's because it's delivering national benefits. That's not what this agreement does, at all.
It does one thing, and one thing only, which is not maximizing return on investment for Canadians, it is maximizing return for the very small part of the population that is lucky enough to own most of the shares in those oil companies – quite literally, at the expense of everyone else.
Not only does the MOU offers to trample and suppress the democratic rights of millions of Canadians, including First Nations, it is also anti-business, anti-competitive, anti-innovation, anti-efficiency."
From a post by Ismaele from GeoPolitiQ –
Marie Jana Korbelová, Nom du pouvoir: Dr. Madeleine
Jana Korbel Albright
Following her years as Secretary of State, Marie went back to
Georgetown University.
"Georgetown University, like many American universities, trains students for war. Marie, the first female Secretary of State of the US superpower, called her students "my apprentice ministers". On Saturdays, she trains them to wage wars and bomb other countries around the world far from the US; on Sundays, she trains them in conspiracies and coups d'état."
In describing her course, she says:
"Due to its size, the university class is divided, with one cohort tackling a crisis scenario on Saturday and the other going through the same obstacle course on Sunday.
The pressure on students to make decisions not only challenges their reasoning skills, but also reveals their conception of how the world works. Some students abandon diplomacy almost immediately and want to send in troops or start bombing, regardless of the consequences. Others insist on avoiding bloodshed even when diplomatic measures are clearly doomed. For every role-player who quickly adapts to a sudden twist, there are several who throw up their hands or freeze."
Marie plays with her students to create hell only for other peoples and nations: "Imagine, for example, that you are a diplomat assigned to the United Nations the morning after a North Korean missile went off course during a test and crashed into a city in Japan, killing thousands of people. The tragedy appears to have been an accident, but North Korea has not issued any statements and its leader, Kim Jong-un, has disappeared. What would you advise the decision-makers in your capital? And how would you respond when you were informed later in the day that North Korean troops were massing along their country's southern border, that an unidentified group had hijacked a plane travelling from East Asia to the United States, and that a woman claiming to be Kim Jong-un's step-sister was plotting to overthrow him and seize power in Pyongyang? Would you, like my Saturday group, seek authorisation to launch military strikes against North Korea, or would you follow the example of my Sunday students and try to organise a coup that would bring a new government to the North and end on a hopeful note? The scenarios were the same every day, but the outcomes differed because of the choices my apprentice ministers made. The lesson was clear: leadership matters..."
These responses by her "assistants" reveal the same imperial
premises:
In an interview on The Today
Show, February 19, 1998, Albright said "If we have to use
force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable
nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries
into the future...." (from Wikipedia)
American Exceptionalism allows the U.S. to act as Captain
America, World Police and the option of "go in there and ..." is
ever-present in American foreign policy.
So what should be a proper response to the supposed N. Korean
incident? The Saturday response of launching strikes (since for
America, there is a military solution to every problem), or the
Sunday group's proposal for regime change? Might we instead
consider why N. Korea feels so embattled and lives in such fear
as to see the necessity of building a strong defensive position?
Can't we find a way toward inclusion of all nations (as in the
"United Nations") instead of alienation and othering? Zbigniew
Brzezinski played a prominent role in shaping U.S. policy, as
advisor to LBJ 1966-68 and National Security Advisor to Jimmy
Carter (with Marie as his NSC Congressional Liaison), and his
"Grand Chessboard" theme is still being played out now in
Ukraine. But in spite of such advice, Pres. Carter would often
spin his big globe and drop a finger on it and try to understand
what the world looked like from that place. Imagine what it looks
like from Russia, surrounded by antagonistic NATO bases.
Leave a comment! This is a re-direct to my Substack page.
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