New Media » politics

Blood-Curdling Tales from the Master of Horror

jnarvey — Wed, 02 May 2012 01:12:06 +0000

Stephen King agrees with Warren Buffett: rich dudes like them should pay more taxes.

Senate Republicans are so horrified, they opposed this rule even though most Americans (and most Republicans nationally) are actually in favor of the Buffett rule. Scary stuff.

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Latest Propaganda. USA Propping Up Theocratic Fascist Mini-Caliphates

jnarvey — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:22:19 +0000

I’ve felt let down by American President Barack Obama. Not that I voted for him — heck, I’m Canadian. But I had high hopes, some of which have been tarnished.

He’s still head and shoulders above his competition, past and present (I’m as disdainful of a Romney presidency as I was of a McCain one). But I’m not fond of his adaptation of the old American habit (continued under George Bush Jr.) of acquiescing to the worst reactionaries abroad. The USA is still the world’s only superpower — it’s leader can afford the political capital required to condemn fascist religious fanatics who want to drag their societies back into the Dark Ages.

More on this in The Propagandist: Democratic and Republican Blindness on Islamist Politics

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Terrorists, Tyrants’ Stooges and Deluded Activists Make a Run for the Border

jnarvey — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 06:41:32 +0000

Canada and the USA are friends. Allies. Close cousins tied together by culture, trade and mutual interest. That said, if a few million enraged Americans intent on swallowing our country suddenly rushed our border and made a dash for Ottawa — and announced their weird plan months in advance — the Canucks would not take this breach of sovereignty lying down.

In less than 48 hours, Israel will be in this situation. Well, sort of. The borderlands there are already inhabited by people who have either formally or informally boycotted the Jewish state. Several sections along the border are inhabited by lunatics who have on many occasions launched indiscriminate attacks against Israeli civilians — all for the sake of slaking their bloodlust, distracting the international community from the daily brutalities of Middle Eastern despots, or just getting a couple of days worth of friendly coverage by the BBC or the Guardian.

The actual number of participants will probably be in the thousands, not millions. But even a few thousand runners can put border police on their back foot. This is not a game.

Should the Global March to Jerusalem materialize as planned, the Israelis will be forced to use every means at their disposal to protect their borders, or else watch their tiny country get trampled and conquered by a swarm of humanity that would like nothing less than the destruction of a United Nations member state.

As the Syrian government murders thousands of its own civilians, Libya replaces one torturing regime with another and Egyptian mobs swiftly finish a centuries-long genocide of its Christian population, the world’s “human rights defenders” will ally with dictators and terrorists to assault the Middle East’s only free democracy.

Learn the facts about this totally avoidable farce and tragedy. Check out this site exposing the truth about the Global March to Jerusalem

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Human Rights Watch and Actual Human Rights

jnarvey — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 01:06:20 +0000

My latest observations in The Propagandist on how Human Rights Watch Criticizes NYPD For Trying to Protect New Yorkers

I’ve visited New York City several times. It’s a great town. I’d hate to see it struck again by weaponized religious fanatics — but so-called “human rights activists” apparently want the cops there to effectively give up, wave a white flag and wait for the inevitable.

It’s not the first “human rights” organization to go over to the dark side. When Amnesty International decided to get into bed with the jihadists at Cageprisoners, I canceled my monthly donations.

What a weird world we live in.

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Propaganda for China, Greece and Afghanistan

jnarvey — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 04:35:22 +0000

Ask a direct question about politics, get a direct atlas. Some new stuff on The Propagandist, including a very worthwhile read from Lauryn Oates:

A Moderate Taliban is Wishful Thinking. When you wish upon a star, doesn’t matter who you are, when you wish upon a star, the Taliban will slit your throat first chance they get.
Athens Burns. Along with a whole lot of Euros thrown at Greece to, you know, prevent this sort of thing from happening.
China Continues to Arrest North Korean Refugees. Question: why are we made to feel so guilty for trying to send terrorists back to their country of origin while China continues to send starving, tortured refugees back to their country to face certain death?

Confusion to our enemies and all that…

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Human Rights and Halftime Shows in America

jnarvey — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:07:01 +0000

Here’s a human rights condundrum for you:

You are reasonably certain that an asylum seeker sent back to his country of origin could face torture.
You are equally certain that this person poses a lethal terrorist threat to citizens in the local community (or abroad, if this person is given a chance to incite violence from the safe haven of your own shores).

In many countries, the practical solution has been to keep the suspected threat here, either monitored at ruinous expense, or left to his own devices in the hopes that he does not commit the terrorist offenses you were worried about in the first place. I argue it doesn’t have to be this way, in Terrorism, Asylum Seekers and the Human Right to Life

Also, do check out the Halftime in America video. If only because it’s Clint Eastwood.

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Occupy Movement on a Low Boil. For Now

jnarvey — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:22:45 +0000

Isolated pockets of the Occupy Movement’s anarchic resistance appear to be popping up in cities around North America with almost random timing. The movement is sure to come back hard when the winter snow gives way to Spring sunshine — it’s not like the 99 percent’s complaints have been met (or could be met) so far. And while I have noted with disdain some of the more visible stupidities of the Occupy movement, I’ve also been heartened by some of the signs I’ve seen on the protest sites from Vancouver to New York City.

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SOPA and the End of the Internet

jnarvey — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 01:30:08 +0000

Every blogger in the universe should be up in arms against this SOPA legislation coming out of the USA. This is soooooooo bad. Watch the video.

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Christopher Hitchens. He Never Missed A Deadline

jnarvey — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 22:53:04 +0000

No, I’m not being mean. Apparently, the man some called the most brilliant writer in the English speaking world really did want that for his epitaph (according to Francis Wheen). Another alternative that he quite enjoyed was ‘I sleep mad.”

Sleep mad, Christopher.

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Disband the First Nations Reserves. Start with Attawapiskat

jnarvey — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 05:36:32 +0000

Imagine you’re the slumlord owner of a rent-controlled bedbug-infested hotel in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. You’ve pocketed big bucks over the years from the government that was supposed to pay for essential renovations. Your welfare-dependent tenants usually don’t complain too loudly about the mold or the rats or the lack of working toilets, for fear of being tossed out on the street.

But this time, they couldn’t help themselves, when a wall fell down, exposing several families to the elements and the shocked stares of onlookers from Hastings Street. They spilled the beans. Reporters from all over the country started talking about the deplorable crisis. It’s downright embarrassing.

An independent auditor comes knocking to go over your financials. He wants to find out what you’ve done with the millions of dollars that you were supposed to use to fix the leaky plumbing and the crumbling brickwork and rotten wood and broken windows. You tell him to take a hike. When he objects, you physically throw him out.

Then you get an epiphany. Oh, this is brilliant. You file a grievance with the United Nations over your ill treatment.

How do you think this story ends? With you keeping your hotel? With the United Nations giving you a badge of honor? With your long-suffering tenants patting you on the back for your courageous stand? With you not going to jail?

No.

No, no, no, no.

The crisis of Attawapiskat has thankfully helped put the entire system of First Nations reserves under more scrutiny. Band leaders on many (most?) reserves operate with impunity and an explicit rejection of democracy. The nepotism, corruption and wastefulness not merely of money but of human beings is something that people in the rest of the country would never stand for.

I’ve been ambivalent about this problem over the years because I don’t live next to it. I see the conditions on reserves in the news from time to time. The places do look awful. But that’s not the fault of the government shoveling cash into these places. No amount of cash can paper over this perpetual horror show. Not with band leaders demanding 280 new houses at $250,000 a pop, according to the NDP — houses in the middle of nowhere that are just going to fall apart again after a few years because under the rules on reserves, no one actually owns the property.

Think about that figure again: $250,000 per house. That’s just to build a house, since the land has no value. This is a house that will stand in an isolated community with no jobs, no schools, no hospital, no reason to live there at all. Why does it cost that much to build a house there? Because that’s what the band council says it costs… for houses that are going to end up as firewood.

This problem needs to be solved yesterday.

The solution? Simple. Stop the flow of money. There are some examples of well-run, prosperous reserves that are closer in development to Whistler than Attawapiskat. They will survive, maybe even thrive. But those reserves like Attawapiskat that cannot survive without massive infusions of funds (or fail even with such generous support) need to be dismantled. Let the people living on those reserves migrate to places with education, jobs and a hope for a future.

No more money. No more reserves.

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