The Revolution is Exactly 400 Days Away

I happened to come across these videos on YouTube. The first was published on August 25th, 2007, with a prediction, the second was posted 400 days later. They might mean nothing to you, or you will understand and want to act. The way we live is about to change. Are you prepared?

Fast forward 400 days.

Books You Should Read

Gore Vidal
"United States Essays 1952-1992"
"Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace"

John Ralston Saul
"Voltaire's Bastards, the Dictatorship of Reason in the West"
"On Equilibrium"
"The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World"
"The Unconscious Civilization"

Jean Baudrillard
"The System Of Objects"
"La société de consommation"
"The Perfect Crime"
"Fatal Strategies"
"Utopia Deferred, Writings for Utopie (1967-1978)"

Gwynne Dyer
"War"
"The Mess They Made, the Middle East After Iraq"

Naomi Klein
"The Shock Doctrine"
"No Logo"

Jacques Attali
"Une brève histoire de l'avenir" (soon to be published in English as "A Brief History of the Future")

Christopher Hitchens
"god is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything"

Thorstein Veblen
"Conspicuous Consumption"

Sir Steven Runciman
"The History of the Crusades"

Paul Virilio
"Open Sky"

Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer
"Pure War"

Market Meldown, Corporate Bailouts and Government

The United States is not a democracy and has not had a capitalist economy for a very long time. Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky have been saying this since the 1970s but many people chose not to listen, and look at where we are now.

Our friends south of the border live in a corporatist republic where government, regardless of party affiliation, works hand in hand with big corporations, who pocket as much of the profits as they can, and ship them off-shore to avoid paying taxes. Neither have much responsibility towards their citizens or their consumers. The citizen/consumer, in turn, feels alienated, disenfranchised, and without hope for change. This only reinforces the status quo, both politically and economically.

The U.S. economy is starting to show the symptoms of years of deregulation, mergers, outsourcing, and downsizing. The virtual eradication of the manufacturing sector in favour of a "service" based economy that does not produce anything of concrete value has annihilated their account balance. Their over-reliance on credit has sunk them irreversibly in debt, largely to China, Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia.

The problem we are seeing because of these self-inflicted policies is being exacerbated by the widening gap between rich and poor. By concentrating the vast majority of the wealth in the hands of so few, the economic base of consumers in a large market is effectively wiped out.

Consumers are broke, out of a job or working for a hideously low wage, and their homes are being repossessed. Their credit cards are maxed out and they can't get another mortgage. Their taxes pay for corporate bailouts and weapons, against the wishes of the vast majority.

The plummeting standards in education provide for a huge pool of ignorant, malleable citizens, which is very convenient when in a state of permanent war, but does not make for a strong body politic.

My point is, how long is it going to take people to realize this is not the way we want to live? How long are people going to sit by until they realize our outdated systems do not work?. Balance and clear-headed thinking are needed. Government has to stop treating its citizens like children, and the citizens, for their part, must take a larger part of the decision making process for the greater good. Citizen participation is essential.

Remember that we are the government, we are the economy, we are the nation.

We do not get the government we deserve, we get the government that we are willing to tolerate.

Canada in Afghanistan, Opium and the War on Terror

The easiest and most logical way to solve the Afghan débacle, is to let the Pashtuns harvest the poppies they are already growing, and sell them in a government market, to be used for the production of medicinal opiate derivatives and analgesics. These farmers would have something to do other than shoot at foreign soldiers, and the war would be over. They could make money legally, raise a family, and have a reason to live. The government would have a cash crop to help pay for the reconstruction of a country that has been at war for thirty years.

But that is unlikely to happen because big chemical companies don't want the extra competition. The excuses thrown to the media, however, conform to the current stance on drugs. We might have been a little distracted of late, but there still is a "War on Drugs".

So we are back to square one, the War on Terror, and Canada's military and humanitarian involvement in Afghanistan. There are three options here. Either this is a real war, which entails enacting conscription and shipping over one million troops to get this over with in a timely and decisive way. We can squat on Afghan soil with a brigade or two for the next hundred years with a slow painful stream of bloodletting, in which case we'll finally get tired of shipping our troops home in body bags, and bring them home. Or we pull our troops out now, and let the Americans fight their "war on terror" on their own. The choice is ours to make. I say we let our brave soldiers come home. What say you? What say our politicians?

The Idiocy of Polls

In view of the recent polls that suggest Stephen Harper's conservatives have a comfortable lead over the opposition parties, I have just one thing to say. Polls are nonsense. I can find at least three other polls online, conducted during the same period, with the conservatives and the liberals neck and neck. So what's the deal?

According to Jean Baudrillard "Polls manipulate the undecidable. Do they affect votes? True or false? Do they yield exact photographs of reality, or mere tendencies, or a refraction of this reality in a hyperspace of simulation...?... it is ultimately only members of the political classes who believe in them... this is not due to a particular stupidity (although we can't rule this out), but because the polls are homogeneous to the way contemporary politics operate. Ultimately though, who else does [believe in polls]? It is the burlesque spectacle of the hyperrepresentative (that is, not representative at all) political sphere that people savour and sample through opinion polls and the media. There is a jubilation proper to this spectacular nullity, and the final form that it takes is that of statistical contemplation. Such contemplation, moreover, is always coupled, as we know, with a profound disappointment - the species of disillusion that the polls provoke by absorbing all public speaking, by short-circuiting every means of expression".

In other words, don't believe the hype, learn to think for yourself and make up your own damn mind about the issues.