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LET'S INVADE CANADA Henry Rollins

from Henry's LA Weekly column:

Give me a minute before I explain to you that our invasion and occupation of Canada is a mission that cannot wait. Operation Maple Dawn Cobra Thunder must go hot ASAP.

Last month, I spent two weekends in Canada. Edmonton and Toronto, respectively. Both trips were to service and promote a film I am still involved with years after its completion, called He Never Died.

The visit to Edmonton was to be on hand for DEDfest, where I presented the film and answered questions afterward. This is the third of these screenings I have done this year.

Horror-film fans are a blast. They cheer at violence and laugh at the misfortune of others. I felt right at home.

That being said, whenever I arrive in Canada, it always takes me a few hours to adjust to all the politeness and lack of cynicism. As an American, you might very well believe the Canadians are soft, and their borders will no doubt be breached at any moment by hordes of dangerous brown people, bringing with them all manner of vampiric sloth and extremist rationalizations.

Our neighbors to the north are a problem, aren’t they? Drowning in decency and socialist Kool-Aid, these squishy sacks are going to bring the entire continent to its knees with health care for all and an emphasis on education.

As if you really want to live in a country with a low homicide rate, full of kind-minded intellectuals. A life without the constant sound of gunfire. Without never-ending wars, both domestic and abroad. Ugh!

I agree, it would be super-boring. But hey, it’s their country (for now) and these flouncing nellies can use their illusion until their quasi-commie unicorn dream runs out of rose-colored steam. When they emerge from the euphoric ether of goodwill, they hopefully will have learned their lesson and understand that the world is an awful place, full of bad guys with guns. Maybe at that point they will wipe those anarchy-inspired smirks off their faces and get to work.

You see the clear and present danger, don’t you? You’re absolutely right, patriot: The illegals (amigos de Obama) will be using the US of A as a ramp to vault themselves into Canada, the new promised land.

Why, those bastards will be running to our northern border so fast, they won’t have time to clip your hedges, clean your house, take care of your kids and repair your roof at amazingly low wages. All they’ll want is to get to sweet home Vancouver.

If things get any better in Communada, we’ll have no more illegals. Finally, real Americans will be doing the jobs that just a few years before they swore they didn’t want to do. Good thing we’re damned adaptable.

You realize that Donny Trump wants to build the retaining wall along the southern border to keep people from leaving, right? I see grim days of manual labor at low wages ahead.

You probably won’t believe this but, more than once, when walking the streets of Toronto a few days ago, I saw several people doing cartwheels! No, really. I witnessed elderly citizens rolling by, frisky like dogs in the park on the first day of snow.

I asked them what the hell compelled them to such visible displays of seemingly limitless joy. “Justin Trudeau! Wheee!”

Yeah, the DPRC just elected a 43-year-old hipster as its 23rd prime minister. Ooooh! Justin (and I bet it’s “cool” to call him that) was born on Christmas Day. He’s the son of Pierre Trudeau, the country’s 15th prime minister.

Justin’s into … peace! I can smell the patchouli and failure from here. Wait until this handsome, smart, energetic young man, who won by a landslide over Stephen Harper (who I wish would hurry the hell up and become an American citizen and hurl himself into the 2016 elections, because the GOP needs more go-getters on those debate stages), finds out that the only thing that ensures peace is capitalism, drone strikes and boots on the ground.

A year from now, the skyline of Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, will be corrupted by mosques. Then it will be Justin Bin al Trudeau, surrounded by his phalanx of Islamic thugs. You will think of Canada as the Mecca of the north. You watch, they’ll even have their own hajj — where of course, no one will get hurt and there will be plenty of water and restrooms. But it will be a hajj just the same!

All the great work we have done over decades to improve the lives of Canadians by bringing them McDonald’s, Home Depot and Starbucks will be left thanklessly behind for solar panels and wind farms. This dictator wants to reduce Canada’s emissions! A nation will be deprived! Jihad, eh?

And this is why, for the love of all things good, we must conquer and neutralize the other Red Menace: Canada.

It is time for Operation Maple Dawn Cobra Thunder! A great man once asked, “Is our children learning?” but he also said, “Borders no longer protect us.” It is time to flip the script and make these eco-freaks on the north side understand that borders no longer protect them.

You know what they call getting them before they get you? That’s right, winning. Under Imam Trudeau, Canada’s progressive policies will become a virus that will empower women, gays and other fringe-element actors to become part of the new mainstream.

We have got to strike before equality takes an even firmer foothold in Canada. Because when that happens, you think they’re just going to sit still?

It is go time in America. Canada has been unleashed. Wake up and smell the thunder.

If you really think it matters which party controls the Senate, answer these simple questions:

from our friend Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds:

This is a guest post from Charles Hugh Smith. Read his essays daily at his Of Two Minds blog. Smith’s latest book is Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

Please don’t claim anything changes if one party or the other is in the majority. Anyone clinging to that fantasy is delusional.

If you really think it matters which political party controls the U.S. Senate, please answer these questions. Don’t worry, they’re not that difficult:

1. Will U.S. foreign policy in the Mideast change from being an incoherent pastiche of endless war and Imperial meddling? Please answer with a straight face. We all know the answer is that it doesn’t matter who controls the Senate, Presidency or House of Representatives, nothing will change.

2. Will basic civil liberties be returned to the citizenry? You know, like the cops are no longer allowed to steal your cash when they stop you for a broken tail light and claim the cash was going to be used for a drug deal.

Or some limits on domestic spying by Central State agencies. You know, basic civil liberties as defined by the Bill of Rights and the U.S. constitution.

Don’t make me laugh—you know darned well that it doesn’t matter who controls the Senate, Presidency or House of Representatives, nothing will change.

3. Will the predatory, parasitic policies of the Federal Reserve that virtually everyone from the Wall Street Journal to what little remains of the authentic Left understands has greatly increased income and wealth inequality be reined in? Please don’t claim either party has any will or interest in limiting the Fed’s rapacious financialization. There is absolutely no evidence to support such a claim—it is pure wishful thinking.

4. Will the steaming pile of profiteering, corruption, waste, fraud and ineptitude that is Sickcare in the U.S. be truly reformed so its costs drop by 50% to match what every other developed democracy spends per person on universal healthcare? It doesn’t matter if ObamaCare is repealed or not; that monstrosity was simply another layer of bureaucratic waste on an already hopelessly dysfunctional system.

If you answer “yes,” please run a body scan on yourself to detect the biochips that were implanted while you voted Demopublican.

5. Will the influence of Big Money be well and truly banned from politics? If you answer yes, please pick up your tin-foil hat at the door.

6. Will the incentives in the Status Quo be reset to punish rapacious financialization and gaming the system and reward productive investment and labor? Before you answer, check out who’s buttering the Senators’ bread. Hint: Wall Street does not qualify as productive unless we’re talking about the production of life-draining parasites. Virtually none of the vast armies of skimmers and scammers, from those pursuing bogus disability claims to lobbyist leeches, will suffer any consequence.

Moral hazard is the Status Quo’s Prime Directive.

7. Will anything be done to dismantle the Neofeudal Debt-Serfdom known as student loans? You are delusional if you think either party has any interest in limiting the predation of an academic Upper Caste that came to do good and stayed to do well.

8. Will any prudent assessment be made of unaffordable weapons systems like the F-35 Lightning—$1.5 trillion and counting for aircraft that will soon be matched by drones that cost a fraction of the F-35’s $200 million a piece price tag? No way—parts of those insanely costly jets are made in dozens of states, so the pork is well-distributed. Never mind the plane is lemon, built to fight the wars of the past. It’s jobs, Baby—that’s all that counts. Never mind the $1.5 trillion—we can always borrow another couple trillion—the Fed promised us.

Do you really think the Senate controlled by either party will ask why the F-35’s price tag dropped to $120 million from $200 million? That’s easy—the revised estimate left out the engine and avionics. They’ll be added back in after the Senate approves open-ended funding.

If none of these key dynamics will change, you got nothing. Please don’t claim anything changes if one party or the other is in the majority. Anyone clinging to that fantasy is delusional.

If you doubt this, please take the above quiz again.

This is a guest post from Charles Hugh Smith. Read his essays daily at his Of Two Minds blog. Smith’s latest book is Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

Noam Chomsky: The Dimming Prospects for Human Survival

From nuclear war to the destruction of the environment, humanity is steering the wrong course.

from AlterNet

A previous article I wrote explored [3] how security is a high priority for government planners: security, that is, for state power and its primary constituency, concentrated private power - all of which entails that official policy must be protected from public scrutiny.

In these terms, government actions fall in place as quite rational, including the rationality of collective suicide. Even instant destruction by nuclear weapons has never ranked high among the concerns of state authorities.

To cite an example from the late Cold War: In November 1983 the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization launched a military exercise designed to probe Russian air defenses, simulating air and naval attacks and even a nuclear alert.

These actions were undertaken at a very tense moment. Pershing II strategic missiles were being deployed in Europe. President Reagan, fresh from the "Evil Empire" speech, had announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed "Star Wars," which the Russians understood to be effectively a first-strike weapon - a standard interpretation of missile defense on all sides. 

Naturally these actions caused great alarm in Russia, which, unlike the U.S., was quite vulnerable and had repeatedly been invaded.

Newly released archives reveal that the danger was even more severe than historians had previously assumed. The NATO exercise "almost became a prelude to a preventative (Russian) nuclear strike," according to an account last year by Dmitry Adamsky in the Journal of Strategic Studies .

Nor was this the only close call. In September 1983, Russia's early-warning systems registered an incoming missile strike from the United States and sent the highest-level alert. The Soviet military protocol was to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own.

The Soviet officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, intuiting a false alarm, decided not to report the warnings to his superiors. Thanks to his dereliction of duty, we're alive to talk about the incident. 

Security of the population was no more a high priority for Reagan planners than for their predecessors. Such heedlessness continues to the present, even putting aside the numerous near-catastrophic accidents, reviewed in a chilling new book, "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety," by Eric Schlosser.

It's hard to contest the conclusion of the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, Gen . Lee Butler, that humanity has so far survived the nuclear age "by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion."

The government's regular, easy acceptance of threats to survival is almost too extraordinary to capture in words.

In 1995, well after the Soviet Union had collapsed, the U.S. Strategic Command, or Stratcom, which is in charge of nuclear weapons, published a study, "Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence." 

A central conclusion is that the U.S. must maintain the right of a nuclear first strike, even against non-nuclear states. Furthermore, nuclear weapons must always be available, because they "cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict."

Thus nuclear weapons are always used, just as you use a gun if you aim it but don't fire when robbing a store - a point that Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, has repeatedly stressed.

Stratcom goes on to advise that "planners should not be too rational about determining ... what an adversary values," all of which must be targeted. "[I]t hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed. . That the U.S. may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project to all adversaries." 

It is "beneficial [for ...our strategic posture] that some elements may appear to be potentially'out of control'" - and thus posing a constant threat of nuclear attack.

Not much in this document pertains to the obligation under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to make "good faith" efforts to eliminate the nuclear-weapon scourge from the earth. What resounds, rather, is an adaptation of Hilaire Belloc's famous 1898 couplet about the Maxim gun:

Whatever happens we have got,
The Atom Bomb and they have not.

Plans for the future are hardly promising. In December the Congressional Budget Office reported that the U.S. nuclear arsenal will cost $355 billion over the next decade. In January the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies estimated that the U.S. would spend $1 trillion on the nuclear arsenal in the next 30 years.

And of course the United States is not alone in the arms race. As Butler observed, it is a near miracle that we have escaped destruction so far. The longer we tempt fate, the less likely it is that we can hope for divine intervention to perpetuate the miracle. 

In the case of nuclear weapons, at least we know in principle how to overcome the threat of apocalypse: Eliminate them.

But another dire peril casts its shadow over any contemplation of the future - environmental disaster. It's not clear that there even is an escape, though the longer we delay, the more severe the threat becomes - and not in the distant future. The commitment of governments to the security of their populations is therefore clearly exhibited by how they address this issue. 

Today the United States is crowing about "100 years of energy independence" as the country becomes "the Saudi Arabia of the next century" - very likely the final century of human civilization if current policies persist.

One might even take a speech of President Obama's two years ago in the oil town of Cushing, Okla., to be an eloquent death-knell for the species.

He proclaimed with pride, to ample applause, that "Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That's important to know. Over the last three years, I've directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We're opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We've quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We've added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some."

The applause also reveals something about government commitment to security. Industry profits are sure to be secured as "producing more oil and gas here at home" will continue to be "a critical part" of energy strategy, as the president promised.

The corporate sector is carrying out major propaganda campaigns to convince the public that climate change, if happening at all, does not result from human activity. These efforts are aimed at overcoming the excessive rationality of the public, which continues to be concerned about the threats that scientists overwhelmingly regard as near-certain and ominous.

To put it bluntly, in the moral calculus of today's capitalism, a bigger bonus tomorrow outweighs the fate of one's grandchildren.

What are the prospects for survival then? They are not bright. But the achievements of those who have struggled for centuries for greater freedom and justice leave a legacy that can be taken up and carried forward - and must be, and soon, if hopes for decent survival are to be sustained. And nothing can tell us more eloquently what kind of creatures we are. 

This is Part II of an article adapted from a lecture by Noam Chomsky on Feb. 28, sponsored by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara, Calif (Read part 1 here [3]).

© 2014 Noam Chomsky

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/visions/noam-chomsky-dimming-prospects-human-survival

Links:
[1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/noam-chomsky
[3] http://www.alternet.org/chomsky-staggering-differences-between-how-people-and-powerful-define-security
[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/chomsky

[5] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B