Right To Left

Your link from the Beeb shows that most of those arrested were white, middle aged (about 40), middle class and many were small business owners. True, they were mostly from blue states and counties in America, but they wouldn't have been there if they weren't also strong Trump supporters also. There were also many veterans and active duty military...and police also, from across the country....which explains some/but not all of the reasons why they got kid glove treatment and let through police lines so easy. What I noticed missing from the Beeb's list of Five is that a very large number....from 40% to almost half of those arrested either had or were facing financial difficulties...many were bankrupt or facing bankruptcy and foreclosure. Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran who was fatally shot in the neck when she tried to take the lead among her group, to break through the glass and enter the Capitol Rotunda, was running a pool services business with her husband. A business that was weeks behind on taxes and paying creditors. So, along with being a Q-Anon believing Trump fanatic, how much motivation came from staring at financial ruin and losing everything? One account I read, noted that 80% of the rioters were employed....but that also means that 20% were unemployed (I can't help thinking Q-shaman was one) and one thing that is totally lost on most casual observers about economic class issues is that it's not about what your income is in raw numbers that cause people to question their self-worth. It's more about whether you perceive yourself moving up or down the economic ladder, and gaining or losing social status as a result. This is why billionaire assholes, who can't possibly spend enough money to use up their billions are still intensely competitive with others in the country club brethren, and keep working and scheming to come up with ways to advance their wealth and stock portfolios even further. $120 billion isn't enough! So, middle class small business owners who have to deal with closures and partial closures, are among the most likely to become depressed and turn to opiate abuse, suicide, or drive across the country to stop the evil forces trying to rig the election for the Democrats. https://www.complex.com/life/people-charged-capitol-riots-history-financial-hardship In the end, I don't think the Capitol riot has much to say about Canadian politics, unless the economic forces pulling America into the abyss produce similar results up here. Then, as the more socialist form of capitalism we have, stops providing as much in benefits...especially healthcare, we could end up with similar scenes in Ottawa and provincial capitols...with mobs of older, white middle-aged men who thought they were doing well, end up on the downward slide to bankruptcy at a time when they are nearing retirement. Can't say it can't happen here, I guess!

Gee, that's twice as high as the 50 million number most anticommunists quote at me. Where did you find those other 50 million graves? And how many graves were filled with the victims of capitalism...including fascist state-supported capitalism? For clarity's sake, Hitler was not a Catholic when he was Chancellor of 3rd Reich Germany. He forced leaders of Catholic, Lutheran and smaller protestant sects to attend special theology conferences he organized, that were intended on uniting all of the different legitimate sects of Christianity into one German religion, or go into exile, or maybe face death. Hitler wanted a united, specifically German Christian Church, and likely didn't give a crap about what doctrines or rituals they professed, as long as they became members of one united German club. The main reason why you are an anti-communist is because your religious indoctrination has come from a religion that learned some time early on....after a few troubles with Roman authorities, to steer their new religion down a path that would not conflict with state power. That's why the Pharisees could not trick Jesus into condemning a Roman coin with Caesar's image on it as a graven image! Jesus had to turn from first century cult leader into public relations spokesman at times to dance around such loaded questions.

Correction! Canadian Ruling Class Profiteers, NOT Canadians! Or at least, not Canadian workers, who only have the voting franchise during normal times, and have to turn to strikes, blockades and revolutions when conditions get bad enough....and maybe that's not too far away now. We weren't sure what exactly was coming at us 30 years ago, except that we would lose much or most of our national sovereignty, and the big argument back then was over which of the three countries would profit the most from "free trade." But, we knew something was up, because so many Canadian manufacturing operations (especially branch plants set up for the Canadian market) were being closed down even before the ink was dry on the treaty! The business leaders already knew what they were getting, while they kept us in the dark. We envisioned that all our jobs would be headed for hicksville in the southern states or Mexico, while US workers focused laser-like at Mexico, unless they feared the declining Canadian Dollar was pushing more automotive production into Ontario and Quebec. But, as it all turned out, most of the manufacturing would eventually end up in China and the Far East. Karl Marx declared years ago that capitalists were so shortsighted and profit-focused, that they would dig their own graves for short term gains, if provided the shovels. And that's pretty much what has happened under both D's and R's. Only difference now, is that the Dems are so dependent on high tech now, and currying favor with its new oligarchs and PMC support staff, that they don't even bother talking to average workers anymore! This is worse than Republicans, who are still trying to pull in as many white, disenfranchised working class with dangerous white identity appeals, that they are able to win most of the former longtime Democrat strongholds in the middle of the country.

Yes, but the next question is how much longer can we maintain our quality of life as things unravel and unwind south of the border? We are already getting stuck with going along with their demands to increase our commitments and contributions to NATO's war efforts (I mean defense). And that will leave us the same ballooning deficits they've taken on and we'll be under increasing pressure to cut funding from Medicare and privatize more and more hospital and medical services. It will be tougher to maintain the Canadian advantage in quality of life!

Why did we pass FTA and then NAFTA 30 years ago? We tried to vote against ratifying the final NAFTA treaty by voting out Mulroo and replacing him with a Liberal who promised to scrap NAFTA. But then again, he also promised to end our hated federal sales tax (GST) also! We were promised...just like American factory workers that there would be no net manufacturing jobs lost; just some of the low-paying textiles and other sweatshop industries after all the tariffs were gone. But, we were all integrated into the new common market, and worse: being one tenth of the US economy means being unable to wave a big stick at enemies or allies to try to extract better trade conditions. I, like many blue collar workers, had to go look for new jobs a few times as layoffs continued on during the 80's, and I lost a lot of earning power before I started making a comeback in the 90's. Some people never did! But, win or lose on wages be damned, I wanted, and many other Canadians wanted to remain independent and not become a 51st state like we are today. As things played out, there have been no real winners of the globalization game, except for the small groups of oligarchs who have become richer at everyone else's expense! And loss of effective sovereignty means being stuck with either choosing a conservative imbecile, or a spineless, duplicitous liberal who follows an almost identical course regardless of the flowery, disingenuous rhetoric coming out of his mouth!

I've been getting the feeling for at least 30 years that the Constitution...like the Bible, can be interpreted and reinterpreted in whatever ways suit those with power...and money of course! I would say that the recent rigging and fixing of the past election mostly by funded interests working for Zuck and other multibillionaires for Joe Biden^, is as clear an indication that there is no real equality under the law when small wealthy interests wield that much economic power over everyone else. ^about that election rigging and interference....when Time Magazine already rushes out a featured article bragging about how some Democrat policy think tank experts "fortified" (they won't use the term "rigged") the election win for Biden, hauntingly similar to one they ran about the American help provided to Boris Yeltsin, when he defied all odds to be re-elected in 1995. But, whether you want to call it rigging or 'fortifying', the lesson is clear now that the powers that be don't even feel they have a need to hide the shit they do behind the scenes! They can go ahead and brag about it to reporters from Time, because anything negative will be swept aside in MSM and social media platform news coverage. And once all the rightwing cranks are gone, it will be all about whatever Pravda has to say is the news! _https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/79302/time-magazine-exposé-admits-conspiracy-to-steal-election-activists-told-to-stand.html

You got to admit, that Q Shaman guy is at least good for entertainment if nothing else!

We need more than knowledge and tools to survive the ravages of looming climate changes. Square one would be to start with a clear, concise reason why or how our species started a slow, gradual increase in atmospheric carbon levels for several thousand years, and then all of a sudden 150 years ago, everything started spiraling out of control, as carbon levels keep rising faster and faster each decade, too fast for our planetary biosphere to sequester enough carbon to bring it back to what apparently was the desired range by the majority of living creatures on earth -- between about 180 and 300 ppm CO2. Without human animals setting brush fires for hunting and farming, we likely would still be in the Pleistocene Era and be undergoing another drop in carbon and a new ice age by now...since past interglacial periods were very short. But instead, the foot is on the accelerator, freeing up more carbon into the atmosphere, and we are already entered into the quickest mass extinction of life in the entire history of our planet! I wish more books like this obscure, barely noticed historical account of the effects on climate caused by the shift from water power to steam-powered machines beginning in 1820's England. The author - Andreas Malm, builds a case making the unalterable conclusion that the shift from water to coal-fired steam engines was not about cost, or efficiency and certainly not about safety or cleanliness, but because the leading 18th century capitalists hated the lack of complete control they had over their plant workers, when they had to locate their mills near good sources to build waterwheels needed to power the mills, and be forced to pay more money, if or when they couldn't get enough locals to work in the mill. Coalfired steam engines on the other hand, could be located anywhere, and that meant putting them together with other dirty coalfired industries and having the added bonus of having lots of recently landless peasants to work the mills for whatever wages the bosses offered.....no negotiating! https://www.amazon.ca/Fossil-Capital-Steam-Global-Warming/dp/1784781290 So, just as the "clearing of the commons" which started in England and has traveled around the world, including Africa today, where the last large populations are being subjected with expulsion from the land to work in new urban hellholes while foreign Big Ag concerns take over the land to produce cash crops mostly for export, it is and has been a total fraud to portray the changes to modern society as being all about blind, natural economic forces, rather than being forced on populations by minority wealthy profit-driven interests, who don't give a damn about the consequences to people or the environment! As for Churchill, what can I say! He was a richly rewarded tool - a servant of his empire and global capitalist imperialism! My kind of military hero worth honoring would rather be someone like Smedley Butler, the US Marine officer who ended his military career at the rank of general, and had stacks of medals to wear on his uniforms, but ended with a memoir called "War Is A Racket" in 1938, acknowledging that all of the fighting and sending young soldiers to die in the foreign wars of his time (the Philippines, Cuba, not sure about WWI) were no more than being a hired mercenary for wealthy US capitalists who wanted governments changed by force to install the compliant regimes that were good for business! https://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/major-general-smedley-butler

When I started reading some of the research in anthropology and sociology many years ago, to try to figure out answers to all the big questions, I discovered that there was a consensus of opinion that mythical stories handed down through oral tradition for generations had greater symbolic meaning going beyond the characters and stories themselves. So one scholar (I forget who now) noted that our "Garden of Eden/Adam and Eve" myth of an ideal early life destroyed by making bad choices is found among every society and culture that transitioned from hunting and gathering to permanent settled farming, gives the clear indication that leaving the garden was not a desired goal, but something forced upon them....like by an angel wielding a flaming sword! An expulsion from paradise to as the Genesis account says: By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground; are found among all farming societies around the world in one form or another; while non-agrarian cultures...even those like the Inuit bands of the Far North, who lived precarious lives dependent on successful hunts, with much of their free time devoted to making clothing, tools and makeshift shelters for protection from extreme weather, don't have anything similar to stories like being expelled from the Garden. The point being that for every society that has gone down the road of civilization, the Fall From Grace is a mythologized explanation of how the journey started and was felt to be necessary. But it's not until the so called enlightenment, that some writers are telling us that the Fall is not a loss, but the new beginning of something wonderful and miraculous....and we're still waiting for evidence for that beyond the shiny new gadgets!

Yes, I would say right now, and have been sayin for a couple of years at least, that America is a 3rd World nation with a gigantic, expensive military industrial complex...and not much else. Now, the problem is that, however we try to kid ourselves up here, how far behind failed state status is Canada right now? We are not that different than the US. We have a huge and growing federal debt, which our central bank keeps building higher and higher (like the Fed banks south of the border) with no plans besides empty promises to stop the financial bleeding sometime in the future....distant future from the looks of things! We also are a major global arms merchant and supplier for all of the ongoing wars that the US Empire has opened up in the past 20 years. Our arms sales are consistently about 10% of the US arms shipments totals. And since our population is not much more than 10% of the US, that puts us pretty much on par with the American Empire -- adding more and more fuel to the wars at a time of global pandemic....not to mention that even militaries that aren't actively shooting and dropping bombs have the highest carbon footprints...if anyone is still counting! And about US politics: I notice a lot of liberals really get twisted out of shape when leftists rake them and their Democrat reps over the coals (same with JT and the Libs on this side), and call us traitors to the cause. If the cause went beyond condemning the latest Trump/Republican outrage, they might have a case. But it's mostly sit down and shut up and accept the watered down compromises we make to win mediocre benefits for the majority of people. The greatest failure is fake socialist - Bernie, who promised a revolution in 2016 (Our Revolution), which has withered and died since, because he was so obviously dishonest about his intentions and even after being subjected to abuse and lies, still parrots the centrist Democrat line. So as of now, it looks like the left has nothing to gain from electoral politics, just as the Jan. 6th Capitol Riot showed that those on the right who are facing economic hardships also feel cheated! The problem with the right, is that they see their way forward by following some messianic leader who has all the answers and will lead them to freedom and prosperity....this time! And that's how failed states usually end up under fascist control.

Can't lose with Spinal Tap! They created their pseudo-rock supergroup as a parody of bloated, overblown and unfocused rock music of the 70's, and the same lessons apply across the board on many public issues and no-nothing celebrities who are asked or just feel entitled to tell everybody else what they should think or believe on any given subject. Almost 25 years ago now, when my 13 year old guitar student step-son, wanted me to bring home "This Is Spinal Tap" from the local video store, I'm pretty sure he and his friends thought they were a real rock band; since being featured on the Simpsons so many times blurred the lines between real life and fake parody. No doubt Harry Shearer (Spinal Tap guy with moustache), who was a Simpsons head writer along with being a voice actor for the shows at the time, wanted to sneak Spinal Tap into Simpsons' plotlines whenever possible. And nowadays, hardly anyone knows or cares what the difference between real and unreal is anyway! But if This Is Spinal Tap pretty much ended the self-indulgent, bloated phenomena called 'Rockumentaries' (thinking of the Who docs with more Pete Townsend monologues than songs) then that was a good thing!

Back when the Repubs were the dominant political party in the US....collecting the lion's share of corporate donations and taking over more and more state and local offices with each election, Grover Norquist (leading conservative intellectual) declared during a speech before a CPAC conference, that: "we need to shrink government down to the point where it can be drowned in a bathtub!" Well, Texas sure provides a great example of the success of that rightwing pro-corporate project. But, what do they do when things go wrong? If government (except for military and policing) is unnecessary interference, what do you do when your deregulated and largely unregulated electrical grid is a dangerous, chaotic mess, and likewise, the poorly regulated collection of power plants (not just wind and solar, but also including natural gas and nuclear power plants, are failing because they weren't equipped to deal with extreme cold). A larger problem has been that as the GOP went lurching to the right since Lewis Powell wrote his infamous "Powell Memo" 50 years ago, calling on the persecuted rich minority class to work together and use their money to fight labor, consumer activism, and the environmental movement, the Democrats didn't offer much of a pushback. It was more like "how can we get in on this and get some corporate cash too!" So, California's electrical grid and power stations also have failed under stress, and the Feds aren't much help whether a Dem or Repub is in office....as Joe Biden is showing every day now.....whether new Dem allies in the MSM will report on it or not!

Umm, does that mean you're going to try to drag us out onto the main road?

Who says "noble savage" is a trope? I said before that the origin of the term came out of the surprise white European explorers felt when they first started meeting "savages" during the era when voyaging and colonialization was first beginning. And Rousseau prefigured the era of romanticism, which arose after the rapid societal shifts caused by early industrialization of the 18th century. What you're saying is a repeat of the capitalist enlightenment trope best expressed by the smartest and most useful intellectual tools of the oligarchs, starting with Stephen Pinker. Again, was it wrong that a few people took a step back and asked if the net results of sudden privatization of common lands, forcing many itinerate farmers off the land to go on desperate searches for factory work in the new, dirty and dangerous factories of growing industrial cities, was a step up for the former peasant farmers.....it certainly was a step down for the thousands of skilled craftsmen and women who worked in their little shops or homes producing fewer, but better quality products than factory line work was capable of! Now, where is this crap being shoveled from? What you're describing on authorship is about enforcing copyright...not about knowing the author! And now that we have a few multinational corporations owning most of the copyrights to almost all books, music, movies etc., how is the modern regime of permanent copyright-- with no more cultural products winding up in public domain anymore! Same problem with patents that never expire, and are now effectively permanent monopolies on drugs.... new identical drugs are created and pushed on the public and the former drug that goes generic is pushed to the side for new ones with big ad campaigns and doctors paid to push them on patients. Same goes with everything else under patent! It's just an excuse for someone who is almost never connected with inventing the product to keep profiting from it forever! Well, in a world with green, livable spaces shrinking at faster and faster rates, certainly we are at a point in time when it is not possible to go back and live in nature as many of the 18th and 19th century romanticists had hoped for! But, what does 'further advancing civilization' mean anyway? The advances in civilization you and others have mentioned, have made most societies increasingly unequal, more violent and toxic, and after a claimed turnaround in living standards in the Third World (mostly because of economic growth in China and other Far East nations) are clearly coming unglued today, as extreme poverty grows, more and more people die from food shortages, and migrations of the desperate increase, whether the nations of the global north like it or not! Capitalism is the main reason why our collective fate is sealed as the cancerous forces of capitalism keep demanding more and more economic growth to push the debt off further and further into the future, where it becomes a burden for future generations to deal with. At some point, the capitalist ponzi scheme will fall apart, and the captains of banking and industry today at the WEF working on their 'Great Reset,' are just sociopaths who are only interested in making sure disaster doesn't happen until after they're gone from this earth! So, if anyone thinks Bill Gates, Elon Musk and other liberal multibillionaires are working to fix environment and other crises/ rather than lining their own pockets, they're only fooling themselves!

Well since this is so far off track of Churchill and the importance/or unimportance of street names, I just want to make the point that over the past 20 years, as education has ended up more and more under the thumb of wealthy interests looking to finance the kinds of science and science-related subjects that serve their likings and economic interests (even indirectly), it has become clear to me (a non-academic with no advanced education) that there is a group of public intellectuals like Pinker, who seem to have the red carpet rolled out for them for their lectures and books, while others who may not catch the attention of a billionaire or two, go unnoticed. *let's not forget that Pinker was among the notables willing to whore himself out to Jeffrey Epstein, when one of his foundations was seeking out big-named academics for some bizarre transhumanism workshop he was trying to set up in Nevada....before the wall closed in on him! So, especially when it comes to the social sciences which are much more subject to interpretation, I don't take someone who actually has no credentials in anthropology himself, and just provides a mountain of indexed source references to be the expert on the subject! A nice, heavy and expensive book I picked up some years back on paleoanthropology is called "War, Peace and Human Nature" compiled together from several contributors who work in a range of studies, by Douglas Fry(2013). The size, cost and plainness of the text meant that this book wouldn't be sought out by casual readers browsing through Chapters or the local book store. When it comes to the question of is human nature innately violent and selfish/or usually peaceful and generous, the study of our ancestors should weight in heavily in the debate; because as primatologist- Franz de Waal has said many times about human primates--'we spent most of our approximately 200,000 years as a distinct species living in small hunter-gatherer groups which usually had to travel frequently. Historians in recent years are determining that there was no sudden jump to settled agriculture...and surprisingly, it was also not the preferred choice of living when humans first started cultivating and even hybridizing preferred grains such as rye, as far back as 15,000 years ago. A pattern of seed-planting in spring at different elevations in Anatolia (for one place) went on for millennia until population densities made it easier to stay in place year round about 6 to 10,000 years ago. So, which style of living would have the most genetic effects on human nature. And then there's industrialization, modernity and high tech city living much more recently! Today, we have to live with huge gaps of structural inequality, whereas or roving small extended family groups of ancestors lived in relative equality and shared all of their food (big break with earlier primates) together, and even the much maligned Neanderthals, wouldn't 'leave a man behind' so to speak. In one of the neanderthal digs 40 years ago, paleontologists were shocked to find a relatively old woman (in her 40's) who had been crippled for years because of rickets. As her band moved about, someone in the group would have had to carry her along. The mostly hunting-dependent Neanderthals of the Pleistocene, invariably lived close to extinction whenever major hunts didn't go right, and yet this family group would not abandon someone who was physically at least, a burden for the rest of them. Why? So, it seems that if we have spent most of our history as a species preferring equality over the modern day striving for success and superiority over others, then that would mean that most people today are trying to adapt to a system that is likely the main source of depression, anxiety and mental illness disorders that get worse as life becomes more and more unequal, precarious and challenging. For many psychologists and epidemiologists looking at a wider scale, the biggest surprise of modern capitalism is that even most of the successful rich aren't happy either! Just the sociopaths who thrive from chaos excel under today's conditions.

Okay, I guess we're at an impasse then. Because using common sense and critical thinking to analyze a problem and find the best solution, is my method for making decisions and deciding what's right and what's wrong. I don't agree with just following a 2000 year old rule book ( or more correctly-- someone else's interpretation of an internally contradictory collection of books). You're a follower of a Divine Command-Deontology (rules-based systems) .... and I definitely am not! And haven't been since I escaped from fundamentalist shackles decades ago, when I wanted to do my own thinking on just about everything. I don't fall completely within the strictures of any one of the other moral systems developed over the eons. I believe some study and self-reflection should be done to develop a system of Virtue Ethics...which was first plotted out by Aristotle a long time ago. His thinking was to develop a subconscious sense of what's right and wrong, so that you know right from wrong immediately, before you have to see the problem laid out in front of you. Catholic theologians commenting on the NT believed that Jesus's statements of 'knowing the law in your heart' followed this line of thinking....if you're a moral person, I don't need to tell you what the rules are! But, a standpoint based on virtue ethics is going to be hard to use to convince others! So, I would say Utilitarian or Consequentialist systems are the best methods to think through what the best solutions are to wider social problems that affect everybody, or could affect everyone. The problem is that utilitarianism...supposedly finding the best solutions for the majority and doing the least harm to the fewest, are difficult to agree upon, so that's why many social issues never get fully resolved. Then there's the problem of weighting the scales to favor monied interests looking for profitable advantage....and that's why "civilization" is so screwed up today! On this topic here, my thinking is that much unnecessary suffering is caused by a majority of people who live in denial of death and can't face it, so they make bad decisions on these life and death issues for themselves and others.

Well, thank you for your hopefully sincere condolences, not sure with all the added evangelical proselytizing material, but I'll take it as a given. Now, what if? What if he was suffering? I know that I would want assisted suicide available as an option if needed, and I don't see how it is in any sense 'merciful' for the victim and family members to be forced to linger on unto death in a state of pain and misery where death provides the only relief from suffering! In my brother's case, he has unfortunately been like so many people who don't think about thinking through these things and making arrangements beforehand. In his case, he is of limited intellect, but was smart enough to earn a modest living doing relatively simple/but strenuous work in the time when having a strong back was more important than having brains in many jobs before automation, the computer revolution, and before entire industries vanished without a trace. He was never married, so he leaves no children or a spouse as dependents, so making his funeral and other final arrangements is much easier than where family members may end up fighting against each other over what remains of his estate. So, in the end, I would say the present rules dealing with cancer patients and others with terminal illnesses are already too restrictive, and instituting an outright ban like the writers in the extremist conservative Catholic site you linked are captives of strict ideological purity and nothing they have to say on euthanasia, abortion, homosexuals, or socialists, is of any merit. It's just more authoritarian Catholic ideology to maintain all of the present systems of oppression!

You don't say when you lived in Russia! So, I'll hazard a guess that it was after Stalin's death in 1953, and especially after Kruschev started the revisionism later in the 50's, in the effort to create a communist system that performed along capitalist lines... i.e. producing a consumer-driven economy pushed along by advertising and marketing-driven product demand. It's no small wonder that by the 80's, the Soviet Communist Party stood for little beyond maintaining its power and control over the political process...similar to the empty ideology of today's Chinese Communist Party. Maybe communist governments have a limited shelf life after the revolutions and initial building process establishing industrial production. Once communism survives the initial challenges, like the post-WWII Soviet Union, but struggles to find meaning afterwards if it's organized in a top-down manner like Stalinism. Same thing with China...and the main reason why Chinese communism almost has disappeared as an ideological force and just lives on as an authoritarian capitalist state. If Mikael Gorbachev had been able to turn the economy around, it's more than likely that the Soviet Union would have survived and just sent Russian Communist President - Boris Yeltsin to the gallows for high treason...who knows. But, it's much easier to understand why the Trotskyists and others believed in "Permanent Revolution," which would have required endless war against the capitalist states. What's different today, is that we now live at a time when growth-dependent capitalism has revealed it has greater flaws than generating and maintaining economic inequality, but is also pushing our entire world towards mass extinction in a very short time frame. And that's why myself and many other people around the world from all different backgrounds and vantage points started dusting off our old books on Marxism and the communist movements and governments of the last century. Because somehow, some way, a new system of organizing politics and economics has to be created which can live within allowed resource limits and keep most everyone happy and alive! As things stand today, we are heading over a cliff as the American Empire, which finally achieved global hegemony 30 years ago, struggles to maintain its control against rising power - China, and its the US political and military leaders which are threatening to move towards using nuclear weapons (something unthinkable most of my lifetime) to maintain their advantage by any means necessary! And, I don't want to make this too long, but you are totally wrong about how our prehistoric ancestors lived! What you have been immersed in is mostly rightwing propagandist narratives created by atheistic humanist scientists and philosophers of the past 50 years, who keep falling back to denigrating the anthropological studies of past and present simple societies as "Noble Savage" narratives! The facts remain that the whole reason why Karl Marx and more particularly - Frederick Engels and the many 'utopian' socialists of the mid-19th century started trying to develop egalitarian communist systems was from their readings of the first generation of modern anthropologists - like American - Lewis Henry Morgan and contemporaries who lived among the "savages" and interpreted the accounts of many explorers and would be conquerors who wrote accounts of natives in the lands where they started arriving and their shock and surprise that unchristianized 'savages' were more 'christian' in action and conduct than the vast majority of their European contemporaries. Now that most of the "savages" have been contaminated or went into extinction after "civilization" arrived, modern narrative managers working for well funded think tanks who can buy the kinds of historical, economic, and scientific research that suits their demands. So, in a nutshell, the fraudulent science calling itself "evolutionary psychology" which attempts to explain human behavior in terms of modern culture and gets heavy promotion for its writers like Stephen Pinker, who writes large volume, authoritative looking books that mostly consist of him cherry-picking his way through history and prehistory to pull up the conclusions that are invariably: man is savage by nature, prehistory was "nasty, brutish and short" in the same way Thomas Hobbes portrayed the recent and distant past of his era, but adds that the promises of innovation and technology guided by capitalistic forces are and will continue to pave the way for a better, more fulfilling and more peaceful future for the citizens of this planet. Pinker's bullshit narratives may have carried some serious influence 20 years ago, but this dystopian new century is already unwinding everything that Pinker and other evo-psych enthusiasts claim to believe in! And this has taken a lot more time than I intended, so I better quit here.

From the pov of someone who is clearly and unequivocally on the left...maybe far left by other people's estimation, I have concluded that the greatest threat to our world today comes from so called 'moderates,' who are lukewarm about any political ideology. They just want a nice, less controversial global empire dominated by the US, which does not speak loud and raise red flags like Trump and similar braggarts in a few other US-allied countries do (Brazil, Philippines etc.). And that's why the consensus of billionaire opinion in America (all except for oil and a few arms manufacturing industries) determined Trump had to go, one way or another. And considering past conspiracies, I would have assumed that Donald Trump wouldn't have been long for this earth if he had won the 2020 Election! For most of the campaign, it seemed like the DNC-Dems were doing their best to try to fumble the ball and give away an easy win by picking the stupidest, most corrupt, and most incompetent Democrat candidate among the list of 2020! It took lots of stupid statements by Trump, a complete undisguised collaboration by all of the controllers of social media giants that dominate all media today, along with the same polling manipulation tactics that many of the same players used back in 1996, when they acted as 'consultants' for Russia's first drunken fool president - Boris Yeltsin. And same as this time, the manipulators were so proud of their behind the scenes work, that they provided all the info needed for a Time Magazine self-congratulatory piece on how they 'saved' Russia from descending back into communism because capitalism was failing so badly! Once again, just like the Dirty Wars, the same tactics used in propaganda wars abroad find their way back home to be used at the source! Cover: http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html text: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,136204,00.html Other commentaries on 96 Election compared to Trump (legitimate or not): https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-07-09-mn-22423-story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/06/26/russian-election-interference-meddling/

I don't know if you're familiar with former Democrat lawyer - Tim Canova, who committed the unpardonable sin of running directly against Debbie Wasserman-Schultz in her Florida district in 2016. But his main grievance from that unsuccessful campaign and the main impetus for running against her again as an independent in 2018 was from evidence she and her campaign staffers gave at a post-election trial where they admitted to destroying ballots while his lawsuit was still pending at the conclusion of the 2016 debacle. Canova also lost that attempt as an independent....no doubt because election officials mostly work for whichever party dominates local politics, and in her district, nobody has a chance against a Democrat nominee no matter what they do! Canova has since tried to get some attention for the much needed cause of electoral reform in America. As he points out, computerized vote-counting machines aren't even necessary to begin with, and not used in any countries that actually want accurate results and a real democratic process! Fourteen US states don't even use voting machines that leave an audit trail that can be verified later if a recount is called for. So what exactly are clains and counter-claims of voter fraud based on anyway! More than likely fraud occurred, BUT Trump and the Republicans on his side would have had a much, much better case if they called for a full examination of all forms of voter fraud, including schemes used by Republicans and centrist Democrats to strike names off of voter registry lists who appear to represent the wrong voter demographic that suits them. So, who knows how it would have played out if a fair, honest election happened in America! If neither the GOP's frivolous interference with voting lists and Democrats' business allies who are in the business of supplying most of the voting machines used across the US were all eliminated, it's possible that voters would have chosen the volatile and dangerous Trump over the lackluster and near brain-dead Joe Biden....it's a coin toss! But, unless both parties bring all out in the open...which Trump partially did this time around. Trump's post election tantrums are the first glance behind the curtain at what the Wizard of Oz does behind the scenes. Up till now, both sides have likely been controlled by institutional insiders who don't want the process called into question, because they don't want to make any changes to it. Note how Hillary Clinton and her minions would not help the fledgling effort by Jill Biden and the Green Party to do recounts in three battleground states. She wanted to squawk bloody murder about Russians and being cheated and that it was "her turn" but she did not want an in depth examination of the process, because nobody else has done it before...ever! When Kennedy stole the Election in 1960, thanks to his old man's close friendship with Chicago Mayor - Richard Daley, Nixon kept quiet, same when Algore agreed to end the ballot counting in Florida in 2000, when the Supreme Court ordered an end to the count. Gore could have contested that decision, but he didn't! In 04, Ohio was the battleground state that decided the Election, but the clown who should have never won the nomination - John Forbes Kerry, also kept his mouth shut "for the good of the nation." So, whether or not Trump has good intentions, he may be serving a higher purpose by causing so many to question a process that should have been turned inside out decades ago!

Yes I do as a matter of fact! What about it! Got any more crap to throw at the wall as a distraction? The Moguls and the West African empires did not set the template for development of permanent colonialism, done after a capitalist system of economics developed. Hell, it was the British Empire which licensed the East India Company -- the world's first multinational corporation! And the reason why the new republic of the United States of America set up very restrictive rules (slowly abandoned in the following decades) for gaining corporate charters. The American revolutionaries saw corporate 'artificial persons' as dangerous, destabilizing threats to any system striving for democratic governance. And boy howdy, they were right! So, starting with Euro-colonialism, which strived for the formation of international, universally accepted banking and commerce systems that the Moguls could not or did not think of developing (except for paper currencies), the only thing they and earlier empires in Asia and Africa had in common was establishing currency systems...since prior to the creation of money (in the modern sense of the word) about 3500 years ago, the only purpose one nation or large tribal group would have for attacking or going to war with a neighboring group was to seize all or part of their land, or plunder their wealth (usually not much beyond horses and livestock). So, from a historical perspective, there were no great land battles prior to the year 1500 b.c. - a decisive battle between Egyptian and Hittite armies on the Plains of Megiddo. The soldiers on both sides were essentially mercenaries, because they were paid in silver or copper coins for fighting on behalf of their respective kings. And in our time, the American Empire utilizes a tactic that the British Empire started using when their empire started stretching past governable limits - setting up vassal states dependent on the Crown economically and militarily with a compliant useful dictator established as the local potentate. Solzhenitsyn was a Russian Orthodox monarchist crackpot who dreamed of a time when Russia would dissolve the Soviet Union and reinstall the Czar as divine representative ruler of the Russian Empire. Funny that you don't have a number for Hitler's killings, but you can pull out 70 million from some orifice for Stalin! A show I was listening to which went through the claims and counter-claims about what Stalin did or did not do provided this reading list for source material. Aside from Michael Parenti, I think all the other books are old enough to be in public domain and I have three of them ( Douglas Tottle, Ludo Martins, Grover Furr) available free online. sources "Another View of Stalin" by Ludo Martins"Fraud, Famine and Fascism" by Douglas Tottle"Khrushchev Lied" by Grover Furr"Class Struggles in the Soviet Union" by Charles Bettelheim "Stalin" by Ian Grey"Stalin" by Isaac Deutscher"Origins of the Great Purges" by J. Arch Getty,"Blackshirts and Reds" by Michael Parenti https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/joseph-mother-fucking-stain It's said that History is written by the winners/not the losers. Well, in Stalin's case, he had the misfortune of being the great enemy of fascism and western capitalist imperialism during his time, and then he was repudiated by renegade Marxists like Leon Trotsky, who had once caused slaughters in his drive to enforce the rules of collective farming in Russia and Ukraine when he turned the Red Army on people who were following proper socialist principles. In comparison...Stalin looked like a moderate! And then after the War, a lot of highly placed Communist Party officials started thinking about getting rich and feathering their own nests. This was how Kruschev almost got sent to the gallows...which he apparently never forgot, since he led the repudiation of Stalin, that mostly featured attributing everything bad that happened in the Soviet Union from 1920 to 1952 to Stalin personally. This created a psychological break that modern Russians still can't put together: how to brag about Russia's great economic and military achievements in WWII without recognizing the success of the communist system and its long time leader - Joseph Stalin! Stalin is a rough equivalent to Churchill, and if he was put on some international trial after his office, I'm sure the defense would claim that he had to often be ruthless and despotic to prevent....well, what eventually happened to the Soviet Union! Last I heard, China is leading in all of the green tech stuff like building windmills, solar panels and thousands of miles of high speed rail tracks. If they are still building coal-fired power stations (like Europe is as a matter of fact) it is a much smaller part of their planning than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Most of the human-produced carbon added to the atmosphere was put up there starting when the Industrial Revolution switched from water power to coal-fired generating stations in the 1830's and China, India and other third world nations haven't had significant carbon footprints until very recent times. And it's also worth noting that up till now, most of China, Vietnam, Indonesia's and others are producing carbon because of outsourcing of production to make clothing, shoes and other crap for US and western-based corporations. The reasons why branch plants were set up there are the same that a company I worked for 40 years ago moved its production of silica for making sandpaper to Argentina --- to escape from increasingly restrictive Canadian air pollution standards! The outsourcing allowed for flatter increases in CO2 production from the US and allies, and that's why we were hearing bullshit 20 years ago that our new technology had decoupled capitalist growth from growth in energy use and carbon production. Back to your street name dilemma: I don't have strong feelings whether or not you keep Churchill or not, or name a street for Stalin...all the same to me! But, I don't think either leader or hardly any political leader is in need of valorization as some great icons of history. Some years back, I came across some writing by Ernst Becker, who developed a theory he called Terror Management Theory -- to explain the apparent denial of death many or most people feel, and is expressed through the economic and social costs of funerals and leaving memorials for posterity. It's as if some people believe that if a big cross or a statue is on their grave or they have streets, buildings, let alone cities named after them, they gain some form of immortality. In the cases of important people who've died, their worshippers seem to feel some degree of immortality .... like if their leaders live on after death, so do they! For me, I'll take cremation and just dump my ashes somewhere convenient!

Presidents, like Prime Ministers are little more than empty headed figureheads set up by behind the scenes forces that make the policy decisions. At least our Justin fits the role of a figurehead better than Trump....then again, maybe he does it too well!

Secret? Secret to whom? It was called the German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact, and it caused a major division within the communist international around the world. The only part of it that was secret was that Stalin knew Russia and its allies were far from ready for another war with Germany. And they knew they had to buy time to build up their armaments and military forces for the next war that was considered inevitable if Hitler's dreams of empire couldn't be stopped. The real secret non-aggression pact with Hitler and Mussolini were the political and business forces in the US and England (everyone except Churchill and Roosevelt) who wanted their nations to accommodate Hitler and work together to destroy the communist threat to the east. Even after France was invaded and England was being bombed by the Germans, Roosevelt still couldn't put together enough congressional support (or business) to bring the US into the War. It would take the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to do that (and that's why it has been rumored ever since the end of WWII that FDR told his naval commanders they had to allow for at least a limited Japanese attack, so that the pretext to war would be firmly established. I'll set the 'the standard Stalin Murdered His Own People' canard aside for now, since there were a few Russian and even western historians who've questioned the many claims, statistics and numbers that are rarely if ever verified. Not much different than today's propaganda. You can (and likely will) argue till the cows come home about Churchill's greatness as a military leader and even a painter for some reason...but like every Great Man of History narrative that gets created to explain historical events, Churchill's many flaws are just glossed over...including his work to preserve control of the British Empire's colonial holdings around the world. Aside from causing a massive slaughter of Bengalis (which I guess doesn't count cause they're not white people), the Empire that Churchill was the last great champion of, looted these nations for their wealth or resources and also most of the wealth earned from what their peasants produced in agricultural exports back to the motherland. Just India for example....Churchill was part of the looting till he was forced to end the empire: Great Britain Looted $45 Trillion From India Indians paid the price for British prosperity I still say F#$% the Empire! Is the world we have now what you wanted? To me, it looks like global capitalism has devoured too much of the resources of this planet already, and that's why we're already on a downward spiral! A lot of people would have to grow up real quick to stave off disaster now. I don't know if it's possible anymore. Our best hope is that aliens land and take over, or a comet/asteroid hits the earth, but is destructive enough to take out 'civilization' but a remnant of humans remains alive...along with enough other creatures to rebuild a living planet, and those lucky few will need to have maintained an historic memory to never allow sociopaths and narcissists (the types of people who prosper and rise to the top under capitalism) to take over and impose their twisted visions of what is and is not 'progressive democracy.'