We have idiots and scumbags in Canada too...

[shiva2999]

https://original.antiwar.com/Yves_Engler/2022/10/28/who-is-pushing-canada-to-go-on-war-footing/

 

Who Is Pushing Canada To Go on War Footing?

by Yves Engler Posted onOctober 29, 2022

Militarists, warmongers and arms dealers are riding a wave of momentum and they’re organizing to profit as much as possible.

On Tuesday the Canadian Global Affairs Institute (CGAI) hosted a conference titled "Putting Canadian Defence Procurement on a War Footing". The military put up $50,000 for the conference and likely spent tens of thousands of dollars more to cover delegates registration fees ($300) and travel costs. The sponsors list suggests arms manufacturers contributed even more to the conference.

CGAI’s conference seeks to help industry and DND hash out logistical and contractual issues to ramping up arms production. It also seeks to build political momentum on a theme raised by the Chief of the Defence Staff four months ago. At the time Wayne Eyre declared, "given the deteriorating world situation, we need the defence industry to go into a wartime footing and increase their production lines to be able to support the requirements that are out there, whether it’s ammunition, artillery, rockets … you name it."

The Canadian Forces want to replenish the stock of weapons they’ve sent to Ukraine and to increase arms deliveries for their proxy war with Russia. Preparing for conflict with China is the other aim of putting industry on "war footing". Three weeks ago Eyre said China and Russia considered themselves at war with the West and a week ago he added that those two nations will increasingly challenge Canada’s "tenuous hold" over its territory in the Arctic.

While Eyre pretends the Canadian military’s aims are defensive, geography suggests otherwise. Canadian Naval vessels regularly pass through the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea while a decade ago Canada’s military began seeking a small base in Singapore, according to the Canadian Press, "to support the United States’ ‘pivot’ toward Asia to counter a rising China." With regards to Russia, Canada has had a significant deployment of troops in Latvia since 2017 as well as aircraft, soldiers and naval vessels throughout eastern Europe.

CGAI’s "war footing" conference is a sop to its military and industry financiers. Organizing a conference featuring the head of the military to implement his suggestion is remarkably sycophantic even by their low standards.

Formerly the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute, CGAI has held joint symposiums with DND, NATO and NORAD. It has also received financial support from a bevy of arms contractors such as General Dynamics, BAE Systems, Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. CGAI’s weekly Defence Deconstructed podcast is "made possible thanks to the support of the Department of National Defence’s MINDS Program" and various arms firms.

Unsurprisingly, CGAI promotes a militarist worldview. In a particularly embarrassing display of intellectual prostitution, CGAI published "Canada and Saudi Arabia: A Deeply Flawed but Necessary Partnership," which defended General Dynamics’s $14-billion deal to sell light armored vehicles to the kingdom. At least four of the General Dynamics-funded institute’s fellows wrote columns justifying the sale, including an opinion piece by CGAI analyst David Perry, published in the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business as, "Without foreign sales, Canada’s defence industry would not survive."

Eight months ago PeaceQuest reported a small victory against CGAI’s militarist propaganda. A PeaceQuest member sent the group’s newsletter titled "Experts used by CBC and others funded by weapons companies" to the public broadcaster’s ombudsperson Jack Nagler. In response, Nagler sent a message to the Editor in Chief of CBC News saying journalists should reveal that CGAI is funded by arms firms and the military when quoting David Perry, its president, on military issues.

While probably the most widely quoted military/arms industry front, CGAI is but one of many "independent" think tanks, organizations and university programs funded by the military. DND and Veterans Affairs also give tens of millions of dollars annually to groups organizing war commemorations. But financing pro-militarist think tanks and other groups is only the tip of the military’s propaganda iceberg.

The military has Canada’s largest PR machine. With some 600 communications staff, the Canadian Forces aggressively protects its image and promotes its worldview. DND also operates a history department, post-secondary institution, media outlets and more.

All those who claim the war in Ukraine is only about defending national territory against foreign invaders are ignoring the naked self-interest of outfits like CGAI.

 

[RichJ]

We know. Your leader is the biggest one. 

[SpikedLemonade]

I know who is pushing to get these fuckin' crocus, daff and tulip bulbs planted today?

Come on SUN!!!

Melt the frost and warm the place up.

[shiva2999]

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/10/28/all-at-once-mainstream-pundits-push-for-ww-iii/

 

All at Once Mainstream Pundits Push for WW III

October 28, 2022

 

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

Punditry in the latter half of 2022 is rife with op-eds arguing that the U.S. needs to vastly increase military spending because a world war is about to erupt, and they frame it as something that happens to the U.S. as though its own actions would have nothing to do with it.

As though it would not be the direct result of the U.S.-centralized empire continually accelerating towards that horrific event while refusing every possible diplomatic off-ramp due to its inability to relinquish its goal of total unipolar, planetary domination.

The latest example of this trend is an article titled “Could America Win a New World War? — What It Would Take to Defeat Both China and Russia” published by Foreign Affairs, a magazine that is owned and operated by the supremely influential think tank the Council on Foreign Relations.

“The United States and its allies must plan for how to simultaneously win wars in Asia and Europe, as unpalatable as the prospect may seem,” writes Thomas G. Mahnken, adding that in some ways “the United States and its allies will have an advantage in any simultaneous war” on those two continents.

Mahnken doesn’t claim a world war against Russia and China would be a walk in the park; he also argues that in order to win such a war the U.S. will need to — you guessed it — drastically increase its military spending.

“The United States clearly needs to increase its defense manufacturing capacity and speed,” Mahnken writes. “In the short term, that involves adding shifts to existing factories. With more time, it involves expanding factories and opening new production lines. To do both, Congress will have to act now to allocate more money to increase manufacturing.”

But exploding U.S. weapons spending is still inadequate, Mahnken argues, saying that “the United States should work with its allies to increase their military production and the size of their weapons and munitions stockpiles” as well.

Mahnken says this world war could be sparked “if China initiated a military operation to take Taiwan, forcing the United States and its allies to respond,” as though there would be no other options on the table besides launching into nuclear-age World War Three to defend an island next to the Chinese mainland that calls itself the Republic of China.

He writes that “Moscow, meanwhile, could decide that with the United States bogged down in the western Pacific, it could get away with invading more of Europe,” demonstrating the bizarre Schrödinger’s cat Western propaganda paradox that Putin is always simultaneously (A) getting destroyed and humiliated in Ukraine and (B) on the cusp of waging hot war with NATO.

Again, this is just the latest in an increasingly common genre of mainstream Western punditry.

In “The skeptics are wrong: The U.S. can confront both China and Russia,” The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin wags his finger at Democrats who think aggressions against Russia should be prioritized and Republicans who think that military and financial attention should be devoted to China, arguing por que no los dos? (Why not both?}

In “Could The U.S. Military Fight Russia And China At The Same Time?“, 19FortyFive’s Robert Farley answers in the affirmative, writing that “the immense fighting power of the U.S. armed forces would not be inordinately strained by the need to wage war in both theaters” concluding that “the United States can fight both Russia and China at once… for a while, and with the help of some friends.”

In “Can the U.S. Take on China, Iran and Russia All at Once?” Bloomberg’s Hal Brands answers that it would be very difficult and recommends escalating in Ukraine and Taiwan and selling Israel more advanced weaponry to get a step ahead of Russia, China and Iran respectively.

In “International Relations Theory Suggests Great-Power War Is Coming,” the Atlantic Council’s Matthew Kroenig writes for Foreign Policy that a global democracies-versus-autocracies showdown is coming “with the United States and its status quo-oriented democratic allies in NATO, Japan, South Korea, and Australia on one side and the revisionist autocracies of China, Russia, and Iran on the other,” and that aspiring foreign policy experts should adjust their expectations accordingly.

When they’re not arguing that World War Three is coming and we must all prepare to fight it and win, they’re arguing that a global conflict is already upon us and we must begin acting like it, as in last month’s New Yorker piece “What if We’re Already Fighting the Third World War with Russia?”

These Beltway swamp monster pontifications are directed not just at the general public but at government policymakers and strategists as well, and it should disturb us all that their audiences are being encouraged to view a global conflict of unspeakable horror like it’s some kind of natural disaster that people don’t have any control over.

Every measure should be taken to avoid a world war in the nuclear age. If it looks like that’s where we’re headed, the answer is not to ramp up weapons production and create entire industries dedicated to making it happen, the answer is diplomacy, de-escalation and detente.

These pundits frame the rise of a multipolar world as something that must inevitably be accompanied by an explosion of violence and human suffering, when in reality we’d only wind up there as a result of decisions that were made by thinking human beings on both sides.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no omnipotent deity decreeing from on high that we must live in a world where governments brandish Armageddon weapons at each other and humanity must either submit to Washington or resign itself to cataclysmic violence of planetary consequence. We could just have a world where the peoples of all nations get along with each other and work together toward the common good rather than working to dominate and subjugate each other.

As Jeffrey Sachs recently put it, “The single biggest mistake of President Biden was to say ‘the greatest struggle of the world is between democracies and autocracies’. The real struggle of the world is to live together and overcome our common crises of environment and inequality.”

We could have a world where our energy and resources go toward increasing human thriving and learning to collaborate with this fragile biosphere we evolved in. Where all our scientific innovation is directed toward making this planet a better place to live instead of channeling it into getting rich and finding new ways to explode human bodies.

Where our old models of competition and exploitation give way to systems of collaboration and care. Where poverty, toil and misery gradually move from accepted norms of human existence to dimly remembered historical record.

Instead we’re getting a world where we’re being hammered harder and harder with propaganda encouraging us to accept global conflict as an unavoidable reality, where politicians who voice even the mildest support for diplomacy are shouted down and demonized until they bow to the gods of war, where nuclear brinkmanship is framed as safety and de-escalation is branded as reckless endangerment.

We don’t have to submit to this. We don’t have to keep sleepwalking into dystopia and Armageddon to the beat of manipulative sociopaths. There are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and we’ve got a whole lot more at stake here than they do.

We can have a healthy world. We’ve just got to want it badly enough. They work so hard to manufacture our consent because, ultimately, they absolutely do require it.

 

 

[Very Wide Right]

6 hours ago, SpikedLemonade said:

I know who is pushing to get these fuckin' crocus, daff and tulip bulbs planted today?

Come on SUN!!!

Melt the frost and warm the place up.

Be patient Spike, its not like you have to be anywhere the rest of your life....

[LIBills]

2 hours ago, Very Wide Right said:

Be patient Spike, its not like you have to be anywhere the rest of your life....

Doesn't the fat fuck have a pie eating contest to go to?

[jc856]

I knew that years ago when I’d go to the outlet mall in Niagara Falls on Black Friday or a big sale.*

busses of Canadians would come in, buy shoes and clothes, and throw away the rags and worn shoes in the garbage cans to avoid paying taxes coming back in.

* j/k, I like Canadians 👍

[SpikedLemonade]

The addiction to Russian Whore Piss (RWP) is an ugly thing to witness.

 

[HipKat]

15 hours ago, jc856 said:

I knew that years ago when I’d go to the outlet mall in Niagara Falls on Black Friday or a big sale.*

busses of Canadians would come in, buy shoes and clothes, and throw away the rags and worn shoes in the garbage cans to avoid paying taxes coming back in.

* j/k, I like Canadians 👍

Is the Outlet Mall still there?

[jc856]

3 hours ago, HipKat said:

Is the Outlet Mall still there?

Yep

[jc856]

6 hours ago, SpikedLemonade said:

The addiction to Russian Whore Piss (RWP) is an ugly thing to witness.

 

Why did you unignore me to poop on my comments?

I was making an innocent but true comment about the state of our Canadian brothers dress and the lengths they go to to insure they look good without having to pay all those taxes.

and I get a poop for that?

 

[shiva2999]

33 minutes ago, jc856 said:

Why did you unignore me to poop on my comments?

I was making an innocent but true comment about the state of our Canadian brothers dress and the lengths they go to to insure they look good without having to pay all those taxes.

and I get a poop for that?

 

Crossing the border to buy clothes is so 40 years ago.

I do all my shopping at the Oakville Goodwill and I've never had a cooler wardrobe in my life and its cost me peanuts.

The stuff that rich people just give away is fucking amazing.

[jc856]

10 minutes ago, shiva2999 said:

Crossing the border to buy clothes is so 40 years ago.

I do all my shopping at the Oakville Goodwill and I've never had a cooler wardrobe in my life and its cost me peanuts.

The stuff that rich people just give away is fucking amazing.

I like to buy my underwear and mattresses from goodwill.

I bring a black light and only buy things that light up like a Christmas tree 🎄 

Shiva, why is your buddy a sour-puss all the time? 
all his many campaigns against the right wing wackos here are failing terribly, and inevitable as it was, he seems to double down all the time.

 

 

[HipKat]

2 hours ago, jc856 said:

I like to buy my underwear and mattresses from goodwill.

I bring a black light and only buy things that light up like a Christmas tree 🎄 

Shiva, why is your buddy a sour-puss all the time? 
all his many campaigns against the right wing wackos here are failing terribly, and inevitable as it was, he seems to double down all the time.

 

 

Because he's stupid

[SpikedLemonade]

4 hours ago, jc856 said:

Why did you unignore me to poop on my comments?

I was making an innocent but true comment about the state of our Canadian brothers dress and the lengths they go to to insure they look good without having to pay all those taxes.

and I get a poop for that?

 

You are OFF the IGNORE List

I poop when warranted. 

[SpikedLemonade]

38 minutes ago, HipKat said:

Because he's stupid

 

[jc856]

7 minutes ago, SpikedLemonade said:

You are OFF the IGNORE List

I poop when warranted. 

Also, when it’s not warranted.

I was eating a 37$ Delmonico steak when I opened your best-shit-that-came-out-of-you pic. You owe me 37$, plus tax, plus punitive damages.

[jc856]

17 minutes ago, SpikedLemonade said:

You are OFF the IGNORE List

I poop when warranted. 

I gave you a stiff, hard, throbbing white penis.

the owner doesn’t offer us a colorful palette of cocks to choose from, so you just get the little white racist one. 
 

[shiva2999]

3 hours ago, jc856 said:

IShiva, why is your buddy a sour-puss all the time? 
all his many campaigns against the right wing wackos here are failing terribly, and inevitable as it was, he seems to double down all the time.

 

 

It's a comedy routine.

For some reason he thinks Americans have no sense of humor.

[jc856]

15 minutes ago, shiva2999 said:

It's a comedy routine.

For some reason he thinks Americans have no sense of humor.

 when a sitcom ain’t funny, it gets cancelled.

why do you lump all Americans together, like we are some borg-like mind hive entity?
 

we are a melting pot, haven’t ya heard?

[shiva2999]

2 hours ago, jc856 said:

 when a sitcom ain’t funny, it gets cancelled.

why do you lump all Americans together, like we are some borg-like mind hive entity?
 

we are a melting pot, haven’t ya heard?

A hundred years ago.

You guys think your thought processes are normal, but they aren't, they're unique because for at least my lifetime every American grows up every day hearing how America is the greatest country in the world because of your strength of character.

Indoctrination like that is hard to shake off, especially when you don't want to. 

[SpikedLemonade]

36 minutes ago, shiva2999 said:

A hundred years ago.

You guys think your thought processes are normal, but they aren't, they're unique because for at least my lifetime every American grows up every day hearing how America is the greatest country in the world because of your strength of character.

Indoctrination like that is hard to shake off, especially when you don't want to. 

That was brilliantly said.

[jc856]

31 minutes ago, SpikedLemonade said:

That was brilliantly said.

How would you know?

[SpikedLemonade]

I met brilliance.

I knew brilliance very well.

AND sir, you are NOT brilliant.

[shiva2999]

28 minutes ago, SpikedLemonade said:

I met brilliance.

I knew brilliance very well.

AND sir, you are NOT brilliant.

He's an okay guy.

He doesn't get bent out of shape when he hears something that contradicts American conventional wisdom.

You have to remember how insular Americans are.

So many get hostile when the popular narrative is questioned.

That's a start.