SDA regular Peter O’Donnell shared much wisdom yesterday:

Between the radicals of left and right, there is a vast dead zone which I would divide into two roughly equal halves. One of them is faintly conservative and would prefer that our radical philosophies would win out, but they don’t want trouble and are too easily intimidated by liberal social contacts and family etc. The other half are mildly progressive and are willing to remain ignorant as to how the globalists are actually doing what they do, because they want them to succeed no matter what laws are broken or rights are trampled. Hence the puzzling statistic that 70% of U.S. voters think there was fraud in 2020 while (if there was fraud) only 50 to 55% voted for Trump. (if there was not fraud then 30% are correct and 45% voted for Trump).

It is this “go along to get along” mentality that has allowed the globalists to accomplish what amounts to a revolution without firing a shot other than one at Ashli Babbitt and another at Scalise (and his fellow baseball players of that incident). And of those crimes, only one is currently even viewed as criminal.

It should be clear to any rational person that the climate change movement is a thinly disguised effort to overthrow free market economics in favour of directed socialism, in which unproductive alternative energy sources will be heavily subsidized so they can continue to pretend that they actually generate any electricity worth mentioning. So many people out there, however, just want to virtue signal or live in peace and harmony with the idiots down the street and at the other end of their video phone calls, so they pretend not to see any of this and act nervous if anyone does mention it. If our economies slowly fall apart under the dead weight of faulty assumptions then they will go down with the ship, never having tried to avoid hitting the iceberg dead on.

I wonder what Churchill or Maggie Thatcher would have said at Glasgow and specifically to Greta Thunberg. “It’s past your bedtime” might be a start.

In response to yesterday’s Wagging the Dog posting, SDA contributor, Ann, shared some amazing thoughts. I do hope she’s wrong but fear she is not:

You are correct, Robert. They are, in effect, showing us their power. The majority of the population of the U.S., including a record number of ethnic minorities who broke rank, rejected the elites. We rejected the entertainment industry, the mainstream media, the “wisdom” of academia, and the Swamp of bureaucrats in Washington. We voted for Trump in record numbers. We knew that Trump and his administration stood in the way of this bleak, gray, awful life under overloads who keep all the goodies for themselves. But they are showing us their power. With smiling faces and smooth word salads, they are robbing us of freedom. They are robbing us of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They are denying us the ability to travel, to gather, to enjoy live concerts and live sports in big or small venues, to dine out, to enjoy pubs and bars. Soon they will start denying us the foods and drinks we enjoy. And it won’t end. Our safe suburban neighborhoods are going to be forever altered. Our camping and hunting and recreation and sports are going to be denied us forever.

We won’t get back the pre-Covid times. Those are gone with the wind. Voting is meaningless. They know that we know what they did. They know that we know they cheated. But it doesn’t matter. They have the power. And they will never give it up. They no longer have to pretend to govern according to the will of the people, not when they can just order an extra 100,000 “votes” in the middle of the night to disenfranchise our votes in key districts. Soon even the smiling and “kind” and “benevolent” front they keep presenting will be gone as well. They won’t even need to pretend anymore.

The French Revolution got rid of a king but ended up with the Emperor Napoleon. And Robespierre, the despot who governed before Napoleon, was worse than the aristocrats he replaced. The whip just changed hands.
America gave us common folk middle class people a few good centuries. But it’s over. The aristocrats are letting us know we are back where they always want us: lower class, under their heel, producing things for them, inferior and cringing, doing their will, and no longer free.

It’s sickening.

From the previous post come two brilliant comments from Jim and CT respectively, both well worth a careful read:

Complacency and submission to faux authority types permitted a wide spread corruption of the organizational infrastructure across the entire spectrum of human activity in western democracies. From education entities to labour entities to corporate entities to political entities to legal entities to the media there was a failure to challenge and to root out the infiltration of Marxist philosophy and doctrine embedding itself in the fabric of activity.

Now, the majority of these complacent and submissive supporters of western democracies find themselves on the outside looking in as a Marxist insurgency roils across the country supported by the various entities named above. These same supporters have no idea of what they can do to oppose the insurgency and no idea of what entities can be persuaded to support and work with them to restore order.

Standing on a precipice and staring into the abyss is where these supporters of western democracies are today. If they fail to figure out that they have to cease their complacency and their submission and if they then fail to move quickly to organize themselves into a formidable infrastructure that is able to counter and challenge the Marxist philosophy and doctrine then the Marxists will win, if not now, at some point in the near future.

Excellent and to the point, Jim. Like so many aspects of society, people are looking inward with a serious lack of skills to determine their future actions. Politically ordinary people have no idea how to organize and make their voices heard. If Trudeau gets his way and his socialist promises are accepted then there will be little hope for Canada.

How people could have been led down a road that totally ignored the communist threat is astounding to me. It is as if the fall of the Berlin Wall brought an end to communist ambitions led by Russia and China. Communism is an ‘international’ effort to raise the downtrodden. It is a fascist theology. Geopolitics is not abstract. It is a very real reality. If your governance cannot produce enough to satisfy the people, you go out and take it from someone else. The communists have incubated their efforts in western media, education, and government workers. Any challenge to what they have achieved will take years and will be bloody. By the time society realizes the true nature of what is going on it will likely be too late.

1st thought. That’s a coin?
2nd thought. I’ve seen better fridge magnets
3rd thought. Why is there a dog humping a bird?

– Morocco Mole

Fresh from the pages of Reader Tips;

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) claims it is owed $11 billion in unpaid taxes by Canadian Corporations in 2014 alone. CRA estimates total unpaid taxes for 2014 were $26 billion. See, for example …
 
 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/canadian-corporations-owe-up-to-11b-in-taxes-1.5183181
 
In the above link 2 millennials try and unravel this dark secret about corporate tax avoidance. The female host talks about getting emails from CRA. They never email, but I diverge from the story.
 
The two biggest court cases regarding tax evasion (in Canada) are BMO and Cameco. CRA lost both decisions. In the case of Cameco, CRA claimed the company set up companies explicitly to avoid paying corporate tax in Canada (which is not a crime by the way). CRA called the scheme a “sham”. CRA claimed $2.2 billion in unpaid taxes.
 
What interested me about the Cameco case most was how it was reported in the media. If you Google “Cameco and CRA in court over taxes” most of the links are prior to the court decision and consist mainly of CRA claims and calls of unfairness by fair tax activists. Once the decision was made public there seems to be no follow up or discussion – until now where the CBC is regurgitating the CRA claims of widespread corporate tax avoidance in Canada. Here is the decision …
 
 https://decision.tcc-cci.gc.ca/tcc-cci/decisions/en/item/344951/index.do
 
The most relevant part of the testimony is where a former Cameco executive explains why Cameco set up overseas operations in the first place.
 
Q. What were your conclusions regarding how Cameco could minimize its tax expense?
 
A. Well, we had a choice which — you know, I had had opportunities before, comparable. The company Cameco had a choice to make. With these new opportunities, such as HEU and offshore purchases and such, we could continue to run the company Saskatchewan focused. Everyone would remain in Saskatoon. All of this material would be brought back in to Cameco Corp., the Canadian parent. It would be sold through them and all that activity would be as it had always been. Everything ran through Cameco. Then nothing really would have changed. I would have the same tax bill. The same items would be included in the tax calculation as it always had been, so nothing would have changed.
 
But then I’d turn around and say, “Well, from a cost reduction perspective, I haven’t done anything. What can the company do? What can Cameco do to change that?” And the idea came up to say, well, in particularly the HEU material, it’s Russian. It’s equivalent over the life of it to about 80 million pounds for Cameco, which is a very substantial uranium mine. It had no connection to Canada. Why bring it here, subject that uranium to Canadian tax when it never was from Canada in the first place?
 
So that started me down the road of saying, “All right. If you move the HEU material — or if you don’t move it. If you put the HEU material offshore so that it never, in the first place, becomes part of the Canadian company, if you make your third-party purchases other than that offshore for material that’s never part of Canada, all of that material, then, is not part of the Canadian tax system. So that was the start of it.”
 
Cameco set up a company in Switzerland to buy uranium from Russia so that it did not have to bring the Russian uranium back to Canada and pay Canadian taxes – perfectly legal. This means that CRA was in error – the taxes they claimed were owed were not in fact owed. But no one challenges CRA in the media when it comes to corporate taxes. No one will challenge the bogus $11 billion in unpaid taxes from 2014 alone.

Thanks to Steve from Rockwood for that.

Peter O’Donnell;

We live in strange times. There are a lot of crazy people out there, no doubt about that. Yet it remains demonstrably true that some of the craziest people are the leaders of our countries, the elites that are directing the herds lock-step towards unimaginable disasters that we can see are inevitable if we go much further (not that you or I are willingly going along, but you know what I mean).
 
Somehow, we have to call a halt to this. It’s tricky. How do you end the institutional madness of the high functioning and the random madness of the marginalized (which may be equal and opposite reactions to some middle ground reality) without becoming the new elitist totalitarians? Or are we forced to confront a stark choice, them or us?

 
I have stared it down and I know, there has been no chance for reconciliation for a long time now. This is a whole generation or two perhaps into this cult of madness, and it does not surprise me that while the elites spiral helplessly out of control with their insane policies, individuals do the same thing at random in a variety of unpredictable ways. The orthodox view is that Breivik and the Quebec mosque shooter are the anomalies, madmen who are at odds with the values of the society. My view is that while our society went nuts at the top levels, these bottom feeders said to themselves, “hey, going nuts is the new normal, why don’t I go nuts too?”

 
So we end up chasing our tails because every attempted political response to restore order to the asylum inevitably attracts its share of nutbars from the fringes, and also requires that the general public would trust the unknown outsiders (people like you and me) with any sort of position of authority to replace the known if obviously demented authority figures we now face as our so-called superiors.

 
What is truth in this complicated situation? It’s like those Russian dolls, you open them up and find you have to do it again, and again. And then, what’s at the end of that? The question that is never asked contains the answer. For example, with the Trump – Russian collusion question, the question that is never asked is this: “Would it perhaps be a good thing for Trump to collude with Putin?” The assumption is made by both sides that it would be a bad thing, so the debate is about whether he has done it or not, but not whether he should do it. I say this because if Putin is opposed to the globalist agenda and is in favour of aggressive national sovereignty, then why not collude? We face shared enemies. I would collude with anyone who could help us throw off the yoke of the cultural Marxists. They know they are on borrowed time, that’s why they nervously look out the window every time they hear a protest has arisen, as there is what the lawyer might call consciousness of guilt. With the random violence of the unhinged, there is just an absence of proportion and the loss of hope. They think the only way out is to rampage. At the very least, we should all rampage together with a rational objective in mind. Shakespeare had it right, “or by opposing, end them” seems like the only way out of this death spiral.

 
And for those challenged by metaphor, I don’t mean end their lives. I mean end their access to power.

SDA regular Ken Kulak left a brilliant comment earlier that everyone should read:

There are many great comments above.
If I may add my two cents. No doubt some of you might think One Trick Kulak. While reading and listening to the material presented by Robert the thought occurred to me that I have seen this before, not literally, but on paper.
Not to brag or blow my horn, but I have close to 200 Russian history books in my library. Almost all are by recognized historians who are or were recognized authorities in their field of study. Some like Richard Pipes were advisors to governments during the cold war. I have read everyone of those books and parts of some more than once and have been used as background resource material for the four family history books I have written.
What has been happening in our universities across North America to stifle free speech and any opposing views to the entrenching of Marxism and seems to be escalating in intensity. Thank goodness there are a few brave warriors like Jordan Peterson and Lindsay Shepard and possibly others attempting to stem the flood.
However, the increasingly more open Marxist controlled events in our higher learning schools is not new. The same thing happened 100 years ago in Russia. What has and is happening in our schools has just been slower, more subtle, and thus more insidious in nature.
Prior to the Russian revolution there was a covert socialist/Marxist/Bolshevik presence in Russian universities. After Russia entered the Great War the agitation in the schools increased and became more overt in the late fall of 1916. When the February revolution broke out and was successful the radical left took over all the schools. Then, after the Bolshevik coup, the effort to expel any opposition by professors and students began, and by the spring of 1918 the Bolsheviks took direct control of the schools.
The troika that Lindsay experienced was the standard method of operation and control in the schools and enforced by the Komsomol under the direction of the education commissary.
So, what happened in Russia in a relatively short time frame has been happening here slowly over a couple of decades and basically come out into the open only recently.
Make no mistake, after they shut up Jordan and Lindsay they will get around to shutting us up. Bill M-103 and the federal refusal to help pay for summer student help unless you tick off the box expressing obedience to full on abortion is all a part of turning up the heat on the pot with the frog in it.

Let’s hope a sufficient number of Canadians will seize the warnings that the likes of Ken and Jordan Peterson and Mark Steyn have been proffering for years. The sheeple are likely too far gone with the “Progressive” indoctrination to wake up though.

“Don’t worry, everyone. Putin has been rendered impotent by the raising of Pride flags at city halls across the country.” – Rob H.

The children are our future…

The best thing I ever did for my kids’ education is getting her out of the Saskatoon Public School System(SPSS). She now attends a Charter School in the Phoenix area, and it truly is apples and oranges compared to the SPSS. She was an ‘A’ student her entire life until she came to Arizona.
In Arizona she got a swift kick in the butt her first year, especially in math and English. Now I’m happy to say she is achieving A’s again because of a lot of hard work. It was a “swift kick in the butt” because the students at her school are at least 1 year(probably 2 years) ahead of the kids in the same grade (8) in the SPSS, especially in Math and English. Furthermore, they use “traditional” teaching methods including phonics, word and sentence structures, essay writing for English. In math they must memorize math formulas and tables; and, they are not allowed to use calculators. I believe that using calculators in Saskatchewan elementary schools is gravely hurting the students, but I digress.
At my daughter’s school they don’t bother with the “new and improved” teaching methods, they regularly fail students, hand-out zeros, they shame students that under achieve. On top of that, they spend next to NO CLASS TIME on frivolous escapades such as art, music and so on. Those things you must do on your own time, by joining clubs before and after school( you must be passing all classes to qualify). Finally, they recognize achievement, as the top math student in 2011-12 received a full scholarship to ASU for her first year; a grade 8 student! All of that said, the most significant difference is they will kick a student out of the school if they cannot “keep up” to make room for someone who can. This is quite different from the SPSS’s ‘race to the bottom’.
I reckon if my kid returned to the SPSS she would have to be moved-up at least one or two grade levels. The SPSS is an embarrassment, and the expectations for the students is embarrassing. If your kids are in this school system, they are being robbed of a decent education. Get them out somehow! Unfortunately, I didn’t know how little was actually being taught to my kids in the SPSS relative to other students abroad; but I am glad to now see the truth of things. I suspect most kids graduating from the SPSS will not be able to compete abroad because of the poor quality of education they are receiving; and, my kid was at an ‘achieving’ school, which makes it all the more shocking.
Finally, I always was suspicious of the SPSS because of the unavoidable comparison between my kid’s academic education and her athletics. In past years I’ve said at sda that “the teachers at school never challenge my kid nearly as much as her softball and basketball coaches who demand perfection, and accept no excuses”. Well, I’ll tell you what; I can now say that my kid is challenged as much, if not more at the Ward Traditional Academy in Tempe than she is by her club team basketball coach. And that is saying quite a bit, considering the ramp-up in athletic competition is at least a factor of 2X more competitive than what she was used to in Saskatchewan.