Category Archives: State of the planet

Bernie Sanders, the teflon candidate

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I used to be, four, five years ago, a Bernie fan. I stopped after being offended by his capitulation to Hillary. Then I began to see tell tale signs of his character, and eventually came to my own conclusion, that Bernie is a teflon candidate, who will attempt to wriggle out of every challenge by greasing his comments and behaviour. He is not genuine.

I am fully aware that most of the so called liberal, progressive and left of centre folks support the Democratic Party and also Bernie Sanders. Even Donald Trump himself seems to lament how the establishment Democrats are working to kill Bernie’s nomination unfairly.

So, writing a critic of Bernie was not going to be popular. Nonetheless, I post what is my analysis – and not post what is popular. For the same reason, me blaming todays false liberals (pseudo-liberal is a good adjective) has not been a popular move. I have lost some fair weather friends through a process of polarisation. That too is part of life, I understand.

But I am a thinking person and not a rubber stamp. I am not here to get popular, since I do not aim to live off other people’s hard work, like most politicians do including Bernie Sanders.

Like Jim Hightower wrote – swim against the current. Even dead fish can go with the flow. And I am not a dead fish, with all due respect to the fish family. They are successful animals, cold blooded, and can be of various skeletal types – jawless, cartilaginous or bony fishes, most of whom sleep with eyes open as most lack eyelids.

But, back to Hightower, I am not a dead fish, and I do post my views and support them with the logic that bolsters my views, which are always flexible and will change if better information or introspection turns me to another direction.

The term “teflon politician” is not my invention. It has been around, and is lately being attached to Bernie. I find the term usable here, so am borrowing it.

A friend who was a Bernie supporter has recently said on social media, that the reason Bernie ended up supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 election was that going against Hillary and in favour of Trump would have been political suicide.

Well, well – that comment started a chain of thoughts in my mind. I contemplated it over the next several hours, went to sleep on it, and while preparing some free range Cornish hen carcass along with some root vegetables for my wife to cook into a stew, I thought about it some more, and decided I should come out with a post about Bernie being a teflon politician that would not be good for USA. He would be popular among the lefties, just like Obama was. But he would be just as disastrous for USA and the world.

Political suicide ?

Bernie is supposed to have avoided this political suicide, by not going against Hillary and for Trump. If this is true, then, in my thinking – Bernie would even support the very devil, just to keep his political future alive. USA can go to hell.

But hang on. Bernie did not need to support Trump. He could stand as an independent candidate and worked to splinter the Democratic Party as well as Hillary by taking voters away from them. Even if that resulted in Trump winning, it would have likely forced the Democrats to clean up their act and stop rigging the convention.

Most importantly, Bernie stabbed his own support base and voters, by supporting Hillary Clinton. This to me proves, voters are a mere temporary necessity for Bernie. He is essentially here for himself, and not for the voters and nor for the nation.

Consider in contrast – the case of Tulsi Gabbard. She resigned her high ranking chair in the Democratic Party early on, in order to support Bernie Sanders and go against the nomination of Hillary Clinton. She committed the same “political suicide” that my friend was talking about. Contrary to Bernie, Tulsi was willing to face potential political suicide, in order to support what she felt was the best for the nation.

See the contrast? Well, I do not suppose people would see the contrast, because many folks have hard wired views and would ignore evidence that do not tally with those views.

His rubbish comments about Russia is an exasperating example of how he has been, or became, a teflon politician. His duplicity with regard to Russia meddling in US elections is beyond dishonest. USA has a million times more funds and arsenals to interfere in other nations elections. USA has a million fold more solid examples of not only interfering, but actually toppling legitimate elected governments in endless list of countries. Post Soviet Russia has done none of that, and Bernie Sanders, the two faced liar – gives in to the propaganda, and blasts Russia – just to steal your vote.

If he had an ounce of honesty, he should have pledged that, as a president, he would stop once and for all, any and all US meddling in other nations elections, governments and policies. I am flabbergasted that Bernie Sanders fans fall for this kind of dishonest double talk.

Bernie Sanders voted in the senate, to uphold the impeachment because he though Trump abused his power but Joe Biden and his son did not. Without going into the details, that logic itself absolutely stinks. I have sufficient reason to believe that Bernie Sanders voted against Trump in the impeachment travesty, only because he wanted to enhance his own political future, and disregarded all other consequences including the fact that this act is not going to be forgotten nor forgiven, by the right of centre, Republican leaning voter base, and the fact that the impeachment was a sham act. There are dozens of real cases for which Trump could be impeached, but then in all those cases, many more Democrats too would fall prey.

More I think about all this, more I get convinced that I was wrong four years ago to think Bernie Sanders was the best candidate to lead USA. He is just a slippery guy with some charm, not unlike Barak Obama and in many ways, not unlike Hillary Clinton either. All in all, he is one more candidate that promises to be worse than previous presidents on a continual downward slide.

Bernie voted for all the wrong things, despite talking to the public in a way you would think otherwise.

His refusal to come clean on pardoning Julian Assange is, in my view, the deal breaker here, the last straw on the overloaded camel.

And then there is this shameful stand of supporting forced vaccination on people, to toe the line for big pharma and ensuring the citizens get sicker and sicker !!

He is an example of a teflon Candidate. And I am not surprised that the pseudo-liberals cannot see through all this. That is why they are pseudo-liberals.

In my second book, which is in the making, I am contemplating including these long posts as sub-chapters, explaining why the world gets to be as shitty as it is. Bernie is not at fault here. Neither are Trump, Obama or Hillary.

At fault are the citizens of the world. They suck. Its all related to that dead-fish thing.

A note on Julian

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It has been six long years that Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

I try to keep up with relevant world news and have for long been frustrated with the decay of free press in the English Language media across the world. This is not to say that non-non-English media is any better, judging from the Hindi and Bengali media from India. But, back to the topic, the destruction of free press in the west has been nothing short of breathtaking.

Free and independent press was touted as one of the principal pillars of democracy. It was supposed to help the citizenry informed and provide a restraint from Governments taking law into their own hands. Freedom meant a right to information, and a right to freedom of speech and expression. It was also seen as one of the fundamental inventions of western sociocultural transformation beyond the monarchy and feudalism of the medieval times.

Early post second world war decade was perhaps the best period for this utopian dream. It has since been just that – a distant dream.

The destruction of the main pillars of freedom and democracy started almost immediately after the war, although I personally was not born neither grown up enough to contemplate these issues till much later. After I had a chance to see and visit many parts of the world, and learn to look at things beyond the superficial, I began to suspect of a fundamental difference between my idea of freedom and democracy in the west, and the ground reality. This included the impending collapse of the global ecology – something that I was conscious of even back in my twenties, though I could not put my finger on it properly at the time.

It took me a while to understand that every single aspect of humanity, from its development to economic and social maturity and mankind’s march to modernism, were each responsible for driving a nail into the coffin of the planets living existence. Man, by merely being around – was killing this planet. It took me a while to understand that I along with my species represent the most toxic of all evolutionary misadventures that has occurred in the four billion year history of life on planet earth. It also made me convinced that there was no God. Had there been one, he would have made sure humans never happened.

But back to Julian Assange.

I am 99% certain that Julian was being hounded because the western world does need whistleblowers any more. It stopped nurturing freedom of speech, and stopped promoting a functioning democracy, though it continues to wear a mask to fool the unwary.

The Medusa responsible for the death of freedom was USA itself which dragged all its lackeys such as the UK, Canada, Australia, India and all other countries where English was one of the primary working languages. Along with them came the non-english progressive western nations such as Germany, France etc. These nations lead by the US strangled democracy and freedom.

What we now have is a belligerent fascism masquerading as a just and free conglomeration of societies.

I became aware that watching TV was a waste of time if one wanted to get real news. I stopped watching TV almost 15 years ago. I slowly stopped reading mainstream media such as the New York Times, Washington Post, or CBC, and started looking for fringe news sources on the internet. I temporarily dallied with Amy Goodman and other sources. I read up people like Noam Chomsky or Chris Hedges. I started checking on Aljazeera and RT.

I first started suspecting that google search engine was being tampered to skew the results in favour of state supported political propaganda and against free speech. I started testing google and eventually not only confirmed it, but got outraged by its one sided depiction of reality.

I found my friends, particularly the westernized, anglicized, upwardly mobile people from India that had either already migrated to the west and held good jobs, or were dreaming about doing so, were far more subverted to a false facade of western propaganda and the assumption that the west represented real freedom and that the US was among the best nations because of blah blah blah, than many thoughtful Americans themselves. The new immigrant pals of mine had become more American than Americans. Many of them cannot read nor write their mother tongue any more, and have an extremely shallow and narrow outlook to existence, despite being highly educated in the conventional sense. This also makes me question the definition, value, and purpose of education.

Mentally, I started drifting away from them. Today most of them appear like specs on the horizon, without shape, colour, or form. This increasing loneliness is part of the background of my somewhat singular journey into activism against agro-toxins in general and glyphosate in particular – which lead to me attempting to write a book titled – Lonely Road.

I acquired many new friends that have no blood link with India. Many are also like flotsam and jetsam – passing by in the current. But there are, I am happy not note, real deep thinkers too, who refuse to be indoctrinated by propaganda – western or otherwise, and have the depth of perception and the courage, to call a spade a spade.

Julian Assange just happens to be an icon for many such individuals, a floating log in floodwaters that is washing away our notion of a just world.

I decided to write a chapter on Julian Assange because he represented, in a modern day version of the epic of paradise lost – where we lose our conviction about man’s greatness. I am aware that the term man is used both to represent a male human and also the species homo-sapiens-sapiens – something that the feminist movement has reason not to be happy about. In my own mother tongue, Bengali, the name for a human is used to describe human civilization, while the term for ‘man’ is exclusively used only to represent a male and not the species.

Anyhow, this chapter about Julian Assange, was, for me, about more than just Julian. It was about my realization and coming to terms with the loss of our psychological paradise brought about by ourselves being ourselves, and how our own genes might be the worst enemy of the planet. Man, by his genetically programmed drive to use technology to better his life, is the ultimate doomsday weapon unleashed on earth.

And amidst all that, we learned, unlearned and then again re-discovered, the art of killing our messengers, feathering and tarnishing our torch bearers, and crucifying our prophets.

I have no idea how Julian Assange will be remembered by history. I do not much care about public perception at this stage. But Julian has been a good pointer, a symptom, by which to contemplate the deep cancer within our society that has been brought about by the very institutions that were to be the pillars of our modern civilization. He is the messenger that the world today wishes to be silenced. His messages, usually second hand and originating from someplace else, which makes him a messenger to start with, represents truth that is no longer cherished by the ex-pillars of modern democracy.

This new age fascism pretending to be an incarnation of capitalism controls all media. Its propaganda machine puts the Stalinist era Soviet propaganda machine to shame. Doctored news turns night into day. People are put away in prison by the tens of thousands without trial, and keys being thrown away. USA tries to prove it is the leader of the free world, by placing an unbelievable number of its own citizens behind bars without trial. People across the planet, killed by faceless drones operated by secret US establishments without any pretence for justification or judicial oversight is commonplace and near daily occurrence across the globe.

Honest scientists are being fired, and prevented from speaking out the truth without political clearance. Honest whistleblowers that expose the Governments illegal spying on its own people and extrajudicial killings of foreigners are either arrested and put away for years in jail, or have to run in fear of life and take refuge in countries like Russia, to save themselves from persecution for speaking the truth about their own Government’s wrongdoings. And the citizens of such “freedom loving” nations remain silent while the few brave torchbearers of the same freedom are silence or have to run away. The worst things we feared about communism has come true under this new age capitalism.

In Hindu mythology, there is mention of four eras that repeat themselves cyclically. The first era was Satya Yuga or the era when four out of four spoke the truth. Stay stands fro truth and Yuga stands for era. There were no liars. This is as close to heaven as one can get while on earth.

Then starts the downward slide. In the second phase, three out of four are truthful and one is a liar. This is the Treta Yuga. “Treta” means three. Hell lurks in the corner and threatens to disrupt normalcy and tranquility in this phase.

Then comes the next phase where two truth speakers are pitted against two liars.  This is the “Dwapar Yuga”. “Dwapar” means two. World begins to lose its balance. It gets near impossible to figure out what is right and what is wrong. Confusion reigns supreme. Only the most contemplative and wary can navigate through this world on a just path.

The last phase is the beginning of hell – “Kali Yuga”. This is the current age, with one quarter virtue and three quarter sin. In Sanskrit Kali may represent a number of unpleasant items – conflict, discord, turmoil. It also represents the Goddess of “time” which in turn invites the end of time, and hence the beginning of a new cycle and a new calendar. In this current era, crooks rule the world. Doomsday is here. Living hell is ongoing right now. An all consuming catastrophe, stylized by the arrival of an angry Lord Shiva to burn everything, thus cleansing the planet with fire, and set the stage for the new cycle, starting with another golden age of peace, happiness and tranquility. 

Thus continues the never ending cycle of time and events.

Intriguing as this tale is, we already know that a repeat cycle on planet earth is unlikely. Should life disappear from the planet, or should all higher animals go extinct, which is very possible since we are already in the midst of a man-made sixth mass extinction phase, a side effect of the “Kali Yuga” lead turmoil, then there may not be enough time left on the life span of planet earth, which in turn is dependent on the lifespan of our sun, for new life forms to start from near scratch and then evolve enough to come to higher intelligence animals like ourselves. The planet is likely going to be uninhabitable in the next phase, as our sun consumes most of its hydrogen, and begins to expand and die. The sun is not large enough to generate the kind of gravitational pressure and temperature at its core, to fuse heavier elements than hydrogen. As a result, the sun itself is not going to have any “phase two” existence like other larger stars. Solar system dies when the sun dies. Bet even before than happens, the expanding and exploding sun would consume all near planets, including planet earth.

So, Hindu mythology or not, man had only one chance on earth. And man blew it. That, far as I can tell, is the long and short of it.

Meanwhile Julian reportedly resigned from his post as the editor of Wikileaks.

If this is true, it hardly appeared in any news outlet. There are speculations that the Russians might have hatched an aborted plan to ferret Julian out of the Ecuadorian embassy and into freedom in Russia. There are other news clippings that indicate possibility that New Zealand might offer asylum to Assange. There are more news clippings suggesting Ecuador might have given Julian citizenship and turn him into an Ecuadorian diplomat (with diplomatic immunity ?), and assign him on a political post in Ecuadorian Embassy in Moscow. There are more news, almost all fo them from no-name outlets. One claims there are efforts to have him extradited into USA only to offer information on Hillary Clinton’s wrongdoings, before letting him go and that president Trump of his son-in-law might be behind it. Another one claims that the US might offer assurance that they don’t want Assange extradited, in which case the UK government might just let him go after he pays a fine and spends a symbolic few days in jail for jumping bail.

All of these might be speculation.

But most of my close friends and relatives – especially those ultra-modern americanized converts – that have successfully been reprogrammed to think Putin to be the biggest rogue these days and that the US is basically pure as driven snow – are at a psychological plain of falsehood that I find increasingly painful to visit. The specks in the horizon keeps getting smaller, merge into each other and begin to disappear in the mist.

Was a time when I thought the US to be one place where rule of law worked, and one was presumed innocent unless proven guilty. However, the US government has long been engaged in assassination of people without trial, including assassination of heads of state, many democratically elected, without ever acknowledging their role nor apologizing or explaining to their own people, why they conduct such extra-judicial killings or dethronement of other nations heads and topple their Governments. What kind of law allows that?

I do not bother asking these questions to my “Americanized” ethnic brothers and sisters. I realize these questions by now are outside of their field of perception. They are incapable of comprehending them. In any case, it is pointless for me to try to have a meaningful conversation with any of them.

Essentially, I was destined to be on my lonely road. Freedom of thought and freedom of thinking comes with a price tag – it ensures you are likely to be lonely. It is not a bad thing. Much better than living in a din where you cannot even hear yourself, are hemmed in by state sponsored propaganda and reprogrammed humanoids  that should have been free thinking humans. Before you realize, you have surrendered the one thing that is supposed to set a human apart – ability conduct independent analysis of what is happening around.

And thus, I decided I would add a chapter on Julian Assange. This overlaps with my notion on activism and the fact that the road essentially has to be lonely. There is no other way.

This is the primer of the chapter. The rest should be in the book.

Spraying glyphosate around the Turtle Creek Reservoir in NB

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Someone from New Brunswick asked for my opinion of the CBC audio interview with Mr. Len Ritter. The interview was about the issue of the town of Moncton, NB objecting to the practice of spraying glyphosate around the Turtle Creek Reservoir that supplies water to over 100,000 people. The province of New Brunswick overrode the objection and claims that Glyphosate is safe.

I have a lot to say about it all, including:

  • My opinion of CBC’s neutrality and our responsibility in this regard
  • The value of science today and the qualification of Len Ritter
  • Non-disclosure of safety data on glyphosate & possible illegality about its continued use.
  • The need for glyphosate to be at all sprayed

My views are in the above 20 minute video.

To start with, I do not consider Len Ritter to be qualified to talk on the issue from neutral standpoint. He has made a career of allowing toxic chemicals in our environment – in my judgement.

I do not consider science to be neutral and objective any more, thanks to removal of public funding in science.

Questions directed to Mr. Ritter did not mention the fact that the government has hidden the safety data based on which it approved the use of glyphosate, which is, in my judgment, illegal. And my idea of safety data involves subjecting a group of test animals to the herbicide and their health parameters compared with another identical group subjected to clean food. This comparison, and analysis, constitutes actual safety test – and not someone else’s opinion on if glyphosate is safe or unsafe.

Canada should demand such tests be done specifically for registration of glyphosate in Canada and the promoter should be asked to pay for these tests, but the tests should be done by competent neutral institutions outside of control of either the industry or the government. The cost of this should be borne by whoever wants to register it in Canada.

This is just one area where we have junk approval of glyphosate. Without disclosure of their safety data, its use is illegal in my view.

Why spraying was at all necessary near Turtle Creek was not asked bY CBC.

We have junk science, junk scientists and junk media, covering this issue of life and death importance to the people of Moncton.

Letter to Mayor of Moncton

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In support of her effort to stop spraying of Glyphosate in eco-sensitive areas near her town in New Brunswick, Canada.

To: Ms Dawn Arnold, Mayor, Moncton, New Brunswick,

Date: Saturday, August 26, 2017

Subject: Your effort to stop spraying of glyphosate in eco-sensitive areas of Moncton.

Dear Ms Arnold,

I am a Canadian citizen that writes to you in support of your effort to get the provincial government to put a stop to the practice of spraying glyphosate near the Turtle Creek reservoir. I came to learn of this through news outlets on internet.

I am a resident of British Columbia and have been to your province some years ago along with scientist Thierry Vrain, talking to people about dangers of glyphosate. I had an influence in getting our government to test thousands of food samples collected in Canada for presence of glyphosate. I obtained a copy of the results from Health Canada and was shocked to find north American foods to be the most toxic in the world, with regard to glyphosate contamination. I published my analysis in a 400 page book on Amazon titled “Poison Foods of North America”.

Mayor Dawn Arnold

I write this not just to show my support in your endeavour get the government to put a stop to spraying glyphosate in areas where it can cause maximum damage, but also to seek ways to spread this message to the rest of Canada, since you are considered to be a role model that many other Mayors could learn from.

If you agree, I would like to give you a call over the phone, for say a five minute talk where you can speak in your own voice about the issue. I would like to record it and have it converted into a short video with still images related to the subject, and promote it through blogs and social media across Canada and the world. My blog gets around 2,000 hits a day and I have talks with scientists such as Anthony Samsel of Stephanie Seneff from the US that are investigating all the different ways glyphosate can hurt the living planet. One can key in “glyphosate” or “Samsel” in the search field of my blog and read the resulting entries including talks of the scientists themselves.

I also have a three year old running case through Access To Information application for the government to release all safety test documents based on which it approved the use of glyphosate. In my understanding of the law, it is illegal for the government to release a product while withholding its safety data. The government has indirectly agreed to my view and accepts that I have the right to see the documents and yet it drags its feet. It has been dragging its feet for 35 years now.

If  you agree to our talk, please revert a telephone number and a suitable date and time when I might call you.

Either way, please take this letter as a note of appreciation from a citizen activist that supports your efforts. It is our view that citizen activism is a critical component that enables the government to relate to views of the civil society, which in itself is a critical element for a functioning democracy.

Thanking you

Tony Mitra
10891 Cherry Lane, Delta, BC, V4E 3L7
Canada

Reference : “POISON FOODS OF NORTH AMERICA”

Reference : Talks with Scientist Anthony Samsel on my blog:

Response received:

This is a good example of citizens taking it upon themselves to lend mass support to a few politicians that are out there willing to fight back at this avalanche of chemical attack that we are subjected to. This entire blog is geared to encourage more people to do the same. Politicians need mass support for doing the right thing.

A book about Mother Teresa

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One of the books I intend to read shortly, from Christopher Hitchens. This provides a counter argument to the theory of service in the name of God and about how good or questionable might have Mother Teresa of Kolkata been.

I will not buy it from Amazon, nor buy a paperback or kindle version.
I shall instead buy an audible version and “listen” to it while working on something else.
Audio books are the preferred format for me, on non-fiction issues of social significance.

Chis Hitchens is one of the original thinkers of our time, and so his opinion might be worth checking. But there is more.

I don’t completely believe this is sensationalism or pushing fake news. I come from the same town she worked all her life in – Kolkata.
My mother personally met her. That is not to say she was against Mother Teresa, but rather, was ambivalent. I have met a few nuns that worked in her organization both in India and in the US. I found them rather earthly and interested in earthly issues, not unlike you and me. I am keeping an open mind here and intend to read the book first, before passing opinion.

Also, strictly speaking – this is not so much news per se, as it is a book of opinion, by Chris Hitchens.

Lastly, I have another instinctive, and somewhat knee-jerk, opinion that missionaries, of any religion, do more harm than good in poor countries. This is a feeling that will not go away easily, because of the weight of evidence across the globe, going several centuries and perhaps even millennia.

Direct Democracy?

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There is a news from Paris, where the newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed that the French Parliament be trimmed by a third because it is too top heavy and has too much bureaucracy and has gotten slow and inefficient.

The article came up here.

This is an interesting idea – to cut the French Parliament of excess fat and trim it by a third.

I believe time is ripe for not just trimming the fat, but to radically overhaul our parliament and question the very need to have Members of Parliament at all.

IN the time gone by, there was a need for representative of the people to go to the Capital, and vote on bills, representing the wish of the constituents that elected the member.

Today, two things have happened that makes the job of the Member of Parliament redundant:

1) The elected public servant no more votes according to the wish of the people. Rather, he or she votes according either to the diktat of the party boss, or whoever funds her campaign, such as lobby groups and corporations. In short, the elected official has become a traitor to the constituents.

2) In todays world of internet and instant communication, it is not too difficult to set up system where each voter can either log in from home, or in a nearby Government kiosk, and vote once a week or once a month on a number of pending issues – or decide to abstain, thus exerting “direct democracy” instead of proxy democracy through middlemen that betray the people.

There is a case for direct democracy, and cut the fat much deeper.

Think about it, Mr. Macron of France and think about it, Canadians.

Many of these observations first came from me through social media such as Facebook. But I am storing them here as I believe some day they might deserve to be  part of a book of essays.

Can electric cars kill the oil industry & save the planet?

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This is just a rant, and a half hour or banging the keyboard because it is raining and not nice for going out to plant more seeds in my back yard.

I noticed a lively thread on social media where I had commented that I did not feel strongly that electric cars would kill the oil industry or the dependence on fossil fuels, mainly because electricity, by and large, will continue to come from fossil fuels, unless we consider nuclear energy, which has its own bag of issues. That generated a nice and healthy chain of comments from learned and well meaning folks. I did not wish to bother them with any more lengthy posts from my cantankerous self. But, it was raining outside, and I was stuck indoor for a while. The coffee was hot, and so here I am, on my own blog.

As to having a choice on what kind of electricity one gets may be relevant in very few spots on the planet. For a vast majority, on a global scale – there is no choice. What you get is what is on offer, and fossil fuel burning plants that produce electricity is the global norm right now. So, I do not see electric cars to bring a death knell to fossil fuel industry.

Of course, there are many many other issues far more relevant than a car, with regard to fossil fuel industry. Folks say, though I have not read the actual measurements, that a single flight by a single person on a cross Atlantic round trip in a year, as one passenger in a three hundred passenger carrying commercial plane, makes you responsible for a higher carbon footprint annually, than you driving around as a travelling salesman clocking 300 KM every day of the year.

So, perhaps one should talk about electric aircraft, rather than electric cars, or perhaps conscientious folks should start a movement to boycott air travel altogether to save the planet.

But, again, on a global scale, one can consider how much of the fossil fuel goes into industrial scale agriculture used in new world nations such as Canada, USA and Australia and compare it with fossil fuels used for on surface of air transportation, to get a perspective on our fossil fuel consumption.

This of course does not cover the non commercial flights such as cargo flights that bring goodies to our neighbourhood but was produced in China or Indonesia. It also does not cover our tax payers money used to fly bombers over Syria to drop bombs over civilians in the name of fighting terrorism.

Fossil fuel usually means hydro-carbon. This means a series of molecules, of a thousand different variety, that has carbon and/or hydrogen in bond. ON one end of the spectrum is pure carbon. Folks think coal is pure carbon, but it is actually not so. It has hydrogen too, but much less. As the percentage of hydrogen increases, the fossil fuel gets lighter and lighter, into liquid mode and eventually into gaseous mode.  Among the lightest that is still around on earth in plentiful quantity are gasses like natural gas or methane, Liquified petroleum ( a mix of propane and butane) etc.

They are all called fossil fuel because, billions of years ago, they along with carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapour constituted our atmosphere. There was no oxygen at all. One could argue that the CO2 in our atmosphere back then came from burning up whatever oxygen was available at the time with too much hot carbon. Either way, the atmosphere was full of stuff that would not allow us to live even one minute.

Then came a long chain of slow reactions, thought to be triggered and engineered by tiny living creatures we generally identify as micro-organisms, or bacteria. They invented photosynthesis, used sunlight as a source of energy, started splitting CO2 to grab the carbon, pull hydrogen out of water vapour and other hydrogen containing molecules and started constructing biological molecules that would be the foundation for a whole plethora of life forms. In the process, it did a few interesting things. It removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, produced oxygen as a byproduct, sequestered excess carbon and hydrocarbons into the ground and away from the atmosphere, and made it possible for plant and animal kingdom to evolve. And all those sequestered hydro-carbons are today known as fossil fuels, handiworks of billions of years of industrious micro-organisms that changed the planet and made it habitable for us air breathing animals.

Up came man or man’s predecessors, found out how to make fire out of wood, and started a two million year process of reversing the four billion years of work done by the bacteria.

It took our ancestor hominids and modern humans around two million years to finish off easily available wood on the surface of the planet, so clear cutting of forests became the next major source of energy. Around five hundred years ago, Europe finished off most of its forests so no more wood was available for energy. Man had invented a thing called “technology”, so buried “fossil fuel” called coal, could be pulled out of the earth, and used in place of wood.

Steam engine got invented so water that flooded coal mines could be emptied without manual labour. The rest was an inexorable march of human “technology” to undo the work of the bacteria.

It took around 400 years or so, for man to run out of enough coal on a global scale, to satisfy its ever increasing greed. So, around the beginning of the 20th century, large deposits of the next best thing – oil, was discovered and technology developed to use it for energy production. Being liquid, it had its other advantages that could be exploited better.

However, unlike wood that lasted us two million years, or coal that lasted about four hundred, mans ever increasing demand is finishing off oil is just over a hundred years. So we finished off solid fuel and liquid fuels and the last remaining frontier in fossil fuels is fuels that would be gaseous, but are somehow kept underground by those industrious micro-organisms as part liquid in strange conditions of pressure and temperature that is only possible deep underground or underwater.

So the next, and last, remaining source of “fossil fuel” appears to be natural gas and its other cousins such as LPG etc.

By now, demand for this gas, in places such as BC, Canada, is making the industry cut away last of the remaining forests, flood good agricultural lands, in order to make gigantic dams using the last of the meltwater fed rivers to produce hydro-electric power that can be used for hydraulically fracturing our stone foundations on an earth-quake prone continent, to get at the trapped natural gas, so that more “fossil fuels” can be extracted to power our ever more thirsty civilization.

How long would this natural gas last, compared to wood, coal and oil of the past? Your guess is as good as mine, but my guess is it would last far less than a hundred years. What the bacterial world achieved over 4 billion years, man will finish off in less than a hundred.

When hydro-carbons, or fossil fuel, is gone, what kind of energy is there in nearly inexhaustible quantity that man’s ever increasing greed is not likely to exhaust any time soon?

Far as I can see – it is nuclear fuel, and not wind power or solar or ocean waves etc all of which will remain as fringe. Nuclear fuel has kept the core of the earth hot, molten and magnetic ever since the planet formed and there is enough of it around.

However, just like burning fossil fuels have a nasty side effect. So has nuclear fuel. The reason mankind particularly chose Uranium for power generation and not one of the less dangerous nuclear fuels is because Uranium is a particularly good dual-technology fuel. It not only allows power generation, but it, and its synthetic derivative Plutonium also helps greatly in making atomic and eventually hydrogen bombs. Its great for warfare and weaponization.

So, in the long run, just as I do not believe electric cars are going to solve the planet’s environment on a global scale, I also do not see natural gas to solve it either, and do not see an end anytime soon, of an unending increase of nuclear power plants across the planet either. Till now, Uranium-Plutonium duo remains the most favoured technology which has allowed at least nine nations to develop nuclear bombs (USA, Russia, France, UK, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea) and at least a few more merely months away from making one if needed.

Meanwhile, an equally increasing number of nations have now the capability of building rockets than could carry such bombs across continents and deliver it at your doorstep, raining death and destruction from the sky, all following the age old model of warfare designed to enhance someone’s economy.

There are, meanwhile, environmental scientists that are beginning to predict that the current business-as-usual model of world civilization is long past the point of no return and the planet has absolutely no chance of maintaining life forms as we know it now. We are already in the midst of the sixth mass extinction phase, which is not even a disputed argument any more. The last mass extinction happened 65 million years ago that make the dinosaurs go extinct. Today it is recognized to have happened because of a massive asteroid strike on planet earth. However, the current sixth mass extinction is not due to any extraterrestrial phenomenon. This one is wholly man made.

So, how much time does the planet have left. Again, your guess is as good as mine. But a rising group of scientists, mostly kept out of mainstream and out of public eye, are claiming that this century, the 21st will not end with the business as usual model still in place.

Some are predicting 95% of living animals we can now identify will be gone by the end of the century, along with 99% of human population. What will the earth look like – I have absolutely no idea, but cities as we know it will be gone, as would be civilization.

Maverick scientists like ex-Jet propulsion laboratory and NASA notable James Lovelock predicted some years ago through his gaia series works that world has less than thirty or so years left before all hell breaks lose. That was made a decade  ago, so perhaps today, by his calculation, we have less than ten years left. His advise at the time was – there is actually nothing one can do to reverse this cataclysm, so might as well put your feet on the table, have a coffee and enjoy life while it still lasts.

I do not know if Lovelock’s prediction and time table is correct, but instinctively, I believe him to be fully correct even if the time table is arguable, and the reason I believe this to be correct is not just on account of man using up fossil fuel alone, but on an increasing different ways including our economy, money creation, agriculture, ever increasing population, ever increasing material demand made by the so called ‘Developmentality’ of civilized humans etc etc etc. So, in my mind, we are the very last generation of living people that are seeing the world as a continuum and peaking of a specific trend of human civilizational evolution and planetary sustainability.

For the next generation on – it is going to be a dog eat dog downward slide where it gets to be impossible for the bacterial world to keep maintaining the earth’s environment in a habitable range for air breathing animals in a manner that we humans of today can still relate to.

Time for a coffee ?

Judy Hoy on Glyphosate and Wildlife

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I had a telephone interview with Judy Hoy on January 24, 2017, regarding effect of glyphosate (RoundUp) on wildlife. Judy is a wildlife biologist that has cared for wildlife all her life and is 77 years old.

She had a lot more to say beyond what is covered in this eight and a half minute video, regarding birth defects through glyphosate affected newborns, and how some of the deformation can be cured through the right kind of treatment, though the doctors do not like to acknowledge that, and claim the deformations are genetic, from the parents and cannot be cured. That conversation has not been recorded for inclusion in this video.

Here is her statement, and the talk recorded over the phone and converted into this video

I would like to address atmospheric transport of pesticides (an umbrella term that includes herbicides, insecticides and fungicides) and the consequences of those pesticides falling in rain and snow downwind of where they are applied. With regard to so called organic crops, rain containing pesticides, especially those extensively applied, like Roundup with its primary ingredient glyphosate, contaminate all of the foliage on which the rain falls, including organic crops. Such pesticides also contaminate the surface water used for irrigation of all crops, including the otherwise organically grown crops. This causes most organic crops to have measurable levels of glyphosate and/or metabolites, but much less than crops that are directly sprayed with Roundup. With regard to pesticides sprayed by aircraft, studies have shown that approximately 20 percent of the chemicals fall on the area sprayed. The rest of the chemicals are carried by the winds far from where they are initially sprayed, sometimes hundreds of miles in just one day.

Studies have shown that the environmental toxins travel across North America in a northeasterly direction so a large amount of the pesticides sprayed here in Western United States goes across the United States and north into Eastern Canada. It has also been shown that most pesticides sprayed in the Northern Hemisphere north of the equator travel around and around the earth towards the north, eventually ending up in the snow and ice above the Arctic Circle. Environmental toxins sprayed in the Southern Hemisphere go around the earth in a southern direction ending up in the snow and ice in the Antarctic.

Animals all over the world now have the same birth defects, many being far from sprayed cropland. For example, Roundup is not used in the extreme backcountry of Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, but the animals in remote areas of both parks have the same facial and male reproductive malformations reported in studies of big game animals and documented on domestic grazing animals here in the valleys of Western Montana. This observation is based on pictures of the animals in documentaries and photos taken by photographers who hike far from roads in the national parks to photograph wildlife.

The Forest Service person I contacted by phone emphatically stated to me that they do not and have not used Roundup on the National Forest here in Western Montana. That is because Roundup kills everything and the forest service does not want to kill the native plants and trees. Yet, the examined hunter-killed deer and elk that live on the Forest Service land full time, well away from the valley where sprayed fields are, have the same birth defects. And the birth defects there appear to be at the same high prevalence as the animals living in the valleys. I would like to state that when collecting the study data from accident-killed big game animals, I didn’t separate the animals I examined into valley animals and forest animals.

My biologist colleague and I have examined a fairly large number of mule deer and pronghorn antelope from Eastern Montana and the same birth defects were higher in prevalence on those from Eastern Montana than on our Western Montana mule deer. We don’t have pronghorn antelope here in extreme Western Montana where most of the white-tailed deer I examined came from. White-tailed deer from Central and Eastern Montana brought to my colleague or to me to examine have an equally high prevalence of underbite and a much higher prevalence of overbite than our white-tailed deer here in Western Montana. My colleague examines the bite of each animal when he cleans the skull for the hunter. Those animals lived on the open prairie or in small isolated mountain ranges until the hunter harvested them, so we don’t find much difference in the birth defects with regard to where the animals live. They all have the same birth defects at very high prevalence. Some birth defects, especially underdeveloped premaxillary bone and male reproductive malformations are close to or over 50%. Biology books state that any birth defect with a prevalence of over 5% should raise a red flag, so the prevalence of those birth defects on wild ruminant species here in Montana is 10 times more. It is far past time to raise that proverbial red flag.

Severely underdeveloped lower jaw or overbite was found on over 5% of the white-tailed deer taken to a butcher shop in New Brunswick, Canada. The butcher who reported the overbite on the deer did not look for underbite on other deer brought to his shop.

The evidence shown by the extremely widespread identical birth defects on the wild and domestic animals and the evidence that Tony Mitra reported was found in the Canadian glyphosate test levels, indicates a high level of contamination in the rain and snow. Most of the pesticides in the weather fronts that come through our area are on dust picked up by the winds as they move across the bare fields in the states to the west of us. The millions of acres of bare fields in states upwind of our Western Montana valley are the source of large dust storms when the autumn months are dry. Even if there aren’t large dust storms, when the wind in the weather front passes over the bare fields, the soil particles on the very top of the dirt in the field is blown up into the air. When Roundup is used as a desiccant and applied just prior to harvest, glyphosate and other chemicals in the Roundup are still on the top layer of soil just prior to winter. When the weather front carrying the pesticide laden dust particles hits the high mountains, it slows down, dropping the contaminated snow or rain on the mountains and into our Western Montana valleys.

The snow is especially significant because the toxins that melt out of the snow during the spring and early summer are released into the creeks, rivers and dams that provide the irrigation water. When the water evaporates after the crops are sprinkled with the contaminated water, it concentrates the Roundup and other toxins on the leaves and in the top surface of the soil. In the winter the highly contaminated soil from organic fields and directly sprayed fields is picked up by winds and carried in the weather fronts to be deposited in the snow and surface water downwind and the whole contamination cycle begins again. It will take years to rid the environment of biologically significant levels of Roundup if they never spray another drop for the rest of time.

As many researchers have stated and shown so emphatically in studies, the biologically significant levels of glyphosate that cause birth defects and health issues in developing young animals are hundreds or even thousands of times lower than what is present on the foliage, in the rain and snow, and in the air throughout North America and now likely throughout the world.

Judy Hoy

Meanwhile, for those interested might read up on a dozen year old report from environment Canada on the spread of pesticides through the Canadian estuarine and aquatic environment, and results of its presence from various such samples.

Click on the image for browsing the file from Environment Canada

About New Brunswick Herbicide Spray

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IN the last few days, I have had a number of exchanges from people in New Brunswick, regarding a near collapse of big game wildlife, suspected through herbicide spray over the forests on one side, and a long lasting sad story of people getting sick from the same as power companies spray the ground under power lines that border human habitation. Here are a few quick observations and calculations. New Brunswick is under a peculiar and undesirable condition of a single corporation having a stranglehold on the province and able to manipulate government regulations to suit its business model. It is also alleged that the spray chemicals might actually be paid for through taxpayer dollars.

Wall mounted deer head with overbite

Meanwhile, people of the province are pushing for a ban on spray and the effort is going door to door, having garnered tens of thousands of signatures in a province that is low in population.

Wild game meat cutting shops in Fredericton are reporting strange cases when they receive animals that were killed by hunters for butchering, where the deer heads show lower jaw severely under developed (having an overbite). Others have seen similar animals in the wild, including animals with only one horn developed. Same is also observed and a few of such heads are also collected by wildlife scientists, looking to have them meaningfully tested somewhere.

Then there is the case of continuing and long lasting history of the province under a crippling history of a higher percentage of people being sick and dying of all kinds of  ailments suspected from exposure to toxicity that are much less prevalent elsewhere. Some areas are so bad that almost every single family has dear ones that died, or are dying, or are suffering from severe illness, including permanent disabilities, even in young children and youths. And the suspected culprit is excess use of herbicides too close to these habitations for too long.

Deer killed by hunters with great overbite

The area is also well known for military testing of nasty chemicals such as agent orange and others that have been for decades and reportedly are still being tested over the ground in secret locations out of bounds for the people or media, and the effects may be spilling over to the local flora, fauna and humanity.

To make things worse, the province is under a sustained recession. There are no jobs except with the Government and a single corporation that owns everything, including involvement in the forest management and herbicide application. So, the people have nowhere to complain without risk of losing their job, and nowhere else to go. They are suffering silently.

It almost sounds like wilful genocide being committed on the Canadian people of the province through a sustained chemical attack ongoing for multiple generations.

Some of them contacted me.

My thoughts – it is neither easy nor perhaps the best idea to have the deformed deer heads sent off for some lab test for presence of Glyphosate. Why? Because:

  • Canadian labs are not offering testing of animal tissue or body fluids for glyphosate, to the best of my knowledge. They only offer glyphosate testing on soil, water and some kinds of food and plant matter (foliage might be tested by labs that test plant matter, but if they will accept samples from the public or only from Govt needs to be investigated, since only one lab does this plant matter test and I am not sure if they only do it for the Govt or also for the people)
  • The bone malformation in the deer are suspected to be caused through epigenetic effects from toxic influence while in embryonic stage in mother’s womb, or soon after birth while still going through major development process and before they have had time to develop a robust immune system. Therefore, testing for presence of glyphosate on an adult dead deer might not point to the root cause.
  • Glyphosate might not be the only chemical involved in this malady, although it is the most used herbicide and suspected to be linked to a whole swath of ailments in humans and the living planet. Other chemicals equally suspect could be Killex, Mecoprop-P, 2,4-D etc.

Next – it may be a better idea to actually start a practice of measuring pollution levels of these chemicals in soil, water, and plant foliage periodically over some suspected areas.

Average test using Liquid Chromatography (HPLC-MSMS), for glyphosate goes to say around CAD 300 to 400 per sample, and cost for ELISA test goes to just over CAD 100. So, a mix of the two systems used might result in an average cost of say CAD 200 just for a rough estimate. ELISA test is indicative but considered not accurate or consistent (repeatable) enough to hold up in court. However, if the results also show up similar in multiple tests or also show similar results in LCMS methods, they will be good enough. Also, any suspect results can then be cross checked and verified by a more costlier test.

So, with an average cost of CAD 200, if sample of ground water, soil and foliage is collected from a sample test area (three samples) and if tests are done say four times a year, to see seasonal variation depending on spraying cycle, foliage growth period, pregnant animal foraging period, and newborn period (say four seasons in a year), then a single area will have 3×4 – a dozen samples to be tested. At CAD 200 that makes it CAD 2,400 annually – from one area and for one chemical (glyphosate). This breaks down to a budget of say CAD 200 per month.

Now, if one wishes to check against five chemicals and not just Glyphosate alone, and assuming test costs will be very similar for other chemicals too, then a single area would need a budget of 200×5 = 1,000 per month.

If ten such places need to be placed under continuous monitoring, in order to get an idea of the degree of chemical pollution to environment, then a monthly budget of 10k x 10 = 100K is needed.

In other words, a million dollars will cover ten years of data accumulation, covering ten test areas, for five pollutants, from three kinds of samples, tested four times a year.

This kind of money is unlikely to come from volunteers or the people. This can however be made available from provincial government, even if started small and then expanded.

The trick might be gathering enough public support to lean on their government to cough up with this testing regime.

At the end of the day, this problem may not be dealt with purely on a scientific platform because of two basic problems with science today:

  1. Independent study and verification of the safety of the industrial biocides are not being allowed, on various pretexts.
  2. Scientific institutions by and large are no more public funded, and are supported by the same industry that benefits from the production, sale and application of these biocides. And industry is not interested in funding any science project that might find a problem with their herbicides. Therefore science has become biased, and has lost its neutrality and objectivity.

So, if it cannot be solved within the ambit of science, how might it be addressed? A million dollar question, but I suspect it cannot also be solved by money. In other words, people donating to a good cause will not solve the problem. Why ? Well, if money could be the deciding factor then the people have already lost the battle because the herbicide pushing corporations and lobby have far more money than the people, and can easily outspend the public and also buy the government if the government is for sale.

So then, in my thinking, the only ace that the public has that has not yet been taken away, is their vote – at the federal, provincial and municipal level. How the people might get together on this issue – remains a million dollar question. But building a grassroots movement to resist this chemical attack seems to be a good place to start.

The people of New Brunswick already have performed a near miracle – they have dedicated people working towards the petition to ban spraying in NB, and have garnered over twenty thousand signatures, going literally door to door. That is a support base that, if used properly, should begin to make a difference.

My heart goes out to the people of New Brunswick, and I stand in solidarity, helping them in whichever way I can, starting with, but not ending with, this blog.

Meanwhile, I am looking for people in New Brunswick who have a story or  an observation, or a personal statement, for making the rest of us more aware and alarmed at what appears to be a sustained chemical attack that the people of the province might have been subjected to, and how to find ways to stop this madness, and how initiate a public funded and transparent scheme of measuring the levels of toxic pollutants in the forest and residential environment, and how to trigger an independent analysis and study of the effect of such practices on the flora, fauna, people and biological diversity of the land, skies the estuaries and the oceans around New Brunswick. Everybody stands to benefit from such an endeavour, but most of all, it helps the people and the wildlife of NB who are at the front line of this chemical assault.

Any interested person – feel free to contact Tony Mitra by email.

Recent Blog attendance map.

Above blog attendance map shows degree of interest in the New Brunswick story. The red areas are sort of “hot” meaning multiple hits from them since this blog came up. Clearly, there is high level of interest from both coasts in Canada and also USA. It also shows some noticeable interest from pockets in western Europe as well as some of the eastern block nations such as Poland and also from the western part of Russia. This shows that some of the issues faced in New Brunswick might have a parallel, perhaps at a lesser extent, in matters of forest management in Northern Europe and Russia.

India has a long and sustained grassroots movement against GMO in general and a rising awareness about the herbicide that goes with GMO, though they are not, far as I know, too aware of herbicide use in forests. Anyhow, India has a healthy grassroots activism against chemicals in environment, who are also curious on similar goings on across the world. That might explain their level of curiosity here.

Then there are isolated points of interest in Taiwan, Malaysia, New Zealand, and the populated arc of south western Australia. Add isolated points of interest from Panama, Antigua, Colombia and Brazil – and that covers up central and south America. One would have to post in Spanish or Portuguese to get more response from there.

In the middle east, there is some interest from Israel and Iran – an indication that hazards of herbicide spray can find common ground among even arch enemies.

Africa is mostly missing, perhaps due to lack of internet access, or preoccupation with more pressing issues of their lives. Cape Town is the sole exception.

That’s all for today. So far so good.

Update Sunday, March 8, 2020

This is an update on this over three year old blog. A lot has happened in these three years. My success in getting the Canadian Government to test thousands of food samples for glyphosate is one. Handing me over all that test data and me analysing them to discover that Canada along with the US produces far and away the most toxic food on earth with glyphosate poisoning – and publishing all that in the book “Poison Foods of North America” is another. Both of these actually happened before this blog was written.

And then there were follow up issues such as me warning folks from India that by importing toxic lentils or other grains from Canada, the nation was mass poisoning its own people. This warning reached the floor of the Indian Parliament and resulted in the food ministry, something that India has but Canada does not, deciding to test imported Canadian lentils for glyphosate, and the Canadian Government trying to impress India that there was nothing to worry about as the level of glyphosate was within safe limits. The safe limits in Canada is astronomically high without any proof of safety, while in India, which has not approved use of glyphosate in agriculture, the effective safe limit is zero – and so on.

I met Rod Cumberland last time we visited Fredericton, to speak about glyphosate years ago. Lately he got fired from the college of forestry on a cockamamie pretext, while the real reason was his continued objection to the use of glyphosate spray over forests. It made me so mad that I ended up sending a nasty public letter to the Governor of New Brunswick accusing the provincial government of acting like a regime of a fourth world warlord, a letter which the Governor chose not to respond to.

There are people that sent me emails and I ended up speaking with a few. There is perhaps a plan to make a video or two, with voice recordings of some of the NB residents and activists. Some concerned people from British Columbia are considering visiting New Brunswick to check up who all are already there trying to fight the Mono-corporation Goliath Irvin and perhaps join the fracas of other protesters, movement initiators and general noise makers.

On retrospect I do believe the poisoning of New Brunswick is rooted not just in glyphosate, but poisoning of its economic and political landscape. The people are either employed by Irvin or by the Government which appear to be owned by Irvin. There is nobody else. As a result most folks who have relatives earning wages from one of these two employers, are afraid to shout too loudly against the chemical attack for fear of their loved ones turning up unemployed. It is almost unbelievable that such a thing can happen in Canada. In olden days, at least in Europe and Asia, these are reasons why heads used to end up on pikes.

I wonder why the church does not stand up on behalf of the people and the land. They are supposed to have independent financial resources, do they not? God and Jesus used to be a powerful motivator once. I am saying this although I am a Hindu turned agnostic tending to be an atheist. I appeal to the various church groups to get together and lead the way, or try to find a path out of this nightmare.

Anyhow, I do believe this needs to somehow turn into a political movement, and not just for New Brunswick. I have been generally greatly disappointed by the political class the world over, but understand that ultimately, it is the fault of the people.

If Irvin has a monopoly on business there, it is unto the people to break that monopoly. If the government is violating its constitutional duty and working for Irvin, it is still the duty of the people to fix it. At the end of the day, the buck stops at the feet of the people. But, in all history, people only rise up when the right leader leads them to resist tyranny.

New Brunswick sorely needs a local leader that will shepherd the people. We the rest of Canada need to follow, support and learn from it.

A fresh blog may appear on this.  Link to such a blog will appear here.

Stay tuned. My email: Tony.mitra@gmail.com

Russia-China vetoes Aleppo ceasefire resolution

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Well, the goings on in UNSC is perhaps an indication of geopolitical shift in the issue of regime toppling efforts by western interests.

The issue is the town of Aleppo in Syria. There is a multi-pronged warfare going on in much of the country. A lot of different groups are trying to topple the current government of Assad.

According to the US, the people fighting the government are local Syrians that wish to topple a brutal regime there.

According to other reports, the country is infiltrated by jihadists, ISIS, mercenaries etc, sent there specifically to start the next phase of the middle east war, and to topple the Assad government.

Assad

To complicate matters, there are also Kurdish resistance groups who wish to have a homeland of their own, and currently occupy strips of Turkey, Syria and Iraq, and are treated as second class citizens most everywhere. I am not sure which side of the war they are on, but Turkey, who hates the Kurds (Because the Kurds in Turkey also want independence) would either like a piece of land carved out of Syria so all the Turkish Kurds could perhaps also go there and stop bothering Turkey, or perhaps hoping that all the Turkish Kurds would cross the border and join the fight in Syria, on whichever side, as long as they vacate Turkey.

Obama

These are reasons why the issue may be too complex to fully comprehend, and many folks have opinion based on one or another point of view.

There are other factors about Syria that might be relevant. Assad does not allow western banking and oil interests to benefit from Syria’s land or its assets.

Also, Syria, while Muslim, is largely secular and do not promote a sunni version of lifestyle. Women are not required to cover themselves or stay home.

There is also additional issues of two competing oil pipelines proposed to go through Syria. The US plan leads gulf oil from Qatar to reach the west via Turkey to the Mediterranean.

Putin

There is apparently another Russian plan to help Iran develop a pipeline going through Iraq and Syria and reach the west through a Syrian terminal facing the mediterranean.

Saudi Arabia, Israel and the US do not want Iran to benefit from pipelines, and do not want Syrian ports to benefit from the business, unless Assad regime is toppled and a pro-West, Pro-Saudi, Pro-Israeli group rules Syria.

IN the middle of all this, is the issue of the current legitimate government of Syria inviting Russia to come and help fight the opponents of the regime, who they claim are foreign terrorists being funded by Saudi, Israeli and US interests, and are using US weaponry. Russia accepted the offer.

Jinping

This pits Russian military in direct confrontation with US-Saudi-Israeli interests.

Things have reached a pitch where nothing USA says about Syria, including what comes out specifically from Obama and Hillary (before she lost the election) could be believed.

It was better to look for independent reports emerging from the ground in Syria, such as Canadian reporter Eva Bartlett

Now, the epicentre of the fight is concentrated around the city of Aleppo. It was completely in control of the rebels, and there were reports of horrific treatment of the civilians coming out from there too, including mass graves and using the people as human shields against Syrian forces trying to free the town.

Anyhow, now the rebels are apparently surrounded by the syrian forces who are also being supported (I am not too sure of the details) by Iraqi forces who also want ISIS and jihadists defeated, since they believe these people actually came from Iraq, and if they succeed in Syria, would turn and haunt Iraq again. Anyhow.

Maduro

Now the battle around Aleppo has apparently turned a decisive corner, and much of the town is liberated by the govt forces. The rebels, which are perhaps the concentrated mass of ISIS forces and mercenary soldiers on pay, are surrounded and cannot flee and regroup because their escape route through the desert is blocked by Russian missiles, fighters and bombers.

USA and its supporters have been pushing for a no-fly zone for a long time, specifically in areas where the rebels move around. But since the area is under control of the Russian air force intent on cutting off rebel movement, this pitches the US directly against the Russians. USA has not put their own airforce to enforce a no-fly zone here, presumably because US generals warned Obama that this move would trigger a direct war against Russia.

Hillary herself has spoken often about wanting a no-fly zone there, fully toting the Obama-military-industrial wish. Putin’s intensions are not very clear, but this much is accepted by most – Russia does not have a wish to control the assets of the region. Rather, Russia is more interested in ensuring the region does not become an US stooge and hostile to Russia.

So, now, three countries pressed a resolution in the UNSC to force the security council to adopt a 7 day stopping of bombings around Aleppo, in order to “pass humanitarian aid” to suffering residents of Aleppo.

What has happened today, is that Russia, China and Venezuela voted against it, and 11 other security council members (some non-permanent and some permanent) voted for it. Russia and China are permanent members with veto power.

In essence, this perhaps is the first time China has openly joined Russia in a veto about the war in Syria.

I take that as the beginning of a new phase of China. They are also, slowly, beginning to bring assistance to the Assad regime, in paramilitary and military sphere.

I believe one of the main reason for China to decide to help Syria and defeat the insurgency, even at the cost of openly opposing western commercial and military interests, is because China itself has a lot of boundary provinces with substantial muslim population, and it believes some of the Islamists and Jihadists are fomenting trouble in those Chinese provinces, hoping to start a revolt and turning those areas into an expanding Islamic state. China believes some of the mushrooming or budding terrorists from these regions have already been recruited and are right now being trained first hand in insurgency through the war in Syria.

Therefore, China would like the rebels to be defeated. It considers this mushrooming of Islamic terrorism that spreads from nation to nation, and is apparently supported by Saudi Money, Israeli political support and US weaponry, poses a threat to China’s own security and integrity. In other words, its not a joking matter for them.

Ohh.. well .. we are all living in interesting times..