Venezuelan government upset with Stephen Harper's "insensitive" comments about the death of their monstrous dictator

OTTAWA — Venezuela has sent a formal protest to the Canadian government for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s “insensitive” remarks on the death of President Hugo Chavez.  

Harper issued a statement that offered “condolences to the people of Venezuela,” but not the family of the flamboyant 58-year-old leftist leader, who died Tuesday after a long battle with cancer.

A statement from a senior Venezuelan government official says a “card of protest” was sent to Ottawa after Harper expressed what he called insensitivity at a time when their country is grieving.

More at The National Post

The NDP slowly comes to understand their incompetence is newsworthy

As the 4th party, behind the governing Conservatives, the Liberals, and the Bloc Quebecois, Canada's national socialist party, the NDP, was able to get away with its caucus members behaving in idiotic and incompetent ways and still avoid the type of scrutiny a serious political party would endure.

But following their rise to  Official Opposition status following the last Canadian federal election, they appear to be shocked and disgruntled that the media dares to criticize and mock them for their incompetence.

Most politicians clamour for the spotlight, but the boobs in the NDP know it is something to be feared, lest it shine a light on their bigotry, hypocrisy, stupidity,  and insanity.

This week, they've been caught like a deer in headlights at the revelation that their unanimously sanctioned interim leader was a member of two separatist parties, one of which is also a communist/separatist party.

While the NDP spends a great deal of time whingeing about the unfairness of being treated like any other political party that has held Opposition status, senior NDP strategist Gerry Caplan has at least marginally figured out that this is what they have to look forward to until the next election.

The fact that it has taken this long for the brain trust at the NDP to realize something that any neophyte political observer knew the day after the election is another reminder of just how unfit the party Jack rebuilt is to govern.


The new leader of the NDP Collective:

Chomsky vs Chavez: Battle of the crackpots

Earlier this year Chávez even suggested Washington make Chomsky the US ambassador to Venezuela.

The president may be about to have second thoughts about that, because his favourite intellectual has now turned his guns on Chávez.

Speaking to the Observer last week, Chomsky has accused the socialist leader of amassing too much power and of making an "assault" on Venezuela's democracy.

The entire transcript of the Chomsky interview is at The Guardian.

More on the story here

Iranian government employee George Galloway denies Tiananmen Square massacre

The right to free speech is not the right to force people to listen to you

While claiming to speak "for the people", communists and Marxists uniformly behave as if they are the sole custodians of "the people's will." They think they know better than you what is in your interest, which is why they act as if views they disagree with should be barred while their own should be imposed.

Even when operating in democratic countries, communists never seem quite able to manage a fundamental understanding of democratic principles and only seem to grasp their trappings. In countries where there is a free press and free speech, radical socialists and communists complain that they are unable to get their message out. If that's true, it's not because of any concerted effort to suppress what they are saying. It is, of course, due to their own ineptitude and their lack of having anything to say that people want to hear. There are any number of means of mass communication, via blogs, a competitive mainstream media, social media, publications and so on. The average Canadian has more access to diverse media now than any previous society in world history.

If a message isn't taking hold it isn't because there aren't means of disseminating it. It's because people don't find the message compelling.

But some (e.g. communists and Islamist Human Rights Commission complainants) demand that they should be able to impose their opinions on others while claiming their right to free speech is being denied.

Which is pretty stupid.

Free speech is the right to say or write what you like. It isn't the right to demand that others listen to you or  have to broadcast your opinion.

But Canadian communists are like the ugly, bitter wallflower who handles rejection badly.

A recent outburst involves Canadian communist Kimball Cariou (how's that for an alliteration!).

Offended that colorful Hockey commentator Don Cherry is expressing support for Canadian soldiers fighting against totalitarians in Afghanistan, Cariou, joined by Sea Hitler (Canadian Gaza boat) swabbie Derirck O'Keefe are demanding Cherry change his ways or that they should be able to appear on Hockey Night in Canada to debate him.

They have formed a group, absurdly calling themselves "Hockey Fans for Peace" - a misnomer since there are too many exceptions to their peace activism to mention; Afghan women, Lebanese being persecuted by Hezbollah, religious minorities in Iran, Jews in Israel, Christians in the Muslim world plus plenty more would all seem to be exempt from the peace interests of these people. "Warmongers Against the West" has a better ring to it and is a better description, but I doubt they'd take my suggestion. However, I digress..

The point is that in democratic Canada, you have every right to say what you want about Cherry and the war. But until the Stalinists run the show here, people like Cariou and O'Keefe don't get to tell anyone what they have to hear.

Mao's Little Helpers

When Mao Tse-Tung launched the Cultural Revolution in May 1966, one of the principal targets of attack were intellectuals. Thousands were silenced, beaten to death, imprisoned, tortured or sent out to the countryside to be re-educated and purified through manual labour. Many of their persecutors were university students and schoolchildren. But theirs was also a death warrant signed by fellow-travelling intellectuals in the West.   

Richard Wolin advances no one theory to explain this act of betrayal. The Maoist temptation was part radical chic, part revolutionary tourism, part orientalism. It drew upon a deep-seated discontent with the corruption of Western society as well as the illusion of a radiant utopian future. It was also heavily infused with bourgeois self-hatred.

Full article at Standpoint

CUPE, CUPW, NDP Socialist Caucus co-sponsor rally calling for violent revolution in Canada

It isn't just the Islamists you have to worry about.

Believe it or not, Canada still has communist and radical socialist organizations advocating violent revolution. And they may be involved in places you wouldn't expect.

The Trotskyite International Bolshevik Tendency (what the hell does that mean - they aren't always Bolshevik, but they tend to be??) as well as the NDP's Socialist Caucus, CUPE, The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (of course) and Independent Jewish Voices, a virulent anti-Israel group that is a sponsor of The Sea Hitler, (holds events at OISE) and is led by 9-11 conspiracy theorist Diana Ralph, along with Khaled Mouammar's Canadian Arab Federation, were just some of the groups behind a protest last month outside the US Consulate in Toronto.

The rally was to support convicted American cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamar (nee Wesley Cook).

The rally managed to attract about two dozen people, as you'll be able to see in the video below. That's a rather remarkable achievement, given that it was endorsed by exactly 33 organizations.

(This is further proof of the assertion that there are only a few radical crazies in Toronto who have created a large number of groups to which these same few people have cross-memberships in order to create the impression of greater numbers.)

One of the speakers was an organizer from the Communist newsletter BASICS. Following a rambling speech about conspiracies and praising violent revolutionaries, at about the 9:22 point of the video, he says "we haven't had any threat of insurrection or any, you know, revolutionary uprisings in Canada quite for, for quite some time, right?  But that that doesn't mean that operation is not still in play."

His speech contains what appears to be both advocacy of a violent revolution designed to overthrow our democratic, constitutionally-based government and the suggestion that it is being planned right now.

It's interesting to see CUPE, CUPW and a faction of the NDP associated with that. I haven't heard of them issuing a statement repudiating what was said at that rally. But then, is that really such a surprise?

At Rob Ford's inauguration - Don Cherry mocks "pinkos"

From The Toronto Star:

Hockey commentator Don Cherry used his official address at the inaugural meeting of Toronto’s new city council to blast “pinko” lefties, apparently taking aim at many of the councillors in front of him.  

Cherry, Mayor Rob Ford’s special guest at the pomp-filled ceremony, wore a bright pink-and-white silk jacket. “I’m wearing pink for all the pinkos,” he said, apparently referring to the followers of former mayor David Miller who have dominated council for the past seven years.  

Cherry said he had expected that his presence, at Ford’s invitation, would be a nice occasion but that he was “ripped to shreds by the left-wing pinko newspapers out there. It’s unbelievable”  

“One guy called me a jerk in a pink suit so I thought I’d wear that for him too.”

“This is what you’ll be facing, Rob, with these left-wing pinkos – they scrape the bottom of the barrel.”

Go to the 38:10 point of this video and you can see all of Don Cherry's speech to city council

Why the "Progressive" movement is actually a "Regressive" movement

Don't let socialists get away with calling themselves "progressive." They are anything but that.

The "Progressive" movement never really was about progress. Not in the way most people in a liberal democracy would define social progress. They have a vision of a socialist, non-racist society, which they undermine at every turn by defining everything in terms of race. And despite their claims to the desire of a society without class differentiation, they believe very religiously in class. The class of the ruling and the ruled. And guess which class they aspire to?

What is progress?

Technological progress is very easily defined. While there may be negative environmental ramifications to some technologies, innovations which improve the speed and efficiency of performing tasks qualify. Why is it that capitalist societies have always been more advanced and produced more technological innovations than non-capitalist ones?

Simple.

Less government interference and more incentive for individual creativity.

But that doesn't line up with a "Progressive" socialist world-view which implicitly creates disincentives for individual achievement in the form of fewer rewards for more work than a capitalist culture. So as far as technology goes, "progressives" are actually regressive.

What about social policy?

In an ideal world, all people would be treated and thought of as equal regardless of their skin color, race, or ethnicity. In our world, the people who are arguing for racial preference, who are suggesting racial conspiracies and ethnic guilt are none other than the "progressives."

Judging a person on the basis of race, whatever your motive, is racism. Racism is regressive behavior.

Which leads to cultural relativism and equivalence - the ideas that all cultures are equal.

Some cultures suppress women's rights. Some cultures persecute Gays and minorities. Some cultures do not allow press freedom and some will execute you for blasphemy.

These are all manifestations that a liberal democracy would consider backward. But cultural relativists say that those cultures are equal to ours.

Who are the cultural relativists in our society?  You guessed it. The self described "progressives".

Lots of self-described "progressives" are adherents of Marxism. Yup, the same Marxism that is responsible for millions of deaths under Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and the repression of free speech and civil rights in the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, and more.

So the next time one of these buffoons tries to call themselves a "progressive," consider reminding them: "No. You're not progressive.  You're a follower of a regressive socialist ideology. The rest of us have already progressed beyond you."

The idiots at rabble.ca contemplate whether the radical left should start killing politicians and bombing banks

It was really just a question of time.

The imbeciles who frequent the discussion forums at Rabble.ca, the radical leftist website founded by Judy Rebick and published by NDP MP Libby Davies' spouse, are currently mulling over the prospect for violent revolution.

Their absolute failure to convince the bulk of the public of the merits of their socialist vision with its command structure which would place them at the top was inevitably going to lead to this sort of frustration.

The thread started with the proposition: Given the lefts failure to effect any positive change in the past few decades when exactly should the left advocate for violent revolution?

Some of the comments in the thread include:

"I think 9/11 was just a test run. The people failed with flying colours. And I think it's an example of what's in store for the future if fascists back themselves into another corner."

"Perhaps the reason the ballot box isn't working is because the ballot box isn't the way to the solution. Or it's not perceived to be the way. Which I agree with."

"There is such a huge wedge between the left and the right,that it looks like it's all going to inevitably come to a head. The shit will hit the fan in the next couple years if this trend continues and there may well be a class war in the near future.Whatever ends up taking place in Quebec in 2013 will influence what will happen in the ROC.This could be good news for progressives or the kiss of death.But clearly,there's no room for compromise...It's these conditions continue it will drive this country into a conflict that will ultimately culminate into revolution."

"When is the time for a revolution? Whether or not, or to what extent, it becomes "violent", depends on lots of factors - primarily, how far the rulers want to go in resisting the change."


"I was wondering when it would be ok to overthrow a government, violently if need be."

Here's one of my favorite in that it betrays the totalitarian tendencies of these Marxist halfwits: "How many more decades should we wait? It appears that Canadians arent catching on, so should we suffer in silence for 30 more years? maybe a generation or three? Dont the better people of our society have a responsibility to the stupid?" (my emphasis)

"Are we talking about fire bombing police stations,banks,Quebecor or 24 Sussex Drive? Would the targets be political figures? Are we talking about old fashioned assassinations? I'm all for a revolt but I'd like to know if this revolt would be a bloody coup,an organized mass vote against the status quo (unlikely unfortunately)"

"my answer to the initial question posed by ArghMonkey is yes, now is the time, why? because the crisis we are facing is entirely new, if we wait for the inevitable climatic catastrophes which are coming it will be too late to stop them, possibly ever, this is a paradigm shift in crises I would say, the mother of all &etc. ... but what kind of violence should this revolution undertake exactly? well, that's what I'm not sure about and I have been following this thread hoping that someone might shed some light"



There's lots more. It doesn't get any smarter, but it sure gets crazier. These people are the same radical leftists who think that by aligning themselves with radical Islamists who have no respect for women's or Gay rights, they are somehow making a statement against American imperialism.

These people have always been imbeciles, but now they are revealing that they are potentially dangerous imbeciles.

  

Fidel Castro's Diary - October 20

Dear Diary:

Getting old sucks. Lenin had the right idea. He doesn't look like he's aged a day since 1924. Perhaps a few hours a day in formaldehyde could help me preserve my youth too.

But then there's also the lack of energy. It was only a few years ago when I could give seven, eight hour speeches to my adoring people and it would seem like no time went by at all. Now I can barely speak for two uninterrupted hours before I get winded. What's the point?

I wonder if anyone is ever going to realize that the reason for my lengthy speeches was to watch the crowds sit there, and after a few hours, see them need to have to urinate, but be afraid to walk out and risk the trip to the Combinado del Este by incurring my displeasure. Ha! That was such a laugh! I know they used to wonder how I could go so long without needing to pee. They'll all admire me the more for my fantastic sense of humor when they find out I wore diapers during my speeches. I'll save that bit of information for my memoirs which I'll have published posthumously.

I better call Raoul this afternoon and make sure he hasn't screwed up anything today.

Still no call from Obama. I don't understand it. The Tea Party keeps saying he's a socialist and I know he's interested in health care reform, so who better to ask for advice than me? Under my rule, Cuba has more doctors per capita than any other country on earth! We send doctors to Brazil for weapons, we export doctors to Venezuela for oil. During the last food shortage, we were able to use a few for emergency ration meat and no one noticed. If anyone knows about providing medical care to the poor, it's me. It's easy, you just make sure everybody in the whole country is poor, including the doctors!

Phone's ringing. Got to go.

Who is it? ..

Ahmadinejad? Shit. Him again? I better take it. I hate the bastard, but they have oil. Good thing the crazy Iranian maricon has a crush on me. I'll try to talk him into toning things down, like the crazy mother will listen. He's the kind of guy who gives totalitarian dictators a bad name.

That's all for now, dear Diary.

Fidel

Don’t give him the Nobel – he’s right-wing!

Swedish leftists are outraged that Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for literature, because he isn’t ‘one of us’.

‘I am a bit angry’, said the Swedish literary critic Ulrika Milles during Swedish television’s broadcast of the announcement of the Nobel Prize in literature for 2010. It took the country’s cultural elite just seconds to realise that a mistake had been made in the Swedish Academy’s voting process: you see, Mario Vargas Llosa, the winner, is no longer a socialist. ‘I lost him when he became a neo-liberal’, complained Milles. Many others echoed her.

People who never voiced any concerns about the politics of other Nobel Prize winners – like Wisława Szymborska, who wrote poetic celebrations of Lenin and Stalin; Günter Grass, who praised Cuba’s dictatorship; Harold Pinter, who supported Slobodan Milošević; José Saramago, who purged anti-Stalinists from the revolutionary newspaper he edited – thought that the Swedish Academy had finally crossed a line. Mario Vargas Llosa’s politics apparently should have disqualified him from any prize considerations. He is after all a classical liberal in the tradition of John Locke and Adam Smith.

Read the rest here at http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9776/

h/t Ghost of a flea

John Baglow chooses the 40th Anniversary of the October Crisis to sarcastically complain that the government is mishandling and overstating the threat of domestic terrorism

From Baglow's column in today's National Post, titled The terrorists in our midst:

Vic Toews, our Minister of Public Safety, is quoted as saying:

"[I]t’s so very important that we have cooperation from the groups where these individuals are coming out of so that our security authorities can better assess the situation and protect Canadians."

He was referring specifically to the case of three Muslim students who have gone missing. There is suspicion, and only suspicion at this point, that the three are training somewhere in Jihadistan and planning to come back to Canada as fully-trained terrorists.

The article continues:

The minister, who represents a southern Manitoba riding, urged groups that have spawned extremists to report their suspicions and held up Somali Canadians as an example.

Balgow soon gets into his mendacious sarcasm:

I know, at first hand, that communities can spawn radicalism. And I want to do something about it. 

The first hurdle to overcome is to figure out which community gave rise to me. The white community? The Christian-in-name-only (United Church) community? The anglophone community? The central Canada community? The NDP community? All of the above? Still more?

I ask only because I demand to know what leaders were accountable for me, and disgracefully dropped the ball, allowing me to flourish in their midst. 

Once we have that one figured out, I’ll know where to begin. As a conscientious citizen who believes in the rule of law, I want to keep an eye on those in my community who might be up to no good.

It probably escaped Baglow's attention (or maybe not) that today is the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the October Crisis. For those unfamiliar, that was when a Quebecois separatist group, the FLQ, kidnapped British Trade Commissioner James Cross and Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte. Laporte was murdered by these fiends.

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act to declare martial law in Quebec until the crisis was resolved.

Canada is currently in a war in Afghanistan fighting the jihadists that Baglow stupidly underestimates.

The reason that terror plots in Canada can be dismissed by Baglow in the way he does is because CSIS, the RCMP, local police and agencies working under the aegis of the Department of National Defence are doing their jobs well.

We live in a democracy. We are the government. So when the government asks us for help in preserving our own safety, we can choose to mock and do nothing like Baglow, or we can provide what help we can when those opportunities arise.

Baglow and his friends on the fringes have become increasingly shrill as his ideology has become more marginalized within the mainstream of Canadian society. It must be hard for him to sit on the sidelines, knowing how much better things would be if only people outside the NDP's Socialist Caucus took him seriously.

Just when you thought the NDP couldn't get any weirder.. Let me introduce you to the ideological leader of a certain wing of the NDP

Yes, this guy.

I should never lead an item with a headline like the one for this piece. If there's one thing I've learned about politics, it's the infinite capacity for stupidity and weirdness from the fringes on the far right and far left.

The New Democratic Party Socialist Caucus has a manifesto.

How could they not?

Other political organizations and groups have Constitutions, Charters, Policy Papers, Mission Statements, Founding Principles.


But how disappointing would it have been if the NDP Socialist Caucus had anything but a manifesto? And as Libby Davies has recently reminded us, the Looney Left rarely disappoints in that regard.


Some quotes from their considered document tells us how the state should control all means of major production, all banking, distribution and exchange, or basically, everything except the vegetable patch you grow in your back yard. Although that would soon be the collective back yard, since along with Capitalism and Free Enterprise, private property would likely be the next thing on their lengthy list of things to abolish.

In their own words:

The global capitalist system is today in the throes of a massive economic, political, environmental and social crisis. If the capitalist system continues to exist, growing poverty, violence, war and repression and environmental degradation will be the fate of working people across Canada and around the world. The Socialist Caucus of the NDP does not believe that it is possible for working people anywhere to achieve significant and permanent social and political progress without transcending the limits of capitalism. A prerequisite is the establishment of Socialist governments all across the country, federally and provincially. 

By a socialist system we mean the replacement of the private ownership of the major means of production, distribution, banking and exchange with social ownership under workers' self-management and democratic government. A socialist NDP government would as a first order of priority institute a system of economic planning with the objective of satisfying human needs rather than private profit.

And we know it's a great idea, because it worked out so well for the USSR and Communist Albania.

You can look at the NDP Socialist Caucus Manifesto for yourself here.

I've read about the Workers' Paradise the NDP Socialist Caucus has planned for us. It was in George Orwell's 1984. And it wasn't pretty.

This is part of the NDP the Liberal Party was considering merging with. The Libby Davies fiasco has done the country a tremendous service by focusing the spotlight on the lunacy that would edge closer to the halls of power if that merger were to occur.

On the bright side, it's not like they don't have any fun in store for us. The NDP Socialist Caucus website also has a prominent header titled Cuba Tours.

There you can see glorious life as dictated by their other inspiration....

If you have about 1 3/4 hours to kill, here's a chance to watch the life the NDP Socialist Caucus would build for us, given the chance (This remarkable production includes a young Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasance):