As IF Times

link U.S. interests leveraging Vancouvers civic politics.

While not shocking, I am duly impressed by the fact that an article such as this can appear in a Vancouver paper.  Years of marketing propaganda have managed to manufacture Vancouver’s reputation as the ‘greenest’ city in the world, whatever that means.  While there’s no doubt that the geography has much to do with this, the absence of any industry beyond selling real estate has certainly contributed as well.

Residents here are manipulated to think green by recycling bottles, paper, trees, cars, computers, coffee grounds, food waste, virtually anything that we use in everyday living.  And to make sure people comply, surcharges are added to many and most consumer items.  You can’t buy a computer, a car battery or tires without paying an extra fee for disposal costs….whatever that is.  It’s gotten so ludicrous that the phone company will charge you $2 on your monthly bill if you insist on having a paper notice.

Sure these things are perhaps nickel and dime items, but they do add up to some real money.   When the push was on to make transportation ‘greener’, transit trains were introduced to get people out of cars.  To encourage people to use transit, the cost of driving became more and more prohibitive.  The combination of insurance costs, gasoline taxes and associated green surcharges thereon, parking and now tolls for bridge usage wear away at people’s abilities to drive, forcing them on to public transit.   Somehow, transit still loses money regularly, so ironically, they will tax automobile drivers even more.

For those hardier types, bicycles were the way to go and before you knew it, bicycle-only lanes appeared in the downtown core causing congestion and disruption to the downtown streets.  Some government official must have returned from China and thought having thousands of bicyles on the streets was a good idea.  Luckily, since cyclists don’t pay any kind of consumption tax or licensing fee,  the cost to them is zero.  Unluckily for drivers of automobiles, owners of businesses and the average citizen, they get to subsidize these lucky few cyclists.

This article finally makes it clear that all of these ‘green initiatives’ were not spontaneous groundswell demands by citizens.  In fact, it appears as if they are the result of very sly marketing and persuasion techniques by green groups over time to make it appear as if everyone was onside with all the green propaganda.

The other recent prick in this balloon of illusion was the occupy protest.  As we can now obviously see, this activity was hardly the manifestation of a groundswell of discontent among the “99%”.  The 99% are actually working for a living to pay green taxes and so don’t have time to play 60’s hippy in public spaces.   The conspicuous reluctance of Gregor the Green to clean up the site has more to do with appeasing the sensibilities of his sponsors than it does to the overwhelming majority of citizens who prefer the site to be cleaned up.

In other cities in North America, the citizens are also finally fed up with the ‘spontaneous and democratic’ gatherings of anarchists and street people.  These gatherings were about as spontaneous as a Kardashian wedding.  They are all being cleared up as well.  Try as they might, the mainstream media’s attempted characterization of the occupiers as peaceful average folk were foiled somewhat by such inconvenient occurrences as rapes, fights, thefts, drug use, public defecation and deaths at the sites.  Like many house parties, it’s all fun in the beginning but eventually, you want the late attendees, many of whom were uninvited to just go.

Maybe these revelations will cause people to finally push back against all the politically correct dogma that’s pushed into their lives.  From observation of recent events, it looks like the “99%” are really the 1%.  It’s about time the real majority was heard.

link Carlos the Jackal tells court in Paris: Im a professional revolutionary – Telegraph.

I wonder how he decided on that as a career vocation.  What mixture of family and educational experiences led Carlos, nee Ramirez Sanchez,  to pursue his chosen career of professional revolutionary?  We get that he may have had some bad schoolyard experiences, perhaps some bullying and maybe a few tough girlfriends.  But at what point did he decide that bombing buildings and killing people was his life’s calling?

Apart from the fact that this activity may be construed as anti-social and crazily so, isn’t it illegal?  The first time he was apprehended, wouldn’t it have been prudent to keep this avowed revolutionary behind bars for his activities? From his proud recent proclamations, he is a professional revolutionary, which sounds exactly like professional criminal.  I’m more curious as to how he ever made any money to suppport himself.  Did he bomb buildings for money?  Someone must have supported this guy over the years.  Did he work at a Wendy’s part time to gather enough money to pay the rent as well as buy sacks of nitrogen fertilizer?

Likely he was able to mooch off of other misguided young idealists who were smitten with the romantic notion of the underclass rebel.  While certainly there may have been elements of oppression in his native Venezuela, it’s hard to see that same kind of oppression in his adopted France.  Perhaps the famously haughty waiters set him off.  In any case, he’s in jail and still unrepentant for the mayhem and deaths he caused during his career.  And yet, there are those who probably worship this guy as they also worship and romanticize the exploits of Che Guevara or Fidel Castro.

While Carlos may be misguided, at least he came to his worldview honestly.  It’s hard to understand the views pushed forth by some of the other equally questionable personalities often featured in the news.  In the political space for example, it’s a stretch  that working people would identify with a Nancy Pelosi, the epitome of a privileged limosine liberal, speaking about poverty and oppression.  Or for a Michael Moore whose fortune was made from laughable depictions of the capitalist system he so derides.  Or Al Gore whose carbon footprint is so big, you’d need surveyors to map it.  Carlos at least lived his convictions.  The others are the true mercenaries.