Amortizing War - the Mortgage on W.W.1 was just paid off. Canadians will be bled by our Afghan War debts till the end of the 21st C

World War 1 was Bad Luck for millions of Canadian taxpayers, but a Bonanza for those who perpetuate the legacy of wartime spending.
On Remembrance Day I did some shopping at a very busy Superstore in Vancouver. There I counted just two people, one outside and one inside the store wearing a Legion poppy. For the milling crowd it was just a well deserved day off. It's just the way it is. They are entitled, so criticize at your peril. Most Canadians have lost track of WW1, which is really careless, because they're still paying for it.

No, I don't mean Canadian Federal Income Tax, the grab which was imposed as a measure to pay for that bloody war, and retained by the greedy guts who run the national government. There are several very expensive vestiges of World War 1 still being funded by you, the absent minded Canadian taxpayer. Some of that waste is bureaucratic, such as "Veteran's Affairs" the clunky, cranky cheque writing dragon which should have been slain two decades ago. V.A. is now a Tory pet, pampered and petulant enough to fight on until the day when only robot soldiers are in need of its "service".

The recent rebuild of the VIMY MEMORIAL in France cost taxpayers $20 million dollars and served notice that the Feds will maintain the archipelago of war memorials in perpetuity, as well as continue the expensive annual junkets to European battlefields which our military and political brass, along with carefully selected civilians, enjoy no end.

You may have read of the death of John Babcock, the longest surviving Canadian soldier of the Great War. The old soldier lived a long life of quiet dignity, and was 109 years of age when he died in February 2010. Babcock moved to the U.S. in the 1920s but his Canadian citizenship was reinstated in 2008 in preparation for a (aborted) plan to give him a State Funeral in Ottawa. It has not been reported that Mr. Babcock's death does not mark the end the administration of WW1 pensions as his wife and an undisclosed list of other women are still receiving generous WW1 survivorship benefits. It is a costly precedent which pertains not only to enlistees of W.W. 2, Korea and the current War in Afghanistan, but also to Federal police employees. It is an expenditure that must be financed through taxation till the end of the 21st Century.

John Babcock was only fifteen when he Attested in the 146th Bn. C.E.F. The last surviving Canadian soldier of WW1, Private Babcock died at Spokane, Washington in February 2010. By so graciously refusing Ottawa's repeated offer of a State Funeral, Mr. Babcock saved long suffering Canadian taxpayers millions of dollars. He must have been a Republican.

WORLD WAR 1 (1914 - 2010)

In October I planned to comment on the fiscal lesson given to our jaded world by the mighty German government. Berlin had, on behalf of Europe's most productive taxpayers, diligently made the payments on a massive Reparations load imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. At the time I exiled my research notes to a file up in the right corner of my 23" monitor. The Reparations story got me thinking about Canada's war debt from the 20th Century, most of which is hidden from us.

On October 3, 2010 Germany made its 20th and final interest payment, ($94 million dollars), on bonds which were issued at mid-century to refinance outstanding War Reparations demanded of "the Huns" by the Allied Powers in 1919. So as far as Germans are concerned, the once humiliating "War Debt" is paid in full. You can read the details in this article . It is very interesting that the term "Allies" is in vogue again, for the multi-national forces attempting to defeat the Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan, and that Germany is now one of the "Allies".

We are still punch drunk from the arrogant squandering of $$Billions$$ on the 2010 Winter Olympics, so few Canadians even noticed the October story on German War Reparations. (Nothing less than Ottawa calling in the American FBI to investigate RCMP invoicing for Olympics security, would satisfy me!) Skipping over other wars we are still in debt for, let us ponder the current fiasco in Afghanistan, a "limited" war which has already lasted TWICE as long as the World War in question.

AFGHANISTAN - Canada's Eleventh Province

Canadians have no grasp of just how much our War in Afghanistan has cost them, and how much it will cost over the next 100 years. I am not referring merely to the incredible burden of military expenditure - not limited to heavy transport aircraft, light armoured vehicles and twenty new Main Battle Tanks, but to purchases and institutional costs yet to be disclosed. (The complex shell game of buying, leasing, trading and delivering the Canuck Leopard II tanks from the Dutch and Germans is a story in itself. At least three LEO 2 books are in production.) If we do a rough total of what DND. CIDA and other Federal Agencies have spent or are committed to spending in the future, it is in excess of what we transfer to our Atlantic Provinces.

Why can the President of Afghanistan expect more money out of Ottawa than say, the Premier of Prince Edward Island? Because Ottawa bureaucrats now think in terms of Afghanistan as a dependant territory, a de facto Eleventh Province of Canada. More Afghan men and women are on the Canadian payroll than Ottawa has employees in the Maritime Provinces. We know that if the Afghan National Police managers do not make payroll, the very policemen we trained and equipped will turn on us.

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The biggest secret in Ottawa is that we have already accepted the truth of an Afghan collapse. Washington hasn't, but Ottawa has. In Kandahar morale is high, but all sense of accomplishment is tempered by a grudging reality; When the major Allied expeditionary forces pull out, the Taliban will return to power. And taking our historical cue from the chaotic American evacuation of Saigon in 1975, we have an existing plan and designated managers to coordinate the evacuation to Canada of tens of thousands of Afghan government employees, military, police and civilians, those who have worked most closely with Canadians these past eight years. The total movement of Afghan families to Canada will equal the intake of Vietnamese boat people from camps in Southeast Asia decades ago. So far WIKILEAKS has not turned up the code name for the Ottawa's Afghan evacuation plan, but we can hope that an enterprising journalist will turn over that rock before it becomes a redacted rock.

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Some Afghan-Canadians have already assumed lucrative positions in our Eleventh Province.

WIKILEAKS - is only playing catchup to CRYPTOME and the NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE

Julian Assange is less a "renegade" and more of a Hero than the editorialists will ever admit. Unlike most of those who cultivate celebrity or notoriety, Assange reads books, and literature informs his private thoughts as well as the essential work he does as the Editor-in-Chief of WIKILEAKS. He read Kafka and was ready for arrest and isolation in a London dungeon. He's read Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTYFOUR and because he also reads history he fears for human destiny. His self-described mission is save us from the daily avalanche of deception which is burying us all. Assange and his cohorts cry out to any who still have ears, guiding us as we struggle and claw our way to blue sky and the promise of pure air.

Julian Assange as Guy Fawkes - this demo was in Madrid. His Spanish supporters did understand the Gunpowder Plot metaphor and the significance of the British Crown throwing an Australian into solitary confinement, while U.S. government prosecutors scramble to concoct excuses for a legal lynching.

Not long before Assange began the controlled release of U.S. State Departments documents in November, he teased an interviewer playfully with the old rhyme "Remember , remember the 5th of November" which refers to Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot. [Read the well written and illustrated account of it HERE. ] Assange knows very well that Fawkes failed 400 years ago. The plotters were crushed by the Crown, and then mocked by generations of pressmen more loyal to Parliament than to their paying readers.

The Crown constantly sought to deny information to the public by controlling media, and that tradition never died out. (CRTC for you and me!) Modern censorship has deep roots. For example, in 1663 Sir Roger L'Estrange became the King's Surveyor of the Press and he relished the work. What he wrote about the riff raff of his own time still applies to you and I. Sir Roger on newspaper publishing: "I think it makes the Multitude too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiors, too pragmatic and censorious, and gives them not only an itch but a kind of colorable right and license to be meddling with the government." As newspapers disappear, and are replaced by news and information websites, we must decide the level of control and manipulation we will tolerate in our lives. If Julian Assange was a Canadian passport holder the chorus of Opposition MPs and TV network Allstars would rival the din of a pack of lovesick coyotes.

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All of this invites the obvious question - Where are Canada's Info-Anarchists? Do they even exist? We have legions of Winston Smith's in Ottawa "weeding" and "redacting" federal records, but probably not a one who has the gumption to do what U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning did. Not one.

Long before the conception of WIKILEAKS there were plenty of courageous Americans and Europeans willing to web-publish secret government files, some of them won through ATIP research and others delivered by anonymous email. The campus based National Security Archive is a prime example. I've been following NSA since 1994, the year I first surfed the Net on dialup. One of the books NSA published in the 1990s was WHITE HOUSE E-MAIL (1995). It contained the emails of two American Presidents, which are in fact a PUBLIC RECORD. Sadly, we may never read its Canadian equivalent PARLIAMENTARY E-MAIL. (The office emails of a Prime Minister, a Premier and a Mayor, are PUBLIC PROPERTY but who in this country has read any?) John Young's CRYPTOME site in New York also performs heroic service and I am a devoted fan of his excellent work. Young was asked to participate in setting up Wikileaks but his own projects occupy most of his day.

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Of course there are NO CANADIAN WEBSITES offering purloined federal or provincial files. The National Archives of Canada is mandated to decide what is retained for the permanent collection, but the bitter truth is that Ottawa bureaucracy destroys much before the juiciest file groups are perused by archivists. That is one reason Canadian Parliamentarians can make self-serving claims about being vigilant in safeguarding of our democratic system. Their confidence derives from our utter inability to monitor what they get up to. Canada is the only "democracy" which tampers with its citizens private mail, running mail opening operations 24/7. Our "democracy" tolerates the strong arming of Internet Service Providers, requiring them to assist the police by providing surveillance of citizens without a search warrant, and in real time. Our "democracy" requires bank employees, accountants and real estate sales persons to act as a clandestine informant, and rat out any client who offers "suspicious" cash. Muslim terrorism certainly angers Canadians but we don't really fear it. We suppress our anger because government tells us who to like, and punishes the expression of "hate". Actually our greatest fear should be that the American Democracy, its commitment to openness, might degenerate to the level of our own. If that should happen, the so called "Free World" would be doomed.

WHITE HOUSE E-MAIL, a 254 page book compiled by the NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE in 1995, revealed the secrets of two Republican administrations. If a President's personal email is public property, and has been for fifteen years, why should Hilary Clinton's State Department get special treatment?

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The only Canadian secret pertaining to this book is why I had to pay BOLLUM'S BOOKS $21.95 for it in Vancouver, when the cover price in 1995 was $14.95. I'm being facetious of course. We all know why the Canadian dollar was kept artificially low. But hey, making pesky U.S. books unaffordable did keep Pierre Berton and his crack platoon of researchers employed.

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JULIAN ASSANGE - sex charges unique to Sweden, ANNA ARDIN -a character assassin unique to our era, and NAOMI WOLF puts the boots to blonde policemen

Wow, it's so very appropriate that the decade is ending with this whole WIKILEAKS fiasco. For nine years, ever since the 9/11 Attack on New York and Washington, we have witnessed the construction of Fortress America, which has turned every U.S. city into a para-military bastion, and every airport into a neo-Checkpoint Charlie. How appropriate that a stereotypical "90 pound weakling," who's job title is "Editor-in-Chief", should put the Fear of God into the super-secret puppet masters of the world capitals. Well Assange is an Australian, so for all the salacious details of the sex smear, how about letting the Sydney Morning News explain? Guy Rundle's article "DID HE OR DIDN'T HE " is here. If you are as sick as I am of the TV networks hashing the story, you will give Rundle a few minutes of your time.

And what of Mr. Assange's brief bed partner and principle accuser, the political activist and tragi-feminist ANNA ARDIN ? She turns out to be an incredibly complex 21st century mutant, and very likely the prototype character assassin of our era. If there is a Wiki page for her (and I haven't bothered to look) she probably wrote it herself.

Sweden.... the rape capital of the world, has the gall to accuse Julian Assange of ... what? "Sex by surprise"!? Naomi Wolf, in a scathing essay kicks the Swedish legal system in the balls. It's only a five minute read. Treat yourself to some potent prose. It's posted here.

"...I knew this position taken by the male dominated U.S. British and Swedish media was, basically, horseshit. But none of the media outlets hyperventilate now about how this global-manhunt/Bourne-identity-chase-scene-level treatment of a sex crime allegation originating in Sweden must be 'normative' has bothered to do any actual reporting of how rape -- let alone the far more ambiguous charges of Assange's accusers, which are not charges of rape but of a category called 'sex by surprise,' which has no analog elsewhere -- is actually prosecuted in Sweden."

Ten are gunned down in Vancouver, but "There were no innocent people who were struck by bullets." say's Vancouver Deputy Chief

The masthead of the Vancouver SUN newspaper says it all... "Gangs, Weather, Traffic Cams". Ah, the petty preoccupations of life here in "The Best Place on Earth [sic]".

Ten gangsters and guests shot at a birthday part underway at the BEST NEIGHBOURS RESTAURANT in Vancouver. Was it the ultimate payback or just a warning salvo? Hard to say, but when a man opens fire with an assault rifle and nobody is killed, but ten are wounded, it seems to indicate that the gunman was pulling some of his shots. Still, all of the wounded have buddies or boyfriends, so this is certainly has great potential for an escalation in violence. (Warning **to Vancouver municipal taxpayers - the boys in blue will be running the ass off of the VPD overtime clock this Holiday Season.)

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The recovered Kalashnikov rifle used in the restaurant shooting. Note it is a folding stock variant, which explains why none of the ten victims were killed. The inexperienced shooter could not control the bucking weapon and most of his shots went wild.

This morning we learn that a Kalashnikov assault rifle has been recovered from a stately home in Vancouver, and the residents of the multi-million dollar property have lawyered up. More intriguing is that this shooting is somehow related to the murder of Gurmit Singh Dhak, who was shot at Metrotown Mall in Burnaby on October 17. Dhak was sitting in an SUV with his wife and daughter, neither of who were hit when the shooter emptied his whole clip through the windshield.
The NATIONAL POST, which has many subscribers here in Vancouver, provided this graphic in today's edition. The detail provided for the BEST NEIGHBOURS RESTAURANT crime site more than satisfies my curiosity.

As I mentioned in a previous Blog article, the crime graphics used by the VANCOUVER SUN suck, blurring rather than revealing information. So it was refreshing to find a very helpful graphic of our Vancouver mass-shooting, in a Toronto based newspaper. I think I'll start checking the NATIONAL POST website for continued coverage of gangland shootings here in Vancouver. The most startling thing I read were comments of Deputy Chief Warren Lemke, who suggested that because "the bulk of the people", (ie. the ten who were shot), have known gang affiliations, "no innocent people ... were struck by bullets". Wow !!! Now if we can just get the mealy mouthed media to stop referring to shooters as "alleged gangsters" UNTIL they are convicted in court, then boys and girls, we will really have made progress. For my money, if a women dates or marries a gangster it shouldn't add her to the target list.


Comments attributed to Deputy Chief Lemke and to Gregor Robertson, Mayor of Vancouver. Robertson forgets that when a man is scooping a municipal executive salary and the pension points... the whole damned city is supposed to be his neighborhood.

Retribution for the execution style killing of a gangster in front of SEARS at Burnaby's Metrotown Mall is alleged to be a contributing factor in the weekend attack on a birthday part in Vancouver - ten hit by a vengeful shooter.

CBC News traffics in illicit U.S. documents, and not a peep from the U.S. Embassy

Well, well.... Tom Flanagan has apologized for his outburst on a CBC News panel discussion. He admits he's still pissed off at Julian Assange, but he doesn't really want him dead. It sounds like the mea culpa hastily offered by the Muslim clerics who put out a hit on film director Theo van Gogh in 2004, when he ended up literally butchered in downtown Amsterdam. Of course all Flanagan really wants is Assange muzzled for good. That way we get to listen to Flanagan shovel shit on CBC till the cows come home, but are denied knowledge of how the elites of this world con and manipulate the taxpayers who fund their vapid careers and plush retirements. WIKILEAKS style anarchy doesn't threaten our economic stability or U.S. national security. It destabilizes confident careerists.


Julian Assange as he appears on the banner of WIKILEAKS. Not one of the unflattering photos his detractors enjoy distributing. The site and its mirrors are under constant attack. As of today it can be accessed here: (Read Wikileaks)

Of course the majority of Canadians have never heard of WIKILEAKS and have no interest in Hilary Clinton's confidential email. What frightens the puppet masters this week is easy to see. If Mr. Assange is not turned into road kill fast, really fast, there is every likelihood that other disaffected drones with access to data-links, will dump juicier files onto the Internet.

I am not the only Canadian who has noticed that Mothercorp is having it both ways on this WIKILEAKS. Prior to last Sundays bulk release by WIKILEAKS , CBC News decided to traffic in illicit U.S. government documents. CBC set up a handy search widget so dummies like me (and Professor Tom Flanagan) could search and download U.S. State Department cables. I did and he did, but I am grateful for the free lunch from WIKILEAKS and Tommy is not.


This search widget has been featured on the main CBC News website for over a week. Many Canadians, including Tom Flanagan used it to access and download WIKILEAKS files. Why is that CBC traffics in illicit data provided by WIKILEAKS, but doesn't go to Julian Assanges defence? Why should he be in the crosshairs of public opinion while all of the pundits get to play it safe?


Wow... the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation even has the brass to claim copyright on "stolen" WIKILEAKS content. Has the American Embassy nothing to say on this matter? So what type of con is the U.S. government and the media establishment really trying to pull here?


Here are questions from a CBC viewer named DAMON which I read on the CBC News WIKILEAKS search page. He comments on what is bloody obvious - Mothercorp traffics in WIKILEAKS content, and yet one of its less inhibited panelists calls for Assange's assassination. He asks "How crazy is that?"


The point I made in an earlier Blog article is that Assange is an anarchist, but he is doing us a valuable service. For example he is helping us understand what the Chinese government is up to, and he champions the potential for China's citizens to reach out to us in spite of the firewall erected by the Communist Party. TIME magazine conducted an interview with Assange on that very subject. It's (here).

Flanagan uses CBC News as a podium; top TORY advisor to P.M. urges the assassination of Julian Assange

Pity poor cyber warrior Julian Assange. Now even Canadian academics want a piece of him! The truly exciting thing about sowing anarchy is that what you tend to reap is a lot more anarchy. A case in point was the spectacle of an upper echelon Tory advisor, live on the CBC News channel counselling the Americans to murder WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange with a cruise missile. One major newspaper, the JERUSALEM POST made his ugly outburst their top story this morning, although they got Tom Flanagan's name wrong.

Tom Flanagan, a top advisor to TORY Prime Minister Stephen Harper, thinks Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WIKILEAKS should be assassinated. This is a screen capture made this morning of the story posted on the JERUSALEM POST website.

The clip of Flanagan venting on CBC News World is available on You Tube and it seems like Canadians all want to see what he had to say. (Here) It's had 117,000 plays today. Incredible! What I found really amusing is that in almost the same breath of air used to denounce Assange, the Calgary based professor admitted he had read the files and found them titillating. As I mentioned in my previous article, an enormous number of Canadians were waiting to pounce on the U.S. State Department files when they appeared on Sunday, but as soon as they didn't find anything to suit their taste, they all turned on the messenger and started bitching. Flanagan happens to be just one of the those ungrateful bastards. Take a pill will ya! The world is not going to stop spinning just because of the leak of these State Department cables. Anyone who pays attention knows that the Chinese are a bigger threat to U.S. commercial, diplomatic, and military communications than WIKILEAKS could ever dream of becoming. When Mr. Flanagan opened his GLOBE & MAIL on November 18th and read that China had tapped the secure flow of Internet traffic for over a quarter of an hour, and downloaded the lot, he didn't council the Yanks to launch a strike at a Chinese data centre. Of course not.

The Chinese have been harvesting higher grade traffic... U.S. military traffic. In fact the Chinese in 2008 pulled a WIKILEAK type stunt of their own - teasing the Americans with a electronic shot across the bow of the U.S. Navy. Seymour Hersh told the incredible story in an article published in the NEW YORKER on November 1. The Chinese, he wrote, had broken secret U.S. naval codes and for several years had been "reading" everything. "A few weeks after Barack Obama's election, the Chinese began flooding a group of communications links known to be monitored by the N.S.A. with a barrage of intercepts... . The intercepts included details of planned American naval movements. The Chinese were apparently showing the U.S. their hand." What if the Chinese choose to share their NAVAL harvest with WIKILEAKS? What if they already have? The horror! The horror!

Seymour Hersh revealed how the Chinese military pulled a WIKILEAKS type stunt of their own. They fed the American N.S.A. a big dose of decrypted U.S. naval communcations. Would Prof. Flanagan recommend the White authorize a strike against Chinese military hackers? Read the entire NEW YORKER article here. Flanagan clearly hasn't.

The problem with Mr. Flanagan is simple. Because he's a buddy of the P.M. and has a security clearence, he believes he's well informed. However, having a head full of TORY gossip is far from a healthy view of the world. Julian Assange and the WIKILEAKS furor is a convenient scapegoat for a corrupted political elite which never did and never will, allow its secrets to be exposed.