On a hot (it was always hot) afternoon between classes I was walking through the campus cafeteria to a pizza joint. Next thing I knew I was being ushered in to listen to a lady in a smart red suit from the Canadian embassy liaison talk about why I and everyone else in the room should consider going to that country to finish our degrees.
Canada was not a melting pot she said. No crime like in the US, poverty and things like that. Very nice people. The new(er) land of opportunity.
So my formal introduction to this land was an utter and completer lie. Continue reading ‘Whom to trust?’
Dharma: I had planned to throw a 
The past few weeks have been trying on a number of accounts. Watching good friends getting beaten up and arrested by cops, watching a war machine in propaganda mode after murdering activists bringing aid to Gaza, and (on the positive side) seeing for the first time in Vancouver a massed solidarity movement in support of Palestine.
On 19 January, as the people of Dubai marvelled at the very rare instance of rain in the city, Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was being given muscle relaxant before being smothered. His assassins were 26 operatives that were using fake passports to get around the city. The operation took place quickly and mercilessly, at the end of which the Hamas operative who had been accused of trying to get his organization closer to Iran lay dead. What the agents, who have been by now been identified as Mossad, did not count on was the fallout. 
This is a complicated post. This post is about the old colonial policy about divide and rule and how it impacted the world over centuries and continues to do so to this day. This post is about the fallout from the colonial masters, the tatters of cultures they left behind once they decided that multi-nationalism worked far better at creating and maintaining slave culture than actual colonialism. This post is also about cows smuggled inside tunnels. How are these two subject related? Read on.
The man on the left is Jalaluddin Haqqani. He was aided back in the 80s by the CIA in his battles with the Soviets in Afghanistan. He even helped form the post-war government back then. He visited the Reagan White House, and was claimed to be “goodness personified” by Charlie Wilson (Wilson was played by Tom Hanks in a biopic that re-wrote history to say that it was US aid instead of the mujahadin that won the 1980s Afghanistan war).
A bit less than a month ago, a rather special man sat on a flight back from London. He was more than a bit dejected. The European leaders that had flocked to his side had just wagged their fingers at him for the billions his little city owed their nations. He was to them no longer the wunderkid that had raised a metropolis in the middle of a desert.
I was meandering through a shop a few months ago – one of those hipster places that sells things that make you feel like you’re not really buying but sharing whatever the hell it is that’s caught your eye.
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