War baby. ENFJ. Poorly enculturated. Pastafarian. Suited more to the hod than to the epaulet. Bleeds green. Master of The Irish Goodbye. @mjglass@mstdn.ca
Gronlid, Saskatchewan
Joined January 2014
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MJGlass 🇨🇦 retweeted
There is a lot of Russian propaganda in Europe. They have invested as much money in it as in weapons during this war. This is a massive financial program spanning decades. Russia has been waging a hybrid war against Europe, including Italy, France, Britain, and Germany, for a long time. It just isn't waging a full-scale war against them as it is against us. Because we had the same thing – a hybrid war. Russian narratives across absolutely all television and media platforms, on the internet, and on social media.
People should not be pierced through and brainwashed by waves of narratives from the Russian Federation. Because it is up to France, Ukraine, Italy, and Spain to decide how to live and whom to elect. Russia cannot influence Italy's choices and freedom. Italy is a free country, just like Ukraine.
The Russians will seek to exploit far-right movements, religious movements, faith, migration, and gender. Russia doesn't care what issue can divide society: from religion to language, Russia will always find it and strike there. We are seeing this now not only in Europe – they also have influence in the United States of America. They have a very significant wave going on there, and their network is operating.
From an interview with Corriere della Sera. (3/3)
MJGlass 🇨🇦 retweeted
I love the story behind this painting.
The man who made it had failed twice at the most important art competition in France. Instead of trying again, he went home to his village and painted the farmers he had grown up with. And that’s what made him famous...
It’s called October, painted by Jules Bastien-Lepage in 1878. In a wide, open field, a young woman bends forward to tip a basket of freshly dug potatoes into a big sack, and her face is so alive it almost seems to lean out of the canvas toward you. Behind her, another woman kneels in the brown soil, smiling as she gathers more into her basket, while potatoes lie scattered all around them and a few more workers are dotted across the hillside under a cloudy autumn sky. Nothing in the scene has been dressed up for the viewer. It’s simply the harvest, the ordinary work that had to be done every October before winter came.
Bastien-Lepage knew this world from the inside: he grew up in that same village, Damvillers, among the families who worked these fields, and he even wrote its name in the corner of the canvas, just above his signature.
Paris loved it, and when it was shown at the Salon of 1879, it became one of its great attractions. A few years later, the painter Vasily Surikov wrote to a friend that, in an entire Paris exhibition, only a handful of works had “true dignity.” Out of all the grand paintings on those walls, the first one he named was this simple harvest scene...
MJGlass 🇨🇦 retweeted
This latest article from Thomas Pikkety, the renowned French economist and leading authority on wealth inequality, should be essential reading here in the UK.
His argument is simple.
France has never been wealthier. Yet education funding per student has fallen by 20% since 2017, public services are struggling, and inequality is deeply embedded in the system.
Sound familiar?
The problem isn't that our countries have run out of wealth. It's how that wealth is distributed, who controls it, and the political choices made to protect it.
For decades, we've been told that austerity, declining public services and falling living standards are unavoidable consequences of economic crises, yet those same decades have seen extraordinary concentrations of private wealth.
Socialise the costs. Privatise the gains.
This is the reality we all need to wake up to.
These aren't inevitable economic outcomes. They're the consequences of political choices, made over time, that have prioritised the accumulation of private wealth over the needs of society.
And as public anger grows, we're seeing a deeply concerning response: The rise of the far right, directing that anger towards immigrants, disabled people, those claiming welfare and other vulnerable groups, rather than towards the economic structures responsible for the inequalities people are rightly furious about.
As @NaomiAKlein describes fascism, "it's capitalism's most ferocious threat response. A way of directing public anger downwards at the vulnerable, rather than upwards at the system."
Fascism doesn't challenge the status quo. It protects it by giving people someone else to blame.
The fundamental question isn't whether our societies can afford something better. It's why, when we've never been wealthier, we're repeatedly told we must accept less.
We need to fundamentally rethink an economy built around extraction, exploitation and wealth concentration, and start building one that delivers equitable, sustainable prosperity for everyone.
And with the UK Budget next week, this should be a serious warning to @UKLabour.
If the Budget fails to acknowledge this fundamental reality, and instead offers another round of "difficult decisions" that protect concentrated wealth while asking ordinary people to shoulder the burden, then @andyburnham really hasn't understood what's happening across Europe.
What's unfolding in France isn't an isolated protest. It's a warning of what happens when people stop accepting that a society growing ever wealthier somehow can't afford to give them a better life.
This isn't something politicians can keep kicking down the road.
The warning signs are everywhere. The question now is whether those in power are prepared to confront the causes, or continue defending the very system that's driving the anger.
@ZackPolanski @jeremycorbyn @KemiBadenoch @Nigel_Farage
High schoolers, students: the twilight of macronism
Hundreds of thousands of young people work hard to earn their high school diplomas, but there is nothing planned to welcome them into higher education
thomaspiketty.wordpress.com/…
MJGlass 🇨🇦 retweeted
Where are all the anonymous trolls and haters who claim I only support harm reduction?
WRONG.
I support BOTH harm reduction AND recovery.
Today, I helped a couple get into detox to begin their recovery journey.
Harm reduction keeps people alive. Recovery helps people rebuild their lives.
You can support BOTH. I do it every single day.
MJGlass 🇨🇦 retweeted
Robin Williams warning the US about Donald Trump and his links to underage girls in Miss America Pageants in 2012.
Really should have listened.
MJGlass 🇨🇦 retweeted
I don’t know who put this video together, but we actually need it now more than ever:
Our world is not divided by race, color, gender, or religion. Our world is divided into wise people and fools. And fools divide themselves by race, color, gender, or religion.
MJGlass 🇨🇦 retweeted
America isn't witnessing the rise of fascism. It's watching its own fascist foundations become impossible to conceal. The empire isn't abandoning its traditions; it's doubling down. The mask is slipping, and the ruling class is done pretending. #USImperialism
MJGlass 🇨🇦 retweeted
In 1991 eight people were sealed inside three acres of glass in the Arizona desert to prove that a carefully designed farm could feed humans without the outside world, and the design had almost no room in it for animals. Two years later the only thing inside that had reliably fed them was a handful of goats.
Biosphere 2 cost a hundred and fifty million dollars. A rainforest, an ocean, a savannah and a farm under one roof, with the door welded shut for two years and nothing allowed in or out. The farm was the heart of it, and the farm was built on the modern idea: crops first, grown intensively, with livestock as an afterthought at the edges. A few African pygmy goats for milk, a flock of chickens, and four small feral pigs chosen because they could live on scraps.
The pigs did not last the year. In a sealed box short of calories a pig is a competitor, and the crew killed and ate them. The chickens barely laid, because the glass cut the light and there was nothing to feed them that would make an egg. That left the goats, and for two years the goats were the only source of fat in a world designed around vegetables.
The accounts the crew wrote afterwards return to them again and again. The half glass of milk a day was the thing people lived for. When a kid was born it was eaten and the meal was written up like a feast. The men lost nearly a fifth of their body weight, the women a tenth, and the food they dreamed of was never the sweet potatoes they had in abundance. It was the animal they had been given too few of.
The plants were also taking the air. To make the crops grow the soil had been enriched with compost, and the microbes in that soil breathed oxygen faster than anyone had calculated. The level fell from twenty-one per cent to fourteen, the air of a high mountain, until the crew could not climb a staircase without resting and oxygen had to be trucked in from outside. The design that put plants first had removed the thing everyone needed most.
Nobody has ever run the experiment the other way, with a herd at the centre and the crops at the edge. It would not have needed a doctor to explain the results.
They were given three acres and told to feed themselves on plants. They ate the pigs, worshipped the goats, and suffocated.
MJGlass 🇨🇦 retweeted
Do you remember...Chilliwack
Formed in Vancouver in 1970, the band had four Platinum albums and a gold album from 1977 to 1983. They also had six Top 20 hits.
While there have been personnel changes, the band under Bill Henderson continues to perform.
ALT Four young men in a 1970s-style studio portrait, arranged two front and two back, all with long hair and serious expressions—one with a mustache and beaded necklace, another wearing an unzipped jacket showing chest hair.