Sympathy For The Devil?

Okay, somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, I don't follow Canadian personalities as much as I do Miley Cyrus, but there's some half-witted shit-back named Kory Tennuckooluck or something, who wants to bring Glenn Beck to Canada so that he can fellate him and then they can both snort cocaine off of each others' trouser snakes or something right? And Kory is presently the new head of the wingnut welfare ship Toronto Sun where he's apparently bringing it to new depths of moral and intellectual depravity, firing anyone with an independent streak and printing all sorts of miserable, propagandistic dreck.

Case in point was an idiotic article from a week or two back called "Club Gitmo" wherein they took the word of the murdering thugs at Guantanamo Bay that they're making every effort to be culturally sensitive to the random individuals who they're holding illegally. Whatever.

Then, yesterday, there's some Adam Yoshida jerk-off material on the front cover for their story about how our old CF-18 fighter jets were able to approach Russian prop-planes flying outside Canada's international airspace, ... as if that means we really need to buy $16 billion worth of F-35s to defend us from Russia, the USA, or Al Qaeda's box-cutters.

And now, there's this steaming piece of shit story, "Sympathy for the devil" wherein one reporter "Don Peat" gets all populist about how a play about the legal and constitutional ramifications of the Toronto-18 case is playing at a theatre festival that got (prepare yourselves folks) NINETY-Thousand dollars from all three levels of government.

Tax dollars from the very governments he’s convicted of plotting to blow up are helping ensure the curtain goes up next week on a “sympathetic portrayal” of one of the members of the so-called Toronto 18 terror plotters.

Shareef Abdelhaleem was found guilty earlier this year of two terrorism-related charges in connection with the Toronto 18 plot to bomb downtown Toronto.

Following his conviction, Abdelhaleem told court if he ever learned of another terrorist plot, he would sit back and let it happen.

Now he is the leading character portrayed in Homegrown, one of the plays in this year’s lineup of Summerworks, a Toronto festival that has received almost $90,000 from all three levels of government within the last year including a $30,000 operating grant from the city-funded Toronto Arts Council, $24,500 in operating funding from the provincially funded Ontario Arts Council and $35,000 from federally funded Heritage Canada.

One play. From a theatre festival featuring several plays. That's received $90,000.00 in total from the City of Toronto, the Province of Ontario, and the Government of Canada.

"Security" for the G-20 = 1,200,000,000.00
Theatre festival in story=0,000,090,000.00

Oh my fucking god.

So, what about this hideous play? Peat actually lets the playwright talk about her project honestly, but by this point, with the shit-head Sun cover and the Shit-head intro to the story, the damage is done:

Homegrown’s playwright Catherine Frid says the play is a “sympathetic portrayal” of Abdelhaleem, not of a terrorist.

“He wasn’t planning to blow up Bay and Front Street with a truck bomb,” Frid said. “People don’t know the whole story behind Shareef’s conviction, I’m not speaking for all the Toronto 18, I’m just focusing on the one person I met and whose case I followed and I’m telling that story.”

Frid said she’s not condoning violence or advocating terrorism and she’s not anti-Canadian.

“I’ve never even joined a political party but this is something, because I have a background in law, that just really stuck in my craw,” she said. “If you care about Canada, and we all do and you know what we’re all proud as hell of our country ... but you have to look a little bit beyond the headline and it is so easy to portray these guys as, you know, the big scary threat.”

As I said though, by that point in the story the damage has been done. The Sun has got its stupid cover, it's whipped its shit-head readership into a pants-pissing "shred our civil rights please!" frenzy, and it's given them yet another opportunity to shriek that the arts in Canada should be left to the vagaries of the strip-mall capitalists.

If this is Kory's handiwork, then he's indeed a revolting blight on our political culture.

Correlation Between US Aid & Colombian Death Squads

What else is new?

The results were obtained by comparing the number of reports of such killings in the two years prior to the start of Plan Colombia -- the multibillion-dollar U.S. military aid package -- in 2000 with the number of killings after the launch of that counterinsurgency and anti-drug strategy.

It also found that reports of alleged killings of civilians by the army dropped when assistance was cut.

"Whatever correlation may exist between assistance and reported killings, there are clearly other factors contributing to high levels of killings. Yet, while we could not fix the causes of increased reports of killings after increases in U.S. assistance, our findings highlight the need for a thorough investigation into the reasons for this apparent correlation," the authors say.

"The U.S. government should respond to the questions raised by the report," Lindsay-Poland said.

So, your average comfortable USian or Canadian will go: "How odd. If it's true (and we can't trust these left-wing, anti-American kooks) it's certainly a disturbing aberration and I hope something is done about it."

In other news, Glenn Beck said something crazily unfair about poor Barack Obama. The cad!

France Sues Group That Said France Would Do the Right Thing

This story isn't hot off the presses, but I thought I'd bring it to the attention of anybody who didn't see it the first time around:

A group of Canadian, US and French activists calling itself the Committee for the Reimbursement of the Indemnity Money Extorted from Haiti (CRIME) is taking credit for a fake announcement on July 14 implying that the French government will pay Haiti 21 billion USD in reparations.
...
The group today issued the following statement to the media:

The French government has stated that it is considering legal recourse against us.

This is very fitting, as it is our concern with crimes that led us to make this false announcement. We are the Committee for the Reimbursement of the Indemnity Money Extorted from Haiti (in French, le Comité pour le Remboursement Immédiat des Montants Envolés » d’Haïti, and in both languages spelling CRIME).

But is a spoof website such a grave crime, compared to what the French have done in Haiti:

-The forcible capture, commerce, brutalization, torture, murder and enslavement of millions of Africans over more than two centuries

-Expropriating 90 million gold francs from Haiti as an indemnity for lost French slave-trade profits following Haiti’s independence, and saddling Haitians with an illegitimate debt that Haiti paid France for 122 years
...
- Promising to Haiti through pledged contributions to UN agencies, NGOS and the Red Cross some $180 million, but six months later, not one centime has been delivered to Haiti, according to the UN’s humanitarian aid tracking site Relief Web. Meanwhile the French secretary of state for overseas development traveled via private jet to a conference on aid for Haiti at a cost of $143,000.

We leave it to the court of world public opinion to judge: Who are the real criminals?
--CRIME

That lawsuit ought to be fun to watch as it blows up in the French government's face. I doubt they'll proceed with it.

I Agree With Andrew Sullivan! (Hat-tip to Brian!)

So there's this pro-war putz named Brian Platt who I used to keep on my blog-roll as a source of decent-minded pro-war information until he turned out to be a dishonest, cowardly hack/crybaby.

For a lark, I went to check out his response to the Wikileaks story and his first entry was some sputtering drivel about "treason" (from a stateless organization), then he recovered his sense enough to say that the info wasn't new or dangerous (except for some in-country officials who, supposedly, the Taliban would not otherwise have known about) and that (get this!) everything is for the best because the more people know about "the mission" the more they tend to support it (!!!!ha!ha!ha!!!!)

So, then, his latest tactic is to point to statistics about all the girls we're educating n' shit, and all the cellphones some Afghans have, as if that justifies propping-up a hideously corrupt, unpopular government of torturers and pedophiles.

His source for these stats was Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic, so i decided to check out what Sullivan was saying, and i didn't see the statistics, but I did see his article on the significance of the Wikileaks and I'll have to say that I agree almost entirely.

Quote:

When one weighs the extra terror risk from remaining in Afghanistan, the absurdity of our chief alleged ally actually backing the enemy, the impossibility of an effective counter-insurgency when the government itself is corrupt and part of the problem, the brutality of the enemy in intimidating the populace in ways no civilized occupying force can counter, the passage of ten years in which any real chance at success was squandered ... the logic for withdrawal to the more minimalist strategy originally favored by Obama after the election and championed by Biden thereafter seems overwhelming.

We ain't gonna win the way we're going, the documents reinforce that it's a clusterfuck. It creates more "terrorists" than it destroys. Time to call it a day.

Hard to Get Excited by the Census Controversy

So yeah, anti-harper (AKA "normal, decent people") have been typing a lot about stephen harper's bone-headed attack on the Census. But I'm having a hard time getting excited about this story. Not because I agree with harper and his bimbo partner-in-stupidity, Maxime Bernier on the subject. Way back in the 1990s, when Hannibal Lector from "Silence of the Lambs" got some mainstream sympathy for eating a Census worker, I pondered the libertarian argument against the Census. But the historian in me, and the social democrat in me, decided that the Census is an innocuous-enough thing, that helps democratic governments craft public policy and it's therefore well worth whatever impositions it imposes upon people.

What I can't get excited about is the belief that because this makes harper look bad it's going to have some sort of effect on his government. I'm sorry, but harper doesn't give a shit about what people think about him. First of all, he's an arrogant sociopath. Second of all, unless our angry thoughts have powers I'm unaware of, the only things that harper would be afraid of would be an Opposition with a spine and/or the total disgust with him on the part of the Canadian electorate.

Canadians have barely managed to stay awake as harper implicated their country in torture, as harper clearly and directly took a dump on the principle of parliamentary supremacy, we expect ourselves to rise up as one in defence of the Census?? Nah. This is just one more thing that we'll have to fix when, and if, we remove this puss ball from power.

Jon Lajoie - Two Girls One Cup

A word of explanation. I think I first encountered Jon Lajoie with his song about smoking marijuana, "High as Fuck." Somebody else hepped me to "Sunday Afternoon." So one day i decided to go through his YouTube videos and I found something called "Two Girls, One Cup" and I wondered what the hell that could be about. I listened to about twenty seconds of it before deciding it was some bizarre, lesbo-phobic rant and stopped listening.

About a year later, I'm watching some Comedy Central show about internet humour and this guy says that there's no way they could show "Two Girls, One Cup" but like a lot of people, he was going to do a "reaction" video. He was going to play the video "Two Girls, One Cup" for his studio audience and broadcast their reaction. And so, I watched for a little bit as people in the audience got revolted and/or laughed.

Still not knowing what the fuck was going on I googled the video title and Wikipedia informed me that it's supposedly an extreme fetish video wherein two young women begin to eat shit out of a cup and then vomit into each others' mouths.

Okay then.

Then I went back to Jon Lajoie's video and the premise is that his friend sets him up to watch the video and as he does his take is that this is one of the new ways that people have found to express their love for each other. He puts this new discovery of the magic of love's uniqueness to music and turns it into a really upbeat song.

So, if it won't make Jon Lajoie mad, or the people who posted his videos on YouTube, I'm gonna embed 'em here.

Two Girls, One Cup:



High as Fuck:



Sunday Afternoon:

The Smart Slave's Tips For Other Smart Slaves

We smart slaves have learned to sleep on our crossed arms, chest down. That way, the open sores from the lashes across our backs don't get dust and dirt in 'em.

... This has been another handy tip from the Smart Slave for all those other smart slaves out there. Keep on doing what smart slaves do! Toe the line. Keep your head down. Trust in the inherent benevolence of our masters. Learn how to mitigate the pain. And, most importantly, never fail to rat-out all the trouble-making stupid slaves who refuse to stay quiet and who refuse to believe in the never-ending final reward that is promised by the religion that was invented by our masters!

No Accountability, No Consequences

Back to dissing the USA's political culture, because it's easy. Also, when I get the time, I'll talk about the intellectual and moral sewer that Canada's political culture is becoming and I want to give that subject the attention it deserves.

But I really do want to talk about how the slimy, smarmy, stupid, weaselly, Alberto Gonzales got a pass from the shit-head Obama administration allowing him to escape the consequences for what was a seriously repulsive and revolting act, that being the political firing of federal prosecutors. As I said at the time:

Just thought that I'd mention that I think the prosecutors scandal being uncovered in the United States is a big deal and it might very well signal the end of the bush II regime.

As Glenn Greenwald is trying to explain to the absolutely ridiculous Washington punditocracy, using the Justice Department as a partisan weapon against one's enemies (including using it as a tool for voter suppression), and preventing said Justice Department from prosecuting the extreme corruption of one's partisan allies, ... and lying about all of this under oath to Congress, ... is a big deal.

But, as I said, in the interests of "looking forward" the Obama Justice Department has decided that there's nothing to be gained by making the Repugs look bad and nothing to be gained by criminalizing behaviour that they might want to pursue themselves.

So, once again, the US political system shows itself to be a miasma of blatant criminality and vomit.

And Alberto Gonzales, the laughing-stock torturer, the bumbling public cretin, the incompetent, sick, cowardly stooge, gets to portray himself as a victim.

"What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?"

"For some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror." (Emphasis added by me, thwap.)

As I said: vomit.

Racism in the USA

This isn't meant to toot Canada's horn as a bastion of tolerance and love. It's just that two stories were just in the news that show a huge level of disconnect between perception and reality.

Story 1: The black Agriculture Dept. worker Shirley Sherrod who was attacked because a heavily edited video tape of one of her speeches made her out to be an anti-white racist:

Rachel Maddow Show

Story 2: The US feds are bringing charges against white New Orleans residents who gleefully, excitedly decided to hunt black people who they were all certain were "looters" even if they were neighbours or people trying to get to an evacuation centre.

Daily Kos

All of this self-pitying, hypocritical whining about anti-white racism from scumbags like Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart is just so tiresome.

Thanks to last batch of comments ...

... among them, Alison, Eugene and Simon, ... but I've been crushed by a mountain of work. Thanks for your contributions, and perhaps I'll be able to respond to them soon, unless another government atrocity occurs and my focus changes.

To keep the blog alive, ... I do the traditional YouTube link:



This is part 1 of a documentary "Anarchism in America." I haven't watched it.

Well, That Sucked.

So what was the turn-out at the rally "demanding" a public inquiry into the $1 Billion dollars worth of incompetence and brutality at the G20?

You remember that one don't you? It was in all the papers.

• Remember stephen harper, before blowing $16 billion on new fighter-planes to protect us from Al Qaeda's X-acto knives, spent $1.something billion dollars on security for his two-day summit to announce his $2.5 billion over FIVE YEARS on women's health?
• Remember how this one-billion plus was being spent to prevent maybe a million dollars in property damage?
  
• Remember how the property damage happened anyway?
• Remember how the two-day summit that cost over a billion dollars decided to announce a new policy of government austerity?
  
• Remember how the police responded to the riot by arresting 1,000 people at random 24-hours later and brutalizing them?
• Remember the largest numbers of mass-arrests in our country's history?

Yeah, right. No big deal.

Anyway, I went to the rally at Queen's Park yesterday, just to stand and be counted. I figured Canadians are pretty blah-zay about innocent fellow citizens being tortured. They're pretty nonchalant that our soldiers are dying to prop-up a government of unelected, torturing, drug-dealers and pedophiles. They're indifferent to the fact that in the war to impose this government their country has been implicated in torture. Canadians can only yawn and stretch and scratch their bellies when stephen harper prorogues Parliament to avoid having to be accountable for his war crimes.

So, it's not like I expected to see one-million people at Queen's Park.

But I had HOPED to see more than a couple of hundred people. Alas, alack, all there was were a few hundred people. At one point, they were insisting "Never again!' but it didn't seem to have much resonance. I got the opinion that our elites know damned well they can do this as much as they want.

Because it's true. They don't brutalize everyone all the time. They mainly brutalize the tiny minority of people in this country who care about anything. The ones who come out to protest. And make no mistake about it, they'll brutalize us whether we're violent or not.

And that's why I had some sympathy for the Black Bloc, to the extent that they said they were prepared to fight-back when the police brutalized protests. I liked the fact that the Black Bloc weren't so totally sold on this non-violence in the face of psychopathic sadism shtick that most progressive Westerners have swallowed hook, line, and sinker.

On that note, Cathie From Canada has a post today with some good links to sink one's teeth into about the Black Bloc and their tactics.

For my part, I agreed with Canadian Dimension's Ritch Whyman (who Cathie links to) when he says that THIS TIME, peaceful, non-violent protest would have been the smartest tactic in the face of harper's one-billion dollars worth of security spending and that the Black Bloc's antics were counter-productive. I also thought that this random violence is pointless and as much empty ritual as most left-wing peaceful protesting is.

But back to the rally. On the one hand, standing to be counted isn't too much to ask people even if going to these things just so you can say that you did and feel good about yourself doesn't solve a lot of the world's problems. On the other hand though, I can't blame other people for thinking that these demos and rallies are a waste of time. They're not going to achieve anything. They're not going to do anything but allow progressives to get together, discuss, strategize, and look around and realize how powerless and impotent they are.

I think the status-quo, both the present hegemonic political order AND the progressive alternatives are dissatisfying and I'm determined to try and change that.

Free From Arbitrary Search and Seizure

"Human Rights" are a legal construct. But our enjoyment of our human rights are one of the claims that Canada's rulers have to justify their legitimacy and our system's legitimacy. Unless we (at least) stand and be counted as saying that we protest the blatant violation of these rights (as occurred in Toronto at the G20) our leaders will decide that they don't really have to respect these rights, in times of crisis or at any other time.

I'll be at the rally at Queen's Park, Toronto today at 1pm. Just standing to be counted.

Because, stephen, Dalton, the police, ... things can cut both ways. If you guys decide that our rights as citizens and the rule of law are optional, then you have no authority and you can't claim any respect for your rights.

James

James is my youngest boy and I think that he's going to be astonishingly good-looking. And the first time I heard this song, I got this idea in my head that he would unintentionally break somebody's heart when he got older.



Just thinking of him off to university in 2030, ... doing his own thing ... sigh.

Miley Cyrus Rules For-evah!!!!!

Here's a little something from the mail-bag that was written by a regular reader who appreciates my present fixation with Miley Cyrus:

I see you have finally hit the brick wall where our zombie nation is concerned.
If you look beside you that dried brownish blood stain is where I hit the wall a while back.
The Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff once spoke of "suffering consciously" as a tool to utilize in the burning off of illusion and working towards an objective and unfettered view of true reality.
Now that any lingering doubt that you may have had about how truly fucked this nation is due to our hordes of couch cattle and their deference for our politics, political system and the thugs who crush skulls to protect and maintain it, suffer consciously.

I really am suffering. I have always felt like Canada's was a compromised democracy, but it's just gotten ridiculous people. We overthrew the elected government of Haiti! (No penalties for any of the war criminals involved.) We've yawned in the face of fellow Canadians being tortured at our government's request in their idiotic "War on Terror." We've yawned or APPROVED, ... fuck there are even some lowly pieces of filth who APPROVE of the torture of Maher Arar and other innocent Canadians!! ... of the torture of Afghan citizens. ... The fact that we've countenanced this abomination, this war on the people of Afghanistan (defended by the most flimsiest of pretexts) for over ten years is enough to make me weep for this country.

... I've been told that for some ordinary people, the torturing of strangers by their government, doesn't really affect their comfort zone because it's all too abstract for them. I thought the ability to grasp abstractions, ... and more, the ability to live up to abstract principles was one of the signs of a mature individual and a mature society. ... I guess what I'm saying is that I didn't think we were all that stupid (those of us who aren't just disgusting idiots).

I tell you, ... when the "security" at the G20 ALLOWED the vandals to smash windows (including the ones the police PAID to smash windows) ... I really didn't think the majority of Canadians would be so clueless, apathetic, just plain stupid, authoritarian-minded enough to believe that the next day's trampling of innocent protesters' Charter rights and freedoms was somehow "justified" but that's where we are people. The majority of Canadians ... or enough Canadians to matter, ... are so fucking stupid that they can't see they've been played.

That when one-billion dollars is spent and the riot occurs anyway, you'd think the people would be enraged at police FAILURE, not SUPPORTIVE of police trampling of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

This isn't fucking rocket-science!!

Besides which, the financial cost of the smashed windows could not have been far in excess of one-million dollars, which again, would show the stupid wastefulness of harper's ego-fest.

Blah, blah, blah. So I sit here, waiting for the pointless "drama" of harper versus Ignatieff to grind to its meaningless conclusion.

HOT Child in the City!

In a tribute to all those beautiful video-vixens (Miley Cyrus, Ke$ha, Britney Spears, The Pussycat Dolls, Tuesday Weld, Hillary Duff, etc.,) here's Seventies Superstar Singing Sensation Nick Gilder with his Mega-Monster-Modern-Sexy Smash!!!! "Hot Child in the City"!!!!!!



Fuckin' A!!!!

Sigh.

To hell with it all.

Miley Cyrus: Can't Be Tamed

In keeping with my disgust with this fucking country and our inability to defend what little democracy and human rights we have, with our complacency and our apathy and our inability to think our way out of a paper bag, I continue with my writing about pop-princess Miley Cyrus.

I don't really have anything against Miley Cyrus as a person. I remember a few years back I saw an armada of shiny, very big, transport trucks outside the local hockey arena and I thought, "Whoa! There's some big act in town." Looking around I found out that it was Britney Spears. This whole massive commandeering of resources was to feature this artistic and intellectual non-entity's coming to town! A so-so voice, a so-so dancer. Nice looking, but there's a lot of that going around. The whole thing seemed so contrived. Evidence of the way our culture can manufacture something out of nothing. (Sort of like the presidencies of bush II and Barack Obama!)

So a few years ago it was Britney Spears (Hey! No fair! Britney is still confounding her critics and she's still on top of the charts!) and today it's Miley Cyrus. Big fucking deal. In the mid-1990s, Britney was 16 and singing provocative lyrics. Then she became "legal" and it was no longer risking a jail sentence or societal disgust to express a desire to have sex with her. It was all very "revolutionary" or something. Now, another Disney child star (How transgressive! Disney! The epitome of squeaky-clean blah, blah, blah, puke, anybody could write this shit, I hope our magazine doesn't go under, blah, blah, blah, ... this YouTube celebrity gossip show might be the next big thing but probably not, blah, blah, blah ...) Anyhoooooo .... so in-between Britney and Miley there was, whatsherface, ... shit, it was just in my brain a second ago, ... the "___" movie, ... fuck. Courtney? Samantha? Oh yeah, ... Hillary Duff. Of course, Hillary Duff didn't SHOCK THE WORLD by working the pole at some teen music award or something. But Miley's got the whole country talking about whether it's sick and wrong for a seventeen-year-old to be acting like she is in her "Can't Be Tamed" video.

I was going to post an embedded link to "Can't Be Tamed" but I've decided that I don't want to. My partner put it on the computer one night when were both high, ... she wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I watched this slickly filmed, set, choreographed bit of tripe for about a minute before getting nauseated.

Yeah, she's cute, with a nice set of legs. But she's not some world historically-important event for god's sake! She doesn't really have wings. She's not some exotic, supra-human creature. She's just a former child star milking some extra mileage out of the quasi-legal status of herself as a sexual being.

But this is the sort of shit that North American culture chooses to elevate. It takes half-a-brain and maybe five minutes of sustained thinking to grasp the dangers to our own and our loved ones' safety as a result of stephen harper's serial assaults on parliamentary democracy, and that's too much to ask. Besides, people who care about politics are lame dweebs. Whereas those chicks in the music videos are smokin' HOT!! I'd type more, but I hear that there's a reality show where they're going to choose the NEXT "Pussycat Dolls" and in one episode a few of the girls have a cat-fight! Fuckin' A!!!

Miley Cyrus

Okay. Full disclosure. I'm 43 or 44 (can't remember at the moment) and I never heard Billy Ray Cyrus's "Achy-Brakey Heart." (I never heard "The Macarena" either. What can I say?) For what it's worth, I was also under the impression that Billy Ray Cyrus got ripped-off by his record company and then blew what money he did make by knocking-up several women on his concert tour.

To which I thought "too bad" because I was charmed by his role as "the pool boy" in David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive."

So, when I started to hear about somebody called "Hannah Montana," followed by whispered rumours that she was played by somebody called "Miley Cyrus" I wondered if she was one of Billy Ray's numerous love-children. Turns out he didn't spawn an enormous brood of genetic diversity while on the road but this Miley Cyrus character really is his daughter.

Why am I writing any of this? Because as I said yesterday, Canada's democracy is a fucking joke. The harpercons are covering up evidence of the serious poisoning of water sources as a result of the Tar Sands project because they're bought-and-paid for oil industry shills. Canadians Charter Rights and Freedoms were blatantly abused at the Toronto G20. Haitian democracy was crushed under "Mr. Dithers." Our parliamentarians deliberately blocked the testimony of Colombian human rights activists at the hearings for the Canada-Colombia "free trade" deal. We, as a nation are complicit in torture in Afghanistan, in the effort to prop-up a torturing, thieving, drug-running, government of pedophiles on them and most Canadians didn't care when harper flat-out refused to obey Parliament's right to know what the government is doing during one of the rare moments when our opposition showed a spine. All this happened and Canadians just stood there in the "Tim Horton's" parking lot sipping on "double-doubles" or "triple-triples" and discussed lottery numbers and the NHL.

So, maybe i should turn my blog into a celebrity gossip site. Or maybe i could give crowd control advice to our corporate governments. Stick a poster of Miley Cyrus up on one of those over-crowded, hetero-men's only cages at the G20 mass-arrests, ... maybe a bitching blue-ray (whatever the fuck that means) flat-screen tv in there, and they could have whiled away their incarceration talking about whether Miley Cyrus was something special or just some kid who doesn't hold a candle to Tuesday Weld or some other stupid shit like that.

Canada: The Best Damned Democracy That Money Can Buy!

And if you ain't got no money nobody gives a shit what you think anyway!

Disturbing, disturbing, highly disturbing stuff from Alison at Creekside and the passionately anti-NDP Eugene Forsey. It seems that the House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment has decided to shred all the evidence from its past six meetings and all the research evidence that was to go into their report.

The last seven committee sessions on the tar sands have been locked to the public.

At the last public session back in March, the committee heard testimony from a scientist who had conducted the first independent research done since 1983 on airborne tar sands contaminants found in the snow pack along the Athabasca River.
Dr. David Schindler from the University of Alberta told the committee that at the 31 locations he had tested :

"Mercury emitted from these plants has increased three-fold in seven years, lead has increased four-fold in six years, and arsenic three-fold in six years as well."

Further, he said that although Environment Canada tests at only one location on the Athabasca, it has come up with the same numbers, as have the oil companies in their own research.
Schindler contends the oil companies' reports on contaminants are duly submitted to Environment Canada but he believes EC is being muzzled and prevented from making the findings public, and the oil companies of course are not obliged to do so on their own.

And that, my friends, was the last public session of the Environment Committee before it went in camera for the next six sessions and decided against making a report to the House, and to us.

This is serious stuff. It goes like this people: If you're a convinced proponent of the Tar Sands project (but an honest one) you'd say "I think all this global warming stuff is so much hooey," or "I don't think these pollutants are so excessive or that they'll be all that harmful," and then you'd allow to be published whatever the studies say.

The fact that the harpercons are doing the same-old strategies of obstruction (based on their play book for the destruction of democracy) shows that they're actually revolting pieces of shit who KNOW that bad stuff is happening, which they don't want the people to know about.

It ought to be front-page news, a major scandal, in this country, but I'm now convinced that we have a bullshit democracy where "the rule of law" is a sick joke. After the overthrow of the Aristide government, after mike harris's contribution to the death of Dudley George, after two prorogations, after the torture of innocent Canadians and Afghans, after the constitutional crisis provoked by harper's refusal to inform Parliament had degenerated into some boring committee sideshow where nobody is going to be embarrassed, and after the non-reaction to the total reaming of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms at the Toronto G20, ... after all those things and more (APEC-Suharto-Pepper-Spray, Caledonia, etc.,) I have no faith in this country's political system or its people.

Tomorrow, check this space for extended commentary on Miley Cyrus's career aspirations.

G20 Reflections

Thinking about the police riot at the Toronto G20 Summit made me think about the processes I wrote about when I blogged about having watched the film "Jarhead."

A lot of people took "Jarhead" the wrong way. They got the impression that the
movie is asking us to feel sorry for US-American soldiers who don't get to kill
anybody. That wasn't the point of the film. The point of the film was that the
US military (the Marines in the case of "Jarhead") trains young men (and now
women!) to become killers. It teaches them to dehumanize their enemies and it
pumps them up to want to kill them. The main character becomes obsessed with the
desire to see "the pink mist" a pseudo-erotic description of the explosion of
somebody's head when a sniper's bullet blasts their skull apart.

I'm sure something much the same was done to the police at the Summit. They were no doubt pumped by "training" sessions wherein demonstrators were referred to as dangerous, lawless, violent anarchists. I'm sure the term "terrorist" was tossed around even more sloppily than it usually is. After the enemy was dehumanized, the police were then all pumped-up with nowhere to go for a couple of days. Like the soldiers in "Jarhead" sweating their balls off in the desert boredom, the cops in Toronto sweltered in their riot gear waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen. When the rocks were allowed to fly for half-an-hour and the police cars were sent out to be left to the vandals, the boys and girls in the battle-suits were ready to go ape-shit and the rest is a stain on Canada's history.

Secondly, I'd like to address the buffoonery of some of the members of Toronto City Council who saw fit to hoot and holler in blind, total support of the violations of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the rape threats, the physical assaults, the inhumane conditions that aresstees were kept in, and the overall billion dollar incompetence of the Toronto Police Service and the rest of the ISU.

Leading the pack was the loutish public drunk, Rob Ford, who yammered something about how he would have started attacking people at random on the very same day that the fucking security forces ALLOWED the vandals to smash windows and burn police cars, as opposed to the wholesale mass arrests a day later of people unconnected to the violence. That's because he has shit for brains.

Here's a link to one councillor's letter explaining why they abstained from the ridiculous vote:

http://www.torontosun.com/comment/2010/07/08/14651096.html

Mass Starvation and Mass Extinctions

That's the forecast. stephen harper thinks it's a better idea to spend $1.1 billion on a two-day summit than to seriously address global warming.

A Depressingly Accurate Description of the State of US-American Politics

"Living the Regressive Dream"

If the product of this slow and silent coup wasn’t so bloody and so ruinous to so many lives, you’d really have to hand it to these guys for their political acumen and patience. It took a while, and it required the building of a broad and robust infrastructure, spanning from mainstream media to talk radio and TV to think-tanks to Congress, the presidency and the judiciary, to the GOP and now to the Democratic Party as well, but they have pretty much completely succeeded in grabbing all the levers of power in our society. They dominate its discourse entirely, and they have been almost completely successful to date in securing all the elements of their legislative, regulatory and jurisprudential agenda, at least to this point (how far they ultimately intend to go isn’t clear – the US as Honduras, perhaps? – but it’s unlikely to be pretty).

Read the whole thing.

The Rot Starts From the Top

Y'know, all the needle-dicked pigs expressing their rape fantasies and living out their sadistic masturbation fantasies were only playing around with the situation their superiors gave them.

And the G20 ISU took its orders from stephen harper.

And stephen harper takes his orders from BP, Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, and etc.

Canada Day 2010

It was a beautiful day. I was at the park in Hamilton with my little boy when I saw a young woman I recognized from the local activist community. She told me that she'd been arrested in Toronto at the G20 Summit. She wasn't there to protest though. She was visiting friends and they went out for something to eat. They were all surrounded and handcuffed and arrested with the police not even offering a pretence of having any justification. She was shaken to tell me about the terrible conditions of her 30 hour detention. How the police were abusive, calling them all by the c-word, threatening them with lengthy stays in prison. She was traumatized, afraid of being out by herself, afraid that at any moment the police might come back and take her away again.

That's the fear that people feel living in a lawless police state!

That is not what our leaders tell us that Canada is all about.

The Miami Model

Today, why don't we all google "miami model protests" (or "miami model - [anything else]") and see what we find. Because I just know that we'll find great stuff to read.

Because, you know, I think our protests as they stand, are useless. We stand around and chant, the elites ignore us with impunity, and then, either some genuine direct-action types, provocateurs, or vandals of some persuasion or other, break something somewhere and the media creams its jeans obsessing about the breakage.

But apparently, even the IDEA of protest fills our elites with a violent nausea. (Shit! The very idea of parliamentary democracy fills harper with disgust!) And they're doing everything they can to discourage protests. And so, while the ignorant, authoritarian-minded, apathetic, complacent fools go about whatever it is they do, the decent, principled people become more and more afraid to protest the policies that are killing us all.

I want to go to today's Queen's Park rally for a public inquiry into this monstrosity.