Rob Ford's low-hanging fruit

It's easy to write a blog post when your target is so grotesquely stupid.

When he was first elected, Rob (coward) Ford announced that he was going to kill the long-delayed public transportation expansion "Transit City." In return for keeping his suffering suburbanite constituents waiting in the cold and the rain for late, crowded buses, Ford was prepared to pay anywhere from $50 to $150 million in cancellation fines.

Since Canadian politics isn't really designed to accomodate nazi-style government,* there's always a delay in the response to nitwitted bulldozing such as is engaged in by the likes of Rob Ford. Dalton (lying prick) McGuinty acquiesced and gave Ford a chance to grandstand over what is turning out to be a shitty deal for Toronto. Ford would get provincial money to bury the Eglinton Avenue light-rail service and he could find all the private sector money he wanted to expand the Shepard Subway line. Then, TTC Chair (and sometime Ford ally) Karen Stintz, realizing that Ford's plan was garbage tried to suggest a compromise. No deal. Then, Councillor Mihevic hired municipal lawyer Freya Kristjanson to comment on the legality of Ford's unilateral decision to kill transit city. According to Kristjanson, Rob Ford is not the King of Council and did not have the power to kill transit city.

So what's Ford's response?

“'I didn’t overstep my boundaries; I did what the taxpayers want,' he said."

Oh, really? Why is that Mayor Ford?

“I did what the taxpayers want. They want subways. That’s it.”

How do you respond to a complete shit-head like this? His legal argument for his power to unilaterally overturn past Council resolutions is: "The taxpayers want it"???

Then the moron starts yammering about subways. As if he thinks a light-rail system becomes a subway just because you spend $2 billion to bury it!!! As if his failure to find private-sector investors for the Shepard Subway is somehow delivering on the "taxpayers'" demands for subways!

Everything that comes out of this guy's mouth is a mistake. And there's no real debating with this human garbage. (Him and his fans.) You just scorn them. Insult them. Ignore them. Abuse them. Shame borderline people from voting for this drivel. Get the country back on track.

* Oh, but the left-wing on Toronto City Council are two steps to the left of Joseph Stalin, right?

If it was an "honour killing" ...

Shouldn't whoever did it acknowledge their deed fearlessly and suffer the consequences with pride?

Ezra Levant: An Enemy of Canada

Wingnut welfare recipient Ezra Levant has a new book coming out. It's called The Enemy Within. It's not an autobiography however. The slime-ball has decided to return once again to his masturbation fantasies about torturing young Muslim males. That's right. Levant's moved on from Maher Arar to Omar Khadr.

In case you're not familiar with the story (and given his book sales and his television ratings, you probably aren't) Ezra Levant will tell anyone who will listen that Maher Arar lied about having been tortured in Syria. Arar wasn't tortured in Syria! That would be ridiculous! He was just groundlessly identified as a terrorism suspect by some donut-munching desk-jockey at CSIS, and these groundless speculations were shared with the psychotic, paranoid and incompetent US intelligence agencies, and Arar was arrested at a US airport and, even though he was traveling with a Canadian passport, the US sent him to his home country of Syria, because, .... because .... well, it's a bit dodgy I guess.

You see, Canadian intelligence agents said that the USA wanted to let the Syrians "have their way with [Arar]" which would mean TORTURE HIM. But that can't be right, because Ezra says he wasn't tortured. In the war on Islamic terrorism, the USA sent Arar to Syria because it's closer than Canada. Wait. No it isn't. The USA sent Arar to Syria because they trust the Syrians more than they do the Canadians. No. That's not right either. The USA sent Arar to Syria because the Syrians have far better standards for evidence gathering and treatment of prisoners than does Canada. No. That's not right either.

Oh well. Anyway. Arar was lying about being tortured. The Syrian government is a torturing, mass-murdering dictatorship, but they didn't torture this Canadian citizen wrongly accused of being a terrorism suspect. Oh wait! Did I say "wrongly accused"? Ezra says that Arar wasn't "wrongly accused." Ezra says that Arar was most likely involved up to his eyeballs in terrorism!

Of course he didn't: he doesn't want to answer questions.
Arar the hustler -- and his lawyers-of-fortune -- will have to find a new target to shake down. Of course, they won't go after the Syrian government -- the Syrians know too much about him, and what really happened. He's already squeezed what he can out of Canada.

And, anyway, Omar Khadr said so! So, like, CSIS told the US-Americans about this terrorist see, and the US-Americans sent him to Syria for reasons unknown, and the Syrians didn't torture this terrorist, but they let him go instead, and then he lied about being tortured and then CSIS and Stockwell Day said that neither they nor the US-Americans had any evidence on him, and the Canadian government gave him $10 million because we're a bunch of chumps, because GET THIS: Confessed war criminal Omar Khadr says he saw Arar at a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan in 2001!!!!!! Oh, wait:

Defence lawyer Walter Ruiz showed the commission a report written by Fuller right after his interrogation session with Khadr in Afghanistan, in which the agent wrote it took Khadr several minutes to identify the man in a photograph shown to him as Arar, the CBC's Bill Gillespie reported from Guantanamo Bay.

Ruiz also said Fuller's report is much more qualified than his testimony on Monday and only says that Khadr thought he saw Arar in an Arab safe house in Kabul.

Ruiz also pointed out that Fuller's report states Khadr said he thought he saw Arar in Afghanistan in September and October 2001, the CBC's Gillespie reported.

Ruiz suggested to the court that in September, Arar was in the United States, not Afghanistan, while the following month, he was under RCMP surveillance in Canada.

Oh well.

Gee. It's turning out that Ezra Levant is a babbling fool. An apologist for torture. A liar.

So, anyway, this lying piece of shit's new book is about Omar Khadr, and it's called The Enemy Within: Terror, Lies, and the Whitewashing of Omar Khadr. Given that Ezra the Rat's take on Maher Arar is insanely deluded, what could the ugly motherfucker possibly have to say about Omar Khadr?

This controversial new book will be published to coincide with Omar Khadr's return to Canada in late 2011. It will include shocking information about the Khadr family, Khadr's psychological assessment, and his trial that has often been ignored in the mainstream media. Challenging the conventional wisdom about the Khadr case, The Enemy Within is a provocative look at the definition of "child soldier," life at Guantanamo Bay, the media coverage of the case, a tainted plea bargain, and the Canadian government's plan for Omar Khadr's rehabilitation upon his return to Canada.

So, wonder-boy Ezra is going to blow the lid off of how crazy Khadr Senior was? It's already been done shit-head. Everyone knows all about it. "Khadr's psychological assessment"? For real Ezra? Who profiled him? The torturing thugs of the US military and their Mengele-like experts? You don't even know what a laughable, twisted fuck you are! How could you? His "trial"? With evidence based on torture? With a "confession" that is meaningless? You're talking about a kangaroo-court operated under a president who has said that they'll only try people when they're convinced they can get a guilty verdict. Everyone else will just rot in indefinite detention. And, if they bring someone into the kangaroo-court and fail to get a conviction, Obama says he'll lock them up forever regardless. So, by all means, you shit-head, write about Khadr's "trial." It will be the same sort of useless swill as your writing about Maher Arar.

It goes without saying that it's too much to expect a complete moron like Ezra Levant to answer any of the very simple questions I ask about Khadr. You know, ... why is throwing a hand-grenade in a fire-fight a "war crime"? Why have successive Canadian governments allowed this citizen's rights to be so grievously trampled? Why is a boy of 15 supposed to be punished for the sins of his father? How was a boy of 15, immersed in his father's world of terrorism, surrounded by his father's accomplices, supposed to have realized that his father was "evil" (and that the imperialists and murderers of the USA are simultaneously "good") and rebelled against his father and all of his beliefs? Finally, what is all this nonsense about there being strict criteria for "child soldiers"?

Let's deal with this one in isolation people: For a doughy, ugly, pimple-brained fuckwad like Ezra Levant, only some 15 year-olds qualify to be considered child soldiers. Presumably, the "bad" 15 year-olds (and younger) have no rights at all and can be tortured to the perverted sexual delight of monsters like Ezra Levant.

Levant is referring to Khadr as "the enemy within." But given Levant's penchant for torturing children, his shilling for foreign special interests with deep pockets, his desire to poison the country with the toxic sludge of the Tar Sands and resulting pipelines carrying the filth, his attacks on public health care (and therefore on the health and financial well-being of the majority of his fellow citizens) and, lastly, his support for the Conservative Party of Canada as led by stephen harper, we can clearly see that it is Ezra Levant who is an enemy of Canada.

You read that right. Am I just as bad as stephen harper by saying that? Isn't it the case that harper overreacts and says that people who disagree with him are enemies of Canada?

No.

harper believes that people concerned about global warming (the greatest man-made crisis that humanity has ever faced) and about the pollution of West Coast forests and ocean shorelines are enemies of Canada. Supposedly the few hundred Canadian jobs and the massive profits to mainly foreign-owned oil companies are far more important to Canada than the potentially massive environmental devastation that this project could cause.

Which is ludicrous.

Now, re-read why I think Ezra Levant is an enemy of Canada:

But given Levant's penchant for torturing children, his shilling for foreign special interests with deep pockets, his desire to poison the country with the toxic sludge of the Tar Sands and resulting pipelines carrying the filth, his attacks on public health care (and therefore on the health and financial well-being of the majority of his fellow citizens) and, lastly, his support for the Conservative Party of Canada as led by stephen harper, we can clearly see that it is Ezra Levant who is an enemy of Canada.

See the difference? Among other things, Ezra spits upon our Charter Rights and Freedoms, and our ability, as citizens, to access necessary health care. He shits upon our values, all of them, on a daily basis.

Ezra Levant is an enemy of Canada. Treat him as such.

harper's Standing in the Polls

Via "Northern Reflections" we get Susan Riley's "harper wins when voters snooze." She says some interesting things. She mentions harper's numerous fuck-ups, lies and demonstrations of hypocrisy, notes how none of these penetrate the thick skulls of his supporters and then:

What about everyone else? Many have given up - in cynicism or despair. They turn their back on politics, don't bother to vote, even imagine it is fashionable to remain aloof.

They claim all politicians are the same, but they aren't. They claim it doesn't matter which party holds power, but it does.

If Occupiers had simply voted en masse in May, we wouldn't have a majority Conservative government today.

The media aren't to blame. We hector from the sidelines (guilty!), or, more usefully, uncover hypocrisies and small scandals. Opposition MPs - notably Bob Rae, Charlie Angus, Elizabeth May; but others, too - advance persuasive arguments, based on evidence, de-bunking Conservative crime policy, and other initiatives.

Nothing seems to penetrate public indifference - to Harper's benefit.

The media is to blame to the extent that newspapers like Riley's own Ottawa Citizen and "Canada's National Newspaper" the Globe and Mail actually endorsed harper as if he hadn't initiated several constitutional crises and had dragged the tone of politics down into the gutter. As if every time the droning teleprompter reader Peter Mansbridge trumpets another "exclusive interview" with the lying sack of shit it doesn't make him look like a respectable politician.

harper successfully conned or pandered to 26% of the electorate where it counted. I agree with Riley that people who think they're too smart to vote have brought this on all of us. As did a lackluster opposition campaign.

We've failed as a country. All of us.

Long Day

I was going to type something offensive about Patrick Ross for shits n' giggles (as Austin Powers once put it) but I thought better of it. Then one thing led to another and I'm typing a post for the day at 11:44 pm.

I think I'll watch a documentary about telescopes instead.

Austerity and Waste

It is dogmatism. Cut taxes on corporations and the wealthiest for over a decade. Pretend not to notice the lack of a corresponding increase in investment in the economy. Cut public services and pretend not to notice the increase in homelessness and misery. Globalize and automate jobs away and pretend not to notice the rise in household debt. (When a frighteningly persistent recession appears, suddenly decide that debt-to-income overstates' the precariousness of Canadians' household finances.) The world over, elites are using austerity policies to break the back of democracy. But this is insane because capitalism requires consumption. Power is more important to the elites than is prosperity. But their power is based on prosperity. They are digging their own graves and they can't see it. In Canada alone, harper's "jobs policy" equals a relatively small number of jobs in the greatest carbon emitting project on the planet - destroying the future for oil industry profits today. While he refuses to build schools or adequate housing for the First Nations, he squanders billions on anti-democracy summits and tens of billions on new prisons and white elephant fighter jets. In Toronto, the "respect for taxpayers" mayor decides that streetcars constitute a "war on the car" and decides to blow an extra $2 billion burying a light-rail line, making it the stupidest light-rail line in the history of human civilization. At the same time that he's wasting a couple of billion dollars, he's slashing needed public services to avoid having to raise taxes on a city with relatively low tax rates. And his fans cheer mindlessly, because they are mindless.

Remember this at last: They are wrong about everything. They were wrong about WMDs. They were wrong about gravy trains at Toronto City Hall. They were wrong about tax-cuts. They're wrong about global warming. They're wrong about the Enbridge Pipeline debate. They're wrong about spending on First Nations reserves. They're wrong about sexuality. They're wrong about religion. They're wrong about torture. They're wrong about libraries. They're wrong about unions. They're wrong about poverty. They're wrong about protesters. They're wrong about Iran. They're wrong about deregulation. They're wrong about Greece. They're wrong about Hugo Chavez. They're wrong about Wall Street. They're wrong about human rights. They're wrong about contempt of Parliament.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Do not listen to them. Do not be polite to them. If they start up, tell them you don't have time for their stupid bullshit.

Wednesday Random Musings

So, stephen harper convened a summit with leaders from Canada's First Nations communities in order to be able to insult them and ignore them.

Here's SOME of the insulting stuff:

Phillip said the prime minister basically told chiefs that he couldn’t just focus on their issues because he had to run the country.

“He did make a point of saying basically that, as the prime minister of Canada, he had many, many other issues. He talked about the great responsibility and many interests on this ‘great ship of state’ as he described the country,” said Phillip. “Quite astonishingly…at the very end he was recommending we go home and talk to our MPs.”

Here's the results of the ignoring stuff:

And Michelle Audette, president of Quebec Native Women, issued a stark warning about the violence in many aboriginal communities, a topic she said that was once taboo and off limits.

“Look how we are dying in our community. And it’s going to get really worse if it doesn’t change here, really worse,” she said.

“The family violence is epidemic, the sexual abuse is epidemic, it’s everywhere. The suicide rate, the drugs. It is everywhere. How come we have to live that way?”

Last month, the United Nations committee to eliminate discrimination against women contacted the federal government to say it is interested in investigating the disappearance or murders of nearly 600 aboriginal women and girls across Canada.

harper is scum. He is a loathsome villain. He is the most detestable racist. This is a tragedy. A HUMAN TRAGEDY. And of course, former ignorer of the First Nations, Paul Martin Jr., is moved to all sorts of empty rhetoric about harper's scuzziness which I will do no more than refer to since the sad joke of Martin's soaring rhetoric and sniveling action has pretty much played itself out.

About the harpercon spin job that opposition to the Enbridge Toxic Sludge Pipeline are all US puppets, the reply should be: "Shut the fuck up." Pack Ezra Levant on a plane to Iraq and make him look for the WMDs. Then send him to Syria as a one-man prison inspection team. This is a bullshit smear and it's laughable given harper's own craven subservience to US oil and health insurance fraudsters and arms dealers. There is nothing to debate because harper and his team are stupid, lying pieces of shit.

Apparently, safe in the booth at 640 am Moron Radio, Rob Ford was feeling a might testy. It's probably because the higher quantities of fruit he's eating in an attempt to lose weight caused him to unload a big soft ice-cream smoothie of his own toxic sludge into his big baby diapers just before the show began. As it all started to get cold and tacky and cause a painful rash, Ford began to spew about how everyone to the left of him on Toronto City Council are quasi-Stalinists. Very well then. Rob (pathetic coward) Ford reminds me of Julius Streicher.

NGO's and Canadian Mining Companies

At the beginning of the month, at a loss for anything productive to say, I posted a link to the "Bad-Ass Honey-Badger" video on YouTube. Well, today, commenter "sailsmart" replied that I should write about how the harpercons are giving money to NGO's like PLAN, the World University Service Canada, and others, in return for their teaming up with Canadian mining companies overseas.

The spin is that obviously there are strains when a huge mining project comes to some remote community, but Canadian mining firms are concerned to best practices develop with responsibility blah, blah, blah, blah.

Knowing how the pieces of shit who pull harper's strings work, it'll go like this: Canadian mining companies are among the worst corporate criminals in the world. harper is shameless about using public monies to reward his friends and crush his enemies out of existence. These NGOs will be the first of many forced to trim their sails and use their credibility to provide public relations cover to these scum in order to preserve their very existence. Canada's mining firms will continue to poison and displace people but there'll be heart-warming photo-ops of lame-ass "development projects" going on ten miles away.

And then, at the end of the day, everybody will go home and puke their guts out.

Gingrich Upsets Romney in North Carolina Primary

And I couldn't give a flying fuck about it. Matt Taibbi has confessed to enjoying the low comedy of the North Carolina primary, but I'm still in the same mood he was in on January 3rd at the beginning of the Iowa primary. This is a stupid, meaningless waste of time. This is a pointless contest between corporatist scum, validated by the participation of morons and hypocrites. The Repugs will choose one of their shithead Wall Street shills and that shithead will go shithead-to-shithead against the nauseating Barack Obama to see who can (by hook or crook) wrest a majority of the the votes of the people who still bother to vote in that useless, sick joke of a "democracy."

Let's remember a couple of things people: Despite what the braying jackasses of the right-wing believe, this recession is still in business and it was brought to us by the same neoliberals who today vow to starve us to health. Also, global warming is caused by human behavior and it will destroy civilization as we know it.

Oh yeah, last thing: Rob -lying coward -Ford is trying to lose some of his 330 lbs. "Cut the Waist." Ha-ha-ha. I don't fucking care about that either. I want that useless tub of shit to resign and leave public life forever. I don't care if he becomes a male anorexic or balloons to 1,000 lbs and becomes bed-ridden. I just want that fat lying sonofabitch to get the fuck out of my life.

Farm Labour Abuses

Canada's marketing boards are squeezing Canadian consumers dry (or so the argument goes) because it's possible to pay less for farm produce in the USA. The fact that lower prices for food often times stems from abusive conditions, corporate farms pumping the earth full of poison, and exploitative big food processing corporations ripping-off farmers, and etc., is of no consequence to these shit-head simpleton arguments.

Farm gate prices are really pretty low and that, in part, explains some of the terrible working conditions that foreign workers endure on Canadian farms:

Overseen by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, the program is supposed to safeguard workers from exploitation, but critics say there’s little federal accountability. Complicating the matter is the fact the program is administered by a private, non-profit organization in Ontario, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island called FARMS – Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Services. (Its Francophone equivalent in Quebec and New Brunswick is known as FERME.)

The CSAWP “really suffers from a lack of government oversight by the Canadian government in terms of monitoring working conditions and living conditions, regulating them and sanctioning abusers,” said Kerry Preibisch, associate professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Guelph.

Migrant workers are housed in a variety of different accommodations. Most live on the farmers’ properties in bunk houses, barns or trailers. Some live away from the farms in motels or apartment buildings. Generally, accommodations are paid for by the employer.

Preibisch has documented a litany of substandard living conditions, from mould in bedrooms, a lack of indoor toilets and standing water to a gas leak that one employer refused to fix.

I attended the Toronto rally for the Justice for Farm Workers movement. Another small group of weak people speechifying to uncaring buildings and moving traffic. As with most other things, if your average Canuck isn't directly affected by some injustice, even if it registers with them, they do little more than shrug. I worked on a farm once. Outside of Delhi Ontario. Those Jamaican guys worked like sunzobitches. Three-times as fast as us Ontario-raised white boys.

This Country Has Turned To Shit

Latest example: The anti-Canadian, oil-puppet, anti-democracy asshole stephen harper has refused to compensate Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin for their having been tortured by the monstrous Syrian government at Canada's behest.

As a result, these three CANADIAN CITIZENS are forced to sue the Canadian government to have to obtain justice.

harper has been fighting them every step of the way. (What with being a contemptible piece of garbage after all.) And now, Canada's cowardly Supreme Court has decided that the job security of the various politicians and desk-jockey super spies "national security" concerns trump the rights of Canadians who were tortured for months (almost TWO YEARS in Almalki's case) as a result of the actions of government agents. These men and their lawyers can't obtain the government information about the Canuckistan Eichmanns who condemned them to a living hell in Syria.

This is all fine and jim-dandy for Canada. There's been more news about an Italian cruise ship accident than there's been any reflection on the shitty uselessness of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms in preserving our human dignity as Canadian citizens. (This is par for the course. When these men first presented the Prime Minister's Office with a petition calling for an inquiry into their torture, the top story as chosen by our "independent" news media that day was about a "Tim Horton's" employee fired for giving a timbit to a customer's child.) As well, the same sort of right-wing ignoramuses who swallow the blatant lies of the harpercons hook, line and sinker, will also rationalize torture by saying that being Muslim, these guys were natural suspects (which is idiotic) and they will still harbour suspicions about these guys even though the Syrians weren't able to beat anything out of them.

We have a government of thieves and liars and inhuman scum, elected by the most repulsively ignorant, inhuman, stupid, racist and greedy voters. I will say it again: I do not recognize the authority of the harpercon government. They are criminals and they do not respect the institutions that they base their own authority on.

Respect

This article by Tyler McCreary; "An Essay on Respect" focuses on how the chairperson of the Joint Review Panel for the community hearings into the Enbrigde Pipeline simultaneously disrespects the Haisla, Tsimshian, and Wet’suwet’en First Nations while asking them to respect everybody else, including the Enbridge Corporation that threatens their land:

On the morning of the 16th, the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs had opened the meeting by singing a song composed for the hearing. The song expressed the depth of their connection to their territory, the chorus “noh' y'in tah way atsaan tsun” translated to “our territory is our livelihood”. But the song also clearly expressed their opposition to the pipeline, closing with the line, “Enbridge noh' y'in tah wagga way sow' ye'h” (Enbridge don't step onto our land).

Prior to the hearings in Burns Lake on the 17th, representatives of the National Energy Board organizing the review panel indicated that they did not want the Wet’suwet’en chiefs to open with an anti-Enbridge song again. While the review panel presumably considered this prerequisite respect for Enbridge, dictating the terms of traditional opening ceremonies to Wet’suwet’en chiefs on Wet’suwet’en land disrespected those chiefs and their authority.

There was a buzz amongst the hereditary chiefs about the gall of the government folk who sought to dictate proceedings on Wet’suwet’en land. The chiefs, however, did not cede control of the opening. The panel was convened to hear their testimony, and would begin in accordance with their process. The chiefs paraded into the room in full regalia, assembled before the crowd, and again performed their oppositional anthem.

While the details of this performance were conveniently quieted in the official record, which only recorded this demonstration as the “Opening Ceremony”, numerous cameras and cell phones captured events and the words and images of Wet’suwet’en protest circulated through social media.

Here's the thing though: This bullshit government, all its hirelings, and its likely criminal paymasters, none of them deserve any respect. The harper government is a criminal government that hides behind institutions for which it has no respect itself. The proper attitude towards any harpercon slime-ball who seeks to lecture anyone about respect for others and the rule of law is to laugh in their face and tell them that they have renounced all claim to our respect and that they will listen to what you have to say and that you are granting them an unearned privilege by listening to whatever lies they are being paid to spout.

Staying on the Lie

That's what we should call it when the harpercon scum start doing what is ordinarily called "staying on the message." Because with harpercon scum, "the message" is generally some laughably stupid concoction that most sane people would refer to as "a lie."

Case-in-point: The oil-shilling harpercons trying to pretend that public outrage against the Northern Gateway Pipeline is some US-American directed plot. In the latest repetition of the lie, harper blathers that he's not going to keep Canada as this pristine, undeveloped piece of wilderness that Hollywood elites can keep as their own national park.

harper, being a servant of US oil companies and international oligarchy in general, wants to turn Canada into their slag heap.

We have to obey the laws this piece of shit creates, ... why exactly?

We have to respect the ignorant or undemocratic decision of the shitheads who voted for this abomination, ... why, exactly?

This undemocratic, war crimes splattered piece of garbage gets to enact his revolting policies .... why, exactly?

Because our idiotic electoral system gave him a majority of the seats in the House of Commons? But that didn't matter to him when the opposition dominated the majority of seats in the House of Commons? Is there anything important that's happened to that chamber (besides his herd of MPs' asses sitting in the majority of the seats there)?

Did something change about Parliament that we should respect it more today than he did before the last election?

Goodbye To All That ...

I left rabble.ca/babble.

I'm glad I got the boot from breadandroses.ca

I'm pretty much done with emasse.ca

Busy Again. Here's Another Video ...

Gotta post something. I guess. Whatever.

"Order Out of Chaos"

Record-low Mortgage Rates

This CBC story isn't all that convincing. I'll quote commenter "Belgarion" to summarize it:

So the banks tossed out the laws of supply and demand and started setting mortgage rates to...bonds? So if people had lots of money saved up to buy houses the rates would still be low today? Pardon my skepticism.

But whatever's going on, Canadian households are already more indebted than US households. I think our consumer economy is sustained by the higher level of social welfare spending, public-sector jobs, and other factors that harper, McGuinty, Ford and other clueless fucks are now about to hack and slash at.

The consequences of this mindless austerity are going to be catastrophic.

harper the Homophobe

harper's cold, clammy, homophobic hands are all over the asinine statement from the Justice Department lawyer that non-Canadian gays and lesbians who got married in Canada were never married to begin with.

If there's a residency requirement for divorce, then say so and STFU. You gotta know that the blurting out of something so legally atrocious and morally offensive as "they were never married to begin with" was the result of some high-level harpercon cabinet meeting (maybe when John Baird and Jason Kenny were sent out to pick-up some dinner) where these cretins discussed how to attack homosexuals as if there wasn't anything less ridiculous and nothing more important for a Canadian government to be talking about but stupid religious bigotry.

I'm not a nationalist. I'm no patriot. But there used to be more moments when I took some pride in being from Canada than I've been having lately.

The Lying Contractor

So, we needed some bathroom renovations done. Unbeknownst to me the wife decided to go with a contractor who didn't have a clue what he was talking about. His "estimate" was ridiculously low because it wasn't based on reality. Maybe if he gets all his materials for free and finished in less than four hours he could afford to do it for that price. But since it's a week's worth of work (at least) I somehow doubt it.

Not only was the estimate a joke. But he's completely ignorant and incompetent. Pipes where knocked apart before the water was cut off. Yeah buddy, our bathroom has electric outlets in it! And they're live!

This clown has already done hundreds of dollars in damages and he's just getting started.

Here's the thing. I told him to get the fuck out of my house but he says that he's got the contract to do the job and he'll sue us if we try to renege. (He's not bound by his ridiculous estimate obviously, but we're bound by the contract my wife signed. Nice how that works 'eh?) I called the cops but when they showed up, the fact that my wife thinks we should give him a chance and his bullshit about his contract meant that they're not going to do anything unless I get a court order. I get my day in court two days hence.

In the meantime, he's been given a key, so I have to take the day off of work to try to physically restrain him from doing as much damage as he's capable.

What would you do?

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ADDENDUM

I don't own a house. I'm not married. This hasn't happened. It's all a metaphor for the administration of Mayor Rob Ford of Toronto. Elected on false pretexts. Ignorant. Destructive. Costly.

At least with the shitty plumber one could get an injunction or something or other to stop him.

Is it really the case that we have to wait for the end of his term to try to fix the damage that he gets to cause in the meantime? (And the same question goes for the majority of stephen harper.)

Is that really all we're allowed to do? And if anyone dies in the meantime, too fucking bad?

Is that it?

The Time For Lesser-Evilism Has Arrived: Last Chance For Canadian Democracy

Let's be clear. We have a semi-democracy in Canada. But even the low-level of corporate-capitalist democracy was too much for stephen harper. Too many restrictions on his arbitrary policies.

Anyway, I was reading Orwell's Bastard and he was talking about how the Liberals should reconcile themselves to their third-place status and the NDP should be extending an olive branch to them so that they can come to some sort of arrangement to defeat the greater evil of harper's Rovian-style garbage here in Canada.

Canada is in the same place that the USA was in with the bush II vs Kerry campaign. At the time, I said that were I a US-American I would hold my nose and vote for Kerry, just to reassert that electoral politics wasn't completely hopeless. Stop the criminal bush II.

But bush II stole his second election, Kerry caved, and then, when the Democrats retook the legislature, they showed that elections are entirely meaningless in the USA.

Has the "conservative" wave stopped? We have one last chance to try to do things legally.

Another Victory For The Mushy Middle?

Wow! A Quebec NDP MP plans on jumping ship to the Liberal Party of Canada! So that an MP for the party of Bob Rae is moving to Bob Rae's new party.

And we still have an electoral system that allows the scuzziest 25-30% of the electorate to lord their stupidity and greed over the rest of us.

What's the fucking point I ask you?

Check this out. Read it and weep.

The Syrian Crackdown

Syria's government is a revolting abomination. I recall Abdullah Almalki, the Canadian citizen who CSIS had Syria torture for them mention how he could hear children being tortured in the other room behind the back wall of his cell. I despise it just as much as I despise the rapist theocratic bullshit government of Iran.

But at the same time, let's put something into perspective. The USA's detestable puppet-regimes making all that noise for the Syrian government to stop with the crackdown and the killing of innocent people, ... while Bahrain and Saudi Arabia murdered their innocent protesters! And while they did jack-shit about Israel's mass-murdering of innocent civilians in Operation "Cast Lead."

It's the same nauseating, hypocritical expropriation of the call for democracy in the Middle East by the revolting US government and its inhuman stooges. (Of whom, stephen harper is one of the most contemptible.)

None of those governments, Syria, Iran, Jordan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, The USA, Canada, are worth a damn. To hell with all of them.

The Human Element

I've been meaning to type this for quite a while. The picture I'll be talking about has been in my memory for over a year. It was a news article about stephen harper and the picture showed him sitting with his wife watching their son playing a basketball game with his highschool. At the time I thought Harper the Younger was a nice-looking boy and that harper looked remarkably un-robotic. There seemed to be glimmers of real emotions (and not his usual selfish ones that are the only other ones I've seen bubble to the surface) as he watched his son playing.

Of course, I've never doubted that harper is a human being. I don't believe in the reality of concepts like "good" and "evil." My words used against harper (and many others) such as "vermin" and "sub-human" are just that, .... words. I have no belief that harper, or anyone else, is actually lower-than-human and therefore entitled to whatever murderous abuses I could dream up.

So this picture didn't so much come as a shock to me as it made me feel bad for the boy and a trifle surprised about the man. Yes, we're all human. And even stephen harper is capable of caring about someone else.

But that only makes certain of his actions all the more revolting. A while ago, I wrote about how robotic stephen harper is. I still believe that he's a psychopath. But evidently (as that picture seemed to show) he's not 100% selfish and narcissistic.

When he heard that the Afghan military, on who's behalf the CF is fighting, killing and dying for, are raping young children, harper could have stopped and thought about how this revolting behaviour invalidates the entire mission (at least because it is harder to suppress an insurgency against a government whose operatives rape children). But instead, he sees the issue as a problem to be swept under the rug.

When he heard that First Nations peoples at Attawapiskat were cramped into filthy, unheated shacks in the far north, he could have thought about those poor suffering people, and resolved to change the government policies that had condemned them to dangerous squalor. Instead, he deliberately lies and blames the victims for their plight and increases his level of abuse.

And on and on it goes and WILL go. All the people unemployed. All the sick people losing access to help. All the people about to lose the roof over their head. All the people exploited and abused by the corporations and the state. These are all examples of suffering that harper is CAPABLE of preventing, but he chooses instead to exacerbate. Because he's sold himself to capitalist greed-pigs. He's their errand boy.

Young Master Harper: I am sorry that I have to call your father an asshole and a scum-bag. But that's what he is. stephen harper: I am sorry that your son is going to hear so much out-pouring of abuse against his father from so many people and that he is going to have to live with having an imprisoned war criminal for an old man. But you brought it all upon yourself. You had a choice. You could have chosen differently, but you chose to serve power instead of humanity.

The loss is all of ours.

One of harper's Senate Appointments

So, harper the un-Canadian racist corporate stooge homophobic sexist war criminal appointed some people to the Senate.

One of them was Ottawa police chief Vernon White. You know, ... the guy who cleaned house within the Ottawa Police Service, expelling all the scum-bag pigs who got their jollies from torturing (mostly female) prisoners?

Oh, wait a second, White actually did sweet fuck all while his pigs ran wild.

And for that non-action, he gets rewarded with a plum patronage appointment.

Because our political elites are contemptible vermin.

Just like with lying Toronto police chief Bill Blair, covering for his lying boss, lying, crying, farting Mayor Rob Ford, saying that Ford didn't call 911 operators "fucking bitches" for not sending a response fast enough to his house. The CBC ombudsman says that their reporting of Ford's abusiveness was sound. To which Toronto Police Service spokesperson said ....

... well nothing important anyway. I don't see the need to repeat their stupid lies here.

Blair will say any stupid thing that comes into his head and Rob Ford's whole career is based on blatant lying.

What these walking, talking pieces-of-shit need to realize is that past misdeeds (abetting torture, contempt for parliament, lying, lying, lying) eventually have repercussions. These institutions and positions don't magically impart respect to their occupants. That has to be earned.

And they've lost it.

Everyone's a Big Doody-Head

That is all.

Have a nice weekend.

"A Little Thump Therapy Never Hurt Anyone"

"Right on! He's just saying what everybody else is thinking."

The "he" in question is Iowa state representative, Clel Baudler. Baudler is referring to any attempts by the Occupy movement to protest at the Iowa Repug caucus for the farcical presidential campaign that's supposed to take place either this year or in 2222. (Campaign season seems to be forever in their idiotic electoral system down there.)

Republicans across Iowa are bracing for trouble on Tuesday, concerned that caucus sites will be the next stop for the Occupy protesters who've staged demonstrations and disruptions at election events across the state.

Occupy leaders say they're not planning to interfere with the voting, though they expect actions leading up the vote at candidates' headquarters and afterward at victory parties. But even if 99 percent of the 99 percenters comply, the prospect of scattered protesters inciting confrontations with Republican voters has people from both camps on edge.

"Tempers can flare, and people can start to get out of control," said Jack Whitver, a state senator and precinct captain for one of the larger caucus sites, just outside of Des Moines. "With a crowd of over 700 people, you just want to keep everything under control and make sure that something ugly doesn't happen."

Whitver promised a polite response to those who might try to chant or stage other disruptions at his caucus site - but that's not a unanimous position.

Iowa state Rep. Clel Baudler predicted that potential protestors at his caucus site in Adair County should expect a response that "will be swift and it will be sure."

"Since I'm not a state trooper anymore, they probably won't be handcuffed - but I have friends," Baudler said. "If an officer asks for help, I will help, believe me."

"We're just not going to tolerate in rural Iowa what's going on in the big metropolitan areas," Baudler said. "A little thump therapy never hurt anybody."

Baudler is a former Iowa state trooper. Which means that how many people he's raped and murdered is anyone's guess. But he's clearly a total shit-head. Here's a representative of the Repugnican Party USA, the second of the two "Shit on the US Constitution" parties that run that country on behalf of complete Wall Street criminals, and this scum imagines he's fit to criticize the Occupy Movement? A movement of progressives (who have almost always been proven correct about anything that's important) and millions of ordinary US Americans who are tired of being ripped-off and taken for granted and lied to.

Baudler should recognize that he represents a minority, and a despised minority at that. Let me put it this way: If Rush Limbaugh and his whole ditto-head army had to face some "thump therapy" from the entire population of US America that despises them, they'd be pounded into sauce. And that puddle of slime would have constituted the shock troops of the "fearsome" Repugnican Party USA.

Baudler should realize that he's a pathetic old codger whose "best" brutalizing, raping and race-baiting days are behind him. If shit-heads like him don't shut their gobs fast enough they might just find out that "thump therapy" actually DOES hurt. (Hey! I'm just saying what everybody is thinking!)

Speaking of pieces of shit: Barack Obama doesn't have many friends. Awwwwww! Hey Barack! I hear that Bradley Manning doesn't have anyone to talk to! Oh! Wait! You're the guy torturing him and keeping him in solitary confinement! Oh well. Let's hear about the one widdle fwiend that wonewee widdle Bawack Obama has been able to make. Turns out it's a particularly sleazy banker, Robert Wolf. Isn't that sad? Barack Obama doesn't like to press the flesh with ordinary US Americans. He doesn't seem to like his fellow politicians. He has some old "friends" who were part of the machine that brought his public relations snow-job to power. Now he likes to hang out with a super-rich bankster who uses him to protect his ill-booten-gotty and for nothing else. Think this Robert Wolf character will have much time for torturin' Barack after his presidency is over?

Who cares? Who fucking cares one way or the other? In a better world they'd both be wondering if they'll be cell mates.

Still Busy

This is more to complete my "post a day" policy than for anything else ...

Evolution Neanderthals Homo Sapiens Fossils Science Anthropology Biology>

What's With All The Videos Man?

Simple. I'm busy. I started something this morning, but no time to finish before the deadline. Roll the presses! Er, um, ... I mean, "Action!":

Fuckin' "A"

What can I say?

This Went Viral But I Missed It

According to Salon.com this was one of the biggest viral videos of 2011. I missed it I guess. But I can see why it was popular.



I didn't know what else to post.