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!