Posts from our progressive community

It's wonderful to be here! Wonderful to see Rhonda again (permission given to use full name!), to meet Nico, to spend time with her family, to be in their home. And to see London again! I love this city.

So to backtrack... Our flight was uneventful. Flying overnight is never fun, since I don't sleep at all, but everything went smoothly. A few days ago, we had read some horror stories online about US Airways' transatlantic flights through Philadelphia, and were a bit concerned. But either US Airways has upgraded their planes and their service, or those complaining people had unreasonable expectations. The flight was typical, no issues at all.

Rhonda met us at Heathrow, which I thought was a great luxury. We would have been fine with public transit. When I saw the distance - a full hour by car, or two hours on the train and tube - I was very grateful Rhonda insisted otherwise. Rhonda and I hadn't seen each other in 14 years, since she relocated to the UK, but the moment we did, it was like old times. We were immediately laughing and chattering as if no time had passed. (The internet helps with that, too.)

Rhonda fixed breakfast for us and we hung around her lovely home and beautiful garden in Finchley. (I'm told it's not in Finchley proper, and the house needed quite a bit of work when they bought it.) Speaking of returning to old times, it wasn't long before we had killed a bottle of prosecco and indulged in some other substance abuse, accompanied by lots of uncontrolled laughter and goofiness.

Late in the afternoon, we took the tube into central London. It's very suburban where Rhonda lives, but she's still on the tube line, which is wonderful. We walked around St. Paul's, which was cleaned recently, and is even more impressive now, all gleaming stone. We walked over Millennium Bridge, which is only 12 years old, and pedestrian only. Walking across, you get amazing views of St. Paul's on one side, and some of the newer skyscrapers on the other side, including the famous new Shard, although it's really distant from there.

The Millennium Bridge connects with Bankside and South Bank, and (among many other sites) the Tate Modern, in the converted Bankside Power Station. We didn't go to an exhibit, but walked in and around the massive building, and had a view of the Turbine Room, the enormous main exhibition hall. The Tate Modern is free, all the time. I believe all museums should be free or at most, pay-what-you-can. Why put art and ideas behind a financial barrier? (One of my biggest complaints about Toronto is the outrageously high entrance fees of its museums.)

The Millennium Bridge connects with Bankside and South Bank, the strip along the south side of the Thames. There's a pedestrian-only walkway running its entire length, with theatres, performance spaces, restaurants, pubs, design shops, and an abundance of public park area. It's a real vision of what waterside public space can be. (My other great complaint about Toronto: the ugly, privately developed waterfront.) Right now there's a battle going on to save South Bank Skate Park - one of the earliest skate parks in London - from condo development: Save Southbank Skate Park on Facebook. Last time we were in London, we saw the beautiful replica Globe Theatre, but most of the Southbank walkway was unfinished.

It was great to walk a little and get some London vibe, especially since our stay here is so brief. The walk also gave me a new idea for to do with our one full day in London.

We took a long tube ride back to Rhonda's house, where we met Nico for the first time. (Rhonda's first partner, Stephen, was our very dear friend. Stephen and I shared a birthday. He died 10 years ago.) We drank Pimm's Cups in the garden, then had a beautiful vegetarian paella, Rhonda's tribute to our upcoming travels in Spain. Jamie, Rhonda's oldest son, was also at dinner. Since we last saw him about 20 years ago, it was really like meeting for the first time. (Jamie's younger brother Alec is in the US with his grandfather.)

A lovely first day, plus I heard the pups have already been to the dog park with Essie!

Sprung cats.

BC elections are funny, sad and scary all at the same time.  (warning, following BC politics can cause sleeplessness and depression.  Any consumers who feel depressed after following BC politics should immediately turn off the computer/TV/radio and seek vitamin D, hence my recent silence on the blog.)

 

This morning I got an email . . . → Read More: BC Election

Chris Hedges has a powerful interview and analysis with WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange yesterday on Truthdig.

A few highlights:

“The status quo, for them, is a loss,” Assange said of the U.S.-led campaign against him as we sat in his small workroom, cluttered with cables and computer equipment. He had a full head of gray hair and gray stubble on his face and was wearing a traditional white embroidered Ecuadorean shirt. “The Pentagon threatened WikiLeaks and me personally, threatened us before the whole world, demanded that we destroy everything we had published, demanded we cease ‘soliciting’ new information from U.S. government whistle-blowers, demanded, in other words, the total annihilation of a publisher. It stated that if we did not self-destruct in this way that we would be ‘compelled’ to do so.” 

“But they have failed,” he went on. “They set the rules about what a win was. They lost in every battle they defined. Their loss is total. We’ve won the big stuff. The loss of face is hard to overstate. The Pentagon reissued its threats on Sept. 28 last year. This time we laughed. Threats inflate quickly. Now the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department intend to show the world what vindictive losers they are through the persecution of Bradley Manning, myself and the organization more generally.” 
_______________ 

At least a dozen American governmental agencies, including the Pentagon, the FBI, the Army’s Criminal Investigative Department, the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Diplomatic Security Service, are assigned to the WikiLeaks case, while the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are assigned to track down WikiLeaks’ supposed breaches of security. The global assault—which saw Australia threaten to revoke Assange’s passport—is part of the terrifying metamorphosis of the “war on terror” into a wider war on civil liberties. It has become a hunt not for actual terrorists but a hunt for all those with the ability to expose the mounting crimes of the power elite. 
_______________ 

It is from this room that Assange and his supporters have mounted an election campaign for a seat in Australia’s upper house of Parliament. Public surveys from the state of Victoria, where Assange is a candidate, indicate he has a good chance of winning. 

Assange communicates with his global network of associates and supporters up to 17 hours a day through numerous cellphones and a collection of laptop computers. He encrypts his communications and religiously shreds anything put down on paper. 
_______________ 

The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, Le Monde and Der Spiegel giddily printed redacted copies of some of the WikiLeaks files and then promptly threw Assange and Manning to the sharks. It was not only morally repugnant, but also stunningly shortsighted. Do these news organizations believe that if the state shuts down organizations such as WikiLeaks and imprisons Manning and Assange, traditional news outlets will be left alone? Can’t they connect the dots between the prosecutions of government whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act, warrantless wiretapping, monitoring of communications and the persecution of Manning and Assange? Don’t they worry that when the state finishes with Manning, Assange and WikiLeaks, these atrophied news outlets will be next? Haven’t they realized that this is a war by a global corporate elite not against an organization or an individual but against the freedom of the press and democracy? 
______________

Assange spoke repeatedly about Manning, with evident concern. He sees in the young Army private a reflection of his own situation, as well as the draconian consequences of refusing to cooperate with the security and surveillance state. Manning’s 12-week military trial is scheduled to begin in June. 

The prosecution is calling 141 witnesses, including an anonymous Navy SEAL who was part of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Assange called the Navy SEAL the “star diva” of the state’s “12-week Broadway musical.” Manning is as bereft of establishment support as Assange. 

“The old media attempted to remove his alleged heroic qualities,” Assange said of Manning. “An act of heroism requires that you make a conscious act. It is not an unreasoned expression of madness or sexual frustration. It requires making a choice—a choice that others can follow. If you do something solely because you are a mad homosexual there is no choice. No one can choose to be a mad homosexual. So they stripped him, or attempted to strip him, of all his refinements.”
Chris' concluding paragraph:

The world has been turned upside down. The pestilence of corporate totalitarianism is spreading rapidly over the earth. The criminals have seized power. It is not, in the end, simply Assange or Manning they want. It is all who dare to defy the official narrative, to expose the big lie of the global corporate state. The persecution of Assange and Manning is the harbinger of what is to come, the rise of a bitter world where criminals in Brooks Brothers suits and gangsters in beribboned military uniforms—propped up by a vast internal and external security apparatus, a compliant press and a morally bankrupt political elite—monitor and crush those who dissent. Writers, artists, actors, journalists, scientists, intellectuals and workers will be forced to obey or thrown into bondage. I fear for Julian Assange. I fear for Bradley Manning. I fear for us all.
The piece also includes a full-screen option interactive timeline of WikiLeaks major moments and audio clips of the interview.  The opening artwork is impressive in itself.

A bit lengthy, but definitely worth the read by and of today's real progressive heroes . . . .

(Ottawa, May 7) DawgNews has learned that famed astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei may soon be out of a job. And he’s not likely to be the only one. In a shocking development, the Vatican announced today that henceforward the... Dr.Dawg http://drdawgsblawg.ca/

SHOCKING NEWS! Pro-choice group refuses to sign on to latest anti-abortion stalking horse gambit!

Woody's got a brand-new wank. And guess what? It's just like the old wank.

Woodworth said he reached out to Joyce Arthur, the executive director of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, for support on the motion. The group is a prominent national pro-choice organization.

Woodworth said he wrote to the group in January with the specific wording of the motion: “That the Parliament of Canada declare that the equal worth and dignity of everyone must be recognized by Canadian law based on their inherent nature as a human being.”

He said Arthur wrote back the next day, and that he then responded and then received no further response from ARCC.

Arthur said she and her group declined Woodworth’s request because they felt it would lead to giving rights to a fetus, which would have dangerous consequences for pregnant mothers.

“He doesn’t seem to recognize that at all,” said Arthur. “When I bring up women’s rights over and over again, he thinks it’s some sort of sideshow. He doesn’t really get the issue, so what’s the point of talking about it with him?”

Woodworth said in a media release that he has "regretfully concluded" the ARCC "simply refuses to affirm human equality."

"We think the ulterior motive is that he's trying to include fetuses in the definition of 'everyone,'" Arthur said.
Ayup. Seems so.

We don't need to woman the barricades just yet. After the trouncing #M312 took last fall, he may have difficulty finding another kamikazi MP to co-sponsor this latest piece of bullshit.

Also, he'll have to wait until the next federal election, by which time if the good people of Kitchener Centre come to their senses, Woody will be wanking all on his lonely.

If you've got ten minutes to waste, listen to this radio interview, in which Woody seems genuinely surprised that ARCC didn't leap at the chance to join in fucking over Canadian women.

Is he really that much of a moran? Who the hell did he think was behind the campaign to Crush Motion 312?

ADDED BONUS: Seems Woody has memory-holed his genius analogy about abortion and ballooning. Pity that. But I found a thorough and fun fisking of it that really captures the lunacy.

It's a core tenet of our Western industrial/capitalist/democratic orthodoxy that something in the range of 3% annual economic growth is the benchmark of a healthy society.   That's 3% compounded growth.

Now let's take a span of 50-years, roughly one adult lifetime.  Let's say the economy stood at 100X at the beginning of that period and grew at 3% over that interval.   By the end of that 50-years, what began as 100X would have grown to 438X.

This is all great stuff if only our world, our planet, our biosphere was as expansive and elastic that it could grow 4.38X every half century.   But it isn't expansive or elastic and it doesn't grow.  It's finite, fixed, very precisely limited.  It's no bigger than it was when the Pharoahs built their pyramids.  We've rearranged the molecules and chemical properties of some of it.   For example, we have transformed long sequestered underground fossil fuels into atmospheric carbon compounds but everything is pretty much still around in some form.

One thing that has grown is us, the human race.   We have grown like crazy.  In 60-years we have grown by almost 3X but along with there being so many more of us we have also seem a massive increase in the amount of stuff - resources - each of us consumes, uses up and emits, transformed in one manner or another.

When I was a child my parents would buy our shoes in a slightly bigger size than we actually needed.   They knew we would "grow into them" quickly enough and, sure enough, we did just that.  If they calculated right we would wear those shoes out at about the same time as we outgrew them.   Those of us in larger families also became accustomed to "hand me downs" from older sibs.

Our problem at the moment is that we've "grown into" the earth but there's no store where we can buy a bigger one, no older brother to hand us down a bigger size.

We can't get a bigger planet but we've been reluctant to accept that reality.  Our stubborn refusal to face reality is evident just about anywhere we look.   Spreading deforestation is visible to the naked eye from space.  So too is desertification - the exhaustion of once productive land and its transformation into sterile desert.  Satellite-borne radars can now measure surface subsidence caused by draining of ancient aquifers.   We don't need manned spacecraft or satellites to reveal the collapse of global fisheries as our industrial fleets "fish down the food chain" pursuing one fish stock after another.

These events have little or nothing to do with climate change.   They're mainly the product of overpopulation and increased per capita consumption.   Yet, even the most advantaged people of the industrialized nations, keep questing for 3% annual growth from a world that's already sagging under the weight of our wildly excessive demands.

In a nutshell, we're defying gravity.  Years ago I watched a black and white film clip that showed a U.S. Navy balloon that was being controlled by dozens of sailors holding mooring lines.   Suddenly it broke free and climbed.  Most sailors simply let go of their lines.  Others held on until they were five to ten feet off the ground and then let go.  There was another bunch of sailors that couldn't let go and clung to their mooring lines as the balloon climbed higher and higher until they fell, one by one, to their deaths.

For us, that 3% annual growth target is our breakaway balloon.  That's the bad part.   The good part is that we're still within a safe landing distance of the ground.  We can still let go of the lines on our terms.

Today I've got a post up at Fierce Fatties about an experience I had last weekend while on the bus. Check it out and tell me what I should've done!

A february 5-6, 2013 Abascus poll showed that
43% of Canadians had a "neutral or unsure"
view of Tom Mulcair, compared to 21%
for PM Stephen Harper.

Image Source: WikipediaGood news, Tom, you're no longer "Mr Angry!

The bad news is that you're consider blander than whole wheat bread.


When Mulcair was running for Federal NDP leader and during his early days in the House of Commons the few people paying attention, the Ottawa media, spilled much ink (digital or otherwise) about his "anger". "

Thomas Mulcair is Mr. Angry" typed Maclean's Aaron Wherry. Meanwhile, the Winnipeg Free Press's Frances Russell wrote this:

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic." Those were the late NDP leader Jack Layton's last words to Canadians before his death on Aug. 22, 2011. They galvanized his party, moved many Canadians to tears and earned him a lasting place in Canada's political pantheon.

But in Toronto on Saturday, facing the most ruthless and polarizing government in Canadian history, Canada's Official opposition turned the page on turning the other cheek.

With former Quebec Liberal cabinet minister Thomas Mulcair as their new leader, they're going back to Parliament this week with their elbows up -- and sharpened. If Stephen Harper's Conservatives want nasty, they'll get nasty.

[...]

It may not be pretty. It may turn even more Canadians off politics, at least in the short term. But it will level the playing field. Finally, Canadians will have an Official opposition that won't, in the words of political columnist Susan Riley, be mere "puppy chow for Harper's front-bench attack dogs... Like it or not, we get two angry men -- one icy and vindictive, the other hot-headed and ungiving -- facing off across the Commons aisle."

("NDP turns page on turning other cheek". Francis Russell (Mar. 26, 2012) Winnipeg Free Press)Meanwhile, a Liberal blogger who asserted that it was time for an "angry Jack [Layton]" after the 2011 Federal elections noted the perception of Mulcair as having a "volcanic temper", further discussing the need for the NDP to be offer more than an "anti-Harper".  Despite some attention to a potential verbal match between CON MP Peter Van Loan and Mulcair, the "angry Mulcair" talking point has fell out of use with the Ottawa press gallery.

Meanwhile, Mulcair has voiced views on energy & environmental policy and travelled to Washington. He's also, in the words of Colin Horgan,"delivered specific policy-based speeches across the country to very particular kinds of crowds – ones that probably would usually look upon the NDP as a bit of a joke".

But aside from one French and one English leader defining ad, Mulcair hasn't done a good job at presenting himself to the greater public. He's put all his eggs into the basket of appeasing the Very  Serious People of Canada's political-media elite rather than focusing on most Canadians.
Tom Mulcair has become "Mr. Bland".

Image Source: Monash University
But, this policy and elite-centric focus in Mulcair's campaigning have resulted in a dull at best and ill-defined at worst public image. Even the media elite might be troubled by this, as well entrenched political stereotypes are a lot easier to write about than mushy, undifferentiated characters.

This is all made worse by the highly charismatic Justin Trudeau recent election as Liberal Party leader. While Justin may be enjoying a considerable leadership race bump, there's still a great risk of Trudeau knocking out any chance of a Dipper government. This is especially the case given Trudeau's fundraising prowess.

Tom Mulcair has dug himself a grave by embracing the bland, Ottawa-elite-centric method of messaging. The media elite left him in a heartbeat to cover the "flashy" campaign of Trudeau. Dippers can only hope that he digs himself out've that pit.


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The annual March for Lies is scheduled for this Thursday, May 9. It is always held on a weekday so that hundreds of Catholic schoolchildren can be bussed in for an educational day of indoctrination in misogyny.

Read what Amanda Watson, former Catholic student and participant, has to say about the event.

A year ago, when a young girl, no more than 16 years old, extended a sign to block my path that read, “Maybe if you kept your legs shut you wouldn’t need an abortion,” I decided to take myself home.Awww, isn't that sweet? Encouraging witless young women to attack other women on a subject about which they know nothing.

But hey, when your agenda is race-baiting or gender-baiting, it is Standard Operating Procedure to get a member of the targetted group to lead the hate-filled chants.

Thus, female children are the perfect messengers, especially since the theme of this year's bunfest is 'gendercide'. Yep, aka Motion 408, or the aborted Warawa's Wank.

Watson notes that this year the counter-demonstrators plan to keep silent. There is no arguing with these poor brainwashed kids, so they will quietly stand in protest.
Even more, the rage and pain of pro-choicers should be respected as we watch a generation of children learn to slut-shame fellow women, particularly via the dozens of women at the front of the march, wearing oversized yellow sandwich boards with the shaming words, “I regret my abortion.”
The kids learn their lessons well. This is how last year's event ended for our reporter.

As I scuffed through the grass from Parliament Hill, eyes swelling with tears, I stared at my feet so I would miss the poster displays of mangled fetuses and hordes of chanting students, some waving malicious signs my way. A girl yelled “Slut!” in my direction and tears spilled down my cheeks, not for her, but for the machine that pits women against each other over our freedom to control our bodies.
The irony of using slut-shaming in the service of 'protecting girls' is totally lost on them of course.

All the usual suspects are are on board. Mark Warawa himself, who declined to use his first hard-won opportunity to speak about abortion in the House, will avail himself, funnily enough on March for Lies Day.
The day after the Speaker’s ruling, Warawa deflated expectations when he stood up to give a statement about a talent contest in his Langley, B.C. riding.

The timing wasn’t right, he said Monday.

“Timing is everything, and the time had moved on as far as me speaking on the issue of gendercide,” he said.

“I thought it was more appropriate to deal with something that was important at that day at that time…but I will continue to speak out on the issue of gendercide at appropriate times.“

Warawa will also speak on Parliament Hill Thursday at the pro-life event organized by the nonprofit Campaign Life Coalition.Of course he will.

Timing is indeed everything. And it's never too early or too late to teach children to attack and judge others.

Catholic parents, I hope you're proud.

Watson's piece seems to have hit at nerve at Gender-Baiting Central, aka ProWomanProLife, wholly-owned and funded subsidiary of Focus on the Family.

This and that for your Tuesday reading...

- Joseph Stiglitz discusses the abuse of intellectual property law to turn publicly-funded research into privately-held profit centres (no matter how many people die as a result):
(A) Utah-based company, Myriad Genetics, claims more than that. It claims to own the rights to any test for the presence of the two critical genes associated with breast cancer – and has ruthlessly enforced that right, though their test is inferior to one that Yale University was willing to provide at much lower cost. The consequences have been tragic: Thorough, affordable testing that identifies high-risk patients saves lives. Blocking such testing costs lives. Myriad is a true example of an American corporation for which profit trumps all other values, including the value of human life itself.
This a particularly poignant case. Normally, economists talk about trade-offs: weaker intellectual-property rights, it is argued, would undermine incentives to innovate. The irony here is that Myriad’s discovery would have been made in any case, owing to a publicly funded, international effort to decode the entire human genome that was a singular achievement of modern science. The social benefits of Myriad’s slightly earlier discovery have been dwarfed by the costs that its callous pursuit of profit has imposed....
Sadly, the US and other advanced countries have been pressing for stronger intellectual-property regimes around the world. Such regimes would limit poor countries’ access to the knowledge that they need for their development – and would deny life-saving generic drugs to the hundreds of millions of people who cannot afford the drug companies’ monopoly prices.
...
Intellectual-property rights are rules that we create – and that are supposed to improve social well-being. But unbalanced intellectual-property regimes result in inefficiencies – including monopoly profits and a failure to maximize the use of knowledge – that impede the pace of innovation. And, as the Myriad case shows, they can even result in unnecessary loss of life. - Lana Payne writes that the Cons have at least blinked in acknowledging problems with their preference for cheap, disposable temporary foreign workers over Canadian job-seekers. But lest there be any thought that they're doing anything more than the bare minimum to respond to a public-relations firestorm, CBC reports that they've been aware for at least a year that TFWs were being used in the same industries and locations where workers were receiving EI benefits for want of work. Tavia Grant confirms that the Cons' economic strategy is creating three times as many temporary jobs as permanent ones. And Tim Harford is the latest to weigh in on the corrosive effects of long-term unemployment on an individual's career prospects.

- Dennis Howlett highlights another failure of the Cons in government - noting that even after tax havens have emerged as a widely-known public issue, Con MPs have rejected any recommendations which would meaningfully address the problem.

- Meanwhile, the Cons are trying to deflect blame for their losing $3.1 billion of public money by saying...it's somebody else's fault for not identifying their failures sooner. Sound familiar?

- Finally, Paul Krugman comments on the Republicans' chutzpah in blaming everybody else for their own regular deficits. Suffice it to say that Christy Clark would fit right in:

The key measure you want to look at is the ratio of debt to G.D.P., which measures the government’s fiscal position better than a simple dollar number. And if you look at United States history since World War II, you find that of the 10 presidents who preceded Barack Obama, seven left office with a debt ratio lower than when they came in. Who were the three exceptions? Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. So debt increases that didn’t arise either from war or from extraordinary financial crisis are entirely associated with hard-line conservative governments. And there’s a reason for that association: U.S. conservatives have long followed a strategy of “starving the beast,” slashing taxes so as to deprive the government of the revenue it needs to pay for popular programs.
The funny thing is that right now these same hard-line conservatives declare that we must not run deficits in times of economic crisis. Why? Because, they say, politicians won’t do the right thing and pay down the debt in good times. And who are these irresponsible politicians they’re talking about? Why, themselves.
To me, it sounds like a fiscal version of the classic definition of chutzpah — namely, killing your parents, then demanding sympathy because you’re an orphan. Here we have conservatives telling us that we must tighten our belts despite mass unemployment, because otherwise future conservatives will keep running deficits once times improve.