Posts from our progressive community

deadmau5 feat. Chris James - The Veldt

It's an old legal adage that, "hard cases make bad law."   What it means is that when law is made in response to monstrous crimes, the sort that truly shock the public conscience, it can often result in inappropriate and unintended consequences for ordinary or lesser crimes.   In some circumstances it can even create crimes where none previously existed.

Alleged kidnapper rapist Aerial Castro will apparently face capital punishment should he be convicted of five counts of murder.  The supposed murder was the killing of a fetus through beating one of his victims to induce miscarriage.  He is said to have done this five times.

If the prosecution prevails it will have established the offence of fetal homicide which would probably extend to manslaughter and murder of the unborn.   Criminal sanctions normally associated with offences against a person would possibly now apply to the fetus in similar circumstances.

Castro is a hard case.  He abducted three girls and held them captive and sexually abused them over a 10-year period.   That's pretty monstrous by any standard.   Then you cap that off with five, brutally induced miscarriages.

If a third party causes a murder by inducing the death of a fetus, how is that to be distinguished from a woman obtaining an abortion or the attending physician for that matter?   Even if we create an exception for a woman's choice, would she still not be a murderer in the eyes of society - just one who, by some technicality, isn't facing a death penalty?   That would not only wreak havoc on the woman and her physician but it could tear a deep rent in the social fabric.

Aerial Castro has inflicted extreme damage on three young women.  It remains to be seen whether Cleveland prosecutors will inflict even more damage - on society.

There are two possible ways of looking at Senator Duffy's behaviour in the Senate regarding $90,000 in housing allowances.
Here's the Harper Con way:
The Harper government is praising Conservative Sen. Mike Duffy for showing "leadership" in the Senate expenses scandal.That's because he paid the money back, I guess.  But here's the Liberal way of looking at it:
But Liberals say the Conservatives are protecting one of their own, tipping off Duffy about ineligible per diems and whitewashing a report on his invalid housing allowance claims.Gee, which way is the right way to look at this? How can we ever possibly tell?
Well, when in doubt, I suppose we should look at what people actually do rather than what they say.
Yes, Duffy did pay back a whack of undeserved money.
But he kept signing those supposedly "confusing" primary residence declarations month after month, every month for three years.
And then he avoided answering questions about it by ducking through a hotel kitchen after a speech.
Some leader...

One of the most irritating features of government-by-press-release is the “re-announcement” — the enthusiastic proclamation, with full fanfare, of something that has already been proclaimed before, often many times. Today the Conservative government engaged in this practice, or, just as conveniently, had the media do it for them by playing up a funding announcement for a biofuel experiment by Pond Biofuels as though it were evidence of the “new” commercially oriented National Research Council:

Hard on the heels of announcing a new commercial focus for the National Research Council, the federal government today provided an example of what this new mission could mean for Canada’s premier science agency.

Yeah, well, that’s nice. One of the problems with this notion is that the NRC was already working on the algae file. In fact, unless I’m reading the entrails wrong, they were already funding Pond Biofuels to do exactly these sorts of projects. So while it’s nice to see that Pond Biofuels has made it another step toward full commercialization by building a subsidized bioreactor for a tarsands company in Alberta, this really isn’t the “new” NRC. This is the “old” NRC. Whether there will be a “new” NRC, and what form it will take, remains to be seen.

The reason I’m feeling a little bit snarky about this is because I’m deeply skeptical of the long-term usefulness of the sort of product that Pond Biofuels is now developing, with heavy government assistance. Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing sinister about them. What they’re doing is developing ways of capturing carbon dioxide at it’s released from various types of industrial plants and feeding it to algae in specially designed vats. That’s stage one, and there’s nothing blameworthy about reducing emissions. It is somewhat disturbing that the journalists don’t bother to tell us what percentage of the emissions are captured in this way. It seems unlikely that it would be 100%. But even a little bit isn’t nothing.

The problem is stage two. Stage two is that the captured carbon, via the algae, becomes the basis for a new biofuels “bonanza.” In other words, once they’ve prevented the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere they’re going to… convert them into saleable form so they can be released back into the atmosphere anyways. We’re not exactly making a great deal of progress here.

Defenders of Pond Biofuels will interject — correctly too, I might add — that it’s not really the same thing at all. Those biofuels are taking the place of conventional fuels. Less conventional fuel will need to be extracted and refined. The ultimate effect will be less carbon is released into the atmosphere. It’s the same argument that defenders of fracking use: that natural gas plants may emit carbon, but that the industry is still “green” because natural gas is better than coal, which is what the natural gas will be substituted for.

Which is why I don’t want to be too hard on Pond Biofuels, because they’re not doing anything wrong, but the fact of the matter is that this sort of technology is not helpful in the long run and it’s a waste of the NRC’s time, and the taxpayers’ dollars, because it means entrenching an industry we should be displacing. There’s no good follow-on here.

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An interesting exercise: mapping the sources of hateful Tweets in the US. The results might—or might not—surprise you. Here’s the interactive map itself. I wish someone would do this yeoman service for Canada—and overlap the map with Conservative ridings.... Dr.Dawg http://drdawgsblawg.ca/

An editorial I wrote today in response to this article that ran in The Guardian today: '[Anti-choice] movement supporters restate their opposition to abortion'. Submitted it to the paper, maybe it will run on Monday, fingers crossed.
______________________________________________________________


PEI's anti-choice Liberals

In The Guardian on the 10th, was coverage describing the small march on Province house by a group of anti-choice folks. I was surprised to read that one Liberal MLA was in attendance, and provided his anti-choice opinion to The Guardian - Bush Dumville, MLA for West Royalty-Springvale. I have to wonder beyond Lawrence MacAulay, Sean Casey and now Bush Dumville, how many other anti-choice Liberals hold elected office on PEI and potentially have the power to influence policy as it pertains to women's primary health care, specifically abortion services?
What the heck does it even mean to be Liberal on PEI? A little over a year ago (January, 2012) at the Liberal Biennial Convention in Ottawa Resolution 58 was passed
'Reaffirming Women’s Right to Reproductive Health Services'. Very clear support that apprarently is lost on some members.  And in a province as little as PEI 'a few good men' is all it takes apparently to eliminate women's issues from the landscape entirely.If you have a Liberal MP or MLA do you know what they stand for?  Have you ever asked your MLA/MP if they are pro-choice?I've learned a valuable lesson at the hands of this particular breed of conservative in red clothing. That I can't vote for people, I have to vote for the party. People can be all manner of things to all manner of people during elections. But at the end of the day, the candidates are only as good as their party's policies. And it seems the policies of the PEI Liberals leave a lot to be desired.  ____________________________________________________________________________ The more I learn about this PEI version of Liberal the more I understand why women have been denied reproductive health care services and denied representation in our provincial government for so long.

Sources for anti-choice references:Lawrence MacAulay: http://www.arcc-cdac.ca/action/list-antichoice-mps-may-11.html (his voting record shows him voting in favor of abortion restriction related motions/bills) Sean Casey: http://faqmp.ichannel.ca/videos/live-stream-with-sean-casey/ (says he holds an anti-choice belief) Resolution 58: http://convention.liberal.ca/priority-resolutions/58-reaffirming-women%E2%80%99s-right-to-reproductive-health-services/

Late spring to early summer marks Dead Motorcyclist season.  It's the time of year when fatal encounters between motorcyclists and motorists are particularly apt to happen.

Many bikers are seasonal riders.  They put their machines away in the fall and over the winter and only get back on the road once the weather warms.  If someone is away from something that is skill-intensive for any extended period their skills will naturally degrade.  They won't be as sharp, as quick and probably not as alert either while they get into form.

Car and truck drivers experience something similar.   They're coming off a several months-long stretch in which motorcycle traffic is extremely light to non-existent.    They're not accustomed to looking for motorcyles, anticipating them.

And into this mix comes the "lethal left-hand turn."   You're in your car or truck and you're waiting for an opening in oncoming traffic to make a left hand turn.  You might have been waiting quite a while.  You might be frustrated, anxious.   You might be in a hurry to get somewhere.

Up ahead you see what appears to be a gap in the oncoming traffic, an opening in which you can nip through and make your left-hand turn.   You begin to key on the front vehicle to time your turn.  As it nears your foot comes off the brake and onto the gas pedal and you turn the wheel.

Only once you've moved off and are committed to your turn do you discover that the apparent gap wasn't an opening after all.   There's a vehicle there, a motorcycle that you hadn't noticed.  At this point there's probably not much you or the motorcyclist can do about it.  You're going to collide and there's every chance the biker will get the worst of it.  In fact this is the by far leading cause of motorcycle fatalities, the lethal left-hand turn.

The driver making the left-hand turn is at fault.  It's their responsibility not to enter oncoming traffic until they know the way is clear.  It's no excuse that they didn't see the motorcycle.

A lot of motorcyclists, while not strictly at fault, do little to improve their chances.   These days really low-slung bikes are quite popular.  The lower the machine the easier it is for the car or truck in front to mask it from oncoming drivers.  This can be made worse by riders who position their motorcycles in the very centre of their lane, in effect tucking their bike in behind the vehicle in front.  That can make it harder, even impossible, for the motorcyclist to spot the left-hand turner ahead.

For the next month or two especially, if you're waiting to make that left-hand turn across oncoming traffic, don't budge until you're absolutely sure that the gap that seems to be an opening is actually open.  Don't assume there's not a motorcycle in that apparent gap until you can see that with your own eyes.

Photograph - the accident shown in the photo above happened this morning just outside the Nanaimo airport at around 8:15.   The female motorcyclist was northbound.   A pickup truck was in the southbound lane, waiting to make a left turn.  The truck driver turned in front of the motorcycle and they collided.  The woman was airlifted to hospital in Victoria, her condition currently unknown.

Now, this has gotta sting, coming as it does from former senior advisor to Heil Harper, Keith Beardsley.
Fiscal responsibility has been the hallmark of the Harper government from day one. It's therefore quite interesting to see in year seven of his reign that the opposition is focused on trying to destroy the credibility the Tories have on that front. It's a good strategy on their part, enabled by some help from the government side.
He cites Scott Brison's jibe about each Economic Action Scam ad on Hockey Night in Canada representing the cost of the federal contribution to 32 summer student jobs.

Beardsley notes:
Simple stuff, but it resonates with Canadian families struggling to get their kids through university.
Yes, that resonates with Canadians with kids, but how about something that will resonate with all of us?

I did some math. One ad spot costs $95,000. The average yearly Old Age Supplement is a paltry $6,180.

Ergo, one EAScam ad = 15.3 yearly pensions.

In our ongoing quest to Divide the Right, it's time to bang the fiscal wastebin a little harder.

The other day I blogged about just two items: the mystery billions spent on consultants and the Economic Action Scam ads.

On Twitter, I asked my good friend Connie what her members think of such waste and unaccountability.

She obliged and started a thread at the Freaks with a link to my blogpost.

Embarrassing - hardcore leftists calling CPC on fiscal waste

by Connie Fournier » 05/ 09/ 13 11:23 am

With the CPC Convention coming up really soon, it's a good time for us to take an honest look at how the majority CPC government has been performing so far.

When the far, far left is calling the government on fiscal waste, I think we need to, at least, check it out.

What do y'all think?It didn't get much response. But hey, I'm trying and Connie is willing.

Harper is fucked on the so-con file and he knows it as Chantal Hébert points out.

And as a commenter there observes, the base is finally getting it too.
For all these years Harper's worked on the theory the "base" of his party isn't too bright, and it's taken the base this long to figure it out - which pretty much speaks for itself.
Scott Brison is a smart feller. So is Keith Beardsley. Let's help them out. Commit more math!

ADDED: Here's another unit of measurement: $3,000 a day for CON media monitoring. Two days = 1 average OAS pension.

These time-lapse photos - taken over 29 years - are very telling, about what we humans are doing to this Earth. Urban sprawl in Las Vegas, forests and delicate ecosystems being destroyed in the Amazon, melting ice-caps, pollution, and more.

How far will this go? When will the needed action be taken to curb this destruction of our planet? This is the only planet we have.


Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If you live in certain parts of Europe, you can get a Volkswagen directly from the factory.   Your car is built to order and then stored in one of these 60 metre/200 feet silos where it awaits your arrival to take delivery.  Among other things you get your car with "zero" on the odometer.

There are two of these silos at the VW car store or Autostadt near the factory in Wolfsburg.   This video shows how the lift fetches a new car for a waiting customer.

The CBC's Stephen Smart sees rough waters and rocky shoals ahead for Ottawa-B.C. relations after Tuesday's provincial elections.

Perhaps for the first time in his reign our eastern ruler may be confronted by a province spoiling for a fight.

Most of the past dozen or so years can be seen as the golden era in B.C.’s relationship with the rest of the federation.
Former premier Gordon Campbell went to exhaustive lengths to maintain good relations with other provinces, especially Western provinces, and also with the federal government.

...But that was then, this is now. That golden era had already started to tarnish in the run-up to this election and, depending on the outcome of Tuesday’s vote, it could come to a complete end with much more of an us-versus-them mentality dominating B.C.’s attitude toward some of its key provincial and federal partners.

...While playing nice might get B.C. more in the long run, British Columbians have often rewarded past leaders who are seen to stand up for their province.
Given the positions of both Clark and Dix recently, they seem to be very aware of that reality.
The stakes are, arguably, higher this time, given the commercial importance of Alberta’s “landlocked” oil and the Western political base of the Harper Conservatives.

Fortress B.C.?  Sure.  Never in this province's history have the people had such good cause to feel imperiled and set upon by their distant, federal government.   Canada has morphed in to a petro-state and Parliament is full, on both sides of the aisle, with petro-pols whose only vision for the future entails sacrificing our coast and our way of life to peddle bitumen to Asia.

Ottawa wants to force British Columbia into submission, a state of  political occupation where the overwhelming view of the populace is suppressed and subordinated to the will of that distant authority.

We are confronted with a government whose henchmen have already dismissed the views of a solid and growing majority of our people as "extremist" and who have branded us as "inimical" (hostile to/enemies of) to Canada.   They have proclaimed our disagreement a "battle."   And now they're intent on political occupation of our homeland.

Any people subjected to occupation are moved to resistance.  Fortress B.C., perhaps, but only if Ottawa leaves us no other choice.

This is brilliant. Thanks to Anon, who, in his comment on my previous post, directed me to this video:

Let's try to spread this as widely as possible. Mockery and satire often seem to be the best way to respond to the nonsense and lies the government proclaims in our name.Recommend this Post

Is political satire too risky for American consumption?  Luke O'Neil argues in The New Republic that fake news has to go.

Did you hear the one about the racist NRA president? You probably did if you've been on Facebook or Twitter in the last forty-eight hours. A widely shared article from the website the Free Wood Post headlined, “NRA President Jim Porter: ‘It’s Only A Matter Of Time Before We Can Own Colored People Again,’” has been making the rounds (44,490 shares and 66,000 likes on Facebook), and rightfully so. It's an inflammatory, attention-grabbing hook that plays right into the stereotype liberals have about the people who join the NRA. The only problem here is it's obviously fake, which anyone who spent more than thirty seconds reading the article should have surmised. Even worse, the obvious fakery, so easily forgotten once you get the not-so-subtle gag, has gotten much more attention than the actually creepy things that Porter has really said about the Civil War.
“People on the Internet Are Gullible!” would probably be a much less successful headline, and this wouldn't even be worthy of mentioning if it didn't happen so often. The satire site The Daily Currant, has been pulling the same bait and switch over the past year to a similarly facepalming effect: Remember the bit about Todd Akin suggesting that breast milk could cure homosexuality? And then there's Literally Unbelievable, the Tumblr that pulls together incredibly credulous reactions to The Onion stories as if they were real. It's not just average people falling for those stories either; the list of actual news gathering organizations throughout the world being played for suckers is genuinely embarrassing. The Drudge Report galumphed its way into the media news last week, making its top link a Daily Currant story about New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg being denied a second slice of pizza at a restaurant. Back in February, The Washington Post picked up another Currant yarn about Sarah Palin joining Al Jazeera America.

I think O'Neil overstates his case.  If The Washington Post is conned by political satire the problem is with the newspaper, not the satire.  WaPo needs to up its game.  But the point O'Neil overlooks is that the American public isn't endangered by the satirical fake news sources but from mainstream fake news and opinion outlets, the powerful misinformation industry, with names like FOX News, Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Savage and so many others.   The damage they do to the American public renders utterly insignificant the few hundreds who may actually be too gullible for political satire. 

 And, after all, isn't that what satirical fake news does, attack the mainstream misinformation industry?   Who else calls out Fox News and Limbaugh and all these other charlatans and absolutely shreds them but The Daily Show and Jon Stewart?  You won't find that scathing dissection in The New York Times or anywhere else but in satirical fake news sites.

There may not be words to express how much I love this time of year, the leap of seasons between the Spring equinox and Summer Solstice. It's where I live again, breathe deeply, walk and play joyfully, plant and nurture and grow and heal and bask in the sun. My birthday is right around the corner and it's been a long, sometimes exciting but more often than not, stressful year. It's hard to remember that though when the trees are all in full leaf, the flowers are in bloom, the birds are fluttering and chirping on every branch and painting the sky with their vivid colours. It's Taurus season and it's home. Read more about what Kathy has to say about this season, and how it encourages us to let go of body negativity, at the Agora today. Very good stuff.

No boils.   Not a wart to be seen.

I was a little worried about what I might discover when I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror this morning.   Yesterday I voted NDP for the first time ever.

Now, in fairness,  I didn't have a lot of choice.  The B.C. Greens were not running a candidate in my riding.   But still, the NDP and I had to vote in a church hall, fundamentalist at that!

I didn't really have a lot of choice, none at all in fact.  Even if the NDP seem a bit wobbly, the alternative party is steeped in dishonesty, deceit and corruption.   If you re-elect a party with the chequered recent history of the the B.C. Libs what can you expect but more of the same?

As I went to mark my ballot I kept going through a list - B.C. Rail, B.C. Hydro, B.C. Ferries, H.S.T., coastal fish farms - and from that I knew what I had to do.

Done.

The Heritage Institute -   neo-conservative America's premier think tank - is warning Americans that Hispanics are way too intellectually inferior to be accorded U.S. citizenship.  In High German I think the word is untermensch. 

Earlier this week, the Heritage Foundation released a new report, “The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer,” that confounded nearly everyone who read it. Using some preposterous methodology, its two authors, Jason Richwine and Robert Rector, concluded that providing undocumented immigrants with a path to citizenship would cost the U.S. government $5.3 trillion.

...Trying to comprehend how Richwine and Rector could have reached such a conclusion, Wonkblog's Dylan Matthews found a clue in the dissertation Richwine wrote for his 2009 Harvard Ph.D. in public policy. “Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races,” Matthews explained. “While it’s clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics—‘the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ’—he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group IQs are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, ‘No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.’”

 

Predictably, the Cons are running through their Rolodex of excuses as to why they're spending public money on partisan media monitoring - with the answer being that they want to make sure that PR stunts achieve additional partisan goals:
The prime minister’s spokesman Andrew MacDougall told HuffPost PCO tracks the coverage of their backbench MPs because they make announcements on behalf of the government all the time. “Of course the government wants to know what kind of coverage gets generated from those announcements,” he said.But the Cons' abuse of announcement opportunities is far from a new issue. So I'll simply point to my answer to similar issues surrounding past cheerleading sessions:
There's been plenty of debate about the protest which caused Joe Oliver to move a funding announcement. But I'd think there's a more fundamental question we should ask about the event, particularly when the indignant response of the event host was to the effect that "this is an important announcement!".

To wit: how exactly is it important for the Cons to be able to dictate that a public venue serve as a resistance-free backdrop for their PR efforts?
...
(W)e've all too often come to accept that it's the divine right of Cons to assemble a compliant media and no dissenters wherever they please (and at our expense) to deliver talking points. And I'm sure the lesson they'll take from Oliver's press conference is that they should crack down even further on anybody who might disagree with any of their policies.

But there's a more basic question worth asking as to how publicly-funded political propaganda fits with the need for genuinely free speech. And the answer may be that we shouldn't be so ready to see our money and civil service co-opted to PR stunts in the first place.  Needless to say, if there's no public value in holding press events which serve as nothing but personal promotions for Con MPs, then surely there's even less value in spending even more public money to assess whether the media has sufficiently parroted the Cons' talking points. And the Cons only seem to be confirming that they've utterly given up on actual governance in favour of focusing solely on public appearances.

If there's one bunch of Canadians who adore the monarchy it has to be Conservatives.   That's why it was no end of fun to see the Royal next in line for the throne set fire to the coat tails of the climate change "forces of darkness" which has to include our own Steve Harper and his minions.

Hosting a two-day conference for forest scientists at St James's Palace in London, Prince Charles – who is taking over from the Queen at this year's meeting of the Commonwealth in Sri Lanka – savagely satirised those who stand in the way of swift action on the climate.

He characterised them as "the confirmed sceptics" and "the international association of corporate lobbyists". Faced with these forces of opposition, "science finds itself up the proverbial double blind gum tree", he said.

Prince Charles lambasted the skeptics and corporate lobbyists for turning the planet "into a dying patient."   Why, I think the Prince has aptly renamed the PMO.  It should now be known as the International Association of Corporate Lobbyists, Bitumen Peddlers and Climate Change Foot Draggers.  Perfect.

Who knew you needed a permit to climb a tree in Toronto? Where does one apply for such a thing?... Dr.Dawg http://drdawgsblawg.ca/

Like the dotty uncle no one wants to invite to family dinners anymore because of his wildly inappropriate comments, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver is fast becoming an international persona non grata.

With the passion of a senescent zealot, Oliver has drawn unfavorable attention to Canada in recent weeks over his attacks on those who disagree with his unbridled enthusiasm for Alberta's dirty oil. There was, for example, his visit last month to Washington in which he lambasted a leading climate scientist, James Hansen, denouncing him for “exaggerated rhetoric,” that “doesn’t do the (environmentalists’) cause any good.” For good measure, he dismissed the much-respected Hansen for spouting "nonsense' in his warnings about the Alberta tarsands, adding that he “should be ashamed.” His followup interview with Evan Solomon could only be described as 'cringe-worthy.'

His next target was Al Gore who, in a recent visit to Toronto, offered a withering assessment of the tarsands similar to Hansen's. Again, our 'Uncle' Joe denounced him vigorously. Once more drawing upon his limited repertoire, he accused Gore of making "wildly inaccurate and exaggerated claims" about the Harper record on climate change.

But wait, there's more:

On Wednesday in Brussels, Mr. Oliver said Canada would consider filing a complaint with the World Trade Organization, the global referee for trade disputes, if the EU proceeds with its so called fuel-quality directive which singles out crude from Canada’s oil sands as the most harmful to the planet’s climate.

Yesterday, in an apparent rare moment of lucidity, Oliver backed down on the threat, saying that the issue is separate from the European trade deal much desired by the Harper regime.

The antics of our antic Natural Resources Minister have not escaped notice. Yesterday, a group of 12 prominent Canadian scientists wrote a letter to Oliver, essentially asking that he and his government show some maturity on the climate change issue. The letter also offers to help Minister Oliver to understand the data on climate change. No word of a response, withering or otherwise, from the cabinet minister.

Finally, in today's edition, The Star's Rick Salutin has an interesting take on the whole issue, saying that our version of classics like Death of a Salesman, Glengarry Glen Ross, or the current British series Mr. Selfridge would be Mr. Bitumen, the story of a salesman peddling a blatantly faulty, unneeded product.

One of the marks of the enlightened mind is the ability to process new information that can alter one's perspective. Joe Oliver shows no such capacity. Guess that's why he's a member of the Harper Conservative government.

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