The Ranting Canadian

This morning I saw a few minutes of a CBC Newsworld political panel and again concluded that Canada must abolish its senate immediately. Abolish it now! There is no time for messing about.

The dishonourable, fraud-committing senate serves no legitimate purpose in this day and age, and it’s debatable whether it ever did. The unelected, patronage-appointed, archaic institution is an insult to democracy; costs us an obscene amount of tax money; and provides a bad example to young Canadians that crime does pay. It is nothing but a den of Liberal and Conservative crooks and liars living high on the hog at our expense.

In fact, we should take it one step further. Make it an offence under the Criminal Code to be a Canadian senator. Make it a criminal offence to appoint a Canadian senator. Apply the penalties retroactively. No statute of limitations.

Charge them, convict them, sentence them to prison and seize their assets — including the estates of dead slimeballs like the cold and stiff Con senator Doug Finley, who Stephen Harper appointed in 2009 as a gift for organizing the illegal “In and Out” funding scam in the 2006 federal election.

Finley is survived by his Con MP wife Diane, the fuckhead who is responsible for accelerating the replacement of Canadian workers with underpaid “temporary” foreign workers, cutting programs and funding to help Canadians get jobs, and screwing laid-off Canadians out of their Employment Insurance benefits (which is insurance they paid for, not a charity handout).

The recently-croaked filthy senator was also apparently a friend and role model of a certain Sun Media spin artist and right-wing Liberal Party dirty-tricks operative, as well as an idol of another infamous right-wing, pro-Liberal, anti-progressive blogger. Birds of a feather…

Enough is enough! Canadians deserve better!

Canada’s annual protest against women’s rights was held at Parliament Hill on May 9, 2013, drawing thousands of right-wing busybodies who can’t keep their authoritarianism in their pants.

The name of the yearly “March For Life” is misleading, because most of the religious fanatics who attend these events are very selective about their concern for life. They almost exclusively focus on unborn fetuses, and spare almost no thought for actual human beings who have left the womb. Causes of premature death such as war, capital punishment, poverty, pollution, depression and unsafe working conditions are barely on their radar, if at all. Many of them also have a disturbing level of tolerance for bomb attacks against women’s health clinics and assassinations of people who work at them.

Typical conservatives, they are control freaks who tell other people how to live their lives, harass them mercilessly, and want to take away their freedoms. The anti-choice folks are fiercely determined to force women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, as well as prevent terminally ill people from accessing the option of safe, pain-free assisted suicide.

Instead of spending their time, energy and money on improving the lives of people who are already here, these extremists wring their hands over an imaginary problem – that supposedly not enough babies are being born. The cold, hard truth is that planet Earth is massively overpopulated, and there is not enough food, water, clean air and other natural resources to support the population we have already!

Every day, thousands of humans die from starvation and hunger-related diseases. Many of those unfortunate victims are children, including babies. Of the children who do survive, an alarmingly large number end up in orphanages, foster care or homelessness. Go to any major city and look around. There are shortages of many things in this world, but people are not one of them. Conflicts over scarce resources have led to tension, crime, wars and terrorism.

We desperately need to reduce the world population, not encourage its irresponsible growth.

Sex education, birth control and safe abortion should be easily available, at no cost, to anyone who wants it. I mean real sex education, not failed “abstinence-only” programs that inevitably lead to increases in sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. And another thing: not a single penny of tax money should be spent on reproductive drugs and technologies for people who cannot have children naturally. If they cannot bear to adopt a needy child, they should have to pay the full cost of the artificial procedures out of their own pockets.

Take the religious and political garbage out of the picture and leave these matters to the medical experts, the trained educators, and – most importantly – to the women whose bodies belong to themselves, not to anyone else.

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Note: I watched the attached George Carlin video after I had already written my rant. Any similarities are mere coincidence.

I just saw that today, May 5, is the birthday of Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883), the German economist, historian, journalist and philosopher. I post this video in honour of the occasion. It’s a bit silly, and I’m not sure of the intentions of the creators, but I’ve been waiting for an appropriate occasion to share it.

I haven’t read any Marx in a very long time, other than passages that other people quote, but his writings are certainly still relevant today, especially in this era of economic collapse, ongoing exploitation of workers, growing inequality and top-down austerity measures.

Marx wasn’t perfect, and he was a product of his time (including its customs and prejudices), but there is no denying that he led an interesting life and was right about a lot of things, especially the nature and reality of capitalism and class. If you have never read anything by Marx, apparently the best one to check out Das Kapital. Go ahead, you might just like it.