True North

Transitions

2005-06-14T10:16:00.000-05:00

The times they are indeed achanging. This post marks the end of True North as we know it for at least the next several months. My first post to this blog was two weeks short of a year ago and much has happened since then. From a personal perspective, most of it has been good.

However, circumstances change and, like it or not. we have to do so as well. I knew from the beginning that time was going to be an issue. There have been many occasions when there simply hasn't been time to post at all much less to write posts of the quality I wanted to write. It's interesting how even something like a little blog makes you feel obligated. After all, if people were going to bother coming here, I felt an obligation to have something new for them on a regular basis.

That last sentence holds the key to my decision. First, to grow a blog requires regular posting. It is generally accepted that that means at least two or three posts a week of something more than the "me too" variety and it usually means posting on a daily basis. The second key element is the feeling of obligation. That is just as hard to handle because, once you start feeling you have to do something, it usually stops being enjoyable. Waking up in the morning and saying "Oh shit I have to post something today" is likely a pretty good indicator that it isn't fun anymore.

My business requires 70 to 80 hour weeks from April to June and is only slightly less intense from July to October. Part of that is simply the work of living in the country - something you may have guessed I'm not planning to give up anytime soon (as in ever). In practical terms it means essentially shutting the blog down every spring and trying to reactivate it every fall. That is a situation that is not going to change as long as I live here and work at what I do.

Earlier this spring I had considered pulling the plug completely knowing the cycle I was dealing with. Instead I opted to keep it alive. At the time I said :

This will also give me an opportunity to consider different options for the future. Some of the options I'm looking at are:
1) Continuing to do the same kind of broad based advocacy I have been doing here. This despite increasingly questioning its value and an increasing reluctance to make open ended commitments of significant resources to projects which may or may not produce some vague, unspecified results at some nebulous future time.
2) Narrowing the focus so that I can concentrate on doing more, better posts on fewer subjects.
3) Not blogging at all and focusing on local issues where I can produce more tangible, timely results some time before the crows turn white.
4) Resigning from the position of being 'my brother's keeper' on the grounds that I have had the position quite long enough and it's time to concentrate on things that directly benefit me and mine.

I'm sure the correct option will reveal itself in due time.

It turns out the correct option is none of the above. For the last few weeks I have been talking with other progressive bloggers who are having the same problems. At some point in our blogging careers, all of us have encountered problems juggling work/business demands, family commitments, a desire for a life off the internet and blogging. The end result of this juggling act has been burnouts, reduced posting and consideration of temporary and/or permanent blog closures.

For the last few of weeks, we have been discussing these problems and potential solutions. We have decided that, at least on a temporary basis, the best solution for all of us is a group blog. I will be joining Timmy from Voice in the Wilderness and Jonathan from No More Shall I Roam in a group blog with pogge over at Pogge.ca. We are looking on this as an experimental venture for the next several months and will be keeping our current blogs intact for archival purposes while we work toward making the group blog a permanent situation.

This arrangement has blogging advantages. We know we can work together having done so on previous projects. While also sharing a similar world view for the most part, we approach things in different ways and have different interests. We are hoping that working together will help make us better at what we do.

Even more importantly, this arrangement has personal advantages. We hope that working together will reduce the pressure on each of us and allow us to get back to the enjoyment of blogging while still juggling the rest of our lives.

True North is not going to disappear. I will cross post enough to keep it alive for it's archival value - there are still a lot of search engine hits on items like NAWAPA and BSE. I don't know what the long term future holds for it. Who knows, by fall it might be a gardening blog. Whatever happens, True North will always be important to me. I have written since high school but I had gotten away from it over the last ten years. Starting this blog reminded me of how much I enjoy writing and for that reason it will always be a fond memory.

I know I have occasionally infuriated people by calling things the way I see them (after all Steve Gilliard is my blogfather) but I hope I have also occasionally entertained and educated you as well. There is nothing that will change about my style. It will just be found at a different spot on the dial.

See you around.

Harper: "Please Beat Me Some More"

2005-06-13T09:26:00.000-05:00

Or at least I hope that Stevie Wonder Wanker and the rest of the SCRAC high command are heavy into masochism after yet another whipping of their sorry asses by the Canadian public in the latest round of opinion polls.

The Dithers led Kloset Konservatives, scandals and all, are up in the polls again with a 12 point swing in the national numbers. The KK leads in Ontario with 48% support leading the NDP at 24% and SCRAC at 22%. SCRAC has only 9% support in the three largest urban areas trailing both the KK and the NDP. You don't even have the proverbial snowball's chance in hell of winning a federal election in this country if you are beaten in Ontario as a whole and wiped out in Quebec and the large urban areas. Seems it might be time for SCRAC to unload those Republican party consultants.

And that was the good news. If the story is bad for the party, it's even worse for Harper himself. Unlike the mythical King Midas whose touch turned everything to gold, Harper seems to have perfected the Sadim touch - every thing he touches turns to shit.

Harper not only has the rest of the country giving him the bum's rush but his own are now turning on him too. Stevie Stupid Wonder Wanker decided he just had to force a spring election even though the overwhelming majority of Canadians and many in his own caucus didn't want one.

In the course of trying to force an election, Harper managed to make a total ass of himself by somehow managing to look even more desperate to gain power than Martin was to hold on to it. That rather impressive feat seems to have been too brutal for even the party's core supporters to watch. Support for Harper's leadership is dropping faster than a dud Roman Candle. Even in the Prairies, head office for Wing Nuts 'R' Us, support for Dear Leader Jr. has dropped from 63% to 44% in a matter of weeks and among hard core SCRACheads it dropped from 92% to 79%.

And, if being Stephen Harper didn't already suck badly enough, it gets even worse. Right wing talk radio host, Charles Adler, in a column in Saturday's Winnipeg Free Press not only calls uniting the right a bigger hoax than Y2K, concedes defeat in the next election, suggests changing the party's acronym from CPC to STD, but also proposes the dissolution of SCRAC and the reformation of the Reform Party although not quite in those words.

Unfortunately, that column is behind the Free Press subscription wall. Have I mentioned how much I hate the Free Press's anal online policy? Have I mentioned how much I like my old Textbridge OCR software? It seems that, every three or four months, I get to do a free advertisement for the Free Press on this blog by publishing an article they have hidden from public view to show you that, contrary to widely held opinion, the FP is not a total waste of trees and that, even though the days of the outhouse are gone, there is still a reason to subscribe to the paper. Please support this ad campaign by subscribing today - or, at least, tomorrow.

Unite the Right Was a Bigger Hoax Than Y2K
Charles Adler/ Winnipeg Free Press

Will someone please stop polling! Grassroots Conservatives get the message.

Ontario doesn't want western-style conservatism anywhere near the prime minster's office. Western Conservatives are allowed on the property, but not the porch, and certainly not inside the bedrooms of the national government. It's OK for the prime minister to be sleeping with the NDP. But the Conservatives, now known as the CPC, might as well trade in that acronym for STD. It is unwanted.

Westerners may be stubborn, but they get it - the only way for them to be part of the national government is to have a leader who makes at least 40 per cent of Ontarians comfortable.

Ontario voters willing to vote for a Conservative want Bill Davis. Not Mike Harris. Not Ralph Klein. And certainly not Stephen Harper. Never mind that he's from Ontario.

Western Conservatives have received the message from Ipsos Reid, Environics, Decima, and a herd of media pundits. Either the Conservatives find a leader who is willing to be a Liberal in everything but name, or they need not have expectations of victory.

One could argue that westerners are overreacting to the bad polls and the media advice. After all, Harper nearly became prime minister a year ago.

But the truth is the truth. Paul Martin, who in last year's election campaign was given the last rites more often than a dying pope, climbed out of the casket. In recent weeks, he did it again. Yes, Belinda helped. But if she had decided to stay in the potato patch with Peter, we know that Goofy Gurmant and the wife he treats like a sidecar would have rolled into Paul's parking lot and given the PM the votes be he needed to snooker Harper. And if Goofy had been given his Liberal loot bag in return for betraying his party, Harper would not have looked as bad he did by being jilted by Magnababe.

If Goofy and the sidecar had gone to the libs, Harper would not have directed this low-rent passion play for a guy who may have lied his way into Canada, tape recorded his way into the Political Funny Farm, and frightened Air Canada passengers with that goofiest of phrases, "Can you please take my package?" Do western Conservatives really have trouble understanding why Air Harper and its subsidiary, Air Goofy, don't fly in Ontario?

Never mind the facts. Western Conservatives feel rejected and humiliated by the pollsters, the pundits and that acronym which fills the blogosphere, MSM (mainstream media). Once you feel that these powerful forces have been aligned against you, what do you do?

Should western Conservatives continue to participate in a process that they feel is rigged? Or should they go back home? The old hacienda of the Reform/Alliance was more comfortable for western Conservatives. They didn't have to prune their branches every day. They weren't as self-conscious. They weren't expecting the CBC, Toronto Star and Globe and Mail to like them and they didn't much care. Now many feel that they are wearing shoes that pinch and pants that are bursting their zippers. And the Central Canadian establishment still doesn't love them.

Would anyone be surprised if after the coming defeat, western Conservatives say, "We're tired of pretending that every day is Halloween. Let's get out of these stupid clothes and do what comes naturally. The Bloc Québecois guys don't pretend to be federalists. Layton's boys don't pretend to be right wingers. Why should we keep pretend that we are a bunch of panty-waist moderates? If we can't be honest about who we are, what's the damn point?"

Is there an advantage to westerners becoming a bloc party? You bet your sweet bippy! Paul Martin is willing to yield on policy to any party that is not threatening to replace him. If you want Paul Martin to give you stuff, just ask for it. Just don't tell him you will defeat him in the next election. When Paul Martin and Jack Layton shared the same hotel key at the Royal York, Jack never threatened to eat Paul's lunch. He just asked the prime minister to give him part of yours.

Do you want western Conservatives to form their own party and give up what many think of as a charade? Do you believe Unite the Right has been a bigger hoax than Y2K?

I'm no fan of Adler's politics but there are times when I really do appreciate his writing. In this case his conclusions are pretty hard to argue with. The fallout from adscam has pretty much peaked and receded unless the final report results in Paulie and several members of the cabinet being dragged away in irons. Belinda's decision to leave Peter's potato patch hurt in places where SCRAC couldn't afford to be hurt and secret agent double-O dud's flame out in his audio engineering sideline also hurt. If Harper and SCRAC couldn't win public support under recently past conditions, it isn't likely to happen before the crows turn white.

Politics makes for strange bedfellows at any time. The apparently imminent chance to win in politics makes for even stranger bedfellows. The Bush party in the Excited States is in danger of coming apart at the seams as real Republicans try to wrest power back from the wing nuts and religious extremists. The American Taliban are also threatening to leave unless the keys to the party are turned over to them.

The unholy marriage of the Progressive Conservative party and the Social Credit Reform Alliance party didn't make much sense in the first place. It was an opportunistic circular firing squad type of arrangement forged by two groups of perennial lusers desperate to change their circumstances. It always more closely resembled a case of the last two drunks left in the bar at closing time going home together because they both knew they weren't going to do any better than it did a real partnership. Throwing the Canadian Taliban into the mix only made it worse. All these diverse factions could tolerate each other as long as there was a chance of winning. As soon as that goes, it's man the lifeboats and every man for himself.

This 'can't win for losing' cabal of clowns have managed to make The Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight look like expert marksmen. They truly are miracle workers - they managed to make Paul Martin look good and David Orchard look smart. The real irony of it is that, if Peter McKay hadn't been in such a rush to sell out his own party, there is a chance he could actually be living at 24 Sussex Drive today given the Canadian public's lack of enthusiasm last June for both Martin and Harper. And maybe even with Belinda. After the SCRAC balloon bursts, young Peter, sadder but wiser, is likely to have a lot of time to spend walking the dog and digging potatoes.

The Many Faces of Evil

2005-06-08T16:21:00.000-05:00

Continuing with the 'Lusers' theme that currently seems to be developing, this site has posted a rogue's gallery, complete with quotes, of the leaders of the American Taliban. It seems about time for someone to start a similar project with our own Canadian Taliban. There are plenty of candidates here for the list but you might want to start with this asshole.

Police investigating Christian activist for hate crimes
Two thousand leaflets attacking gays and lesbians have put a Christian activist in western Canada under investigation by Edmonton police for hate crimes.

The flyers by Bill Whatcott of Regina refer to gay marriage as "sodomite marriage" and use graphic language to describe the alleged sex practices of homosexuals...

Whatcott has led protests across Saskatchewan and Alberta against abortion and gays.

He says he was a gay prostitute until age 18 to pay for a drug habit, then became leader of a small group called the Christian Truth Activists.

Last month, the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal fined Whatcott $17,500 for handing out similar material.

But he has refused to pay the fine, calling the tribunal a "kangaroo court."

"Once there was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time is called the Dark Ages."

Voltaire had it right a couple of hundred years ago when he said "The world will never truly be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

Even though I live in what used to be the wild west, the authorities seem to frown on putting up "Wanted" posters. With this bunch, I wonder how they feel about us putting up "Unwanted" posters.

Update: Forgot the acknowlegment. The guys at Needlenose were some of the earliest supporters of this blog. Thanks to fubar for the link.

Note to Gurmant Grewal

2005-06-08T16:07:00.000-05:00

While we're on the subject of lusers:

Dear Gurmant:

When your wife is busy trying to put 40 miles and a flooded river between herself and your efforts to buy a better deal for both of you, you're screwed buddy.

After more than two weeks of silence, Tory MP Nina Grewal says she had nothing to do with secret talks between her husband and senior Liberals concerning patronage plums in return for helping the government win a crucial vote.

When your constituents believe the Liberal version of the story over yours by 3 to 2, its time to start brushing off the old resume because you will soon be looking for a new job and it ain't gonna be a cabinet post, an ambassadorship or a senate appointment.

The response was even less favourable for Mr. Grewal with a pair of key groups: respondents who followed the issue closely, and those in Mr. Grewal's home province of British Columbia.

Among those who said they followed the taping affair closely, 32 per cent said they believed the Liberals and 27 per cent said they believed Mr. Grewal.

In B.C., it was 33 per cent for the Liberals and 21 per cent for Mr. Grewal.

PS: I suggest you leave "audio engineer" off your list of recent employment. I don't think you're going to be getting too many offers in that line of work either.

Luser!

2005-06-08T15:58:00.000-05:00

I have to admit I have never heard of a weekly paper called the Vancouver Republic before. But they may have picked up a new reader after this column by Kevin Potvin outlining in bone crunching detail what an utter moron Peter McKay is.

Peter, you have got to be the biggest idiot this country ever produced. There you were, tossing her giggling children on your knee, reclining without a care on her father’s couch with him after supper, comfortably showing affection to her in public, and probably just a few more months of continuing good behavior away from marrying into Belinda Stronach’s billions. That’s “billions,” as in world-league wealth and power. You were that close!

Stronach is no blonde dipstick, as your frat-boy pals in Alberta characterized her after you blew it. She has more power than all of them combined—more even than any mere Prime Minister. She is the former CEO of the largest auto-parts company on the planet. No daddy’s girl, she was named by Fortune 500 two years ago as the second most powerful woman in the world. That’s “in the world.”

Best article on the subject I've seen.

And a hat tip for the commentor at From the Heartland for the tip.

Say What?

2005-06-08T11:49:00.000-05:00

Canadian Cynic's response to this news article is to suggest that you can actually have too many firearms. I must respectfully disagree.

You see our friend CC describes himself as an "unarmed (but reality-based) Canadian". I, on the other hand, am a gun toting, meat eating (but reality based) Canadian progressive. Personally, I think the extra firepower might be useful in the event that we are ever invaded by the Protest Warriors.

The only problem with stashing that much hardware is that I might have to recruit the assistance of Ol' JimBobby to help dig up half an acre of the back 40. And we all know how he likes to talk - especially once he gets into your whiskey.

G'day Eh

2005-06-08T11:27:00.000-05:00

Greetings to those much abused and neglected faithful few who continue to show up. I think I have just set a record for not posting and that is not a great accomplishment. There will be a major item in the near future that you probably won't want to miss. In the meantime, it is raining today, has been for the last two weeks and will be for the next week. It's too wet to plow and I can't dance so I might as well use up some of this supply of snark lying around the office that is getting close to it's "best before" date. So expect a number of short shots in the next day or two.

The Grewal Tapes

2005-05-24T16:58:00.000-05:00

In case you have forgotten this post of mine several months ago, Gurmant Grewal, who is claiming the Liberals tried to buy his vote on the budget, is the same SCRAC MP who had the well known right wing nut case (and Bill O'Reilly's favourite Canadian) Rachel Marsden working in his office under an assumed name until the SCRAC head office went ballistic on him and insisted she be fired. So, Stevie Stupid Wonder Wanker, are you sure you really want to buy a used allegation from this guy?

An Open Letter

2005-05-24T16:27:00.000-05:00

Dear Intelligent Designer(s):

My friend Canadian Cynic assures me there are many people here who believe in your existence. It, therefore, seems appropriate for me to contact you directly with my concerns.

I would greatly appreciate it if you would provide me, in writing if you don't mind, the Intelligent Design rationale behind mosquitoes and wood ticks. And, since I'm imposing, please add to the list black flies, poison ivy, skunks and the Conservative Party of Canada (to the extent the latter two are not the same). The existence of these organisms forces me to question your intelligence and/or whether you ever really graduated from design school as claimed.

I feel I must also point out a significant error in your design parameters. Having any two of the above in season at the same time - for example wood ticks and poison ivy - is an elegant sufficiency. Adding a third is completely unnecessary and totally unacceptable - except for the Conservative Party of Canada which is completely unnecessary and totally unacceptable at any time.

Designing this planet was a rather complex project and should not have been assigned to anyone who did not graduate from Design school in the top 10% of the class and possess significant experience in completing less challenging projects. I am requesting this entire project be turned over to the Supreme Council of Intelligent Designers (for surely there must be such an entity) for a review. At a very minimum the above noted design errors must be rectified at your earliest convenience and consideration should be given to replacing the current Designer with one better qualified for the position.

I would appreciate your prompt attention to these matters.

Yours intelligently,
mahigan

Belinda Bolts

2005-05-17T14:09:00.000-05:00

Well this should be the talk of the blogosphere - not to mention the MSM - for the next several days. Timmy has a post with some conservative reaction at Voice in the Wilderness and Pogge weighs in here. I really doubt that anyone saw this coming although Stevie Depressed Wonder Wanker says he did.

While no one saw it coming, I don't see any reason why anyone should be surprised. Stronach is not now nor has she ever been a SCRAChead. Belinda is a Red Tory and made that quite clear in her SCRAC leadership campaign. And since the demise of the PC Party and Martin's take over of the Liberals, the Liberals are the Red Tory Party in this country.

Stronach blew any leadership chance she had at the time - or any time in the foreseeable future - when she made her speech announcing her candidacy for the SCRAC leadership. Saying that you are pro-choice and believe that same sex marriage is a human rights issue will get you nowhere in the reactionary SCRAC. It has been clear to me from the beginning that Stronach would have been a happier camper in the ~~Red Tory~~ Liberal party than in SCRAC.

What this raises is an interesting possibility of even more defections. Stronach is not the only Red Tory MP in the SCRAC caucus. There are others, and I think that includes some well known faces like Chuck Strahl and the rest who bailed on the Alliance to sit with the PCs, who may be less than comfortable with the orientation of Harper and the fright wing of the party. Is Stronach's defection going to pave the way for still others?

Better buy some more popcorn and beer and stay tuned.

And the Ethics Award Goes to...

2005-05-16T21:44:00.000-05:00

Timmy at Voice in the Wilderness had a post on the new level of esteem in which the NDP is being held these days. It seems that high opinion is much more widespread than the blogosphere. I just checked my email and found a note from SES Research (I'm on the mailing list) on a new SES/Sun Media Poll that shows federal New Democrats score highest on ethics among political parties.

A new SES/Sun Media poll indicates that Canadians were more likely to identify the NDP as the federal party which was more ethical (+17.9) than the Liberal Party of Canada. This view cut across all regions.

The Green Party had the second highest net ethical score (+10.1) followed by the Conservatives (+8.5) and the Bloc Quebecois (-13.7). The BQ were the only party to receive a national net negative ethical score compared to the Liberals. In Quebec, owever, the BQ ethical score was +18.4.

"The only party with the clear advantage on the ethics issue is the federal NDP", according to SES Research President, Nikita Nanos...

The "net national ethics score" is based on the difference between the "more ethical" and the "less ethical" responses.

Here are the scores by party:

The NDP (N=1,000)
More ethical than Liberals - 34.4%
Same - 35.2%
Less ethical than Liberals - 16.5%
Unsure - 13.9%
Net national ethics score (+17.9)
*Score is positive in all regions

The Green Party (N=1,000)
More ethical than Liberals - 26.3%
Same - 25.8%
Less ethical than Liberals - 16.2%
Unsure - 31.7%
Net national ethics score (+10.1)
*Best region - West (+19.4)

The Conservative Party (N=1,000)
More ethical than Liberals - 28.1%
Same - 39.9%
Less ethical than Liberals - 19.6%
Unsure - 12.4%
Net national ethics score (+8.5)
*Best region - West (+22.6)

The BQ (N=1,000)
More ethical than Liberals - 18.2%
Same - 28.9%
Less ethical than Liberals - 31.9%
Unsure - 21.0%
Net national ethics score (-13.7)
*Best region - Quebec (+18.4)

It seems that a broad spectrum of Canadian voters are less than impressed by the goings on in the Common House. It sure is adding insult to injury when the relatively unknown Green Party manages to beat SCRAC in the ethics department. Somebody should up Stevie's meds. Foaming at the mouth doesn't seem to be endearing him to Canadians.

Mouseland

2005-05-15T15:55:00.000-05:00

I'm sure I have posted this before but, with an election apparently imminent, it seems timely to post it again. In fact I may post it once a week until after the next election. I especially recommend it to those poor misguided folks who have been conned into believing that voting for Stevie Wonder Wanker and SCRAC is somehow going to make a difference.

The Story of Mouseland

It's the story of a place called Mouseland. Mouseland was a place where all the little mice lived and played, were born and died. And they lived much the same as you and I do.

They even had a parliament. And every four years the had an election. Used to walk to the polls and cast their ballots. Some of them even got a ride to the polls. And got a ride for the next four years afterwards too. Just like you and me. And every time on election day all the little mice used to go to the ballot box and they used to elect a government. A government made up of big, fat, black cats.

Now if you think it strange that mice should elect a government made up of cats, you just look at the history of Canada for the last 90 years and maybe you'll see that they weren't any stupider then we are.

Now I'm not saying anything against the cats. They were nice fellows. They conducted their government with dignity. They passed good laws -- that is, laws that were good for cats. But the laws that were good for cats weren't very good for mice. One of the laws said that mouse holes had to be big enough so a cat could get his paw in. Another law said that mice could only travel at certain speeds -- so that a cat could get his breakfast without too much effort.

All the laws were good laws. For cats. But, oh, they were hard on the mice. And life was getting harder and harder. And when the mice couldn't put up with it any more, they decided that something had to be done about it. So they went en masse to the polls. They voted the black cats out. They put in the white cats.

Now the white cats had put up a terrific campaign. They said: "All that Mouseland needs is more vision." They said: "The trouble with Mouseland is those round mouse holes we got. If you put us in we'll establish square mouse holes." And they did. And the square mouse holes were twice as big as the round mouse holes, and now the cat could get both paws in. And life was tougher then ever.

And when they couldn't take that anymore, they voted the white cats out and put the black one's in again. Then they went back to the white cats. Then to the black cats. They even tried half black and half white cats. And they called that coalition. They even got one government made up of cats with spots on them: they were cats that tried to make a noise like a mouse but ate like a cat.

You see, my friends, the trouble wasn't with the colour of the cat. The trouble was that they were cats. And because they were cats, they naturally looked after cats instead of mice.

Presently there came along one little mouse who had an idea. My friends, watch out for the little fellow with an idea. And he said to the other mice, "Look fellows, why do we keep electing a government made up of cats? Why don't we elect a government made up of mice?" "OH," they said, "he's a Bolshevik. Lock him up!" So they put him in jail.

But I want to remind you: That you can lock up a mouse or a man but you can't lock up an idea.

--Tommy Douglas, 1944

The proverbial cats have gotten wiser and fatter, hired new spin-doctors and reverted to some old ways.

They have declared that enlarged mouse holes are the wave of the future. Too many mice have been cheating—holding back or hiding. We make the mice more self-reliant and vigorous if more cat paws are scratching their otherwise lazy behinds. Implementing programs using politically correct vocabulary — "opportunity" "skill sets" "retooling," "life style enhancement," we open up the mouse colony to all comers.

When the dust settles, these inspired initiatives add up to more wounded bodies and frightened rodents. Any mice that complain are of course, just a special interest group and can be disregarded as hopelessly biased. After all, the cats can no longer afford to subsidize small pickings from the mice population and without larger mouse holes the whole feline economy will collapse.

In addition to inspiring more vigour among otherwise recalcitrant mice, the country's cats have joined with cats around the world and agreed that some important issues need to be taken out of the claws of local authorities and given to international feline societies. So mouse hole sizes, feeding rates, local micely customs and other important matters will now be handled at a higher council. So, it won't matter if the mice elect themselves into government the really important issues will still be decided by fat cats—most of whom don't run for office anywhere.

In concert with these new reforms, the cats sold the responsibility to regularize certain more minor domestic issues—care of sick mice for instance— to dog syndicates who function as profit centres. They have no interest or responsibility in the welfare of the mice population—not really. They are just offering a service—pay as you go. If canines get too greedy, their avarice will be checked by the market—supply and demand—as the mice decline in health and numbers the dogs will naturally adjust their standards.

Finally, some of the cats are appointing cat public corporations to carry out all new mouse hole protection and maintenance. The elected cats are no longer in charge—it's specially appointed cat committees that all have a few token mice one them, that make the decisions on whose claws to clip. So when the mice complain about the lack of surveillance or protection of their mouse holes. "Gosh," say the fat cats, "That's a terrible pity, but its no longer in our hands. We don't make decisions, just set general policy."

addition from
HEADACHES AND HEART BREAKS:
The Future of Religion in Canada
By Christopher Levan
Annual Meeting of the Canadian Unitarian Council
May 19, 2000

Gay Genes?

2005-05-13T15:23:00.000-05:00

This week has been an interesting one for the members of the gay community. A recently released study indicates that gay men's brains may be 'wired' differently than those of straight men.

Pheromone attracts straight women and gay men
Smelling a male pheromone prompts the same brain activity in homosexual men as it does in heterosexual women, a new study has found. It did not excite the sex-related region in the brains of heterosexual males, although an oestrogen-derived compound found in female urine did.

The testosterone-derived chemical and is found in male sweat and is believed to be a pheromone. It activated the anterior hypothalamus and medial preoptic area of gay men and straight women alike. Researchers led by Ivanka Savic at the Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden believe this brain region integrates the hormonal and sensory cues used in guiding sexual behaviour.

This study adds to a growing body of scientific evidence suggesting that, at a minimum, there is a biological influence on sexual orientation and that sexual orientation is nowhere near as simple a phenomenon as being a "life style decision". More on this in a moment.

On a related topic. The Focus on the Family dog and pony show is making a stop in Winnipeg May 14. Performances run all day at the Calvary Temple in downtown Winnipeg. The production claims

In this dynamic one-day conference from Focus on the Family, you'll get answers to tough questions.

...you'll hear from nationally known experts who have firsthand experience with the seldom-told side of the homosexual issue. You'll learn how to minister to a loved one who's dealing with homosexuality, respond to misinformation in our culture, defend biblical beliefs and prevent your child from embracing this destructive way of life. Most importantly, you'll be reminded of the power of God's love and His desire to transform the life of a struggling homosexual to find freedom in Jesus Christ. Come and witness the type of love that draws men and women affected by homosexuality into the arms of their Creator.

It also promises

you'll get answers to tough questions like:
Is it genetic?

Can it be prevented?

What's being taught in schools?

How will gay marriage affect our society?

What causes homosexuality?

What should I say to my children about it?

I don't think it's right, so what should I do?

What should the church's stance be?

What about gay rights and minority status?

How do I help my friend who's gay?

Speakers include a "cured" formerly gay man along with various other snake oil sales people.

Local members of the GLBT communities, having previous experience with the the loving tenderness of Dobson's Dolts, have expressed their intention to show up and express a little love of their own.

This provides an excellent segue to honour a request that was made to me too long ago. Back in January I posted an item called SpongeDob Has a Bad Week. Part of that post referred to a study showing a genetic influence on sexual orientation.

Researcher Sees Group of Homosexuality Genes
By Tom Spears

A Chicago genome researcher says he has found a group of genes that strongly influence whether a man is homosexual - not a single "gay gene," but a group of genes acting together....

While genes are unlikely to decide everything in sexual orientation, being gay or heterosexual " is probably largely determined before birth. How you acted as a parent probably doesn't play much role," said the main researcher, Brian Mustanski, a behavioural geneticist .

As a result of this post indicating some interest in this topic, I was contacted recently by Dr. Alan R. Sanders, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University and Director of the Behavior Genetics Unit at Evanston Northwestern Healthcare Research Institute who asked me to help publicize a study he is heading up called A Molecular Genetic Study of Sexual Orientation.

Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with either this study or any of the researchers involved. My due diligence is limited to having read the associated material and checking Dr. Sander's qualifications which can be found here.

The Press release:

For Immediate Release

May 13, 2005

Dr. Alan R. Sanders is leading a research team to recruit approximately 1,000 volunteer families across the country for a genetic study of male sexual orientation. This five-year study, the largest of its kind in history, is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and asks gay men with at least one gay brother to answer a questionnaire and donate blood for DNA analysis.

The study is recruiting volunteers from across the United States and Canada through the gay and lesbian press, at various gay and lesbian social gatherings such as Pride events, and from various gay and lesbian oriented groups and on-line. With permission, research staff members contact parents of these brothers to learn whether they would be willing to donate blood as well, as part of the genetic analyses.

Prior studies have provided compelling evidence that genes play a role in sexual orientation in some men. None of those studies has been definitive in the sense of identifying particular genes. This study is designed to detect which genetic regions might be linked to male sexual orientation, which will help clarify how genes contribute to human behavior.

During the study, the research team will communicate with the public about the nature and goals of the study. Specifically, the research team has developed materials to address the ethical, social, and legal implications of the study, and made these available as a matter for public education (http://www.gaybros.com/). When completed, this study will make a significant contribution to the scientific debate about the origins of sexual orientation. For further information, please write to malegene@enh.org or call toll-free (866) 364-7571.

Alan R. Sanders, M.D., is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University. He is the Director of the Behavior Genetics Unit at Evanston Northwestern Healthcare Research Institute.

Comments: This is provided for your information. I am neither encouraging nor discouraging participation in the study simply because I do not feel I am in any position to advocate to or for the gay community.

My motive for publicizing this research is simple. I have had many gay friends and acquaintances over the last several decades. None of them has ever said he considers his sexual orientation to be a "life style choice" rather than a biological imperative. Therefore, it seems to me that any reputable research into a genetic link to sexual orientation is a good thing.

I understand that discovering such a link will have no effect on gay bashing homophobes like Dobson's Dolts who don't give a damn about science anyway.

I also appreciate that there are members of the gay community who are comfortable enough in their sexuality that they really don't care if such a link exists.

However, based on the experiences of some of the afore mentioned friends, I believe there are many within the community who would very much like a deeper insight into something that, rightly or wrongly, has been such a defining factor in their lives.

I Wonder

2005-05-11T08:55:00.000-05:00

According to a May 10 Gallup poll in the US:

Gallup: Americans Think Congress Is Doing Bad Job, See Ethics Problems

NEW YORK A new Gallup Poll released this morning shows that only 35% of Americans approve of the way Congress is handling its job. That is the lowest approval rating for Congress since July 1997.

Almost 4 in 10 say most Republicans and, separately, most Democrats in Congress, are unethical.

After watching our members of Parliament playing in the sandbox at the Common House for the last several weeks, I can't help wondering if our MPs would get anywhere near a 35% approval rating. And they wonder why 40% of Canadians won't give up a rerun of CSI to vote in a federal election. It seems those who want us to be more like the US got what they wanted.

Interesting New Poll

2005-05-09T10:17:00.000-05:00

Before I get to the topic at hand, I must admit to feeling a little humbled by the number of people still visiting here after a couple of weeks of no posts. I have some good news. I managed to get everything done last week that had to be done. The bad news is that, while I would like to be able to say this represents a return to normal posting, I'm afraid that is still several weeks away.

The item that caught my eye this morning is a joint Canadian-American poll published on both the CTV and Globe and Mail websites. The Globe & Mail version is the more complete.

Cross-border amity eroding:poll
Canadians' and Americans' national regard for each other is rapidly eroding even as, somewhat paradoxically, their core values are rapidly converging, according to a new Ipsos-Reid poll.

What is most interesting about the poll is the extent to which citizens of both countries hold similar values contrary to what many Canadians believe. For example, about 40% in both countries believe:

"the expansion of police powers to fight terrorism has gone too far, and threatens the "fundamental civil rights of all citizens."

Overwhelming majorities in both countries -- 78 per cent of Americans and 87 per cent of Canadians -- agree that the government "has a responsibility to protect the poor."

And 88 per cent of Americans and 93 per cent of Canadians believe caring for the elderly is a government duty.

There are similar levels of agreement on a variety of issues generally thought to be divisive. Ed Broadbent questions the depth of some of these commitments on the other side of the border.

Ed Broadbent, elder statesman for the nationalist-leaning New Democrats, said he took some comfort from the notion that Americans appear to be moving toward the centre on key social issues. However, he questioned whether the sentiments expressed in the survey would translate into a willingness to pay higher taxes.

"I'd like to know how deep that runs," Mr. Broadbent said.

Perhaps more to the point is that, if these numbers actually do represent firm support, it is an indication of just how far the Bush regime is removed from majority of the US public.

There is another finding that should indicate how far we should, or rather shouldn't, trust our southern neighbours.

Just 53 per cent of Canadians now cite the United States as Canada's closest friend and ally, down from 60 per cent in 2002. And only 14 per cent of Americans believe Canada is their country's closest ally, compared with 18 per cent three years ago.

Perhaps the shrinking number of Canadians who see the US as Canada's closest friend and ally is simply an acknowledgment of the reality that they never felt that way about us.

Two additional findings have to qualify as good news for Canadian progessives. The first one that caught my eye is

Since 2002, the percentage of Canadians who back further economic integration has slipped to 38 per cent from 44 per cent.

Now if we can only get that message to the Bay Street Bandits and their political underlings.

The second is that, while 36% of Americans said their religious faith determines which political leader they vote for, only 22% of Canadians said the same. It appears, as many of us hope, the separation of church and state is much healthier in this country. We need to work very hard to ensure it stays that way. There is also a possible partial explanation here for why SCRAC has such a problem topping 30% in the polls.

Catching Up

2005-05-02T14:44:00.000-05:00

Thank you to those of you who are still dropping by for a visit. The week before last, my back decided to see how many different ways it could tie itself in knots. Last week was spent trying to catch up everything that was supposed to have been done the week before and dealing with a continuing series of disasters from things not having been done. If that isn't fun enough, this week will be one of the busiest of the spring. Seems my erratic posting notice was right on.

It appears that my bit of Devil's Advocacy in my last post produced pretty predictable reaction both publicly and privately. I will be returning to the subject of legitimate voter alienation at another time.

I am working on a few other things. Since we're going to be deluged with opinion polls until whenever the next election is held and I have some experience in that are, I will be putting together something on polling and what polls do and do not tell you as well as doing some analysis. I'm still working on a Peak Oil Pt2 and there is an interesting research study I have been asked to promote.

Back again as soon as possible.

I Might Sit Out This Dance

2005-04-22T11:08:00.000-05:00

We won't know for a couple of weeks but it looks increasingly like those of us who predicted there wouldn't be an federal election this spring were wrong. If there is an election this spring, I may find myself sitting it out. Perhaps this is my Howard Beale moment.

I'm tired of participating in the great Canadian farce. Yes, that one. The one where you walk into the voting booth, hold your nose and vote for some useless sonuvabitch running for a party that doesn't represent you because he isn't quite as bad as the useless sonuvabitch running for some other party that doesn't represent you. I'm tired of voting for the candidate I dislike least. And I'm tired of voting strategically for someone I wouldn't walk across the street to piss on just to keep someone I don't want to share a time zone with out of government.

I have already pretty much resolved to sit out the next provincial election because there is no one I can vote for in good conscience. The Liberals and the Conservatives here have redefined "bottom of the barrel" by tacking on a subterranean level. The NDP is NDP in name only. They sound more like the Conservatives and persist in passing anti-democratic, civil rights limiting legislation.

So what are my wondrous choices for the next federal election? Let's look at them.

First we have SCRAC. This is easy. I wouldn't vote for SCRAC if they were the only party on the ballot and somebody put a gun to my head.

Then we have the (so called) Liberals. I have only voted Liberal once in my life and that was a strategic vote hoping to keep the SCRAC neandercon from getting elected. He won anyway and, for six months after, I felt like I needed a shower every time I thought about having voted Liberal. And that was before they turned into the Kloset Konservative party. So a vote for Paulie and the boys? I think not.

Then we have the Green Party. Or do we? In my part of the world, they have failed to demonstrate they have a coherent policy on anything much less a coherent vision for the country. Another non starter.

And, of course, we have the NDP who either don't have a coherent vision for the country or have been unable to enunciate it - which, in practical terms, is the same thing. I agree with those of you who feel that Layton gave the best performance following Martin's "please don't beat me like a rented mule even though I'm wearing a sign that says 'Beat me Like a Rented Mule'" speech last night. With Martin, Harper and Duceppe setting the bar, how hard a standard is that to beat ? So Layton has stopped looking like a professional idiot. The fact that we even notice says more about the company he keeps than it says about Layton himself. When you are surrounded by enough turkeys, even a chicken hawk looks like an eagle.

So there is the line up. Feeling better yet? Given a few more months, one of these sorry excuses might be able to persuade me to vote for them. But, if there is an election in the next few weeks, I can't vote for any of them in good conscience because I have yet to be convinced that any of these parties is qualified to run the country. For the first time in my life, I may find myself standing with the majority and voting with my feet. I believe that most of the people who don't show up at the polling station are still voting. They are casting their ballots for 'none of the above'. And, under the circumstances, who could blame us?

Scandal my Ass

2005-04-21T13:13:00.000-05:00

Update:
Ok. As per pogge's comments the post was probably an urban legend although I have heard similar stories elsewhere but I don't have the time or interest in digging them out so I nuked the post.

The Power of Nightmares

2005-04-21T09:12:00.000-05:00

Hyping Terror For Fun, Profit - And Power
by Thom Hartmann

What if there really was no need for much - or even most - of the Cold War? What if, in fact, the Cold War had been kept alive for two decades based on phony WMD threats?

What if, similarly, the War On Terror was largely a scam, and the administration was hyping it to seem larger-than-life? What if our "enemy" represented a real but relatively small threat posed by rogue and criminal groups well outside the mainstream of Islam? What if that hype was done largely to enhance the power, electability, and stature of George W. Bush and Tony Blair?

And what if the world was to discover the most shocking dimensions of these twin deceits - that the same men promulgated them in the 1970s and today?

It happened.

Is Al Qaeda Just a Bush Boogeyman?
by Robert Scheer

Is it conceivable that Al Qaeda, as defined by President Bush as the center of a vast and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy, does not exist?

To even raise the question amid all the officially inspired hysteria is heretical, especially in the context of the U.S. media's supine acceptance of administration claims relating to national security. Yet a brilliant new BBC film produced by one of Britain's leading documentary filmmakers systematically challenges this and many other accepted articles of faith in the so-called war on terror.

"The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear," a three-hour historical film by Adam Curtis recently aired by the British Broadcasting Corp., argues coherently that much of what we have been told about the threat of international terrorism "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media."

This series will be carried by the CBC on The Passionate Eye running April 24 - 26, 2005 at 10pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld. Note this is on NEWSWORLD not the main network (dammit). I have been wanting to see this since it was released and figured CBC was the best chance to see it in North America. Of course they had to put in on Newsworld so, having neither cable nor a dish, I have to find someone to tape it for me. I have heard nothing but rave reviews about this project. There is additional information on the CBC website. For Americans able get get the CBC feed, this is likely your only chance to see it.

Habemus Papam

2005-04-20T12:22:00.000-05:00

At least Roman Catholics have one. Or, perhaps, just some Roman Catholics have one. Having decades ago written off the Catholic church as the worldly manifestation of much of what is wrong with organized religion, the election of a new pope is of little personal interest to me.

What I do find interesting is that, by elevating the reactionary Ratzinger to the papacy, the Catholic Church has continued the world wide movement toward religious extremism. Benedict XVI's dogmatic religious and social conservatism should be almost enough to finish the Catholic Church as a relevant entity in most of Europe, Canada and the rest of the developed world excluding the extremism oriented US.

What will be particularly interesting is the consequences of Ratzinger's statements that the Catholic Church is the only true religion. Given that Christian fundamentalists in North America have already staked out that turf as their own, it will be worth watching what affect this has on the budding romance between Catholic extremists and the fundy extremists in the US. The new Pope clearly intends to meddle in politics. There are obvious overlaps between the dogma of the two groups (eg. abortion) but the question is whether Ratzinger's declarations of Catholic supremacy will cause a split between them.

I couldn't watch these proceedings without thinking back to one of my favourite Mark Twain passages from The Damned Human Race:

Man is the Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven.....The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out, in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste.

Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal....

In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which the other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.

Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh—not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.

Religious extremists taking their disputes to a higher court is probably a good thing for the rest of us - as long as we can stay out of the line of fire.

The Prophecy

2005-04-15T09:20:00.000-05:00

It is my policy not to visit the blogs of the liberally challenged among us to retrieve and rehash their comments. I find it more productive of flame wars than rational discourse. Besides, I've heard it all before anyway. I'm going to make a small exception.

Over at Bound By Gravity, Andrew was railing (or was that wailing?) about the actions of the conservatives' allies. Preston "Gomer Pyle" Manning and Mike "I've got to get the hell out of here before they find out how badly I screwed everything up" Harris released a report calling for "the federal government to get out of medicare and let the provinces experiment with private health services."

Andrew's response was:

I swear - some days it seems like Conservatives everywhere are out to sabotage their own hopes of ever holding power federally. What we have here are two die-hard Conservatives, Manning and Harris, releasing a paper that was sponsored by the right-wing Fraser Institute, and covered using ham-handed scare tactics by the Conservative-friendly National Post. And these are our allies.

There has also been much breast beating by Conservatives about how they don't get why Canadians don't just drop everything and run out to embrace the wondrous Conservative Party.

Conservatives suffer from two not unrelated conditions. The first is what sociologists call the Myth of Universality. Basically it is the belief that, since I see the world in a certain way, everyone else must obviously see it the same way. For Conservatives, this translates into the childlike belief that, way down deep in the heart of their bottoms, all Canadians are really Conservatives. And if they can only be made to embrace their inner wingnut, the Golden Age of Canadian Conservatism will be be upon us "and all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well". Can I get an amen from the choir?

The second condition is that Conservatives have very poor memories and believe, or at least hope, that the rest of Canadians have memories as fallible as their own. One of the things they conveniently forget is that pissing off Canadians to the core of their being is not something on which the Liberal Party has a monopoly. There are two generations of Canadians, those who survived the government of R. B. Bennett in the '30s and those who survived the government of Demon Spawn Mulroney, for a large percentage of whom the word 'conservative' will forever be synonymous with 'bad government'. And many of them swore that, as long as they lived, they would never, ever vote for a Conservative again.

Today's Conservatives, who are almost universally America Lite supporters or 51st Staters, see Lyin' Brian Mulroney as their political godfather so they can't wait to trot out the jaw that walks like a man and bask in the glory of his electoral success and sage advice. Of course the memory thing kicks in again and they conveniently forget that it was Mulroney's policies that drove the Progressive Conservative Party to the brink of extinction and forced it into the wilderness from whence it never returned. So while the Conservatives gleefully line up to kiss Don Brian's hand, it never even occurs to them that, for millions of Canadians, an endorsement from Mulroney is the kiss of death.

It doesn't help them that the presence of the reactionary wing of the party can always be found lurking in dark corners. Nor does it benefit them that they have chosen the Prairie Weather Model for their policy. "If you don't like our policy now, wait ten minutes." This government by polling approach is also a throwback to Mulroney whose model was poll them, find out what they want, promise them whatever it takes to get elected and then do whatever the hell you were going to do in the first place. How did you think he came to be known as 'Lyin' Brian'? So the circular firing squad that is the trademark of the Social Credit Reform Alliance Conservative Party isn't the real problem. It just serves as a constant reminder to Canadian voters how much they hate the Conservative Party and why.

So my prophecy is this. At thine assemblies, bring forth Brian of Mulroney and Gomer of Manning for they are well loved by all in the land. And also bring forth ~~Doris~~ Stockwell of Day for he too is beloved as non other. And heed well their wise counsel. And send forth thine emissaries to all parts of the land. Bid them assemble their countrymen and speak thus unto those assembled. "Thou art all Conservatives were thou not too stupid to know it." Do thus as I bid thee. And verily I say unto thee, thou shalt dwell in the house of Stornoway for ever. And for that one I need a hallelujah from the choir.

They Want to Force an Election on These Numbers?

2005-04-13T01:21:00.000-05:00

I've been busy and haven't been paying much attention to the polls other than what I've heard in the media. I actually sat down and took a hard look at the numbers from the latest Ipsos-Reid poll today. If these are the numbers SCRAC wants to force an election on, there is some good shit being smoked in Ottawa.

Yes, the Liberals are way down blah blah like the media pundits have been saying but the devil is in the details. The Kloset Konservatives aren't the only ones down in the polls. SCRAC is down 2% in Ontario, 3% in Alberta (where the Liberals are up an amazing 8% - the only province in which they posted a gain), and 8% in Saskatchewan /Manitoba. They are up an insignificant 1% in BC, 4% in Atlantic Canada and 5% in Quebec to put them in a tie with the mighty NDP which still means zero seats. This leads me to believe there is a lot of soft support for for the CPC. It seems Canadians are a lot more willing to threaten the Liberals with the Conservatives than they are to actually vote for them.

This is further supported by two more surprising numbers. That 55% of Canadians say they won't consider voting for the Liberals in the next election is no surprise under the circumstances. What is surprising is that 50% say they won't consider voting for the Conservatives in the next election. Perhaps even more surprising is that, even after weeks of what you could be excused for believing (erroneously) is the worst political scandal in Canadian history, 48% say they still trust Mr. Dithers more than Stephen Harper while only 46% take the opposite position.

Some of you may remember this paragraph from an earlier post of mine.

On top of the factionalization, there are well deserved grumblings about Harper's leadership after he led the party to a major defeat in the last election. Yes Pollyanna, I said major defeat. The scandal plagued Liberal government was an object of derision in most of the country. Paul Martin, ever since he took over the party was stumbling and lurching around like someone on a six month binge while wearing a sign saying "Beat Me Like a Rented Mule". Instead of what should have been an easy victory, the best Stephen Harper could do was to lose 5% off the combined Alliance/PC vote from the previous election. That's not a minor electoral setback. That's a 32 ounce can of Whup Ass.

It appears not much has changed. Canadians still don't trust Stevie Wonder Wanker and the refugees from the Alliance.

It's easy to see why Harper might want to have an election in a hurry. If the Gomery inquiry absolves the current leadership of the Liberals in its final report, Harper looks like an opportunistic twit, SCRAC numbers continue to fall and the Liberal numbers rebound slightly as voters have the summer to get over being pissed off. And there goes the ball game.

There are only two problems with Harper wanting a quick election. First, an astounding 87% of the electorate want the Gomery inquiry finished before an election. The electorate is in a surly mood and is likely to severely spank anyone who forces a premature election. Second, the Conservatives need some help from the other opposition parties to bring down the government.

If there is any intelligence floating around the NDP these days, they should be in no hurry for an election. Their numbers are way up in BC (13%) and Saskatchewan/Manitoba (12%). The NDP is in a position to make some significant gains if they play their cards right. First, ~~Odie~~ Smilin' Jack has to convince voters in Ontario and the Maritimes that he's not an idiot. Then he has to push the idea that, with the Liberal shift to the right, there are two conservative parties nationally and neither one of them can be trusted with the family jewels. He has to make the point that the NDP is the only party that doesn't have a bunch of baggage. He also has to have a vision for the country and be able to articulate it. This is a tall order for a party with a leadership that has been a black hole from which no light has escaped in years but it can be done. However, it will take time so Layton has exactly the opposite problem Harper has - time is on Layton's side. He needs to stress that he is listening to the people telling him they don't want an election before fall.

Of course what Harper really needs is the support of the Bloc. The SCRACheads can't bring down the government without the support of the entire Blochead caucus. It really doesn't make much difference to Duceppe when the election is held. The result for him will the the same in six months as it will tomorrow - the Bloc will win at least the same number of seats as they have now and probably a few more. Duceppe will decide the timing of the election on the basis of what is best for the Bloc not what is best for the Conservatives. I don't claim to have any insight into why the Bloc does anything. But my guess is that the decision will be based on whether the Bloc figures a minority Conservative government, which would be the recipient of a general, non-specific hatred from Quebecers, or a minority Liberal government, which would be the recipient of a very specific and profound hatred from Quebecers, would be more useful to the separatists' goals. My bet would be on the Liberals.

The election could be called tomorrow but my best bet is that we won't see one until fall unless someone does something really stupid or it looks like the Gomery inquiry is going south for the Liberals.

When News is No News

2005-04-12T13:46:00.000-05:00

I just walked in in time to see a great TV expose on what is on George Bush's iPod. Great t'underin' jeebus but it never ceases to amaze me how obsessed Americans are with the trivialities of their ~~deities~~ presidents' lives. I'm surprised I haven't seen an expose on what colour toilet paper the White House buys and why.

Note to US media: If you guys spent the same amount of energy on investigating Admiral Bunnypants' policies as you did on investigating the contents of his effen iPod, the world might not be in such a mess.

Note to Canadian media: If you can't think of any more relevant stories to cover than what's on foreign politicians' iPods, give me a call - I have a dozen or so for you.

During the old Roman Empire they used to throw christians to the lions. Under the new Roman Empire they throw lions to the christians. The more things change.....

Peak Oil Update

2005-04-07T21:44:00.000-05:00

There is an interesting diary by Jerome a Paris over at Daily Kos covering a number of issues including peak oil. There are some interesting links in the comments as well as the diary itself. I get the sense a lot of people are sitting around doing the equivalent of riding an elevator while watching for the cable to break. An understandable reaction but not a very productive one.

The Yanks Lose Another One

2005-04-07T10:00:00.000-05:00

Another international trade ruling his gone in favour of Canada.

Canadian pork producers claim victory in trade fight with U.S.

Canada's pork producers claimed victory Wednesday after the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled that exports of live hogs to the U.S. do not injure the American market....

The ITC voted 5-0 that Canadian hogs do not hurt the American market. The vote means roughly $25 million in duties collected must be returned by the end of April. Those duties had been collected since October 2004.

The US must now be about zero for umpteen at winning it's claims of unfair competition from Canadians. This vote wasn't even close. What remains to be seen is whether the US will abide by the ruling or ignore it as usual.

Perhaps it is time for our southern neighbours to stop believing their own propaganda about being able to do everything faster, better and more efficiently than anybody else. The notion that the only way anyone else can can compete equally with Americans at anything is by cheating somehow has gotten awfully old.

Mr. Fit, meet Mr. Shan: Peak Oil Blues Part 1

2005-04-05T16:12:00.000-05:00

I have always been a great supporter of self sufficiency at every level from family to country. Yes, I was somewhat involved in the 'back to the land' movement in the 60s and 70s - some friends of mine had a rather nice rural commune in Oregon back then. It's also part of the reason why Mrs. M. and I haven't lived in a city for over 25 years - there are many other reasons but that is part of it.

I recently discovered another magazine dedicated to sustainable living called simply Back Home which I have been picking up because of a series they have been running on building a DYI wind turbine (ok - I like a challenge). The latest edition contains an article by James Howard Kunstler called Global Oil Production Peak. (The editors have made this article available in pdf format.) So I thought I would pull together a couple of other Kunstler articles and tackle a major issue of the day.

Kunstler has been accused of being overly pessimistic and gloomy about the future. That's not surprising given the emphasis on state sponsored scientism by the Bush regime. Not being overly fond of religion (he once said "Religion is a kind of low-grade showbiz for that half of the nation under the median IQ") hasn't improved his standing with the Theopublicans either. Saying things the petro-jihadists don't like doesn't mean he's wrong.

So what is "peak oil"? I'll let Kunstler explain that himself.

The few Americans who are even aware there is a gathering global energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That core states that we don't have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems.

The term "global oil production peak" means that the time will come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given year, and after that production will inexorably decline. It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve. Peak is the top of the curve, the halfway point of the world's all-time total fossil fuel endowment.

The best estimates of when this peak will actually happen are somewhere between now and 2010. In the past year, after revelations that Shell Oil misstated its reserves, and the Saudi Arabians proved incapable of goosing up their production, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time peak production.

It will change everything about how we live.

Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly under stood by the public and even by our leaders.

The first is that this is going to be a permanent energy crisis. It's not going to go away this time. We will not over come it. We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed conditions.

The second explains the first: no combination of alternative fuels or systems will allow us to keep living the way we do. They will not even allow us to keep running a substantial fraction of what we are currently running. This is particularly true of the so-called hydrogen economy. There isn't going to be any hydrogen economy. The idea is a fraud. It represents the wishful think thinking of American leaders in politics, business, and even technology. I call this the "Jimmy Cricket Syndrome,” the notion that wishing for something makes it come true.

The peak oil idea is based on the theory that oil is a finite resource. It was created by certain organic and tectonic processes millions of years ago, and there was only so much of it formed - a lot, but only so much. The earth does not have a "creamy nougat center" of inexhaustible "inorganic" oil, as some of the wishful would like to think.

This is not about running out of oil. There will always be some oil left. That isn't the problem. The problem is that we have skimmed off the cream (so to speak) in the form of easily accesible, sweet, light crude.

The oil that remains, meanwhile, the second half of Earth's all-time total endowment, is the oil that is harder to get out of the ground. The first half was easy to get to. Most of it was accessible on land, in places where the weather is pretty good and the working conditions favorable - in Texas, for instance. Much of the remaining oil lies in forbidding places, in the Arctic, or deep under the ocean. It will be much more difficult and expensive to get out. Quite a bit of it will never be extracted because it will take more than a barrel of oil in energy to extract a barrel of oil.

Kunstler believes that the implications of reaching peak oil are immense and no part of our everyday lives will be exempt. While I don't completely agree with all of Kuntler's predictions, most of them are plausible.

Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life - not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense - you name it.

But we aren't just talking about oil here.

To aggravate matters, American natural-gas production is also declining, at five percent a year, despite frenetic new drilling, and with the potential of much steeper declines ahead. Because of the oil crises of the 1970s, the nuclear-plant disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the acid-rain problem, the US chose to make gas its first choice for electric-power generation. The result was that just about every power plant built after 1980 has to run on gas. Half the homes in America are heated with gas. To further complicate matters, gas isn't easy to import. Here in North America, it is distributed through a vast pipeline network. Gas imported from overseas would have to be compressed at minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker ships and unloaded (re-gasified) at special terminals, of which few exist in America. Moreover, the first attempts to site new terminals have met furious opposition because they are such ripe targets for terrorism.

Large scale instability figures prominently in his predictions. Some of this instability will be geopolitical and military.

Because demand will stay high, while supply steadily drops, there will be instability in the markets and probably a lot of international military mischief as nations jockey for control over the oil-producing regions. That jockeying is already underway. The war in Iraq has been an attempt by America to insure its access to Middle East oil, not only to the oil in Iraq itself but to influence and moderate the behavior of the two adjoining major oil-producing states, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Other nations may also seek to insure their access to oil, and that could mean trouble.

China started out with much less oil than did the U.S. China has been explored thoroughly (the Communists didn't have to economically justify their exploration, so they drilled everywhere). China has less oil now than the U.S. has left, and they have ramped up the world's latest (perhaps last) great industrial economy. Sooner or later, they are liable to "reach out" for oil elsewhere. The Chinese army can walk into the oil-producing regions of central Asia. We are currently operating military bases in several former Soviet republics adjoining Afghanistan. However, it would be suicidal for the U.S. to engage the Chinese army in an Asian land war. If the Chinese march a little farther, they can even walk into the Middle East....

Nor, as Kunstler noted above, can we count on alternative energy to solve the problems caused by reaching peak oil.

No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements.

The widely touted "hydrogen economy" is a particularly cruel hoax. We are not going to replace the US automobile and truck fleet with vehicles run on fuel cells. For one thing, the current generation of fuel cells is largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural gas. The other way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would be electrolysis of water using power from hundreds of nuclear plants. Apart from the dim prospect of our building that many nuclear plants soon enough, there are also numerous severe problems with hydrogen's nature as an element that present forbidding obstacles to its use as a replacement for oil and gas, especially in storage and transport.

Wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with "renewables" are also unrealistic. Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face not only the enormous problem of scale but the fact that the components require substantial amounts of energy to manufacture and the probability that they can't be manufactured at all without the underlying support platform of a fossil-fuel economy. We will surely use solar and wind technology to generate some electricity for a period ahead but probably at a very local and small scale.

Virtually all "biomass" schemes for using plants to create liquid fuels cannot be scaled up to even a fraction of the level at which things are currently run. What's more, these schemes are predicated on using oil and gas "inputs" (fertilizers, weed-killers) to grow the biomass crops that would be converted into ethanol or bio-diesel fuels. This is a net energy loser - you might as well just burn the inputs and not bother with the biomass products. Proposals to distill trash and waste into oil by means of thermal depolymerization depend on the huge waste stream produced by a cheap oil and gas economy in the first place.

Indeed the economy will be severely damaged by the consequences of reaching peak oil production. Although some of us would question if all of the consequences are bad.

The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the public realizes. If the "level of service" (as traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart....

The global oil peak will eventually put an end to activities that have become "normal" in American life, such as easy motoring, commercial aviation for the masses, national chain-store shopping, theme park tourism, centralized schooling, cheap groceries, and much more. Peak oil will bring an end to globalism as a general proposition because there will be no more cheap long-range transport. Anyway, friction over oil supplies will probably alter our trade relations with the countries to whom we have "outsourced" so much of our manufacturing.

Food production is one of the areas that Kunstler expects to be hardest hit.

Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high tech, not "services" like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming. This is no doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work....

Food production will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for decades. We can anticipate the re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring class.

Most consumers have no idea of the cost of producing the raw ingredients for what winds up on the supermarket shelves. Nor do they understand how much of that cost is for items related to oil prices. The operation of a tractor is incredibly expensive. A 190 hp tractor - not large by today's standards - dragging a cultivator will suck up about 14 imperial gallons of diesel fuel per hour. That works out to around 1 litre per minute. During that hour, it will cultivate approximately 20 acres . At 50 cents a litre, that works out to over $1.50 per acre which jumps to over $3.00/acre at $1.00 per litre. A large industrial grain farm will consist of 3000 to 10,000 acres each of which will have some piece of equipment dragged over it at least twice a year. Do the math yourself.

And all we have talked about so far is fuel for the tractor. There are many other fuel consuming items on a farm. There are also oil inputs into engine oil and grease. Agricultural chemicals contain oil derivatives as well as requiring energy to make them as do tires. Not to mention the manufacture of the implements themselves. To make matters worse, many of the expenses of farming are front end loaded. You still have the costs of fertilizing and seeding with no guarantee you will see a crop at all.

Industrial livestock production is no different. Gone are the days on grandpa's farm where there were a dozen hogs curled up in the straw during the winter and running around in the mud all summer. Modern hog barns with 2-3000 oinkers are very energy (and capital) intensive. The same is true of cattle feed lots.

Of course you not only have to haul inputs onto the farm you have to haul the finished products somewhere to sell them. Semi-trailer units are only slightly less thirsty than the above mentioned tractor. A tractor hauling a 96 foot trailer rated at 50,000 lbs gcw traveling normal highway speeds drinks about 12 gallons per hour as opposed to 14 for its agricultural brother - roughly 5 miles/gallon. Of course agricultural products are not the only ones facing this problem.

The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not survive far into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels" won't be such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The national chain stores' 12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily be interrupted by military contests over oil and by internal conflict in the nations that have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods, because they, too, will be struggling with similar issues of energy famine and all the disorders that go with it.

Instability will not be restricted to international rivalries. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that all this upheavel will have a profound effect domestically.

Before long, suburbia will fail us. We made the ongoing development of it the basis of our economy, and when we have to stop making more of it, the bottom will fall out of our economy. That is already happening, by the way, and the process will accelerate as the air goes out of the housing bubble. The air will go out of the housing bubble because it was sustained by unprecedented amounts of supernaturally cheap credit...

The failure of suburbia as a useful living arrangement will lead to a fantastic loss of hallucinated "wealth".” McHouses far from any town or city bought for a half a million are likely to lose much of their value. All types of suburban real estate will hemorrhage value: retail and office as well as McHouses. There will be a fight over the table scraps of the 20th century. The subdivisions are likely to become the slums of the future; the strip malls will be our salvage yards...

All large-scale enterprises will have trouble surviving the long emergency of the coming global energy crisis...
Many of the fears expressed since 9/11 about the coming of an American police state may end up being misplaced. The federal government may be lucky if it can answer the phones in ten years, let alone keep track of citizen's activities...

Life in the U.S. will become profoundly and intensely local. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil and gas-based "inputs:’ we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and to do it at smaller scale, more labor intensively. This raises extremely difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work.... Vocational niches will evaporate as whole industries wither away. There will be a lot of economic losers. A whole new social class will emerge: the formerly middle class. They will be angry and bewildered over the loss of their "entitlements" to the American Dream. They may vote for leaders who promise to bring back the "good old days:’ (They won't be able to.) These masses of disentitled people may enter into neofeudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. Their labor will be needed. Or they may simply seize that land - which does not cancel the possibility for an eventual neofeudal outcome; it only suggests a period of turmoil in ownership.

I feel better now. Don't you? Seriously, there is a crisis in the offing. When it will happen and how quickly things will spiral downward are still items we can only speculate on. Obviously, many of Kunstler's predictions are not short term concerns. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be concerns.

Before some wingnut decides to show up and attempts to subvert the discussion from the subject as a whole into a debate over just when peak oil production will occur, it really doesn't matter. Peak oil will occur and that fact is far more important than whether it happened last year or won't happen for another 5 to 10 years. The only difference the timing makes is in how long we have to prepare to deal with the consequences of the event.

What we have been doing simply is not working, Doing more of what we have been doing is not going to produce a different set of results. Time is not our friend. If we begin to make make changes in our attitudes, expectations and lifestyles now, the transition to this much different future will be relatively painless. At least relatively painless compared to what it will be like if we don't read the writing on the wall until our backs are up against it.

My apologies in this piece for abusing the copyright of Back Home Magazine, Rolling Stone via Truthout and James Howard Kunstler. My time is short and I needed to lay the groundwork as quickly as possible. There will be subsequent pieces in this series addressing things we can do to avoid the worst of the unfolding events. I am not sure when these post might appear. Please keep in mind my erratic posting warning.

Upcoming

2005-04-04T09:11:00.000-05:00

I'm working on a series called Peak Oil Blues. Hope to have Part One up Tuesday or Wednesday. I can pretty much guarantee it won't be a fun read.

Kicking the Habit

2005-04-02T23:29:00.000-06:00

Wow. 48 hours without being on the internet. And barely a newscast to boot. I haven't done that in a year and a half. It's amazing how much work you can get done in the real world when you aren't hanging out in the cyberworld.

Stranger yet, the world did not come to an end, the sky did not fall, the sun still rose in the east and the level of stupity in the world did not appreciably increase.

Neo-luddites of the world! Arise! You have nothing to lose but your bad posture, your carpal tunnel syndrome and 20 pounds.

Sorry about that. It must have been the fresh air.

About Bloody Time

2005-03-31T10:28:00.000-06:00

It has finally happened. Someone in the Kloset Konservative party actually ~~be still my beating heart~~ got off his ass and did something.

Canada adds sanctions on U.S. imports

Canada is stepping up action against an illegal U.S. trade measure known as the Byrd amendment by slapping sanctions on some U.S. imports.

The announcement of a 15 per cent surtax on cigarettes, oysters and live swine from the United States came Thursday just as the European Union took similar measures.

"For the last four years, Canada and a number of other countries have repeatedly urged the United States to repeal the Byrd Amendment," said International Trade Minister Jim Peterson in a statement....

The other complainants are the European Union, Brazil, Chile, India, Japan, Mexico and South Korea.

Beginning May 1, the EU is adding additional duties of up to 15 per cent on such U.S. products as paper, textiles, machinery and farm produce.

Look for more on this story from the usual supects.

Warning: Erratic Posting Ahead

2005-03-31T09:32:00.000-06:00

The guideline in blogging is that, to be successful, you need to post an absolute minimum of two or three good posts a week. Most successful bloggers post at least once a day. I have rarely met the daily"standard" and it is about to get a lot worse.

This is the beginning of the busy season for our business. Within the next week or two, I will be working 60 - 80 hour 7 day weeks and that will continue for the next 6 months. In addition to that, we are also doing some extensive renovations to our house. To say that this will have an negative effect on my blogging time is well past an understatement.

I was feeling so overwhelmed by the work in front of me that I decided a few weeks ago to shut down the blog. However, I have changed my mind on a preemptive closure. I will try to keep things going and will not shut down unless lack of time and/or traffic make it unavoidable. There will be times when I can knock off a post or two in a day but there may well be other times when I won't post for a week or 10 days. Sorry but that's the hassle of a seasonal business.

This will also give me an opportunity to consider different options for the future. Some of the options I'm looking at are:

1) Continuing to do the same kind of broad based advocacy I have been doing here. This despite increasingly questioning its value and an increasing reluctance to make open ended commitments of significant resources to projects which may or may not produce some vague, unspecified results at some nebulous future time.

2) Narrowing the focus so that I can concentrate on doing more, better posts on fewer subjects.

3) Not blogging at all and focusing on local issues where I can produce more tangible, timely results some time before the crows turn white.

4) Resigning from the position of being 'my brother's keeper' on the grounds that I have had the position quite long enough and it's time to concentrate on things that directly benefit me and mine.

I'm sure the correct option will reveal itself in due time.

Nothing New Here

2005-03-29T10:14:00.000-06:00

This Can't Be Happening! has made a not so new discovery (via My Blahg News).

Even U.S. corporations like Canada's national health plan

News that General Motors is planning on trying to force its unionized workers to agree to a give-back of health benefits--possibly including having to contribute for the first time to their insurance premiums and for coverage of their families--raises an interesting and potentially embarrassing political question.

For the same General Motors (like Ford and Chrysler) has for years been shifting production from Michigan and other venues to Ontario, across the Detroit River, to take advantage of Canada’s national health program, which virtually eliminates health care from the cost of production. For GM, the difference is about $1400 per vehicle produced.

The interesting thing is that while GM, like all American corporations, insists that a Canadian-style single-payer health system, where everyone in the country gets free physician and hospital care, and where hospitals and doctors are paid by the government, is a bad idea, and not workable, over the border they and the other big auto makers, along with other U.S. corporations, are saying something entirely different....

Consider this letter, sent two years ago by GM Canada's CEO Michael Grimaldi, and co-signed by Canadian Autoworkers Union president Buzz Hargrave, to a Crown Commission considering reforms of Canada's 35-year-old national health program.
Publicly funded healthcare thus accounts for a significant portion of Canada's overall labour cost advantage in auto assembly, versus the U.S., which in turn has been a significant factor in maintaining and attracting new auto investment in Canada."

The auto company CEO and his union counterpart went on to tell the commission that it was "vitally important that the publicly funded health care system be preserved and renewed, on the existing principles of universality, accessibility, portability, comprehensiveness and public administration."

There is nothing new here. The Registered Nurses Association of Ontario has a very informative article on their web site.

Straight Talk: Medicare is Good for Business

Canadian business leaders are speaking out in support of Medicare. Their message: Medicare is good for business and good for the Canadian economy! Not only do they realize the significant economic advantage a public system offers, they also recognize the impact a public system has on the health and well-being of citizens.

“It’s a strategic advantage for Canada.” Michael Grimaldi, President General Motors Canada, September 21, 2002. GM Canada saves over $6 per hour per worker compared to American auto manufacturers.

The article continues by listing a number of advantages, including competitive advantages, of our health care system. Of course I don't suppose that facts will have any impact on the wingnuts out there who have already made up their fuzzy ideological minds that they hate Canada's health care system and would rather see it replaced by the substantially more expensive and less effective American system.

Finding a Siver Lining

2005-03-29T09:44:00.000-06:00

I would like to say I haven't been posting because of work but that would only be partially true. The majority of it has to do with being to angry over some of the stupidity over the last few weeks that I can't even write a good rant without it turning into a shrieking diatribe. In the interests of my blood pressure, I'm going to try a couple of simple practical posts instead.

On of the few benefits to come from the whole Schiavo mess is that people are getting interested in Living Wills. The "it can't happen in this country" mentality has surfaced as usual. Maybe it can't happen in this country now. With an upswing in political and religious extremism, that doesn't mean it can't happen here say 10 years from now. Wills and Living Wills are not the same thing and having one doesn't mean you have the other.

Are living wills legal in Canada?
Actually, the phrase "living will" is not a legal term in Canada. But it is used to describe the legal directives each province sanctions that deal with your medical care wishes should you be unable to communicate them.

Do I need a living will if I have a last will and testament?
Yes, your last will and testament deals with matters of property. Your living will deals with your health and personal care. Your last will and testament only kicks in after you die. Living wills are used during life and may be modified by the declarant whenever circumstances change.

Everyone should have both regardless of your age or financial resources. Dying without a will in this country usually pretty much means that you are turning over all of your assets to the government. Or, at least you will have by the time the smoke clears. You hand over enough money to the government while you're alive. Why would you want to give them the rest of it after you die? If you have a family (especially with dependents) and don't have a will, pick up a big felt marker, go to the mirror, and write the word "idiot" across your forehead and then go get a one.

Even if you put aside 15 years of pain and suffering for everyone involved in the Schiavo case, Michael's legal bills have been around $400k and his lawyer has been working free for the last couple of years. Add in what the family has spent and the cost of court case after court case and you have a bill that runs well into the millions. Do you really want to risk being the centre of something like that when even a couple of sentences scribbled on the back of an envelope might have been enough to prevent it?

No one, regardless of age, wants to think about dying or being reduced to a vegetable. Think about it once now and get it over with. This isn't that expensive to deal with through a lawyer. If you don't have the money, you can do something yourself that will reduce or eliminate any problems. There are inexpensive Will and Living Will kits available over the internet. A company called Self Counsel Press puts out a whole series are what are generally valuable books and kits on everything from writing a business plan to prepaing a will. These are available at any decent size bookstore for $25 or less.

Anything you do is better than nothing.

Futility Does Have Its Advantages.

2005-03-25T00:28:00.000-06:00

I have always been a great fan of Billmon at the Whiskey Bar. It was absolutely amazing to me that anyone was capable of writing 2 or 3 long, well written and researched posts a day. Given he has a wife, family and job, it was all the more remarkable an accomplishment and less than surprising when, after 1500 posts in a year and a half, he appeared to burn out last summer.

He reopened the Whiskey Bar a few months back with a new style and I could not have been happier even though I missed his original writing.

Today Billmon finally posted a lengthy explanation of why he quit and returned to blogging. I'm not going to bother with a quote and attempting a paraphrase would be like my 12 year old nephew attempting to imitate Michael Jordan.

His post resonated with me because I have been contemplating my own 40 years of political activism lately and realizing that, on a good day, the best I might claim to have accomplished is that the world might not be quite as bad a place as it would be had I done nothing. As I commented elsewhere today, that really doesn't seem like much of a return on the investment.

It is a sobering post and well worth the read.

The Shallow End of the Gene Pool

2005-03-23T23:31:00.000-06:00

This my first, and I intend it to be my only, post related to the Terri Schiavo case. I generally refuse to discriminate among politicians. Those who know me know that I generally hold all politicians in pretty much the same level of disdain. I have often been heard to state that all politicians, regardless of party, fall somewhere between the AIDS virus and sludge-worms on the evolutionary scale. I have recently become aware that I only feel this magnanimous about Canadian politicians.

Living in the boonies in a five channel universe, I am usually spared the more wretched political excesses of our southern neighbours. After being exposed to Tom DeLay in connection with this matter, I can say with absolute certainty that Tom DeLay could not rise to the level of the AIDS virus on the evolutionary scale if you duct taped the sorry sonuvabitch to the nose cone of a Titan rocket.

If the US congress wanted to do something of value, instead of inflicting itself on Terri Schiavo they should have passed legislation that prohibits DeLay, any of his relatives, anyone who ever voted for him and any of their relatives from ever being allowed to reproduce. That would constitute legislation in the public interest.

The existence of the Republican Party is conclusive proof of the fallacy of Intelligent Design.

The More Things Change

2005-03-23T12:35:00.000-06:00

With apologies to Billmon. All emphasis added.

Many years ago, in a Chinese History class, an Asian Studies professor told us a story of the initial contact between China and England. I have added to the story for clarity but it went roughly like this:

In the late 1500's, China was still the centre of the of the universe, at least to those in east Asia. While diplomatic and trade relations among European states had taken a form we might recognize today, that was not the case in east Asia. China was so overwhelmingly dominant that what existed was a system of tribute. "Tribute" was essentially a bribe paid to the Emporer which, combined with a suitably subservient attitude and pledge of allegiance, might pursuade the Emporer to allow your puny, insignificant state to continue to exist.

China had relatively little contact with Europeans at this time. China was basically a fortress committed to defending itself against the foreign barbarians (and anyone who wasn't Chinese was a barbarian) prowling the edges of the empire. Chinese citizens were prohibited from leaving the country without the permission of the Emporer. Those who did and returned were executed to prevent the importation of foreign ideas that might disturb the internal harmony of the Empire. A couple of countries like the Dutch and Portugese had requested and received permission to establish small trading concessions in the country but their activities were carefully controlled and contact with the Chinese people was limited.

It was into this environment that Elizabeth I dispatched a couple of envoys to request the establishment of European style full trade and diplomatic relations with China. The Imperial court had no idea how to respond to such a request never, apparently, having been addressed in such a manner before. The envoys were kept cooling their heels for a couple of years while the court pondered its response. (One might suspect that retribution for such insolence may have played a part in that.) Eventually the Emporer replied that "The Emporer of the Celestial Kingdom would be pleased to accept tribute from the Queen of the red haired barbarians."

There is no record of the reaction from Elizabeth.

China was basically a fortress committed to defending itself against the foreign barbarians prowling the edges of the empire.

Supposed NAFTA summit with Bush now security focused

Ottawa — Security issues will trump improving NAFTA at the first-ever joint meeting of U.S. President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Paul Martin and Mexican President Vicente Fox in Texas on Wednesday.

In Ottawa on Monday, senior government officials provided reporters with a background briefing on the summit, which the prime minister had said was organized to discuss improving NAFTA.

"I raised with President Bush when he was here that there are a number of areas within NAFTA that really require looking at," the PM told reporters in Fredericton in January. "The constant winning of panel battles - in the case of softwood lumber, for example - really does indicate the need for a better dispute settlement mechanism.

"What I said is, 'Listen, there are gaps in NAFTA and they've got to be fixed.'"

However, the dispute resolution mechanism in NAFTA was not mentioned as part of the official discussions the three leaders will have.

"Tribute" was essentially a bribe paid to the Emporer which, combined with a suitably subservient attitude and pledge of allegiance, might pursuade the Emporer to allow your puny, insignificant state to continue to exist.

Today, the lumber industry is the principal target. Tomorrow, we can expect these tactics to be applied to everything from energy to agriculture, and ultimately to strip the protections from the free-trade agreement itself.

First, a senior Commerce Department official has formally declared that when the administration finally loses its cases before the free-trade panels, after exhausting all reasonable (and some highly questionable) legal tricks, it will simply refuse to pay back the money illegally collected -- now more than $4-billion Canadian -- unless and until the Canadian government agrees to meet the demands of the U.S. industry. This is indisputably in direct contravention of the NAFTA and amounts to nothing less than a unilateral abrogation of the central provisions of the free-trade agreement. Second, the administration is beginning to distribute these and other illegally collected duties to its own industries as a bounty, in direct defiance of the rulings of the WTO, leaving other countries no choice but to retaliate. Congress is blamed but experts say the Bush administration could have, but has not, used its discretion to interpret the offending legislation not to apply to Canada and Mexico.

Second, the administration is beginning to distribute these and other illegally collected duties to its own industries as a bounty, in direct defiance of the rulings of the WTO, leaving other countries no choice but to retaliate. Congress is blamed but experts say the Bush administration could have, but has not, used its discretion to interpret the offending legislation not to apply to Canada and Mexico.

Third, in a highly cynical manoeuvre, the U.S. Trade Representative has taken the unprecedented step of ordering the Commerce Department to amend the trade orders to overrule the NAFTA-panel decision (that found that imports from Canada had not been shown to injure, or threaten to injure, U.S. producers).

Finally, the U.S. industry has pulled out all the stops in its campaign to evade the NAFTA tribunals. It is threatening to challenge the very constitutionality of the NAFTA panel process, enlisting the support, for a fee, of two former attorneys-general who, conveniently forgetting that the Justice Department certified to Congress that the system was perfectly constitutional, are prepared to argue that it is unthinkable that Americans would ever be subject to decisions in which foreign judges take part. If successful, this challenge could demolish the very provisions of NAFTA without which Canada (and Mexico) would never have ratified the agreement.

As U.S. senators have bragged, the purpose of all these actions is to demonstrate to Canada that it does no good to prove in the FTA panels that the U.S. actions are capricious and illegal. The only escape for the Canadians is to surrender to U.S. industry demands for an agreement to limit imports of lumber from Canada on the most unfavourable terms. Only then will the United States be prepared to return some (if not all) of the illegally collected duties.

The envoys were kept cooling their heels for a couple of years while the court pondered its response.

Martin sets modest goals on trade, security for Three Amigos summit

OTTAWA (CP) - Paul Martin, who came to power with big ideas on foreign policy, appears to be lowering his sights as he prepares for a summit with the presidents of the Untied States and Mexico.

The meeting Wednesday in Texas among the prime minister, George W. Bush and Vicente Fox will be heavy on trade policy, border security and a host of so-called quality of life issues like environmental protection. But Canadian officials say there won't be any "big bang" announcements on any of those fronts....

Fox is a lame-duck president, nearing the end of his term and unable to seek re-election. Martin is hemmed in by the realities of minority government in Ottawa.

"Bush is the only one of the three with a lot of political capital," said Sands. "But he's pretty well determined that he's spending it on things other than North American issues."...

Instead the aim is to beaver away at some "very pragmatic, very practical work" in the hope of building for the future, said one senior source.

The Imperial court had no idea how to respond to such a request never, apparently, having been addressed in such a manner before....Eventually the Emporer replied that "The Emporer of the Celestial Kingdom would be pleased to accept tribute from the Queen of the red haired barbarians."

Martin will press Bush at three-way summit
Sources tell CBC News that Bush was not enthusiastic about requests from both guests for some private time with the U.S. president. However he did relent and agree to give them each a 20-minute one-on-one meeting when they are at his ranch in Crawford.

...combined with a suitably subservient attitude...

North American leaders meet Wednesday to talk about closer ties

WASHINGTON (CP) - The leaders of Canada, the United States and Mexico sit down this week in Texas to talk about more North American co-operation on security and economic issues amid a contentious question - how close is too close?

A prominent three-country commission last week proposed a sweeping vision of integration that has nationalists worried about a steady drain on Canada's ability to control its resources and make its own decisions.

But the panel's proposals for a security perimeter around the continent, a common biometric border pass for travellers, an energy strategy and identical tariffs on goods, make sound sense to many others anxious to guarantee Canada's prosperity.

In a world of new terrorist threats and growing economic competition from powerhouses like China, expanding the North American relationship is critical, they argue.

...and pledge of allegiance, might pursuade the Emporer to allow your puny, insignificant state to continue to exist

Bed the elephant

We need much closer integration with the United States -- before it's too late

ALLAN GOTLIEB, WENDY DOBSON AND MICHAEL HART

For more than 70 years, Canadians have profited from a close and mutually beneficial economic and security relationship with the United States, to the point that we assume it will never end. To make such an assumption is a grave mistake. In present global circumstances, nothing can be taken for granted....

Rightly or wrongly, the U.S. no longer regards its northern border benignly. In a nation grown anxious about when and where terrorists may strike next, the border now looms as a point of vulnerability rather than a source of strength, a perception increased by the Martin government's decision not to participate in the ballistic missile defence initiative. Such a perception cannot be allowed to continue. It undermines the very basis of Canada's security and prosperity: cross-border trade and investment drive our economy; U.S. innovation and entrepreneurship propel our own; the U.S. military provides a blanket of security; U.S. intelligence is critical to our own; U.S. popular culture dominates because Canadians choose it; and U.S. warm weather cossets millions of Canadians each winter. The U.S. presence pervades every aspect of Canadian life....

We should also adopt a vision of a common North American economic space, something the tri-national task force chairmen also recommended. Both countries now have an enormous stake in each other's welfare. Five specific issues demand urgent attention: completing the free trade project by eliminating border tariffs entirely and adopting a common external tariff; reducing the continued impact of the border in segregating the two markets by eliminating some of the tasks performed at the border and moving others away from it; ameliorating the impact of regulatory differences in conditioning cross-border trade and investment; abolishing the nefarious trade remedies (anti-dumping and countervailing duties) that scar our economic relationship, and replacing them with a single continental competition policy and rules about subsidy practices;...

Apparently, 400 years really doesn't change much when it comes to the practice of empire.

UPDATE:
Pogge weighed in on a related piece of this while I was away.
As did Timmy here and here.
Maybe I should take a sick day more often.

Update 1:
Updated to repair formatting.

Taking A Break

2005-03-22T10:20:00.000-06:00

I've been trying to work through some *&^%# cold/flu bug with a new symptom de jour every day for the last week. And I still feel like crap. I have gone from getting work done and feeling angry and snarky to getting nothing done and feeling frustrated and bitchy so I'm going to take a break for a couple of days and try to get over this thing.

I was planning a post mortem on the Conservative ~~party~~ convention and something on the Texas meeting between two lame ducks and a lame dork to discuss the future of North America but that will have to wait while I recharge my righteous indignation.

I think I'll just take my own advice and curl up with a bottle of rum. It doesn't do anything to fight the bug but at least you don't give a damn if you're sick.

Mr. Pot Meet Mr. Kettle Meet Mr. Pot

2005-03-20T09:30:00.000-06:00

It's always vaguely hilarious when the leadership of SCRAC, a party built on a web of lies, attempts to question the ethics of other politicians. It's even funnier when it involves Peter MacKay, the guy who narrowly beats out Ujjal Dosanjh as Canadian poster boy for zero integrity. Winnipeg talk radio host Charles Adler nails MacKay's hide to the wall in Saturday Free Press op-ed.

...Yes, it's true that Mackay's father was a hell of a parliamentarian. And it's true that MacKay was the leader of the Progressive Conservative party for a few months after having done a deal with a devil known as David Orchard. That was the deal that stole the leadership from Jim Prentice, the Albertan who was too Albertan for so-called progressives inside the party.

It's true that Brian Mulroney told MacKay to just go and cut the deal with Orchard and Tory spinners would clean up MacKay's political barn later. MacKay had been a guy who said he wouldn't cut a deal with Orchard. But he did. Part of the deal with Orchard was his intention to review Canada's free trade agreement with the United States. Nobody believed MacKay was sincere about that. Next to Mila, Free Trade was Brian Mulroney's favourite trophy, and MacKay would have done nothing to sever the umbilical cord that connects Belinda's boy toy to the Mulroney machine.

The first lie MacKay told Orchard in return for the kook votes at the PC leadership convention was that he would seriously review the party's position on free trade. The second lie was that he would not do a deal with Stephen Harper of the Alliance. The ink was barely dry on the document when MacKay and Harper started their mating dance. If Peter MacKay wants to have a substantive conversation about integrity in politics, he ought never to have that chat with himself.

History is what it is, and we know that the MacKay-Harper entente culminated with the PC party in a coffin and the new Conservative party on the coroner's slab. Every day in the life of Canada's Conservatives is a day labelled DOA. Every one of their leaders is hired to be fired, and today while many will go before the cameras and say they support their leader, off camera they will be wondering which husky will soon be designated as the lead dog after the next election....

And then it was Peter screaming "foul" when some of the SCRAC wing nuts tried to back out of the original deal providing for equal representation of all constituencies regardless of membership so they could stack the party with right wingers from the Social Credit-Reform -Alliance. These ass clowns can barely stop trying to screw each other over long enough for their leader to tell us how his party is going to bring integrity to government. And then they wonder why Canadians don't believe them.

Well SCRACheads, we already have that kind of integrity sitting on the government side of the Common House. As ethically challenged as the Kloset Konservatives are, they come with one big advantage. They don't have a built in collection of right wing extremists circling overhead like vultures. And that fact alone should be enough to insure we aren't going to see Stevie Wonder Wanker taking up residence at 24 Sussex Drive.

Nightmares

2005-03-18T13:56:00.000-06:00

The nightmare that has been causing Stephen Harper to wake up in a cold sweat is now real. The SCRAC policy convention is underway. Developments in the last week have caused both Greg and pogge to to comment on the fact that SCRAC isn't a big tent. No guys, it isn't a big tent. It's two small tents and unlikely to be anything else.

The two tents are populated by perennial losers joined in unholy matrimony in a marriage of convenience. (And these are same guys who think same sex marriage is gross.) The first tent is populated by the right wing extremists of the Social Credit-Reform-Alliance party. Knowing that their brand of extremism hasn't caught on in the rest of the country in 70 years and wasn't likely to do so any time soon, SCRAP went looking for a cloak of legitimacy by taking over the Progressive Conservative party. Unfortunately for them, putting a BMW logo on a Lada doesn't make the Lada a BMW. It just makes it a Lada with a lot of false advertising. Fortunately, most Canadians still recognize a Lada regardless of the insignia.

The Progressive Conservatives, tired of being exiled to the wilderness as a result of the mendacity of their former leader, Demon Spawn Mulroney, thought they could ride the tiger of extremism to political power. Somehow they expected they could could avoid the usual fate of those who ride a tiger - being eaten by it. Those former members of the PC party would do well to keep in mind the fate of the turtle in the story of the turtle and the scorpion.

There's a story about a turtle and a scorpion. The scorpion needs to cross the river and so he asks the turtle for a ride. The turtle says, "Are you crazy? If I let you get on my back, you'll sting me."

"Don't worry," said the scorpion. "If I do that, we would both drown in the river."

So the turtle gives him a ride. Halfway across the river, the scorpion stings the turtle. And as the poison starts to work and the turtle and scorpion start to sink into the river together, the turtle says, "Why did you do it? Now we're both going to die."

The scorpion, in his last few breaths, says, "I couldn't help it. It's my nature."

Now Harper is confronted with a party with so many factions the convention has become an exercise in herding cats. The wing nut faction has removed the duct tape. The Quebec wing of the party is angry. And the Red Tories who haven't already realized that they are in the wrong party are trying to hold back the tide of extremism.

On top of the factionalization, there are well deserved grumblings about Harper's leadership after he led the party to a major defeat in the last election. Yes Pollyanna, I said major defeat. The scandal plagued Liberal government was a object of derision in most of the country. Paul Martin, ever since he took over the party was stumbling and lurching around like someone on a six month binge while wearing a sign saying "Beat Me Like a Rented Mule". Instead of what should have been an easy victory, the best Stephen Harper could do was to lose 5% off the combined Alliance/PC vote from the previous election. That's not a minor electoral setback. That's a 32 ounce can of Whup Ass.

A likely outcome of this, and the best possible scenario in my view, is that Harper survives the convention but is forced into a situation where he has to either repudiate the views of a large part of the party in the interests of political expedience or run in the next election on an extremist platform in the interests of ideological purity. Now that's my idea of a win - win situation.

What continues to surprise me is the number of liberals who claim to want to see a strong conservative party in the country as if that is somehow going to automagically scare the Liberals straight. First there is a logic problem with that position. A SCRAC strong enough to scare the Liberals would have to be strong enough to actually win an election. As bad as the Liberals are, there are worse possibilities. A government by Wing Nuts-R-Us definitely qualifies as one of them.

The second problem with the idea of a strong alternative party is it misreads the last three decades of the Liberal Party's history. The Liberals do not have policies so much as they have a strategy - one that has served them well since the days of Lester Pearson. The Liberals simply stake out the middle ground of the political spectrum of the day and appropriate the policies of which ever party they identify as the biggest threat. They moved left under Trudeau to head off gains by the NDP. And they have slightly modified the strategy under Martin to move socially to the left to try to regain strength in Quebec while moving fiscally to the right to head off SCRAC leaving them as the Red Tory party of the day - loved by no one but, more importantly, not hated by enough people to throw them out of office.

An internecine death match between SCRAC factions is not something for liberals to lament. It's something to buy beer, popcorn and front row tickets for.

Dispatching Stephen Harper and his slithering of trolls back to a well deserved oblivion in the western wilderness is not the end of anything - it's only the beginning. Prior to the US election, Naomi Klein responded to claims that the Democratic Party and John Kerry weren't liberal enough by writing an article called Anybody but Bush - And then Let's Get Back to Work. The same thing is true here. First we make sure the Harper and his minions are not in a position to do the country any harm, then we go to work on the other guys.

Pack your bags. It's going to be a long road trip.

UPDATE:
I don't think I have ever done an update before posting an item but there have been additional developments while I was writing the above piece. Peter McKay is now furious with the convention that is stacked with right wing extremists.

Tory-Alliance merger in 'real jeopardy': MacKay

The deputy leader of the new federal Conservative party says the Tory-Alliance merger is in real jeopardy and is expressing second thoughts about helping to reunite the right.

Peter MacKay sounded that urgent tone today after some delegates to the party's founding policy convention voted to overturn a key principle in the deal to create the new party.

The Conservative party was born last year after an agreement to give equal weight at conventions to all ridings across the country ? no matter how many members the riding has.

MacKay said he and other Progressive Conservatives would never have agreed to merge with the Canadian Alliance without that guarantee.

The old PCs pushed for the deal because they were smaller in numbers than the Alliance and they feared being swamped by the Alliance's more conservative Western power base during future votes on its leadership and on policy issues.

But members at a policy workshop voted to overturn that idea today and give extra weight to ridings with more members. That prompted MacKay to blitz the hall in a furious attempt to defeat the motion when it comes up for a general vote on Saturday.

The irony of all this is that, if he hadn't been in such an unholy rush to sell out his own party, Peter McKay might possibly be prime minister today instead of being relegated to political history as Harper's punk. The Canadian public was much more comfortable with the policies of the old PC party than they are with the extremist riddled SCRAC. McKay and the PCs would have been a much more appealing alternative to most Canadians than Harper and the Alliance.

MORE:
Belinda Stronach is also miffed. One delegate to the SCRAC leadership convention said that Stronach was too liberal to even be a member of the Conservative party much less its leader. Then we have Craig Chandler commenting

Either we are going to become the old Progressives which, last time I looked, we dropped that word from our name. Or we're going to be a Conservative party.”

Belinda call Paul Martin.

BTW - Anybody want to buy a used ~~BMW~~ Lada?

I'm off to the store for more beer and popcorn.

Taming Blogger

2005-03-18T09:45:00.000-06:00

A number of people have been complaining about problems with blogger again (or is that still). For some users the free service is becoming, like windows, the thing you most love to hate. Indeed blogger is going through one of its periodic seizure episodes. There is no fix for the problems but there is a way to reduce them and I'm using it to post this item.

I strongly recommend you check out w.bloggar. W.Bloggar is a replacement for the blogger dashboard. I have been using it for a few months now and recently upgraded to the new version 4. I haven't used blogger's dashboard since I switched.

It features more HTML options, can save posts locally, connects to blogger faster than you can with dashboard and has a settable timeout period to reduce the dreaded double (and triple) posts. You can make changes to your template and edit posts as well. There is a preview mode. It also has its own spellchecker which I must admit needs some work - it is terribly slow to load and not much, if any, more complete than blogger's but at least you can add words to it. Better yet, it is freeware with a request for donations.

It doesn't just support blogger. "This new version supports MovableType advanced post options and also support some new tools: Wordpress, SquareSpace, b2evolution, Blog:CMS, UBlog, .Text, BlogWare and Xaraya".

W.Bloggar isn't going to fix all the problems with blogger but I suggest you make the 2mb download and check it out. I certainly have no plans to go back to using dashboard.

Some Days Just Suck

2005-03-12T20:55:00.000-06:00

There have been a lot of them lately and many more to come if your name is Stephen Harper. I posted previously on Harper's upcoming problems with the SCRAC policy convention. Those bytes had barely realigned themselves when the Globe and Mail lit him up which I covered in an update to the above post. Once again, those bytes had barely settled when the Toronto Star's Chantal Hebert took Harper out for a round of Whack-a Wanker.

Beleaguered Harper endures week from hell

This has truly been Stephen Harper's week from hell. One has to go back to the final stretch of the 2004 election campaign when a lacklustre Conservative performance helped the Liberals snatch a narrow victory from the jaws of defeat to find a comparable period in Harper's leadership when it seemed everything he touched turns to lead.

The budget debate should have highlighted the strengths of a potential government-in-waiting. Instead, it turned into a game of chicken between the opposition parties with the Conservatives running around like hens with their heads chopped off.

Next week's policy convention was suppose to showcase a reborn Conservative party tapping into the best that its two gene pools had to offer.

Instead, the gathering is poised to expose the social conservative fault line that caused so many Progressive Conservatives in the last election to snub the progeny that resulted from the merger of their former party with the Reform/Alliance....

After cataloging a bunch of screw ups of Bushian proportions, Hebert concludes:

In many ways, Harper's goal of building a winning conservative coalition seems more distant today than when he took on the leadership a year ago.

I really hope that Harper sent Mr. Dithers a big box of chocolates for Valentine's Day. Martin's terminal ineptitude is the only thing keeping Harper from being as short a footnote in Canadian political history as ~~Doris~~ Stockwell Day. If Paulie even vaguely resembled a competent Prime Minister in charge of anything, Harper would be out walking dogs for a living.

On the other hand, if things keep going the way they have been for Harper, I wouldn't be surprised to see him decide that being Wanker in Chief of the Social Credit Party version 3.0 isn't nearly enough fun to keep doing it. That dog walking gig might start to look like a good career move.

Update: US Cattle Ban

2005-03-11T10:40:00.000-06:00

Some of us already had this figured out.

U.S. cattle ban expected to last a year.

Beef industry officials in Canada say they don't expect the U.S. border to reopen until 2006, three years after a ban was put in place.

The border was expected to reopen on March 7 to live Canadian cattle under the age of 30 months but a Montana-based ranchers' group obtained a preliminary injunction blocking the move and is seeking a broad ban on Canadian beef...

"You could easily get into nine months to a year and a half ... in terms of the likely time frames around these court proceedings," said Dennis Laycraft of the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, as he and other producers met with the federal agriculture minister in Calgary Thursday.

This will come as no surprise to Manitoba producers who have been saying they see no end to the ban in sight.

So I will repeat myself. And expect to keep hearing this until people start listening.

Someone needs to give Mr. Dithers a rectal craniotomy and acquaint him with that most foreign of concepts "leadership". Some Canadian producers are calling for a meeting withing the week with the federal government to discuss a large expansion in Canadian processing capacity - a discussion that should have been held a year and a half ago. We need to implement 100% testing of all cattle for BSE - another decision a year and a half overdue. We can then ban the import of US beef as not meeting our standards and move on to compete with Brazil and Australia for the Asian market where we are likely to be well received.

At the same time we need to be imposing tariffs against US commodities as already authorized by the WTO. We need to be aggressively pursuing WTO authorization to recover the $4 billion stolen from us in the softwood lumber dispute. We need to withdraw from any further talks on the NAFTA+ agreement which will only bring us more of the same and we need to be aggressively seeking a wide range of new trading partners. Get off your ass Mr. Dithers. It's time to start earning your paycheck.

.

BTW - sean incognito has been busy posting away on this subject. Sean and I are pretty much neighbours and we're singing basically the same song.

No Way, Under No Circumstances, Never

2005-03-11T10:17:00.000-06:00

Our great neighbours and trading partners are calling for a new screwing of the Canadian lumber industry.

Canada rejects U.S. group's call to drop softwood legal action

Canada is balking at a suggestion by the powerful U.S. lumber lobby that Ottawa drop its legal action in the softwood lumber dispute while negotiations begin on a new proposal.

The U.S. Coalition for Fair Lumber Imports says it's very interested in the new Canadian idea, but suggests both sides freeze their legal actions -- many of which have gone in Canada's favour....

Canada has won numerous trade challenges of the crippling duties being levied by the U.S., and Ottawa intends to keep up its legal battles against the duties and to win back more than $4 billion paid out by the industry since May 2002....

But critics, including some Canadian softwood producers, say the new proposal cedes far too much power to the U.S. and would cripple the domestic industry.

Conservative MP John Duncan has accused the Liberals of giving too much too early, particularly when Canada has won several rulings at the World Trade Organization and under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"This proposal admits guilt on the part of Canada, yet Canada has won every round at the WTO and NAFTA," Duncan said recently.

"The government is waving a white flag even before the threat of injury decision is finally announced at NAFTA."(Emphasis mine)

OK. Credit where due. SCRAChead John Duncan gets this one right. The damage to the Canadian industry is already massive. We have won virtually every battle in this fight all four times we have been forced to fight it. The Kloset Konservatives have already given away too much in their proposal.

Drop the legal action? When the first flock of pigs flies by on their way to watch hell freeze over. This is time to go on the offensive. When Marc Racicot is saying "Stop the legal action and let's talk", we should be cranking up the legal action and stopping talking because it's a sure sign we are going to win. In fact, we should probably be suing the US industry for damages since they insist on dragging us through this fight that they keep losing.

This is one of the primary tests of NAFTA. We have won this fight and if that victory is denied, it's time for us to rethink NAFTA participation because it will absolutely confirm that the US idea of free trade is "free to take whatever we want and free to pay whatever we want for it".

The Duct Tape is Off

2005-03-10T12:54:00.000-06:00

NDP leader ~~Odie~~ Jack Layton had the best quip of the 2004 federal election campaign when he said

"Every conservative candidate is now wearing a strip of duct tape across their month, labelled do not open until June 29th."

Stephen Harper has been busy trying to reapply that duct tape ever since the election going so far as to require all his MPs to clear their same sex marriage comments with his office. It appears the tape isn't sticking too well anymore.

Backlash forces Conservatives to rethink plan to avoid social issues debate

A backlash has forced Conservative leaders to retreat from a plan to avoid debate on hot-button social issues such as gay marriage and abortion at the party's convention next week.

Leader Stephen Harper said Wednesday that the rules committee will look at reinterpreting motions so delegates can speak to the questions....

The party had planned to stop debate if a motion allowing MPs to vote their conscience on social issues in Parliament was passed by delegates. They argued that made all other debate unnecessary.

The Liberals saw darker motives behind the process, calling it a strategy by Harper to hide discussion from the public which might reveal extremist views within Conservative ranks.

"Stephen Mr. Muzzle Harper treats party democracy the way Tide treats a tough stain, he just washes it away,'' said Scott Reid, the prime minister's communication director.

Calling the sudden change in the convention process a result of ``an open rebellion within his caucus and party,'' Reid said Harper was willing to allow debate so long as it was meaningless.

Meanwhile Mr. Dithers seems to have hired a new speech writer.

In his wrap-up speech, Mr. Martin revved up the audience by taking pokes at his opposition, particularly the Conservatives, in light of their upcoming policy convention later this month.

"I don't envy them. They've got to figure out who they are, they've got to figure out what they stand for, and once they figure out what they stand for, then they've got to figure out how to conceal it from the Canadian people," he said to gales of laughter.

With SCRAC members no longer in what Archie Bunker (and who better a reference?) called "stifle" mode, the wing nut fringe of the party should be in full rhetorical form.

Pass the popcorn, this show might just be fun.

UPDATE:
From the Globe and Mail

Right-wing Tories gear up for convention

Anti-abortionists and opponents of same-sex marriage who revelled Thursday in their successful scuttling of a Conservative plan to keep those issues from being debated at the party's policy convention are now turning their thoughts to the convention itself....

While Ms. Wilkins is lobbying the Conservatives to prevent the controversial third-term partial birth abortions, Craig Chandler and his group, Concerned Christians Canada, will be make a strong pitch against same-sex marriage.

“We're pushing the agenda. We won the first round. (But) we understand that the convention next week is the main battleground,” said Mr. Chandler. “This is going to determine what this part is. Either we are going to become the old Progressives which, last time I looked, we dropped that word from our name. Or we're going to be a Conservative party.”

The battle highlights problems Leader Stephen Harper will face as he tries to reconcile competing values from the old Progressive Conservative and Canadian Alliance arms of the amalgamated entity.

Would you like some more butter for that popcorn?

Axworthy Take 2

2005-03-10T11:56:00.000-06:00

Via Canadian Cynic, Axworthy's response to the response on his letter to Condi Rice is here.

UPDATE
Kos has the story on the front page along with some good comments.

Another Song That Never Ends

2005-03-10T11:32:00.000-06:00

Or so it seems. Everyone's favourite eco-terrorists, Monsanto has been back in the news again. A few weeks back, folks in this corner of the blogosphere were going after Monsanto and the Government of Canada in regard to 'terminator seed' and Monsanto's acquisition of Seminis, the largest supplier of fruit and vegetable seed. This time the company is back in the news in regard to Bovine Growth Hormone or rBGH.

In the summer of 2003, Monsanto sued the Oakhurst Dairy in Portland Maine for 'deceptive labeling. The story received very little coverage in this country, probably because the use of rBGH is banned here. The July 8 2003 issue of the Portland Press Herald had this report:

Oakhurst Sued by Monsanto Over Milk Advertising

Biotechnology giant Monsanto Co. has sued Oakhurst Dairy of Portland, saying Oakhurst's claim that its milk doesn't contain any artificial growth hormones is essentially misleading.

Monsanto, based in Missouri, claims there is no scientific proof that the milk is any different from that produced by cows that have been treated with the hormones....

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Boston, demands that Oakhurst stop advertising that it doesn't use milk from hormone-treated cows. It also asks that the dairy stop putting labels reading "Our Farmers Pledge: No Artificial Growth Hormones" on its milk jugs....

Lee Quarles, a spokesman for the Missouri company, said the suit was filed because Monsanto believes Oakhurst's ads and labels are deceptive and also disparaged Monsanto's products with the inference that milk from untreated cows was better than milk from hormone-treated cows. Oakhurst was also stepping up its advertising and marketing efforts in recent months, leading to the lawsuit, said Quarles.

The suit was eventually dropped after the dairy agreed to change their label to include

"no significant difference has been shown between milk derived from (hormone)-treated and non-(hormone)-treated cows."

This is similar to the label on Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream whose owners also disapprove of the use of rBGH.

This issue surfaced again last month.

This time, the dispute involves an Oregon dairy - Tillamook County Creamery
Association - located to the west of Portland. The association announced
last week that it would no longer accept milk from cows injected with rBST.

In making that announcement, the creamery complained about what it said is
"an aggressive intrusion by Monsanto into the association's decision-making
process." Monsanto denies the particulars cited by Tillamook - that it hired
a lawyer and helped draft a proposal to overturn the ban - and says that it
merely provided its rBST customers with a list of attorneys and other
information when approached.

Monsanto's product has never taken hold in Europe because consumers there
have been aggressive in fighting genetically modified agricultural
processes. The biochemical firm doesn't want that attitude to catch fire
here in the United States, too.

Recombinant bovine somatotropin (rbST) is a synthetic duplicate of BGHgrowth hormone.

On February 28 it was announced:

TILLAMOOK rBGH-FREE!

The Tillamook County Creamery Association's membership voted 83-43 to back
up the Board's previous decision to go rBGH-free, effective April 1, 2005.

After a two-hour discussion, the co-op's members decided to listen to their
consumers' wishes rather than Monsanto.

In an incredible display of consumer activism and strength, over 6,500
people commented to Tillamook by phone, e-mail, fax and letter. Over 98% of
the comments stressed the desire for the dairy to go rBGH-free! If ever
there was a demonstration that this genetically engineered hormone has
nothing to offer but increased disease rates in cows and health risks to
consumers, this was it.

Unlike the Oakhurst Dairy which put labels on their product, Tillamook will not be labelling their products to reflect the ban. Presumably this is attempt to lessen the chances of becoming the target of a lawsuit themselves.

I came across an older Monsanto story in the course of preparing this post - one that illustrates why we should be concerned about the genetic manipulation of foodstuffs. From the May 31, 2000 Guardian:

Monsanto, the international company that pioneered the use of genetically modified crops, has revealed that its most widely used GM product contains unexpected gene fragments, raising fresh doubts that the technology is properly understood.

Two extra gene fragments have been found in modified soya beans that have been grown commercially in the US for four years and used as an important ingredient in processed foods sold in Britain for a similar period.

The company and the British government, which approved the soya's use in food and animal feed on behalf of the EU, yesterday insisted that the beans were no more risky to human health than conventional types. However, the revelation will cause further problems for ministers trying to prove they can manage and monitor the introduction of the technology.

Monsanto alerted the Department of the Environment to the results of new studies on its Roundup Ready soyabeans on May 19, two days after ministers revealed that thousands of acres of oilseed rape had been grown unwittingly from conventional seed contaminated by GM material. German research has suggested that a gene used to modify rape seed could leap the species barrier into the guts of bees.

Monsanto said the new studies used more advanced techniques to provide "updated molecular characterisation" of its beans which contain an inserted gene to ensure they are not destroyed by weedkiller. The tests found that two "inactive" pieces of genetic material were inserted at the same time as the whole gene. Dan Verakis, a spokesman for the company, said: "All this means is we are able to see genes in soya more clearly now. It is like putting a telescope in orbit allows astronomers to see stars better."

Well that company statement sure reassured me. I don't sit around evenings in the kitchen splicing genes to pass the time. But it occurs to me that accidentally leaving gene fragments in one of your gm products is sloppy workmanship - about the equivalent of a surgeon leaving instruments inside a patient. The statement that "All this means is we are able to see genes in soya more clearly now...." means to me that this technology is far from ready for prime time regardless of whether they are using it on canola seed or synthetic hormones.

These genetically engineered products produce little, if any, benefit to producers or consumers. Their use is a cold, calculated campaign to boost Monsanto's corporate profits regardless of the consequences.

I know there is a lot of competition for the dubious distinction of being the world's worst corporate citizen but these assclowns have to be close to the top of the list.

Should Have Done This Earlier

2005-03-08T11:59:00.000-06:00

Jonathan has an excellent post on the science of global climate change. There is additional information in the comments as well.

Declan has done a lotof great work on the budget starting here. While there check out the article on media bias.

The Song That Never Ends

2005-03-04T00:12:00.000-06:00

This is the song that never ends.
It goes on and on my friends.
Someone started singing it not knowing what it was,
and they'll continue singing it forever just because, (repeat)

The on again, off again, who knows WTF is going on again border opening (or not) for Canadian cattle to cross into the US (or not) is beginning to sound that that incredibly irritating kids' song designed to drive anyone over the age of 9 to drink or insanity whichever comes first.

The border was supposed to open on March 7 with assurances from the US government that the lifting of the ban would go ahead. However,

a group of Montana cattle producers won a temporary injunction on Monday. It prevents the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) from lifting a partial ban on Canadian beef.

The opening of the border is now stalled until at least May 11 when the case goes to a higher court. It is highly unlikely that will mark the end of the border closure.

The Billings-based R-CALF United Stockgrowers of America sought the temporary injunction so it could proceed with a lawsuit filed in January that argues the USDA's plan to resume imports of young Canadian cattle is premature and puts U.S. consumers and cattle producers at risk.

While lawyers for the USDA argued Wednesday the plan is safe, Cebull told the court he wanted to hear testimony from experts in order "to clear up some significant issues."

Whether the USDA would appeal the injunction to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco was not immediately clear. USDA spokesman Ed Loyd said the department first needs to review the judge's written decision to see what the appropriate "next steps" are.

Some industry spokesmen have suggested the new round of court challenges could take six months to a year to work their way through the legal system.

However,

Ted Haney, President of the Canada Beef Export Federation, said there is no time frame associated with when the new trial will begin. "We don't know what comes next," Haney said.

The export federation called on the federal government to initiate trade action against the U.S. if trade has not resumed fully by Monday.

The US government has repeatedly stated its intention to reopen the border but has often appeared less than whole hearted in its efforts to implement those intentions.

There are big players involved on the US side of the issue. Reopening the border would be a hard sell even if the government was fully committed to doing so. There are no benefits to the US government other than attempting to repair relations with Canada which is not something that seems to be a high priority in Washington. Meanwhile, reopening the border, while it would please processing companies in the northern tier that depend on Canadian beef to stay in business, is unpopular with American producers who are raking in windfall profits from the border closure. On top of that, the US senate has voted to stop the reopening of the border.

As I have indicated previously, cattle imports from Canada approximately offset US beef exports to Asia. With the Asian market still closed to US producers, imports allowed from Canada would be directly competing with US production.

R-CALF says it will cost the American cattle industrial which was been reaping high prices for their animals since the border closed – up to $3 billion if it reopens.

There is pretty much zero incentive for the US government to actively push the reopening of the border. In fact, it is possible that we are seeing a version of good cop-bad cop where the Bush administration claims to be the good guys in favour of reopening the border while allowing or even encouraging R-CALF and others to prevent the reopening.

One thing I have noticed in the last couple of days is that here appears to be something of a disconnect between producers in different provinces. According to the Calgary Herald,

Canada's cattle industry was stunned when an American federal judge in Billings, Mont., delayed Monday's planned reopening of the border.

And there are reports that Alberta producers bought heavily to increase their herds in anticipation of the border reopening.

CBC Saskatchewan on the other hand says this injunction was expected.

...cattle producers say they aren't surprised by the injunction and they don't believe it will have a long-term impact. "We knew that if they were going to file for an injunction, they would take the time to find a judge that was sympathetic, and they have," says Brad Wildeman, a feedlot operator near Lanigan.

Meanwhile cattle producers I have talked to in Manitoba have been saying for months that they do not expect to see the border open any time in the foreseeable future.

I have no way to ascertain how widespread any of these views is in each of the provinces. Certainly producers in my area have been very aggressively pursuing additional processing capacity and have even opened a retail outlet of their own.

These events may also have some political repercussions within the country. Western farmers and ranchers have been among the most vocal pro US and pro SCRAC people in the country. They will not take kindly to what many of them will consider and act of betrayal by their southern neighbours. After all, this was not the action of a faceless government it was the action of people supposedly just like themselves. The images of Montana ranchers cheering the court decision, the high fives and the group ~~hug~~ photos will remain with them for a long time. When the president of the Canada Beef Export Federation is calling for trade action against the US, the folks on the farm are not happy campers.

Of course Stephen Harper will run with the red herring that this was all the result of the government's refusal to buy into the BMD boondoggle. The Bushies, never loath to yank the rug out from under their friends, have, by loudly proclaiming their intent to fight to reopen the border, have pretty much left Stevie Wonder Wanker standing over the open septic tank.

Someone needs to give Mr. Dithers a rectal craniotomy and acquaint him with that most foreign of concepts "leadership". Some Canadian producers are calling for a meeting withing the week with the federal government to discuss a large expansion in Canadian processing capacity - a discussion that should have been held a year and a half ago. We need to implement 100% testing of all cattle for BSE - another decision a year and a half overdue. We can then ban the import of US beef as not meeting our standards and move on to compete with Brazil and Australia for the Asian market where we are likely to be well received.

At the same time we need to be imposing tariffs against US commodities as already authorized by the WTO. We need to be aggressively pursuing WTO authorization to recover the $4 billion stolen from us in the softwood lumber dispute. We need to withdraw from any further talks on the NAFTA+ agreement which will only bring us more of the same and we need to be aggressively seeking a wide range of new trading partners. Get off your ass Mr. Dithers. It's time to start earning your paycheck.

Condi Fried Rice

2005-03-03T15:29:00.000-06:00

In an open letter in the Winnipeg Free Press, former of Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy goes up one side of Condi Rice and down the other with a buzz saw.

Dear Condi, I'm glad you've decided to get over your fit of pique and venture north to visit your closest neighbour. It's a chance to learn a thing or two. Maybe more.

I know it seems improbable to your divinely guided master in the White House that mere mortals might disagree with participating in a missile-defence system that has failed in its last three tests, even though the tests themselves were carefully rigged to show results.

But, gosh, we folks above the 49th parallel are somewhat cautious types who can't quite see laying down billions of dollars in a three-dud poker game.

You can follow the bouncing ball at Daily Kos.

UPDATE:
Ok. I actually did know Axworthy was Foreign Affairs Minister not Finance Minister. BTW - Now we know why bloggers have been running out of snark - Axworthy has been hording.

The Firearms Registry, Kyoto and Environmentalism

2005-03-01T14:59:00.000-06:00

I received this in the mail last week from my MP. Since my MP happens to be one of the worst wingnuts in Harper's caucus, I won't guarantee these numbers haven't been slightly fudged for effect. But, then, there probably isn't much need to fudge them.

CRIME STATS SHOW LIBERAL GUN REGISTRY FAILING
Saskatchewan M.P., Garry Breitkreuz, Conservative Firearms Critic, released new Statistics Canada tables that show the reality of weapons crime in Canada - a view completely ignored by the Liberal government and its two billion dollar gun registry.

For the 548 Murders in 2003, Statistics Canada reports show:

• 29% of the 548 murders were committed with a firearm (6% of the guns used were registered, 26% were unregistered and the government didn't know the registration status of the other 68%). Makes a sane person ask:. “What good is the gun registry?”
• 68% of the 161 firearms homicides were committed with handguns (that the government has been registering since 1934).
• Between 1997 and 2003, the registration status was known for 46% of firearm-related homicides. Of these, 86% were not registered and 80% of the accused persons did not possess a valid FAC or Firearms License. Why? Because 69% of murderers were already known criminals including five that had previously been convicted for homicide. Why were these murderers back on the street.

For 22,906 Robberies in 2003, Statistics Canada tables show:

• 88% of firearm robberies reported by police were committed with guns that were either already banned or handguns that should have been registered.
• 85% of injuries suffered by victims of police-reported robberies committed with firearms were committed with guns that were either already banned or handguns that the government has been trying to register for the last 70 years.

This is a dismal record all by itself and demonstrates why the Gliberal government should have done the right thing and cancelled this piece of crap when the absurd cost overruns were finally admitted to the public.

It would be quite bad enough if the impact of this stupidity didn't spill over into other areas.

The firearms registry is a flash point issue in most of rural, and some not so rural, areas especially in the west. In the first place, it was bad public policy. Or, more to the point, it wasn't public policy at all. It was a transparent, cynical effort by the Gliberals to attract votes from women and, to a lesser extent, immigrants in the Windsor to Quebec City corridor. The Gliberals simply exploited fears, which in many cases were based on events happening in the much more violent US culture, to gain votes. The brazenness of the effort offended as much as the action itself. People who actually knew what the hell they were talking about - the millions of firearm owners across the country - were simply ignored while the Glibs went vote hunting. Worse yet, the regulations were imposed equally across the country regardless of how well they fit local circumstances.

Symbolically, the registry has been devastating for the Gliberals in rural areas, especially in the west. Here is daily confirmation that, for the Gliberal Party, Canada consists of Ontario and Quebec. Rational voices that disagreed with the government were ignored as were regional differences in lifestyle. What was appropriate for Toronto and Montreal was the standard to be applied to the entire country. Period. The Gliberal Party does not and will not have any credibility for any of its policies in rural areas of the country as long as the firearms registry stays in place.

So what does this have to do with Kyoto and environmentalism? Actually, it turns out, a whole lot. As I sat at watching the presentation at the dinner I mentioned in my last post, I realized once again that I was sitting in a room full of hard core environmentalists. That fact was really driven home as I watched a bunch of "killers" tear up at images of two polar bear cubs clinging for comfort to the lifeless form of their mother whose once magnificent body had given out at the age of 24 (ancient for a wild bear) and could go no further. It wasn't the urban armchair environmentalists, most of whom wouldn't recognize an acre of prime wildlife habitat if their cars broke down in the middle of it, or the big name environmental lobbyists who had paid for the satellite collar that had tracked the bear for her 24 years. Nor were they the ones who increased the chances of the cubs survival by spending thousands of dollars to helicopter her body out of the area to avoid attracting a male bear that might hunt and kill the orphans. It was the people in the room with me who had supported the efforts of the Manitoba government.

It is the same people who show up at some local charity auction and spend $300 dollars for something they know they could get at the store for $200 because the proceeds go to a local habitat enhancement project. These are the same people who bring their kids out on a Saturday to help clean up a creek. Or, do a habitat enhancement project on their own land with no help from the government except, possibly, for some free tree seedlings. They would never buy a Greenpeace membership and most of them don't even think of themselves as environmentalists yet they are the real foot soldiers of the environmental movement. While armchair environmentalists sit and preach, these are the people who walk the talk.

The federal government has a plate full of environmental issues, including the Kyoto Accord, with which it needs all the help it can get. There is a small army of pragmatic environmentalists who regularly prove their commitment to the cause out there. Sure they're conservative but they aren't, for the most part, doctrinaire wing nuts. I'm sure it has happened, but I have never heard of a case where a cattle producer refused to protect the riparian zones on his land once someone calmly and rationally explained why it was a good idea to do so. These folks have a connection to the land that most urban dwellers have long since lost. Many of them live or work in rural areas. They use the lakes and forests as their back yards. They may not be able to put any of it in scientific terms but they know what is going on. They know they haven't heard a meadow lark in five years. They know a disease or an insect is present in this or that species of tree.

The government, the environmentalists and the hunters and fishermen can be brought together in a common front. It was successfully done in Montana in the last US election. Solid Republican Montana has a Democrat governor. Brian Schweitzer became governor of Montana partly because, as David Sorota who worked on the campaign puts it,

....it let us speak to both left-leaning environmentalists, who wanted public lands and wildlife herds maintained, and right-leaning outdoorsmen, who wanted a place to recreate and a steady population of game to hunt. This was especially important because we did not want to alienate the enviros who would be out in force on election day to vote against an initiative to permit cyanide leach mining. Stern, who had a deft sense of strategy, once pointed out, “Hunters can be some of the biggest environmentalists around, even though they don't think of themselves that way and would never in a million years label themselves that.”

Kos put it this way talking about the "Montana Miracle":

But more interestingly is the increased merger between environmental concerns and the hunter/fishermen community. I've already written that environmental issues can deliver the West to the Democrats, but not in the "traditional" environmental frame. Spotted Owls won't win us any elections. But pristine hunting and fishing areas will.

Last March, the Christian Science Monitor ran an article called Guess Who's Coming To Protest? which also dealt with the new environmentalists.

A decade ago, Karl Rappold, whose family was ranching in Montana before it was a state, would sooner spit than call himself an environmentalist.

Today he's still not about to join any greenie groups - but with gas drilling threatening to foul the crystalline waters that gush from the Rockies onto his spread, he is arm-in-arm with a coalition of ranchers and environmental groups that aim to stop the drilling...

"What we've seen is the growth in the environmental movement shifting away from large-scale national groups," says Robert Brulle, a Drexel University sociologist who tracks environmental groups through IRS data. "In the 80's, the sentiment grew that Washington environmental groups had been co-opted and become ineffectual. The fruit of that, today, is the growth we've seen among all these local and regional environment groups."...

Its clear that many of these people are uncomfortable with the "environmentalist" label.

"No, I'm not a member of any environmental group," she says. "I'm just Margaret Williams working to help people. I am concerned about our people having a clean environment to live in - and that includes air, water, and soil. I think all people are entitled to a healthy environment."

... Mr. Rappold, the Montana rancher, who sees a carefully nuanced distinction from himself and environmental groups.

"I work with environmental groups, but I don't belong to them," he says. "I can do more as an independent rancher. Besides, my view is that whether you're an environmentalist or rancher, everybody has to pull together to save the Front [range]. That's the only way we're going to save it."

But, in the end, does the label really matter?

The federal government needs help and there are people ready to give it. So what would it take to make this happen? Not much in practical terms. The federal government needs to make a good faith gesture by getting rid of the symbol of all that's wrong with the Liberal Party - that useless white elephant called the firearms registry. Then the feds actually have to sit down and start talking to people about how environmental issues affect individuals and their families and the world around them from a personal rather than from a scientific or government policy perspective. Hey, it might even help them get reelected. The environmental lobbyists need to stop preaching at people and start talking rationally and calmly about nuts and bolts issues. And it wouldn't hurt if the armchair environmentalists got up out of their chairs and got their hands dirty.

Fast forward to reality. This is never going to happen. The Gliberals would have to actually admit they were wrong on the firearms registry. That should happen about a week after anyone in the Bush administration actually admits to screwing up. Which, in turn, we know will happen about a week after the first flock of pigs flies by to watch hell freeze over.

Bureaucrats and government scientists would actually have to talk to real people in straight forward language. I don't like the odds here either.

And the environmental lobbyists would have to stop preaching. If they did that, they might not have as much success at fund raising and then the executives of the organizations wouldn't be able to afford all those neat junkets to exotic places.

Oh well. It was a nice dream.

The Feast

2005-02-28T13:21:00.000-06:00

Years ago, I used to host an annual event for my (mostly city) friends I called a Feast From the Land. The point of the feast was that every item on the menu had to be grown, gathered, caught or shot and prepared by me. The menu would include all the usual vegetables you would find in a prairie garden with the occasional not so common items like asparagus and artichokes (yes you can grow artichokes on the Canadian prairies). The rest of the menu might include walleye, pike or, in a good year, ponassed lake trout (a native cooking technique similar to planking salmon) and venison, ducks and geese. Desert would be wild berries like saskatoons or blueberries.

For my friends, this event was a chance to eat some 'real' food rather than factory farmed pseudo food trucked in from who knows where as well as a chance to try things they would not normally have access to. For me, it was a reaffirmation of my connection to the land. There is something inherently satisfying about a meal that is the result of your own labours. There is also something fundamentally honest about killing for yourself what you are eating instead of contracting the dirty work out to someone else so you can pretend that what's sitting on that styrofoam tray wasn't once a living thing that gave its life for yours. You are forced to confront your own mortality. And you tend to treat food with much more respect when the dirt and the blood is on your own hands.

The Feast From the Land faded into history as I travelled further from my base to work on projects and often found myself in areas where the gardening and/or hunting and fishing weren't as good. I got to the point where it was nothing more than an occasional fond memory.

Last Saturday Mrs. M and I had the opportunity to take in a wild game dinner sponsored by one of the area service clubs as a fund raiser for a youth centre. Calling it a dinner is like calling a 20 year old single malt scotch a drink. This was a true feast - moose stir fry; venison Swiss steak; roast bison; roast caribou; sweet and sour elk meatballs; deep fried battered walleye; wild rice and, for a little exotic twist, jambalaya with alligator gumbo. All of it exquisitely prepared under the supervision of the owner of an excellent area restaurant. Outstanding!

And the night wasn't over. A photographer/author who lives a little south of us did an hour long presentation on polar bears based on his new book. Dennis works at a lodge near Churchill Manitoba on the coast of Hudson Bay where he takes people on beluga whale and polar bear photographic expeditions. But these are not tundra buggy tours. These are the real deal. You. Polar bear. Sub-arctic tundra. With the only thing standing between you and being on the menu for the world's largest land based carnivore being his knowledge of the bears and, sometimes, an electrified fence around your campsite.

I saw both belugas and the white bears while I was working on Baffin Island but never up close. Some of his photographs were from 25 yards. A polar bear is the third fastest animal in the world in a short burst. Twenty-five yards is the blink of an eye from eternity.

Needless to say, a great time was had by all. This was a 'First Annual' event and judging by the response there will be many more of them in future years. And based on all the memories that came flooding back, The Feast From the Land may be making a reappearance this fall.

Surrendering Our Sovereignty

2005-02-25T10:29:00.000-06:00

This is from a diary posted at dKos.

Why Canada Must Surrender Its Sovereignty
I've been following Bush Administration moves to press Canada to surrender its territorial sovereignty to the U.S. This is more than just an expression of "The same people belong in the same Reich." It's a question of protecting U.S. sovereignty and a question of economic security.

Canada is on its last legs as a nation. Despite our desire to prop up their Democracy, the Canadian state is crumbling under social pressures that are, frankly, totally out of control....

Beyond security concerns, there is another issue unresolved between Canada and the U.S. This issue is the virtual monopoly on natural resources like petroleum and hydroelectric power that Canada has in North America.

Monopolies, as we know, are the enemies of free markets and Canada has wrongly used its monopoly power to exercise influence over the U.S. that is disproportionate to both its population and its importance in the global sphere.

Before you go ballistic when reading this piece, it is an eerily well written satire although it took a lot of people a long time to figure that out. Compare this with Timmy's post here which references an equally chilling and related Whiskey Bar post here.

My friends and I have been talking about this for at least the last 20 years. Given that most people can't read the writing on the wall until their backs are up against it, I don't know whether to be reassured by the fact that it is getting some wider discussion or depressed because the wider recognition probably means it's imminent.

Smoke and Mirrors

2005-02-23T23:29:00.000-06:00

Just a couple of quick points (for now) on Goodale's wonderous new budget. If the art of politics is talking a lot and saying nothing, the art of budgeting must be pretty similar. Goodale's budget promises the stars and delivers.....sand. So much of what is contained in the budget is back end loaded that the document borders on worthless. The only way for what is promised to actually be delivered is if a) you continue to keep the Kloset Konservatives in power until 2010 and b) nothing unanticipated happens that allows them to weasel out of what they have promised. And in keeping with long standing tradition, much of the spending isn't new money. I have heard reports that half of the supposed increase in the Defence budget is old money being recycled again. It's called smoke and mirrors because Goodale is blowing so much smoke out his ass that it's fogging up the mirrors.

The other point of immediate interest is that the government opted to get into bed with SCRAC to get the budget through the Commons. Paulie had the option of bringing in a progressive budget and getting support from the NDP and the Bloc. Instead he showed his true colours by bringing in a budget that SCRAC could support. When the Social Credit Reform Alliance Conservative Party and the government of Alberta both like the budget, it's probably bad for the country. And some people have wondered why I insist on calling the so called Liberal Party of Canada the Kloset Konservatives.

The Pope Declares War

2005-02-23T12:55:00.000-06:00

Well, we knew that the child raping clergy of the Catholic Church were opposed to extending civil rights to gays and allowing women to rise above being penniless, barefoot and pregnant. His ~~Senility~~ Holiness has offered a declaration of war.

Gay marriage part of 'ideology of evil,' pope says.
Pope John Paul II has released a new controversial book where he suggests same-sex marriage is part of an "ideology of evil" and draws an analogy between abortion and the Holocaust.

It's hard for progressives to deal with assaults from organized religion. After all, we're the tolerant ones with the "live and let live" approach. Too bad the other side doesn't feel the same way. It really isn't complicated. If you disagree with abortions, don't have one. If you disagree with marrying someone of your own gender , don't do it. Just don't seek to impose your personal views on everyone else.

Obviously, the Pope has decided to be part of the problem. It's up to individual Catholics now to decide whether they wish to join the Pope as part of the problem or reject his babbling dementia and be part of the solution.

Hoooraay!

2005-02-17T11:31:00.000-06:00

I've been busy on some other projects lately including some new research so I thought I would stir the pot with this.

The NHL has cancelled hockey season. Hoooraay! Yahoo! And while it may cause my Canadian citizenship to be revoked, it can stay cancelled as far as I'm concerned.

Sure I played hockey as a kid and used to watch it. But 'used to' is the operative term here. The last complete game of "pro" hockey I watched was the Russian team playing the Edmonton Oilers when Gretzky was still playing for the Oilers. That is the way hockey should be played. I tried to get back into the NHL after that series but just couldn't do it although I still watch the occasional international game.

Frankly the NHL product sucks. The interminable seasons, massive over expansion into non traditional markets and the goon squad hockey that became necessary to sell the game in those markets, greedy owners and players and monster egos have all contributed to what I see as the demise of the game. If the NHL came back as a 10 or 12 team league with a 6 month schedule, we might have a watchable product again. It might also have a beneficial effect on community based hockey as many of the undertalented NHL players moved back to the minor leagues.

Of course none of this is going to happen. There is too much greed and too many egos and too much negative local economic impact for that to occur. So the inferior game will likely continue on. In that case, I can only wish the owners and players a long and fruitless strike. Of course, I also have something else to cheer about - it's been several months, and will be several more, without having to put up with the terminally untalented Don Cherry. Hoooraay!

Chuckle Break

2005-02-14T23:48:00.000-06:00

Balbulican has a fun post up at Stage Left proposing a shorthand code for blogging.

Category 1: Contradiction Codes

C-1: Basic Denial (e.g.: That didn’t happen).
C-2: Complex Denial: (e.g.: That can’t possibly be true, because if it were, other unpleasant things that I don’t choose to believe in would be true as well.)
C-3: The Missouri Variant (e.g.: That might have happened, but you can’t prove it to my satisfaction.)
C.4: The Pee Wee Maneuver: (e.g.: You’re only telling part of the story, and I’d tell you the other part if only I had time, but if you REALLY cared you’d already know, so I won’t.)

Read the rest for yourself. A good reminder not to take ourselves too seriously - there's plenty of time for that tomorrow.

Shit Meet Fan

2005-02-14T10:19:00.000-06:00

This is breaking news that I have been unable to verify so far.

Press Release - International Trade Canada
International Trade Minister Jim Peterson today issued the following statement:

"On February 14, Canada will challenge, before a World Trade Organization (WTO) compliance panel, the U.S. implementation in the WTO threat-of-injury case regarding softwood lumber imports from Canada. Canada will also file a request for authority to retaliate against the U.S. in an amount exceeding C$4.1 billion. We expect the retaliation authority request to be dealt with after the completion of the compliance panel proceedings.

"The U.S. International Trade Commission's (ITC) threat-of-injury determination of November 24, 2004, relies on the same faulty analysis that was found to be WTO-inconsistent by the original WTO panel.

"In order to comply with the WTO ruling in this case, the ITC should have found no threat of injury. The U.S. Department of Commerce should then have revoked the anti-dumping and countervailing duty orders, and should have instructed U.S. Customs to refund all of the softwood lumber cash deposits.

"The U.S. failure to comply with the WTO ruling has forced Canada to take the steps necessary to protect its rights under the WTO." This issue has been going on for 2-3 years I forget now. The U.S. Has collected 4.1 Billion in illegal duties (look at the 10+ rulings of the WTO against them). So in responce to there final appeal they lowered the duty from 18.79 % to 17.19 % Canada thought was a slap in the face so they are going to slap duties (with the WTO blessing to recoup the money) on the US. Canada is the US's biggest trade partner and largest (yes Largest) supplier of oil. Is this anyway to treat a friend.

It's also interesting to note that this was an issue during a congressional election in 2002 and the promise of these duties was used to garner votes even though they must have know the WTO would never support them.

As you may have guessed I am a Canadian. I just find it hard to understand why the US would be surprised that the Canadian Government has a bitter taste in it's mouth when dealing with the current administration when these type of issues are unresolved.

Normally I would hold off pending some verification beyond a DKos diary, but this is a major item. This story was one on my trend watch list and a key indicator of the willingness of Paulie and the Kloset Konservatives to live up to their obligation to protect Canadian interests. I'll update as additional information becomes available.

UPDATE:
Thanks to Jonathan at No More Shall I Roam, here is the link for the above story. This announcement was actually made on Feb. 9. Either I've been asleep at the keyboard for the last several days or our highly efficient, nationalistic, left wing media didn't think a $4 billion story was worth covering. I guess the $100 million political scandal was more important.

The Fat Lady Isn't Singing Yet

2005-02-11T23:30:00.000-06:00

Pogge has been busy for the last week, with a little help from his friends, covering the despicable actions of the Canadian, Australian and New Zealand governments shilling for Monsanto in an attempt to get the moratorium on so called "terminator" seed lifted. Fortunately for everyone except Monsanto, the moratorium will stay in place.

I, and I'm sure everyone else following the story, thought it had been put to bed. It turns out the fat lady has just started tuning up and is nowhere near singing. Monsanto is back in the news already in a further attempt to tighten its strangle hold on the global food supply.

Monsanto's announcement of their plans to purchase Seminis, the largest fruit and vegetable seed producer in the world, was quickly followed by a statement that Monsanto does not intend to apply biotech to develop these seeds-at least not yet. This is a curious assertion from a dominant biotech company....

The biotech industry promotes GE foods by claiming these technologies will help break the cycle of hunger and increase food production. These claims are not supported by available scientific evidence. Tests run by the University of Nebraska, and in Australia and Argentina, discovered significant drops in production associated with the switch to biotech crops on the order of 10 to 30 percent....

Many have argued that the real motive driving the development of GE seeds is expanding control over the food system. Biotech crops are not only a profitable patented product in and of themselves, they are also a vehicle to sell other products. Monsanto sells "Roundup Ready" soybeans as a proprietary package in which GE seeds are conveniently mated to their Roundup pesticide. Farmers, who traditionally save seeds each year, are prohibited from doing so with these GE seeds, which must be purchased anew each growing season....

The world's food system is quickly consolidating. Five corporations control 90 percent of the global grain market while five supermarket chains control most of the global retail trade. Monsanto knows that consolidation of the global food system in the hands of a small number of corporations is likely to continue. Wall Street analysts believe Monsanto's future is dependent on the success of GE seed development. Increasing its share of the proprietary seed market will allow Monsanto to exercise significant control over the food we grow and eat. They already control most of the biotech soy and corn markets. Now they've extended that reach to the global seed market.

The Monsanto acquisition of Seminis is not a done deal pending anti-trust investigations. There is no way this takeover should be approved but there is little reason to expect it won't be. This might be good time to acquire a little patch of ground and lay in a supply of heritage seed. That is unless you relish the idea of kissing Monsanto's fat corporate ass before every meal.

Disgusting Doesn't Quite Cover It

2005-02-09T12:32:00.000-06:00

I'm short on time right now so I will simply refer you to Pogge's post here.

Leaked documents seen by the Guardian show that Canada wants all governments to accept the testing and commercialisation of "terminator" crop varieties. These are genetically engineered to produce only infertile seeds which farmers cannot replant.

Let me get this straight. The Canadian government is promoting starvation in third world countries to line Monsanto's pockets? If this story is correct, some people in Ottawa need to be dangled by their heels off very tall buildings. There are some lists on other blogs of contact info for MP's but I can't find one right now. If you have, or know of such a link please post it in a comment.

Such a policy would constitute little more than murder for profit and should be dealt with accordingly.

More Family Values

2005-02-08T13:29:00.000-06:00

Ya gotta love it. Of course this isn't anything new. We've had drugs for guns a few times already and will have again I'm sure. Now we have Porn for Repuglicans

Cable Companies Provide Porn While Funding Politicians
While its previous owners considered adult entertainment "immoral," Adelphia Communications Corp., the country's fifth-largest cable television provider, last week became the first to offer hard-core adult films on pay-per-view to its subscribers.

"It's a very lucrative source of funds," said Dennis McAlpine, a media and entertainment industry analyst. "The cable companies and the satellite companies are programming agnostics in the sense that they don't care what the programming is. It's what the viewers want to see."

Viewers can watch such sexually explicit movies in the Hilton and Marriott hotel chains on video services like LodgeNet or on "On Command," which is owned by Liberty Media, formerly a part of AT&T; at home via DirecTV, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp; or via virtually every cable company, including Cox, Time Warner and Comcast....

While the corporations generate millions in profits from providing adult content, their political contributions are often given to those elected, in no small part, because of their stance on "moral values."

Notice that one on the providers is a company owned by Rupert "Family Values" Murdoch of Faux News fame. Really, what will we tell the children? Or the fundies.

Pack Up The Cat

2005-02-08T11:30:00.000-06:00

Eric Margolis has a new article out called chillingly enough

THE PENTAGON’S NEW ARMIES OF THE NIGHT
Last week, the respected former military intelligence analyst William Arkin revealed a hitherto unknown government directive, with the Orwellian sobriquet `JCS Conplan 0300-97,’ authorizing the Pentagon to employ special, ultra secret `anti-terrorist’ military units on American soil for what the author says are `extra legal missions.’ In other words, using US soldiers to arrest or kill citizens at home, acts that have been illegal since the US Civil War and are a grave violation of the constitution and tradition...

Instead of being fired for the gigantic military-political-financial fiasco in Iraq and the shameful torture scandals that are still coming to light , Rumsfeld has just managed to create a new, spy/special ops organization under the Pentagon, blandly named `Strategic Support Branch,’ that will replace or duplicate many of CIA’s tasks...

Rumsfeld’s new SSB will become the Pentagon’s very own, in-house CIA, complete with mammoth budgets, commando units, hits squads, spies, mercenary forces, intelligence gathering and analysis, and a direct line to the White House. The Pentagon has just effectively taken over the spy business...

The Pentagon’s new spy arm will be largely excluded from Congressional oversight or media examination. Its special operations teams will roam the globe, killing or kidnapping at will, torturing suspects, and bringing down governments, all under cover of `deep black’ missions of which no records will be kept, and no questions asked.

Equally worrying, the Pentagon’s new special ops units are headed up by notorious religious fanatic and loudmouth, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who calls the US Army, `the house of God,’ and Islamic insurgents, `agents of Satan;’ and told Muslims `my God is bigger than your god, which is an idol. ’...

Equally worrisome, the Pentagon’s new `black’ warriors will not be supervised by a normal military chain of command or some degree of Congressional oversight, as were CIA combat teams. These irregular forces will draw into their ranks rabid ideologists, uniformed bounty hunters, and Bible Belt mutants wearing t-shirts proclaiming, `kill em’all, let God sort’em out.’ These militarized thugs and video arcade Rambos are sure to run amok, commit serious crimes, and drag America’s once good name ever deeper into the mud.

For those who need another reminder about ~~Nutbar~~ General Boykin, he also had a role in Abu Graib.

In many of the articles on this emerging Iraqi prisoners story, it has been claimed that some of the key instigators or enablers of bad acts were military intelligence officers.

Now, who's the head of military intelligence? 'Head' is too vague. There's no such post per se. But what comes pretty close is the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.

And who's that? Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin.

Remember him? He's the one who got in trouble last year for describing his battle with a Muslim Somali warlord by saying "I knew that my God was bigger than his God. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol", saying President Bush was chosen by God, and generally that the war on terror is an apocalyptic struggle between Christianity and Satan.

Sweet. A religious fanatic who was involved in Abu Graib is now in charge of a black ops private army authorized to act in the US and anywhere else with no oversight. Better watch what you post people. That knock on your door might not be your neighbour wanting to borrow a cup of sugar. And under this program, they don't even have to export you to Syria for a little water boarding. Are you having a good day yet? Wait my children. It only gets better.

Rep. David Dreier (R-CA) is promoting an amendment to pending intelligence overhaul legislation that would exempt the Department of Homeland Security from all federal law in the course of securing the nation's borders.

Dreier is championing this amendment in the conference committee that is working to resolve differences in the House and Senate versions of a bill to implement reforms suggested by the 9/11 Commission....

The Department of Homeland Security (which now has border control responsibilities formerly granted to the Department of Justice) is already exempted from the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act "to the extent the [DHS Secretary] determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction" of additional physical barriers and roads along the U.S. border "in areas of high illegal entry into the United States" by section 102 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), P.L. 104-208, 110 Stat. 3009-546 Div. C (codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1103 note). The Dreier amendment would expand this waiver to cover all laws in the U.S. Code short of the Constitution itself. It is also drafted to make the Secretary's decision unreviewable in court challenges.

The original iteration of this amendment, as proposed in the House by Rep. Doug Ose (R-CA), would have expanded IIRIRA § 102 by listing a catalogue of environmental laws in addition to NEPA and the ESA. The version pushed by Dreier expands this exemption even further, beyond environmental laws, to put the DHS Secretary above all federal laws, environmental or otherwise, such as the following:
Child labor laws
Davis-Bacon wage determinations
Ethics laws
Age discrimination laws (which exceed constitutional guarantees)
Whistleblower laws
Employee protections
Procurement and contracting laws designed to assist small businesses

It is unclear what limits, if any, would be placed on the DHS Secretary's power to waive federal law.

Not good enough? Want more? How about no judicial review?

(1) IN GENERAL- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary's sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section.

`(2) NO JUDICIAL REVIEW- Notwithstanding any other provision of law (statutory or nonstatutory), no court shall have jurisdiction--

`(A) to hear any cause or claim arising from any action undertaken, or any decision made, by the Secretary of Homeland Security pursuant to paragraph (1); or

`(B) to order compensatory, declaratory, injunctive, equitable, or any other relief for damage alleged to arise from any such action or decision.'.

Now hold on, we're only talking about roads and barriers here aren't we?

But wait, would all of these suspensions only apply to the physical, on-location construction of the roads and barriers?

Nope! There's no such limitation in the law. You can follow this right to suspend the laws anywhere someone might be claiming legal rights and slowing down the process. The manufacturers of equipment and materials would certainly fall under this provision, for example. The government workers dealing with any aspect of this construction, in Washington or California or wherever would also fall under this provision. A city council objecting to something about the project could fall under this provision.

But, of course, all this is just paranoia right? People in positions of power would never abuse that power would they?

Mabel, pack up the cat. We're moving.

SpongeDob Alert

2005-02-07T10:19:00.000-06:00

I've suspected as much and now we know. This story comes as no surprise to me.

Powerful U.S. religious groups are sending money and support to allies in Canada to fight same-sex marriage.

Patrick Korten, vice-president of communications for the Knights of Columbus head office in New Haven, Conn., said no limit has been set on the help his organization is prepared to offer.

"Whatever it takes," he said. "The family is too important."

Mr. Korten said the U.S. headquarters of the Catholic men's group paid $80,782 to print two million postcards being distributed in Catholic churches across Canada.

Another opponent of same-sex marriage, Focus on the Family, is also sending support and services worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to its Canadian affiliate....

Last spring, Focus on the Family Canada ran an ad campaign in newspapers praising the virtues of traditional marriage between a man and a woman. Derek Rogusky, vice-president of family policy for Focus on the Family Canada, said the group spent $800,000 on advertising last year -- well within the $1-million he said the group is allowed to spend on political activities and keep its charitable status....

Focus on the Family Canada has also put a Marriage Action Kit on its Web site -- a sophisticated step-by-step guide to lobbying -- from form letters for MPs and letters to the editor to advice on how to present the case. It has also sent a letter out to the 100,000 Canadian households on its mailing list.

Altogether, Focus on the Family U.S. has channelled $1.6-million in services to its Canadian affiliate between 2000 and 2003, the latest year for which financial reports are available.

Mr. Rogusky said Focus on the Family Canada is independent from its U.S. parent, with its own board of directors and financed by contributions from Canadians.

Documents filed in British Columbia, where Focus on the Family Canada is incorporated, show two of the directors of Focus on the Family Canada -- Tom Mason and Jim Daly -- are vice-presidents of Focus on the Family U.S. with addresses in Colorado Springs. Also listed on the board is Sharon Hayes, a Reform Party MP from 1993 to 1997.

As I said, this comes as no surprise to me. I have been hearing rumours of fairly widespread interference by American right wing and religious extremists in Canadian politics not just through the infusion of money but other resources as well for quite a while. This is just the first confirmation I have seen .

I love Rogusky's line that

Focus on the Family Canada is independent from its U.S. parent, with its own board of directors and financed by contributions from Canadians.

I suppose that would be true except for the fact that two vice presidents live in the US and the American parent organization has shipped $1.6 million north in three years. Sounds independent to me.

The religious extremists in the right wing of SCRAC are no doubt happy about this. However it creates real problems for Harper. Much of the rejection of SCRAC at the polls in the last election was the (accurate) perception that SCRAC is the America Lite party. The involvement of American right wing religious organizations in support of one of his party's flagship causes only serves to confirm the concerns of many Canadians about the real goals of the party leadership.

One can only wonder about the impact of this information on SCRAC's outreach campaign to ethnic groups in the country many of whom are not Christian. Harper may be asking them what kind of country they want to live in. Perhaps the better question would be whether what we're seeing here is what made them want to come to Canada in the first place.

This is a real threat to Canada and very difficult for progressive elements in the country to counteract. Perhaps George Soros would like to sent a few 100k to help our side out. Then listen to the squeals from the right.

UPDATE:
This story seems to have been a better wakeup than the morning coffee. Pogge has a different take on this as does Voice in the Wilderness.

UPDATE 2
Jonathan at No more Shall I Roam also comments.

UPDATE 3
Add some excellent comments from Robert at My Blahg.

Cap'n Flynn R.I.P?

2005-02-07T00:06:00.000-06:00

Last month Timmy at Voice in the Wilderness had a post on our MIA captain. He said in part:

At the time of our correspondence, it was mainly time constraints due to work and non-work related obligations that are keeping him from his rightful spot on the quarterdeck. He was unsure when he would be able to return to blogging.

I hoisted the signal flags lamenting his absence and urging his return with all possible haste.

I checked the good captain's site a couple of days ago and again today to see if the captain had reappeared. Instead it appears that the captain's ship has sunk with a loss of all hands - the blog has gone 404. It would be nice if reports of the captain's demise were grossly exaggerated. If they are true, then goodbye captain. It was nice knowing you.

Everybody Loves Rachel

2005-02-01T23:35:00.000-06:00

It seems that everybody loves Rachel Marsden. Well, maybe they don't love her but they sure seem interested in the dirt on her.

It's a damn good thing I don't choose post topics on the basis of how much site traffic I think they will generate. If I did, this place would get about as many visits as an unmarked grave. I post on significant issues like BSE and NAWAPA and what happens? A bit of a traffic blip and a few search engine hits a month. I post what is basically a fluff piece featuring a neo-conservative airhead with psychological problems and I get a huge bump in hits from search engines using the keywords 'Rachel Marsden' and 'Sticks and Stones'. Are there that many bored ditto heads from the 101st Fighting Keyboarders who think that any female neo-con who doesn't look like she was french kissed by a Mack truck is jerk off material? Worse yet, that wasn't even the subject I sat down to write a post on. I had intended to post on one of those serious issues - same sex marriage.

Maybe I should forget about the serious pieces and start posting fictional fluff stories about Ann Coulter and Rachel Marsden having hot three way sex with Bill O'Reilly and put some ads on the blog. I might be able to quit the day job. O'Reilly would be happy to have something to fantasize about beside screwing staffers and might quit bad mouthing Canada. I don't actually have to demonstrate good taste do I?

I Had to Mess With It

2005-02-01T17:32:00.000-06:00

There is a test making the rounds on the 'net to position you on the political matrix based on your moral positions. Generally these things are slightly less valuable than your average newspaper horoscope. This one is a little different and intrigued me. You can take the boy out of the social sciences but you can't take the social scientist out of the boy so you know I just had to mess with it.

This is not high grade social research but, for what it is, it seems to be reasonably accurate. Forget about your exact positioning. We will assume for this exercise that the margins of error are reasonably consistent so it is the relative positioning that is important. Except that I didn't just take the test once. I took it several times. First I took the test as myself. Then I took it using what I believe would be the answers of people on various points on the political spectrum (eg. American right wing extremist, Canadian right wing extremist, old fashioned conservative, Liberal Party etc.) So what does this do besides screw up their database? It makes it a much more interesting and useful tool.

If you do this and go to their map section and click on the G8 map you find an approximation of the places on this matrix the various G8 countries occupy. You will notice immediately that Canada is well removed from the US on the matrix and the difference reflects a more liberal orientation. Position your results on the matrix. (You have to do this on a paper matrix because theirs does not allow multiple positioning.) Now you can see an interesting visual portrayal of your relative position in the industrialized world.

My position on the matrix, and their commentary, says I am an independent thinking left winger by Canadian standards - a description I can live with. By plotting the other results you obtained, you can come up with an indicator of your relative political/cultural/social isolation from those you consider both your political enemies and allies. Note: since isolation is a relative thing, accuracy while desirable is not essential - the perception is more important than the reality.

You can even go one step further. Find someone on the matrix whose views are on the edge of what you are comfortable with and someone whose views are outside your comfort zone. Take a point somewhere between the two based on your feelings and draw a circle with that as a radius. You now have your tolerance or comfort zone. The bigger the circle, the greater your tolerance. I do this using a point just to the right of Paul Martin but left of Stephen Harper as a cut off. The indication for me is that, while I disagree with both a communist ideologue and a right wing extremist, I would be more comfortable talking to the communist ideologue and have a better understanding of where he is coming from than I would the right wing extremist. This is actually true. I am totally incapable of comprehending the thought processes of the winger. I have no idea how, nor do I want to know how, you get there from here. Can you have a dialogue with the opposition? Only if there is an overlap between your comfort zone and theirs. If there isn't an overlap, the odds are very good that you don't share enough commonalities in world view to ever agree on anything more than to disagree.

Rigorously scientific? Hardly. But it is an interesting way to map your intellectual universe.

SpongeDob Has a Bad Week

2005-01-31T08:55:00.000-06:00

James Dobson better known these days as SpongeDob Stickypants has had a bad week. As Kos puts it,

From Olbermann, we learn that for the last week, Focus on the Family has been locked in mortal combat with themselves, and they're losing badly.

First off, Dobson gets his shorts in a knot over a cartoon character and manages to come out of that looking like a twit. Then he backtracks and looks like more of a twit. Somewhere in all of this, and obviously aspiring to a higher level of twithood, he decides to set up an email generator that Focus on the Family supporters can use to spam Keith Olbermann and other journalists who gave him a hard time. And then that goes seriously astray. It seems the FOTFers had a little problem getting the hang of the email generator. Some non supporters of Dobson seemed to get the hang of it though

... 5-10% letters supporting our coverage and denouncing “Focus On The Family” as, in the words of one correspondent, “the American Taliban.”

If that wasn't enough, this item from the Winnipeg Free Press of January 29 should about make his head explode:

Researcher Sees Group of Homosexuality Genes
By Tom Spears

A Chicago genome researcher says he has found a group of genes that strongly influence whether a man is homosexual - not a single "gay gene," but a group of genes acting together.

If confirmed, it would provide at least part of the explanation for what makes men gay, a question that gene scientists have sought to solve for more than a decade.

The University of Illinois at Chicago and U.S. National Institutes of Health searched through the genes of 456 men from 146 families - each of which has at least two gay brothers.

The finding that a whole variety of genes are common to the majority of the gay men echoes other recent gene findings: Traits from body shape to heart disease are all caused by a complex mix of genes, combined with non-genetic influences such as diet.

But there's no single "gay gene" found only in gay men. And the team says that environment likely also plays some role.

The discovery also raises the prospect of aborting fetuses that carry these genes, or creating drugs to counteract the genes.

While genes are unlikely to decide everything in sexual orientation, being gay or heterosexual " is probably largely determined before birth. How you acted as a parent probably doesn't play much role," said the main researcher, Brian Mustanski, a behavioural geneticist .

"Our best guess is that genes explain about half the variability, and that other (half) is probably explained by other non-genetic biological influences" that are still unknown.

One bioethicist says this discovery, if true, would counter the argument that being' gay is a matter' of choice and therefore morality.

However, some parents will want to test fetuses and abort them if they can genes that suggest a child could be gay just as some fetuses are aborted for being female, he said. Some people doing in-vitro fertilization would also want discard embryos with any sign "gay genes."

Oh, Oh, a possible genetic basis for homosexuality. That would leave SpongeDob stuck on the pointy horns of a rather nasty dilemma. If it's genetic, then it must have been God's intelligent design and he can no longer justify discriminating against gays or if this is some kind of genetic abnormality, he has to become pro-abortion if not a eugenics supporter which kicks the crap out of any claims to be "pro-life". Ouch, those horns are sharp.

Now wait a minute (insert sound of screeching brakes) this would be true in a reality based world. But we all know that SpongeDob doesn't live in reality based world. He lives in that faith based world. So this will undoubtedly be dismissed as 'bad science' since it disagrees with what the religious extremists believe - the litmus test for bad science - and Dobson and his abundant minions will continue to make the world safe for bigotry in the name of religion. Isn't religious extremism great? You can be wrong 100% of the time and still feel good about it.

Clowns to the left of me! Jokers to the right!

2005-01-27T14:04:00.000-06:00

Clowns to the left of me!
Jokers to the right!
Here I am stuck in the middle with you

I watched the Fifth Estate's presentation Sticks and Stones last night on the subject of the right wing noise machine. Couldn't make up my mind whether to laugh or cry. Mostly I laughed. Okay I laughed but very uneasily. The first part of the program focussed more on the efforts to "prove" the myth of the SCLM. Later on in the program, the parade of clowns started.

Of course we had Faux News buffoon in chief, the unfair, unbalanced, all spin all the time Bill O'Liely. Blowhard Bill included in his standup routine that he had read The Globe & Mail a couple of times and thought it could have come from Havana. Pretty much what makes O'Liely one of the best political stand up acts on the comedy circuit today. Although he should probably just change his name to Lord Haw Haw and get it over with.

Next up, the skanky neo-con wet dream Ann Coulter proving that excessive use of peroxide really does impair mental processes. Not only was she stupid enough to tell host Bob McKeowan that Canada had sent troops to Vietnam but proceeded to argue with him when he corrected her.

After Coulter came the not quite so skanky wannabe neo-con wet dream, our own Rachel Marsden. If O'Reilly is an asshole and Coulter is stupid, Marsden is just pathetic. Marsden is much traveled in her career. Moving to the US she worked as an assistant to Connie Chung (which earned her the distrust of the freepers) She moved on to right wing think tanks including a stop at Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation. Apparently not a big enough star in the big leagues of bigotry, Marsden returned to Vancouver where she hosts a radio talk show (now there's a surprise) and writes endless neo-con drivel for the incestuous wing nut press. She regularly appears as the token Canadian neo-con billed as a conservative pundit, political commentator and conservatrive political columnist on Faux and other outlets and writes for the Moonie owned UPI.

Before cutting a check to a largely Muslim area that’s known as a terrorist haven, you’d think people would be in favour of vetting things out, first...

Throwing wads of cash at these people -- no matter how much or how quickly -- will not undo the brainwashing that
has many of them believing that Bush, Blair, Martin and the Westerners they represent are all a bunch of “infidels”. Although bin Laden hasn’t come through with any humanitarian aid for his supporters in one of the world’s most densely populated Muslim areas, it doesn’t seem to matter. They aren’t likely to notice that the disaster was Allah’s mess in the first place, or that he’s now doing squat-all to help clean it up.

Of course that isn't Marsden's only claim to fame. If the name rings a bell this may be why.

Coulter's worst offense, however, and she's conceded as much, is to have inspired so many wannabes...

... And considering the delight they take in the mass killing in Iraq, no one should expect the neo conservatives to pay more than lip service to those "family values" they gush about. So I'm not sure why I was even remotely shocked to see Canadian serial sexual stalker Rachel Marsden play parrot to Bush booster Dennis Miller on his little-watched CNBC chatshow. (She was billed as a conservative "political columnist.")

Marsden must have been on a tight schedule, having just pleaded guilty to criminal harassment before Judge Bill Kitchen in British Columbia Provincial Court. As the Associated Press reported, Marsden was forced to resign last May while working for a Canadian Member of Parliament under an assumed name. When arrested two years ago, Marsden was working for the Free Congress Foundation, Paul Weyrich's D.C. think tank dedicated to fighting America's "long slide into cultural and moral decay."

The major contribution Marsden (aka Elle Henderson) has made to the cause of cultural renewal (besides joining Rush Limbaugh in finding funny the torture at Abu Ghraib) has been in the terrorization of several men; she almost destroyed an award-winning young swimming coach at Simon Fraser University (SFU) between 1997 and 1999. First, she stalked Liam Donnelly for months, making him the target of her warped (and graphic) "erotomania." Or so Leonard Stern of the Ottawa Citizen described the pornographic letters and pictures with which she had deluged her victim.

Sexual harassment kangaroo courts are the Left's unique contribution to obliterating the Rights of Englishmen on campuses. When Donnelly spurned her advances and gifts, "conservative" Marsden proceeded to unleash on him the Soviet-style apparatus and apparatchiks Canadians have come to know (and fear) so well. In a lengthy and lewd complaint, she accused Donnelly of repeatedly raping her and making her his sex slave. (Incidentally, Marsden's writing has not improved much since those heady days of relating to the terrified coach her preference for non-lubricated condoms "without the Exxon Valdez oil slick all over them.")

The totalitarian SFU harassment office, egged on by our jeering Jezebel, fired Donnelly. In the rush to ruin him, the gender ideologues discarded a mountain of evidence against Marsden and proceeded to try and convict the young man in absentia and without due process. (SFU later rehired Donnelly and paid a portion of his legal costs.)

Marsden, described rather charitably by Judge Kitchen as "extremely extroverted," "histrionic," and "attention-seeking," next stalked noted Canadian criminologist Prof. Neil Boyd and then went after former Vancouver radio personality Michael Morgan, the crime for which she was convicted.

Although one can never be certain about the veracity of Marsden's curriculum vitae, she boasts that Queen Bee Coulter herself will be a guest on her little-heard Vancouver radio talkshow. Come to think of it, I had asked Coulter's webmaster why he posted articles by someone like Marsden. That, after I had briefed him on the Donnelly case, that travesty of justice residents of Vancouver (then including myself) recall so vividly. (What am I talking about: unless they were comatose, which is a possibility, most Canadians will remember the case that rewrote sexual harassment policy in Canada!)

He responded thus, and I paraphrase: "We all have baggage, forgive and forget." Tell that to Donnelly, on whom Marsden took no pity. If anything, it was abundantly obvious, as Donnelly's perceptive lawyer noted at the time, that Marsden relished every lurid moment of notoriety. With impunity comes indifference. Unless their indiscretions are exposed, neoconservatives just don't care.

Marsden thought that O'Riley's sexual misadventures were fair game but when McKeowan brought hers up, Marsden refused to talk about them saying they were "irrelevant".

I can't help but wonder why she was working in the SCRAC candidate Grewal's office under an assumed name.

Grewal terminated Marsden after his offices in Vancouver and Surrey received calls from The Sun. An official in Conservative leader Stephen Harper's office had also left a message with Grewal's office seeking clarification of her status.

Marsden, who went by the name "Elle Henderson" while working in the MP's office, was hired over the objections of Conservative officials. "This individual was hired against the express wishes of both the party and the leader's office," said Jim Armour, Harper's director of communications.

Ahh, probably just doing undercover research on creeping communism in SCRAC

Marsden also told an interviewer "I haven't dated anyone in four years!" Hmm. Let's see. A lexoreac neo-con with delusions of hotness and a history of stalking former lovers. Sounds like a dream date to me. I guess the theme song for her ex's is another Dylan song.

Yes, I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
You'd know what a drag it is
To see you

No Loss

2005-01-25T09:39:00.000-06:00

SCRAC House leader John Reynolds, the most reptilean figure in Canadian politics after Paul Cellucci, has decided not run in the next election. The humourless, belligerent Reynolds has been a major force in positioning SCRAC as the 'America Lite Party'. I will miss him - about as much as I'm going to miss Cellucci.

I'm Back

2005-01-24T16:58:00.000-06:00

The bad thing about being out in the boonies is that the devil will need a new pair of ice skates before I see a dsl connection. The good thing about it is being able to get same day repair service from the local telco guys. Believe me, after going back to connections as low as 14.4k with about 50% packet loss, returning to 49k with 0% packet loss feels like jumping to dsl.

Possible Light Posting

2005-01-24T09:35:00.000-06:00

Posting may be light or non-existent for a day or two. I am having a problem with phone lines here and, since I'm working with a dialup connection, that is causing me serious 'net access problems. My normally decent (for a dialup) service is taking multiple attempts to connect at a massively packet dropping 18.8kbps. This is the first decent connection I've had in two days and the telco is on it but it might be Wednesday before everything is back to normal.

It's The Family Values Thing

2005-01-23T00:51:00.000-06:00

From the January 22 Winnipeg Free Press comes this story:

Preacher tells court sex with 10-year-old wife legal

By Allison Hanes

MONTREAL - An evangelical minister who faces five sex assault charges against two minors told a judge yesterday that a love story has been twisted into a sordid tale of abuse.

The 52-year-old preacher told the judge at his preliminary hearing that he married one of his alleged victims, with her consent, on her 10th birthday. He argued therefore that any sexual intercourse they may have had was legal.

The man, who is acting as his own lawyer, contends there is no minimum age to marry in Quebec and told Quebec Court Judge Andre Perreault that the evidence shows not only that the girl and her family agreed to the marriage, but that his child bride consented to sexual relations as well.

"It's really the first time in Canada and perhaps even the whole Commonwealth that a man has been charged for having consensual sex with his wife," he said.

But prosecutor Anne-Andree Charette said that at 10, the girl was too young to be capable of agreeing to either a wedding or sex.

The Crown contests the validity of the marriage since it was performed by the roommate of the accused, who was also a member of the congregation the minister founded.

The girl's mother has testified she was not aware of nuptials taking place. The supposed child bride, now 15, told the court she has no recollection of a wedding either.

The minister is planning a rebuttal to the Crown's arguments for Monday.

Show and tell in her 4th grade class most have been um.. interesting.

Let's recap. Those damn faggots can't get married to each other because that destroys families but I can "marry" and screw the socks off 10 year old girls because I'm a man of God. And the Catholic bishops, who for years, have been protecting priests who have been screwing young boys don't want homosexuals getting married because it destroys the family. The message here seems to be that you can rape as many kids of either sex as you want as long as you're a "man of God" because that doesn't harm the family or society in any way.

Now that's a hell of an alliance to help Stephen Harper sell his family values package to the ethnic minorities he's courting.

Strange Land

2005-01-21T11:59:00.000-06:00

I have been sailing some uncharted waters lately (where's that damn Capt. Flynn when you need him?) and have truly encountered a strange land. The denizens describe this strange land as

Brainwash is the online magazine of America's Future Foundation. Its mission is to feature the musings of up-and-coming writers in the conservative and libertarian movement.

Truly a bizarre place for a country boy progressive to wind up. And yet, despite the self description above, one of the residents has written the following about the coronation speech of King George the Witless.

As revealed in his trimuphalist inaugural address, Bush's view of the world is simple but coherent, but it promises unfortunately to deepen the rift with much of the world, create enemies where there might otherwise be friends, and cost the U.S. a great deal of lives and treasure with few positive outcomes.

The central problem with Bush is his view of what freedom means. He often states, "Our enemies hate us because we're free." And this is true, to a point. Our freedoms and way of life do indeed differ from Islamic and other regimes which differ from ours, and they may threaten them to the extent they offer a seductive alternative. But to the extent our way of life is self-contained, it need not create mortal conflict. The problem is that the whole range of human social organizations that differ from our own are potentially targeted by Bush's "freedom" crusade. Because, for Bush, freedom is not merely a lack of governmental restraints at home--a nonthreatening political goal--but rather a view of the superiority of U.S. institutions and the U.S. duty to impose such systems on other societies, with force if necessary....

Bush is at once ignorant and arrogant. He's ignorant of the numerous failings of "democracy" as well as other attempts to reorganize societies according to some alien vision. And he's arrogant about the prospects of imposing liberal and democratic change on ancient societies that have no interest in U.S. "benevolence." In other words, he's ignorant of the strong and abiding force of nationalism and conservatism in much of the world....

There is more to good policy than good intentions and a contempt for tyrrany. I believe Bush has both of these things. There must be some connection between means and ends, what was once known as "statecraft." Bush and even many of his wiz-kid advisors seem woefully deficient in this regard. These are largely smart people, who have made themselves stupid through ideological thinking.

My advice to these strangers is to proceed with great caution. Continuing to talk like this is likely to get them called "liberals" and designated as an outpost of tyranny in need of a dose of freedom and liberation to be delivered, no doubt, on the end of a CRUISE missile.

If King George and his court jesters can't keep these people on side, he appears to be in the proverbial deep linguine.

BSE: Update

2005-01-19T13:22:00.000-06:00

I cautioned in my original post that both the writing and the documentation were less than what I would have liked. Since Robert at MyBlahg was kind enough to cite the original as Post of the Week, I decided I should do an update. Given the length of the original, a new post seemed in order.

One thing I failed to mention in the original post is that the book Mad Cow USA was originally published in 1997 - about the same time as the feed ban was introduced. The book is, therefore an accurate assessment of the situation in the interval between the BSE outbreak in Britain and the imposition of the feed ban in North America. The question becomes "What has changed since then?" The answer depends on who you ask. According to the US and Canadian governments, the entire US cattle industry and at least part of the Canadian cattle industry, everything has changed. But has it? I already mentioned some problems with the feed ban in the original post. There are three fundamental issues that need to be addressed:
1) The existence of a disease reservoir.
2) Inter-species transfer
3) Cross contamination.

Before we get to those issues, there is something people need to understand. According to Neil Cashman, professor of Neurological Disease at the University of Toronto only a single milligram of infectious tissue is sufficient to transmit the disease to another cow. A milligram is such a small quantity most of us can't related to it. To make it easier, one pound is slightly over 450,000 milligrams. To get an idea of the minute quantity of infectious material require to transmit the disease, imagine dividing a pound of ground beef into 450,000 equal pieces. That is what we are dealing with.

1) The existence of a disease reservoir.
We do not know for sure that such a reservoir even exists. Unfortunately, the only way do find out for sure is to undertake testing on a much larger scale than what we are currently doing. It is certainly possible that such a reservoir did exist. Only ten pounds of infectious tissue getting into the rendering system would, theoretically, be sufficient to infect up to 4.5 million cattle. The likelihood that this happened is far from remote. To make matters worse, it is also possible that such a reservoir of disease exists outside the cattle population which takes us to the next point.

2) Inter-species transfer.
It is widely speculated that the source of the British BSE outbreak was the rendering of sheep into cattle feed. Remember from the original post that scrapie, a related disease in sheep, has been known for about 200 years. If scrapie jumped from sheep to cattle and mutated into BSE and, as is claimed, BSE jumped from cattle to humans and mutated into variant CJD, what is to prevent this from happening again? In fact, it may have already done so. Given the previous, is it that much of a reach to suggest that BSE also jumped from cattle to wild animals and mutated into CWD? (which was indentified in the late 60's). It seems there would be little to prevent the jump from happening in the reverse order. Keep in mind that the US had its own scrapie outbreak in 2003. Remember, too, that the fact sheet on CWD referenced in the original post also speculated on animal to animal transfers including the possibility of transmission through fecal contamination in water sources. Concentrations of and contact between cattle and wild life have increased over time.

3) Cross contamination.
This is a potential problem as long as we allow the use of animal by-products in any livestock feed. The cross contamination can occur deliberately where producers knowingly feed product intended for chickens (which is allowed to contain beef by-products) to cattle. It is more likely to occur accidently through contamination from improperly cleaned production and transportation equipment. How likely? Very likely according to this report which states that 60% of samples of supposedly all vegetable feed cattle feed contained animal material. This is totally preventable as indicated in the previous post.

Closing Comments:
Here are my purely speculative feelings on the subject. I think it is entirely possible that TSE diseases and the prions that cause them may have been around for millennia. Rare incidents of these diseases may have been have occurred spontaneously in a number of species including humans. In the past, such occurrences would have been rare and localized and, given the state of scientific knowledge in past centuries, not even noticed. The difference between then and now is the human factor. Food used to be much more locally produced and consumed in the not too distant past. Even a cluster of cases would be unlikely to spread outside the immediate geographic area. It is only in recent times that we have been moving animals, meat and feed over hundreds and even thousands of miles. It is also only in recent times that we have been rendering and concentrating possible diseases through our feeding practices in increasingly industrialized agriculture. In wildlife populations, the number of white-tailed deer has risen several fold in the last century and while elk numbers have not risen, they are concentrated in smaller geographic areas than before. In these populations in the past, a natural healthy predator population would have made detection unlikely. It is only recently that these animals have been ranched.

The biggest problem surrounding this issue is the shortage of hard facts. A great deal of research is required. Research that is unlikely to occur until governments and industry acknowledge at least the possibility that a problem exists. There is a significant difference in the way European governments and the US government approach public health issues. The more consumer friendly European governments tend towards the position that something is dangerous until proven safe. The more business friendly US government tends toward the position that something is safe until proven dangerous. We have seen the problems with the latter approach recently in the pharmaceutical industry. I believe it is necessary to take the more conservative approach when dealing with the safety of things as fundamental as our food and water supply. It's time we took the normally un-Canadian approach of demanding that our governments put consumers first.

Flashback: The Sands of Time

2005-01-19T00:41:00.000-06:00

I'm going to try something a little different with a few posts. I've been around long enough and done enough different things that there aren't many days when something doesn't prompt a flashback to another time and place. These posts will be a little more personal and less formal - sort of Grandpa blogging of the "I remember back when..." kind. If I like the way they flow, they'll become a regular addition. Otherwise, more candidates for the dustbin of blogging history.

A couple of days ago, I was reading this speech by Zbigniew Brzezinski delivered on Oct. 28 at New American Strategies for Security and Peace Conference. That provoked the following flashback.

I never cared for Pierre Trudeau. He may have been the last liberal to lead the federal Liberal Party but I always thought of him more as a wealthy dilettante. Besides, living in the West those days, hating Trudeau was considered more of an obligation than a decision. It took eight years of some of the worst government in Canadian history led by demon spawn Lyin' Brian Mulroney to make me begin to appreciate Trudeau.

Zbigniew Brzezinski went from Poland by way of Canada to become an advisor to Lyndon Johnson and Bush the Elder as well as Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor. Brzezinski was considered by many to be a dark and rather fearsome character - a super hawk and the ultimate cold warrior. He was also director of, and one of the brains behind, the Trilateral Commission - the origins of the New World Order tasked with making the world safe for the rich and powerful. In short a very powerful man who thirty years ago was not exactly considered the friend of progressives.

Fast forward a few decades to today and what has happened? By the standards of today's rhetoric, Brzezinski's speech is sane, rational, intellectually competent and downright (dare I say) liberal. The US is run by a theocratic whack job who couldn't find anything closer to an intelligent human being to hire out of Canada than David Frum. And the "Liberal" government of Canada is run by a Kloset Konservative who, when confronted by reporters with even softball questions, looks about as comfortable as Red Green's nephew, Harold, in a room full of naked women.

Had you asked me 25 years ago if I could ever envision the day when the era of Pierre Trudeau and Zbigniew Brzezinski would qualify as the "good old days", I would have laughed at you. I'm not laughing anymore.

Wrong Person, Wrong Job

2005-01-18T23:44:00.000-06:00

Commander Codpiece's ~~office wife~~ national security advisor Condi Rice showed today that she is as spectacularly unqualified for the position of Secretary of State as she is for her current position. Senator Joe Biden (who has actually been to Iraq) delivered the smackdown thusly:

BIDEN: Now, how many [Iraqi forces] do you really think are trained that Allawi can look to and say, I can rely on those forces? What do you think that number is?

....RICE: We think the number right now is somewhere over 120,000.

....BIDEN: Well, I thank you for your answer. I think you'll find, if you speak to the folks on the ground, they don't think there's more than 4,000 actually trained Iraqi forces. I strongly urge you to pick up the phone or go see these folks.

To add insult to insult Rice also said today:

"I do agree that the tsunami was a wonderful opportunity to show not just the US government, but the heart of the American people, and I think it has paid great dividends for us," she said.

I'm sure that somewhere in the mighty right wing wurlitzer this is being spun to show that describing one of the greatest natural disasters in modern history as a "wonderful opportunity" is exactly the right level of diplomatic sensitivity needed in a Secretary of State. I'm equally sure that humbly stating that, in any average four month period, more Americans are murdered by other Americans than have ever been murdered by terrorists would be considered symptomatic of an international conspiracy of anti-Americanism.

UPDATE 1/19
I was busy blogging last night & missed Jon Stewart's bit on Rice giving as a reason for invading Iraq that Saddam was "cavorting with terrorists". The actual quote is here. Cavorting with terrorists. Sorry. I can't get my head around that image. The mind boggles.

Goodbye Lois

2005-01-18T20:39:00.000-06:00

We often get so caught up in the bad and the ugly we scarcely notice the good. So a belated goodbye to Alberta's Lieutenant-Governor, Lois Hole. Whether you are in the horticulture business or just a gardner, Lois Hole had an effect on you. She operated a successful Edmonton area nursery for many years and shared her immense knowledge in many books. It's a rare week when I don't consult one of those books. And, by all reports, she grew people just as well as she did trees and flowers. Lois there is a little bit of you spread from one corner of this country to the other. Thanks for all the help. We'll miss you.

Canadian Blog Awards

2005-01-18T12:57:00.000-06:00

Congratulations to the winners in the various categories. The big winner in the last 2 weeks was the Canadian blogging community. When I started blogging almost 7 months ago, Pogge was the only Canadian blogger on my list for daily visits. Today there are 10 Canadian blogs on the daily list - 50% of the total - with more soon to be added. These are not all new blogs. A few of them predate mine but they attest to the increasing number of Canuck bloggers.

Not only are the numbers increasing but so is the quality. I did my usual pass through after I got home yesterday and was pleasantly surprised by the number of posts that made me say "Wow. That was good". Better writing and better documentation. We don't have the names or the traffic of some of those guys to the south and we probably never will. But it's nice to see that we're not taking a backseat to anyone in terms of quality.

Now you've had a day to congratulate yourselves. Get back to blogging you slackers!

Great Frameshop

2005-01-18T09:41:00.000-06:00

I'm back after a day away and there will be more later. Meanwhile Jeffrey Feldman nails it again with his Frameshop: war on terror. My only suggestion is to read rather than scan it. The Frameshop series is always good but this one is a clinic.

Halp!

2005-01-14T09:51:00.000-06:00

The National Intelligence Council of the CIA has produced a report called Mapping the Global Future. The report states

The war in Iraq is creating a training and recruitment ground for a new generation of "professionalized" Islamic terrorists, and the risk of a terrorist attack involving a germ weapon is steadily growing, an in-house CIA think tank said in a report released Thursday.

The "dispersion of the experienced survivors of the conflict in Iraq" to other countries will create a new threat in the coming 15 years, especially as the Al Qaeda network mutates into a volatile brew of independent extremist groups, cells and individuals, according to the report by the National Intelligence Council.

The conclusion shouldn't come as a surprise to many of us but there is also a tool being provided by the CIA which looks very interesting. The CIA site includes an interactive model called International Futureswhich is described as

a web based model of the future. This powerful tool allows users to generate in-depth, year-by-year projections through 2020 for a large number of variables. Topics covered include demographic, economic, energy, socio-political and environmental factors.

IFs can be used at the country-specific level and results can be aggregated for regions or the world. Users can display forcasts in tables and on maps or graphically....Users can also easily create their own scenarios.

This model is available for anyone to use online. It is also available for download and can be used on a stand alone computer. This sounds like it could be an interesting and useful tool. Unfortunately it is a 120mb download and requires 1gb of hard drive. I can find the drive space but I'm not interested in trying to dl 120mb on a dial-up connection. In fact, I can't even get the online version to load. I would really appcreicate it if someone out there with a high speed connection could check out the online version and let me know what you think of it. If it looks valuable, I'll get someone with a high speed connection to download and burn it for me. Thanks.

On BSE

2005-01-13T16:18:00.000-06:00

Caveat:

The purpose of this post is to inform. For the record, I am not a vegetarian nor do I intend to become one. I am also in the agriculture business so I do not have an anti-agriculture agenda. This article is neither as well written nor as well documented as I would like. It is as much as I had time to do (actually it's rather more than I had time to do). In the end we will all have to decide for ourselves what sources we trust and act accordingly.

I originally started to investigate this issue about a year ago. I had concerns at the time about health and safety, including my own, and a conviction that the situation was being badly mishandled. In the light of recent events, I began to get into the subject again and within a few hours re arrived at the same conclusion I had first arrived at a year ago.

The BSE issue has all the necessary ingredients for a Hollywood thriller: death, greed, conspiracy, rich and powerful interest groups, profound conflict of interest, menacing poorly understood diseases, international intrigue, a lack of good information and suppression of what good information there is, with a few advocacy groups thrown in for good measure. In short there is an environment in which determining the truth is beyond the reach of anyone without significant resources at their disposal. At least one book has already been written on the subject and there is material for many more.

Therefore, I will do two things. I will give you a sense of what I have come away with. In the course of that, I will address the three item teaser in a previous post and I will provide some evidence to support those statements. In case that supporting evidence raises some concerns - and it should - I will also provide you with a number of references that you can pursue yourselves to your own level of satisfaction. Don't take the information as absolute truth. Much of the information on this subject is speculative.

If there is someone out there who is interested in pursuing this subject further I will be entirely willing to cooperate and/or collaborate with you. If you have some useful comments, corrections or additional information, please post them. If all you want to do is bitch, feel free to research and post you own article.

Part One

Those of you familiar with the boreal forest know what muskeg is. For the rest, muskeg is type of peat bog found primarily in the rock underlaid northern forests. It consists of anywhere from a few to 10's of feet of a mixture of half water and half silt and decaying vegetable material covered with as much as a couple of feet of moss. It often looks completely dry and sometimes can be walked on unless you fall in a hole or stand still - at which point you start to sink. It never really freezes in the winter and regularly swallows up every thing from snowmobiles to heavy equipment. In short it is a deceptive quivering mass that is rarely what it appears to be. So too is the issue of BSE and related diseases.

First, what is BSE? BSE is part of a family of disease called “transmissible spongiform encephalopathies” or TSEs. (The technical name for mad cow disease is “bovine spongiform encephalopathy” ). These are fatal dementias that destroy the brains of their victims by filling them with microscopic, sponge like holes.(1) The keywords here are transmissible and family. BSE was not identified until the mid 1980's. However, a similar disease in sheep called "scrapie" has been known for over 200 years.(1) Chronic wasting disease (CWD) affecting deer and elk is part of that family. The human version is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD).

TSE's appear to be associated with prions - a nearly indestructible (they can withstand temperatures that will melt lead and can stay in the soil for several years) type of protein molecule.(1) There does not appear to be a good explanation of what causes these prions to malfunction. There are likely a number of causes including a possible genetic link.(1) I have heard of a claim that the pattern of TSE outbreaks matches the location of precipitation that fell through the radiation cloud from Chernobyl but, like so much of this, that is speculation. What we do know is that TSE diseases are 100% fatal and that they have long (usually) and variable incubation periods - up to 8 years in cattle and 40 years in humans.

The transmission method is also uncertain. It is generally accepted that ingestion of infected animal material is a major transmission vector. But it is unlikely the only one. There is a suggestion that transmission of CWD can occur by animal to animal contact, from mother to offspring and from water contaminated with fecal matter.(2) There is evidence to indicate that prions can also enter the water supply but I have seen no references to whether or not they can be taken up by plants.

In an earlier post, I said:

1) I believe BSE is much more prevalent than most people think it is and/or are willing to acknowledge.

One reason behind that statement is simply logic. I believe the resistance we see from governments and industry to adopting the Japanese protocol and testing every animal is a reason for concern. We are told that the meat supply is safe and that the testing regime works but the one (and only) way to prove those statements is continually rejected.

We have been told that it is too expensive. That is simply untrue. There are currently tests being used on live animals in Britain and similar tests have been developed in Canada but they are not being used here.(3) Even the conventional post mortem tests cost about $35 per animal - equal to a 3 to 5 cent per pound price increase at the grocery store. There would be additional initial costs in training, lab facilities and possibly increased cold storage capacity but once these were in place, the testing would be cheap. Do you really know anyone who would complain about even a 10 cent a pound price increase to guarantee a safe meat supply?

In Canada we have been assured that universal testing is unnecessary. When the hell did something being unnecessary become the criterion for the federal government refusing to do it? If that's the case let's take the $2 billion from the firearms registry and put it to BSE testing.

There are even more compelling reasons. In an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show, Howard Lyman of the Humane Society of the United States said(1):

A hundred thousand cows per year in the United States are fine at night, dead in the morning. The majority of those cows are rounded up, ground up, fed back to other cows. If only one of them has mad cow disease, it has the potential to affect thousands.”

“But cows are herbivores. They shouldn’t be eating other cows,” Oprah said.

“That’s exactly right, and what we should be doing is exactly what nature says. We should have them eating grass, not other cows. We’ve not only turned them into carnivores, we’ve turned them into cannibals.”...

“How do you know the cows are ground up and fed back to the other cows?” Oprah asked.

“Oh, I’ve seen it,” Lyman said. “These are USDA statistics. They’re not something we’re making up.”

The exchange continued with Dr. Gary Weber, a policy director for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

“I just had one question,” said an audience member. “I’m confused about why cattle are being fed lamb, and why are they being fed beef?”

“What it comes down to is about half of the slaughter of animals is nonsellable to humans,” Lyman said. “They either have to pay to put it into the dump or they sell it for feed, so they grind it up, turn it into something that looks like brown sugar, add to it all of the animals that died unexpectedly, all of the road kills and the euthanized animals, add it to them, grind it up and feed it back to other animals. It’s about as simple as it can be. We are doing something to an animal that was never intended to be done.”

“Are the animals tested?” asked another audience member. “All of the animals that are ground into feed that are fed to the cows?”

“There is no test other than analyzing the brains, and since we don’t have animals with these symptoms, not every brain is going to be evaluated,” Weber admitted. “No animal can enter the plant that has any of these symptoms, by law. And there’s veterinarians and . . . inspection and it doesn’t happen, Howard and you know it. It doesn’t happen.”

“Oh come on, let’s get real!” Lyman shot back. “Any animal that is not staggering around goes in there. You know as well as I do. We have a hundred thousand cows per year that die. . . . We ended up feeding downer cows to mink, the mink came down with the disease, transferred it to animals, the animals came down with it, and you’re sitting here telling everybody that it’s safe. Not true.”

There are also indications that CJD in humans is far more prevalent than earlier believe. CJD was believed to occur spontaneously in about 1 person in 1 million for about 250 new cases in the US annually.

“Health officials have maintained there are only about 250 new cases of CJD in this country each year, but several autopsy studies suggest this disease has been under-diagnosed,” explained ABC’s John McKenzie. “The studies show that when pathologists actually did autopsies and examined brain tissue from patients with Alzheimer’s and other brain disorders, they uncovered hidden cases of CJD, anywhere from about 1% to 13%. These preliminary findings suggest a public health problem is being overlooked. If larger autopsy studies at more hospitals in this country confirmed that even 1% of Alzheimer’s patients had CJD, that would mean 40,000 cases, and each undetected case is significant because, unlike Alzheimer’s, CJD is infectious.” (1,4)

It is hard to do much reading on this subject without coming away with the feeling that the government and industry are terrified of what universal testing would find. Safe food and water are two things that the public will absolutely demand. Messing with either would result in a sense of outrage that would sweep governments and industries before it. We have already had a taste of that with the Walkerton water scandal.

If universal testing showed, as I believe it would, that there are hundreds or thousands of infected cattle in North America and that hundreds or thousands more have likely made it into the food chain the results would be devastating. The collapse of the beef industry in the US could be the straw that broke the economic camel's back. Millions of cattle would be destroyed. Thousands of producers would go bankrupt. The spill over into other sectors of the food industry such as restaurants as well as other industries would put at least 10's of thousands more out of work. This coming in addition to the precarious state the US economy is already in could be enough to collapse the dollar not to mention the stock market. The situation in Canada would scarcely be any better. Is it any wonder that governments and industry would rather risk public health instead?

I also said:

2) I believe there is evidence to suggest it is found in more species than we are officially being told.

There is in fact a rather impressive list of species that have been infected with the TSE family of diseases.(1)

A TSE called “chronic wasting disease” had been seen in U.S. deer and elk, and mink ranchers occasionally saw outbreaks of “transmissible mink encephalopathy.” In 1986, a British zoo saw the first known case of a TSE in a captive African antelope, and later that year veterinarians confirmed the existence of a hitherto unknown spongy brain disease in British cattle....

A few years later, experiments showed that mad cow disease could be transmitted to goats, sheep, mice, monkeys, pigs and mink—in fact, to almost every species tested. The government pointed out that these experiments did not prove a risk from eating beef because rather than feeding them the infectious agent, researchers injected it directly into their brains, which was considered a much more dangerous route of exposure. Then house cats began dying from beef byproducts in their pet food, and it turned out that zoo animals were
dying from their feed: a nyala, a gemsbok, an Arabian oryx, a kudu, and an eland. A puma died, and three cheetahs.

There are also reports that the USDA has suppressed information about a possible case in a hog and there are also reports that ostriches fed compromised feed have also developed a TSE disease(4) indicating that most terrestrial warm blooded animals may be at risk of contracting some form of TSE.

3) I believe the issue has been totally and completely mismanaged by virtually everyone from the producers to the federal government.

The obvious North American response to the BSE outbreak in Britain would have been to ban the use of any animal by products in all livestock feed and the phase in of universal testing of all cattle. Too obvious perhaps. Instead the position of the industry and governments was to claim there was no problem here so there was no reason to be concerned.

This "no problem" approach was shown to be false with the discovery of BSE cases in Canada and the US but both countries chose to respond in the same way as the UK government had initially responded - by treating it as a public relations problem not as a potential public health problem. Testing was shown to be inadequate and the feed "ban" was shown for the fraud it was.

The feed ban was never real. In some jurisdictions and times it was voluntary (i.e.meaningless). Even when it became mandatory there were reports of bagged feed that was badly labeled or not labeled at all.. The fact that the feed was banned for cattle didn't mean that no cattle ever ate any of it. Furthermore feed containing beef by-products was recycled into cattle. If you feed your cat or dog dry, bagged food, check the ingredients list for "poultry digest". That's a polite term for chicken shit. Recycling poultry waste into livestock feed is a common way of getting rid of the waste from poultry operations. Remember those indestructible prions? They just got recycled back into cattle feed.

The second problem with the response to the discovery of BSE was waiting for the Americans to solve the problem by re-opening the border to Canadian cattle when there was no motivation for them to do. In rough terms, the amount of beef imported from Canada was slightly more than the amount the US exported to its Asian customers. With the Asian market closed to the US, imports of cattle from Canada would have trashed prices in the US. With the border closed, US producers saw an increase in prices they are still reluctant to give up. Closing the border has been good for American producers and it is unlikely to open again until their products are once more allowed into the Asian markets. We should have immediately adopted the Japanese testing protocol, one of the toughest in the world instead of clinging to the American protocol which is one of the most lax.

Here are the steps I believe need to be taken:

1) Governments need to put the brakes on industrial agriculture.

The consumer movement exists because Americans want safe foods raised in old-fashioned and environmentally sound ways by caring family farmers. Consumers want to base their food-buying habits on plentiful information about how it was raised and what chemical additives or unnatural processes might have occurred during its journey from the farm field to their plate.

Unfortunately, what the public wants and what it gets are often two quite different things. The food industry has been operating for the past decade in “crisis management” mode, spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to quell and turn aside the public’s concerns about pesticide-contaminated vegetables, milk laced with antibiotic residues, chickens and pigs from factory farms, genetically-engineered growth hormones injected into cows, human genes spliced into pigs and fish to increase growth, fake fats that can cause loose bowels, and fake sweeteners that may be linked to brain cancers.(1)

Agribusiness dominates the research at Colleges of Agriculture and graduates, including those going on to work for governments, have been thoroughly inculcated with the "bigger is better" mentality. There are other profitable and responsible models for agriculture but they are almost totally ignored. The end result is that corporations like Gargill make massive profits while the people actually growing the food are loosing their shirts.

Living in a rural area I am bombarded with propaganda extolling the virtues of industrial agriculture. The truth is industrial agriculture abuses animals, abuses the environment, has never created a new job and has never saved a rural community.

2) We need a made in Canada solution.
Forget about what the Americans want. We have to think about what Canadians need. We are, unfortunately, in a better position to do what is necessary in this country than the Americans are because our cattle industry has already been largely destroyed and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. We can't afford to wait for them to get on board because that won't happen until the situation gets so bad they have no choice but to acknowledge a problem and, by then, it will be too late.

3) We should immediately implement a total ban on the use of all livestock products in any livestock feed.
This is already years overdue.

4) We should require universal testing of all slaughtered cattle regardless of which food chain they are destined for.
This should probably be extended to include sheep and all cattle dying of "natural causes".

5) We should expand our processing capacity to the point where all livestock produced in this country can be processed in this country.
We need to be masters of our own fate not have it determined by other countries whose interests are clearly divergent from ours.

6) We need to implement a tracking system for all TSE's and expand our research into this whole family of diseases.

The saddest part of all this is that the money lost to the cattle industry combined with the money governments have put into bailing out the industry would have paid for all of this - probably several times over.

Part Two

Here are the references I used in the above:

1) Mad Cow USA by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber
This book has been reprinted with a new foreward but the original can be downloaded free from PR Watch

2)CWD Factsheet http://www.aazv.org/cwdfactsheet.htm

3) Fast, Simple, Cheap Test For Mad Cow Shunned from CanadianBusiness.com 2-23-4
I do not normally use Jeff Rense as a source because I consider many of his articles sensationalist and poorly documented (among other things). However he has a huge collection of TSE related material. Be sure to read the disclaimer first,

4) Could Mad Cow Disease Already be Killing Thousands of Americans Every Year? by Michael Greger, M.D.
Michael Greger may have an agenda of his own since he "has been the Chief BSE Investigator for Farm Sanctuary since 1993 and the Mad Cow Coordinator for the Organic Consumers Association since 2001". The article also contains a 97 item bibliography.

Brazil's Vegetarian Cows Don't Go Mad by Mario Osava

I suggest you start with Could Mad Cow Disease Already be Killing Thousands of Americans Every Year? and Brazil's Vegetarian Cows Don't Go Mad. If you want more information, download a copy of Mad Cow USA (~1.1mb download)

More Housekeeping

2005-01-13T14:57:00.000-06:00

I have added an XML feed. The link is immediately above the Links section. This is a feed burner 'smart feed' that is supposed to deliver your feed in either RSS or Atom depending on your software. Please let me know if you are having any problems with it.

I am almost finished a major post on BSE. I need to proof it and redo a couple of small sections. It should be posted within a couple of hours. It's over 3000 words and I need to get it finished before my head explodes (very messy that head exploding stuff).

BSE and Some Points on Blogging

2005-01-11T17:05:00.000-06:00

There is a rule in blogging that you are never supposed to have more than one topic in a post. I'm going to break that rule here using (what I hope to be) a clever segue.

I have wanted to put something together on the BSE issue for sometime now and, since it is back in the news again, I was considering doing a post last night. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to do the full verification I usually do so I almost decided to do a "slapshot post". A slapshot post is one where you just write it off the top of your head trusting your memory instead of doing the usual documentation and verification. I call it a slapshot post because, as in hockey, it's often off the factual net but usually in the general neighbourhood of it. For better or worse the old academic researcher that still lurks in the back of my mind and acts as my blogging conscience smacked me on the head with the old adage that "Good enough rarely is".

I remember when I was a kid playing hockey (back in the days of stone tablets). Slapshots were just coming into use in the NHL but they were still rather controversial especially for kids. Our coach didn't tell us we couldn't use a slapshot but he did tell us that, if we took a slapshot, we had better hit the net with it because if it we didn't, we were coming off the ice. That's a policy that bloggers and more than a few "professional" journalists should consider implementing. So no slapshot post on BSE. And just as well because it is too important an issue to be off the factual net. As a teaser I will make the following points:
1) I believe BSE is much more prevalent than most people think it is and/or are willing to acknowledge;
2) I believe there is evidence to suggest it is found in more species than we are officially being told;
3) I believe the issue has been totally and completely mismanaged by virtually everyone from the producers to the federal government.
And you will just have to wait until I have the time to document a serious post on the subject for more.

The intellectual tangent I went off on about 1:00 am while thinking about all of this left me with some interesting thoughts on the ethics and practice of blogging that I thought I would pass on to any new or would be bloggers who might happen by.

Anyone who has been blogging for any length of time - as in more than a week - already knows that putting together a long, well documented post takes a lot of time. As an example, my two part post on water exports and diversions that was posted long before most of you knew this blog existed. You can read part 1 and part 2 in the archives. I have known 90% of the information in that post for decades but writing it, verifying the accuracy of everything in it and finally editing to get rid of my ponderous academic style took about 6 hours. I'm getting faster as I get back into writing again and better organized but it still takes time.

If you want to blog about anything more serious than your squabbles with your boyfriend or Friday cat blogging, there are three sources you should check out. Steve Gilliard's blog. The archives at billmons' Whiskey Bar (the lights flickered back on at the bar over the weekend by the way). And Dave Neiwert's work at Orcinus. It doesn't matter if you agree with what they say. Just look at the way they craft and document a post. Steve is trained in journalism, Dave is a journalist, I think billmons' background is in technical writing and mine is in academic research. I don't put myself in the same league with these three but what we do have in common is that someone beat into us to document, document, document. People will always be able to dispute your logic and question your conclusions. If they are ever able to poke holes in your facts, you're doing something wrong.

Bloggers get a lot of flack from so called professional journalists for not being objective, spouting opinions rather than facts and for being biased. Recent events have shown that this pretty much boils down to a case of "People who live in glass houses shouldn't practice the shot putt indoors". Of course we're biased - everyone is. It's impossible to completely put aside the perceptual grid that determines what you perceive and how you interpret it no matter how hard you try. I have never tried. Rather than pretending I was totally unbiased when I was doing academic research, I used to do something unusual (at least for that time) and put a preface in every piece of research I did explaining my biases and initial assumptions so that people would have an easy way to check to see if I was manipulating the data to suit my predilections. No one ever accused me of manipulating the data but I was always up front about where I was coming from. Perhaps some of the people who work for Faux news and the New York Times should try that approach.

Bloggers don't have to hide our biases or claim to be "objective". We also don't have to yield to anyone when it comes to accuracy and thoroughness in our posting. Just make sure, if you decide to take that slapshot, that it's on the net.

By the way Steve Gilliard is working on a series of posts on the art of blogging. I can't wait.

Bad Week Rising

2005-01-11T09:35:00.000-06:00

It's only Tuesday and I'm already feeling overwhelmed by the number of things needing my attention this week. There are a data security project, a couple of web site design projects, some organizational work on a couple more projects and a trip to the big shitty that are going to suck up some major time along with all the usual daily trivia. Somewhere in all of that, I'm trying to find the time to finish my trend watching post mentioned earlier and work on a major story that, between the holidays and the tsunami disaster, was swept right off the table. Then, of course, there is all the usual insanity yet to unfold in the world. So don't be surprised if the blog goes dark for a day or two.

The Fundies Ate My Movie

2005-01-09T23:53:00.000-06:00

I admit I haven't seen the movie Alexander so I don't know whether it is good, bad or indifferent. But director Oliver Stone is blaming fundamentalist christians for the fact that his mega-budget movie is a box office mega-bomb.

Often-controversial director Oliver Stone has blamed the failure of his epic film Alexander on the "raging fundamentalism" in the U.S. South.

The film, which stars Irish actor Colin Farrell in the story of the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great, was greeted with derisive reviews.

It was also a failure at the box office. Budgeted at roughly $150 million U.S., it has pulled in only $34 million so far....

Stone, the director behind such controversial pictures as Natural Born Killers and JFK, believes the hostile reaction to the film is linked to "a raging fundamentalism in morality in the U.S."

"From day one, audiences didn't show up," he said. "They didn't even read the reviews in the South because the media was using the words 'Alex the gay.' As a result, you can bet that they thought, 'We're not going to see a film about a military leader that has got something wrong with him.'"

You know I never pass up the opportunity to acquaint religious extremists with the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate when they deserve it - which is most of the time. But if Stone's claim is correct, how does he account for the fact that Michael Moore's micro-budgeted Farenheit 9/11 outgrossed his film by about 4:1 despite the universal opposition of the entire right including a campaign to keep theatres from showing it?

It seems simpler and more plausible to me that Stone either made a movie that just about no one was interested in or that maybe his latest ~~over priced piece of cinematic bloatware~~ epic just kind of barked. Although I suppose that, if the wing nuts can blame Clinton for the war in Iraq, Stone can blame the fundies for his making a bad movie. I'm just not sure I'd want to be seen sharing that mind set.

Pre-empted by Reality

2005-01-09T21:54:00.000-06:00

I have been working on a piece about a number of trends I will be watching during the year. One of the first lines in the piece is "Can PM Paulie continue his career as a contortionist trying to kiss Bush's ass and kick it at the same time?" There were a number of indicators to keep an eye on. One of the most obvious but not necessarily the most important was the ballistic missile defense scam. Would Paulie cave or find some backbone? Everyone's favourite ambassador, Paul "Snake" Celluci seems to have preempted my post by claiming that the US government expects Canada to be on side by March.

Canada will back U.S. missile plan, Cellucci says

OTTAWA - The United States believes federal government will back the missile defence plan, says Paul Cellucci, the U.S. ambassador to Canada.

Canada will join the plan before the end of March, Cellucci told the Canadian Press on Sunday.

He said "yes" when asked if the federal government would support the controversial project.

"We've been told that it will be dealt with over the next couple of months," he told CP.

Some Liberal MPs, the Bloc Québécois and the NDP are opposed to the idea. Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin and Conservative Leader Stephen Harper have not taken a public position.

The U.S. is developing a missile system that could shoot down incoming missiles, but it faces technological problems.

MPs will have a chance to address the issue before the government makes a decision, a spokesperson for Martin said.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to believe that King George and his loyal ~~sycophants~~ errand boys aren't deliberately trying to screw Martin. First Bush sucker punches him with this during the state visit after being asked specifically not to bring it up. Now dick wad Cellucci does it again. This creates a no win situation for Martin. If he goes along with Bush against the wishes of the majority of Canadians, he looks like King George's punk. If he says "no", Harper and SCRAC, the Bushies' loyal fifth column in Canada get to accuse him of petulant anti-Americanism.

There is no doubt in my mind that this is a deliberate, calculated meddling in Canadian affairs - a point I have made before. There is an old saw that runs "The first time it happens, it's an accident. The second time, it's a coincidence and the third time, it's enemy action". I don't believe in coincidence and I'm not much of a believer in accidents either. When our great friend, the US government is involved, I tend to go directly from accident to enemy action and I don't linger long on accident. This is beginning to look like a deliberate attempt by the Bush regime to hurt Martin's chances in the next election. There are ways Paulie can turn this to his advantage but he is going to have to be much more decisive and politically astute than anything we have seen from him in the last year and a half.

I have said before the Canada needs to find a better class of friends because some of the ones we have are beginning to look far too much like enemies. It will be interesting to see if Paulie can tap dance his way through this minefield. As for the question I started this post with, you will just have to wait until I finish the piece to see what I expect will happen.

Best Blog?

2005-01-07T12:26:00.000-06:00

I started this post weeks ago and then let it sit and stew for awhile. I was checking the referrals on the site meter stats a few weeks ago (the best way I've found to discover who is linking to me) and checked back to this site where I was surprised to find that True North had been nominated as the best Canadian blog. Actually amazed would be a better description especially since this blog was well short of six months old at the time.

Steve Gilliard was nominated for the Koufax awards and responded this way:

Ok, I've had a consistent position since I was a college student and taking journalism courses.

I do not care about awards. I've never worked for one, or thought about them.

While I appreciate the comments, there is never a day I would lift a finger to campaign for one. While this is a nice sentiment and I do respect the regard my work is held in, I could care less about the Koufax Awards.

If people vote for it, that's nice, but I'm totally indifferent. It doesn't change my plans one bit...

Anyone worrying about an award is doing the wrong thing.

Steve is absolutely right in principle. Of course, I might be a lot more cavalier about it all if I was getting 5000 hits a day like he does.

I am very flattered that someone thought enough of my efforts to nominate True North although I suspect that whoever it was may have stumbled onto Grandpa's Christmas stash of the extra good stuff 'round about the same time.

I started writing in high school and have always enjoyed the process of working with words but had gotten away from it for about the last ten years. Blogging has given me a sometimes frustrating way of getting back into writing. I started True North because there were some things I felt needed to be said and felt my background and slightly askew way of looking at things made me a good candidate to say them. Those in the blogging community who know me a little better know that I have concerns over some of the trends I see developing in this country and believe that a strong blogging community on the liberal coast is a valuable tool to thwart those trends. It's my view that anything that brings Canadians into contact with any part of the liberal blogging community is a good thing for the entire community. If awards and being nominated for them contribute to that end, then I'm all for them.

I have written a few pieces I'm pleased with and, with a little more time available these days, hope to be able to come up with a few more. As target rich as the current blogging environment is, I will run out of me long before I run out of things to blog about. If a few people every day visit this blog and come away entertained, educated or forced to think, I'm accomplishing everything I set out to do. But Best Blog? I don't think so.

I do thank those who visit here and link to me. I think we all owe a serious vote of thanks to Robert McClelland from My Blahg and The Canadian Blog Awards for his tireless efforts to support and promote Canadian bloggers. If you do feel inclined to support any of the Blog Award nominees then please go here and do so.

And The First Clue Was?

2005-01-06T12:28:00.000-06:00

From Atrios:

Ben Wikler provides us with a choice excerpt from the Nelson report, a long running insider tipsheet generally considered to be quite reliable:

There is rising concern amongst senior officials that President Bush does not grasp the increasingly grim reality of the security situation in Iraq because he refuses to listen to that type of information. Our sources say that attempts to brief Bush on various grim realities have been personally rebuffed by the President, who actually says that he does not want to hear "bad news."

Rather, Bush makes clear that all he wants are progress reports, where they exist, and those facts which seem to support his declared mission in Iraq...building democracy. "That's all he wants to hear about," we have been told. So "in" are the latest totals on school openings, and "out" are reports from senior US military commanders (and those intelligence experts still on the job) that they see an insurgency becoming increasingly effective, and their projection that "it will just get worse."

No shit! What was your first clue Sherlock? Could it have been this interview from September 22, 2003 where Bush said:

I glance at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves.

Or maybe this one where:

George W. Bush has helpfully explained why he doesn't read newspapers or even watch the nightly news on television: (because)"I like to have a clear outlook...."

Bush doesn't want to know anything that doesn't fit with his carefully crafted fantasy. These guys are just figuring this out now? Where have they been? Hiding in a cave with Osama?

Some years ago I got tired of the bs involved in doing tech support for a Fortune 500 company and I signed on to work for a fledgling computer retailer. Turns out the owner was another of these "I don't want to hear any bad news" guys. Among the bad news he didn't want to hear was that his sales manager was stoned all the time and every time the owner left, the sales manager sat in the office snorting coke and spying on the employees (and watching for the boss to return) on the surveillance cameras. I bailed as soon as I saw the writing on the wall and two months later the rest of the employees showed up for work only to find the doors were locked and the inventory was gone.

Bush is headed for the same result on a much larger scale. Unfortunately he is going to take a lot of people with him. There is an old principle in farm equipment repair that you can put anything anywhere if you hit it often enough with a big enough hammer. Unfortunately reality doesn't respond in quite the same way.

Housekeeping

2005-01-06T11:29:00.000-06:00

I have made some long overdue changes to the links section to the right. My dirty little secret is now revealed. It's not only the road to my private hell that's paved with good intentions - the whole damn place has been paved over. The original links list sat unchanged since the day the blog started and it was long past time for some additions and I expect more will be on the way soon. The criterion, as before, is every blog on the list is one I visit regularly.

Aside from rearranging the list, there are a few things to note. Most of the new additions are some outstanding Canadian blogs of the liberal persuasion. The exception is our token conservative Bound by Gravity because I still think there is hope for Andrew (/grin). (Sorry Andrew but I couldn't resist. My bad.) Other notable additions are Eric Margolis' semi-blog and Gwynne Dyer's web site. Katherine Yurica's web site Yurica Report is a great reference for those concerned about religious extremism in North America and it will be joined by other sites addressing the same concerns. Xymphora is a fairly new site to me but I am using some of their material in an upcoming major post. I have left the link to Billmon's Whiskey Bar because, while the blog itself is dead, the archives are still there and may be valuable.

The Big Stories of 2005

2005-01-05T00:11:00.000-06:00

Eric Margolis has dusted off his crystal ball in his latest article for the Toronto Sun. I do suggest an anti-depressant or at least a good stiff drink (or six) before reading it. This item probably qualifies as the closest thing to good news in the entire list:

The European Union, for all its growing pains, economic doldrums, and bureaucratic obesity, has replaced the United States as the world's champion of human rights and support for civilized world order.

Right - that's the good news. The rest of the list is somewhere between bad and "I want to pull the blankets over my head and pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist". The downers include:

The biggest problem the world faces this new year is the continuing fall of the U.S. dollar. The Bush administration's reckless spending, ruinously expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (now costing as much as the Vietnam War), America's galloping trade deficit and credit spending frenzy are creating the perfect economic storm....

Japan and China's central banks may give up trying to artificially shore up the U.S. dollar by buying U.S. currency and securities. A plunging dollar could cause foreign investors to start dumping U.S. securities and assets. The result: A potential worldwide financial crisis that could collapse the housing bubble, cause interest rates to soar, and send securities markets into freefall....

China's banking system is a house of cards. Uncontrolled credit expansion has fuelled China's property boom and international buying spree. Banks are swamped by bad, non-performing loans made to huge, money-losing state-owned corporations. Collapse of China's insolvent banking system would threaten world financial markets.

You can read the rest of the list for yourself. I've moved past orange brandy and am headed for the 150 proof rum.

Good Riddance

2005-01-04T23:00:00.000-06:00

Something many of us have been waiting for has finally been announced. According to the CBC our great and good friend US ambassador Paul Cellucci has announced that he will leave his post this March. And not a moment too soon. Cellucci has meddled in Canadian affairs to a degree that few other countries not on the US payroll would have tolerated. The only downside I can see to this is that I hate to consider what useless sack of shit King George the Witless is going to replace him with. It's hard to see how his replacement could be much worse but it's just as unlikely to be any better. At any rate, good riddance to bad rubbish and pogge have a beer on me.

The Feldman Diaries

2005-01-04T15:02:00.000-06:00

I must admit that, while being a regular dKos visitor, I used to pay very little attention to the dKos diaries. It made sense. I have limited blogging time available so the more time I spend reading, the less time I have for writing. That has changed recently as I have discovered that there is often more content in the diaries than on the main page.

One of the outstanding diaries is posted by Jeffrey Feldman under the title Frameshop. Liberals in the US have many problems in their fight with right wing extremism. One of the major ones has been their penchant for consistently allowing the right and, especially the Bush Cult, to frame every issue. The end result is that liberals are continuously forced to fight the battle as defined by the right. It's hard to win a fight when you insist on telling your opponents "You name the game. You make the rules. And I'll play". Then they wonder why the right wing agenda is being advanced every where you look. And why is this? Because of the superior rationale and logic as the right would have us believe? One look at the debacle to the south shows that argument for the blatant absurdity it is

The reason the right wing agenda is advancing on all fronts is that for 30 years liberals, especially in the US, have consistently been out worked, out organized, out communicated and out funded by the right. While liberals have been sitting around ridiculing rednecks, making fun of fundies and having great intellectual debates about how many angels can dance on the head of Noam Chomsky's dick, the right has been busy networking, developing and circulating talking points,and getting issues framed and communicated to Joe and Jill Sixpack in language they can readily understand. Regardless of how you feel about the right wingers agenda, you have to, at least grudgingly, admire their ability to frame issues, manipulate language, distribute talking points and relentlessly stay on message even when their message is being publicly shown for a pack of lies. The right wing bobble heads on the Sunday morning talk shows all sound as if they have swallowed tape recorders with copies of the same tape.

Fortunately for us, the fright wing in this country has developed nowhere near the communications sophistication of their southern brethren but that will change and we need to be ahead of the wave to avoid the problems of our southern brethren. This where Feldman's Frameshop series is so valuable - it does for us what the other side has been doing for decades. Feldman's diaries are available individually from the DogFight 04 blog. DogFight has also compiled the entire series to date into a free e-book called The Feldman Diaries that can be downloaded from a link on the blog. I strongly recommend giving it a read.

The individual Frameshop entries are not necessarily directly useable because they address specific US issues but the approach he uses is invaluable. I did something like it in my Talking Points: Ballistic Missile Defense post and we badly need something like this developed for every Canadian issue. This is an extremely valuable role for bloggers to play. After all, who else is going to do it? Paul Martin's ineptitude is exceeded only slightly by that of Stephen Harper and Jack Layton. It is absolutely vital that we get out front on this.

As an additional resource, I also recomend this Michael Erard piece called Frame Wars from Molly Ivins' site. I will have more on this subject later along with some additional thoughts on communicating to those outside the choir.

Frame On!

Toto We're not going home.

2005-01-02T23:48:00.000-06:00

There have been a few references to some press releases by the Pastor Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka Kansas. These documents have not been widely circulated because they are hard to access - a graphics file rolled in a pdf wrapper. I have disassembled these 3 files and what follows is the text minus the (poor quality) graphics but with the photo captions. Forget about your "God of love' or 'Prince of peace' or 'blessed are the meek'. When those were being covered, these people were busy watching the Human Sacrifice channel.

Why spend so much time on the bilious retchings of a rabid amoeba? Because there are things that grow in dark places and the rocks they hide under must be rolled over so they may be exposed to the light of day. This is not the mentality that brought us Auschwitz. Worse. It is the mentality that brought us the Dark Ages and the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Liberals believe that all things can be solved through rational discourse. They are wrong. Some things cannot. If you do not believe there is a war going on, read on.

Westboro Baptist Church
(WBC Chronicles - Since 1955)
3101 SW 12th St. Topeka, Kansa 66604 785-273-0325 www.godhatesfags.com
Religious Opinion and Bible Commentary on Current Events

NEWS RELEASE
Supplemental Info: background, photos, audio sermons & hymns, and video footage - available free at:
www.godhatesfags.com, godhatesamerica.com, fredthemovie.com, and hatemongers.com

December 29, 2004

Thank God for Tsunami & 2,000 dead Swedes

How many tsunami-dead Swedes are fags & dykes? Vacationing on their fat expendable incomes without kids to bother with and spend money on. With respect to each of these earthquake-dead perverts: "He shall be buried with the burial of an ass." Jer. 22:19. Maybe Sweden can pass another law - making It a crime for God to send earthquakes and tidal waves to kill vacationing Swedish fags & dykes.

Sweden sent Pastor Ake Green to jail for preaching in his own church to his own people that homosexuality is abnormal and sinful.

"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all
ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth In unrighteousness." Rom. 1:18.

"Hold" here means to hold down, choke, suppress. Sweden has enacted criminal laws to suppress the truth of God about fags and dykes!!! Ergo Sweden Is under God's silent, irresistible, irreversible curse: "For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm shall eat them like wool" Isa 51:8. The earthquake was a small adumbrations of worse things to come for Sweden: "And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great" Rev. 16:18. Woe to faggot Sweden!

SWEDEN-- "LAND OF THE SODOMITE DAMNED"
Stockholm (ENT) A Swedish court has sentenced a pastor belonging to the Pentecostal movement in Sweden, Ake Green, to a month in prison under a law against incitement after he was found guilty of having offended homosexuals in a sermon. Soren Andersson, the president of the Swedish federation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights (RFSL), said on hearing the sentence that religious freedom could never be used as a reason to offend people. Therefore he told journalists "I cannot regard the sentence as an act of interference with freedom of religion." During a sermon in 2003, Green described homosexuality as "abnormal a horrible cancerous tumour in the body of society."

If that diatribe against the Swedes was not sufficient, he celebrated the New Year by adding Americans to the list:

January 1, 2005

Thank God for Tsunami. Thank God for 3,000 dead Americans!
Yes! Thank God for Sept. 11 and 3,000 dead sodomite Americans in 2001. God sent the Muslim planes to destroy fag New York's twin towers and hurl 3,000 vile Americans into Hell. Even so, God sent Tsunami last week to execute vengeance upon another 3000, carcasses swallowed up in Asian Jungles, and concerning each of whom It shall be said: "He shall be buried with the burial of an ass." Jer. 22:19.

America is awash in diseased fag feces & semen! America: apostate land of the sodomite damned!
Today -Jan. 1, 2005- California joins Massachusetts in lawful same-sex marriage. Last week Montana joined many other states endorsing the gay lifestyle, and Arkansas struck down prohibition of gay adoptions. France has joined Sweden, Canada and other nation-states in criminalizing Gospel preaching against sodomy.

Spain has joined most other European countries in approving same-sex marriage.

(The following are photo captions. ed)

Take a look at fag America! At left are two filthy faggots married in San Francisco. At lower left are two vile dykes with their mutant teenage son between them with his arms on their shoulders. God knows where that pitiful mutation of humanity came from. Below are two smirking dykes with two little babies they've adopted - thanks to evil sodomite Judges who now fill the benches. "Shall I not visit for these things? saith the Lord; shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?" Jer. 5:29. Amen.

Once was not enough. Of course you knew we had to be included.

January 1, 2005

Let us pray that God will send a massive Tsunami to totally devastate the North American continent with 1000-foot walls of water doing 500 mph -even as islands in southern Asia have recently been laid waste, with but a small remnant surviving.
God Hates Fag America!

"And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there
was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the
earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great" Rev. 16:18.

On a huge state-of-the-art flagpole out front, lighted by night, Westboro Baptist Church flies the Canadian flag upside down atop the American flag, also upside down. Upside down signifies distress. They've deeply corrupted themselves and have rebelled against the King. It is sinfully simplistic to speak of repentance for either Canada or America. It is too late for that. They have sinned away their days of grace and are now doomed.

Canada & America are Homo Fascist regimes of Nazi terror!

Fags and dykes rule both nations and punish Gospel preachers with fines and imprisonment if they object.

Ah christian love. Can't you just feel the warmth? Mark Twain said "It's going to be a hell of a heaven when all those hypocrites get together". If these guys are the tour guides for heaven, Hieronymus Bosch's vision of hell is looking like the preferred choice for an eternal vacation.

Toto. I don't think we're in Kansas anymore. And damn glad of it. Please excuse me while I go wash my mind out with bleach. Hopefully there is enough of that orange brandy left to get the taste out of my mouth.

Still Here

2005-01-02T10:43:00.000-06:00

I was greeted this morning by sun dogs, a -34 wind chill and 5 more inches of white stuff that fell last night. My 10hp snow shovel is getting a real workout these days. I guess I no longer have an excuse (other than the -34 windchill) for not getting out the boards and creating some cross country ski trails out through the bush. I definitely need to work off some of the chocolate mint brownies, cranberry cheesecake and orange brandy among other things from the last couple of weeks. Do we actually eat anything at this time of year that isn't at least 200 calories a mouthful? Oh well, everything enjoyable in life is illegal, immoral, fattening, causes cancer, pisses off the religious extremists or some combination of the above.

I'm working on a number of posts - some of which scare the hell out of me but posting will be a little sporadic for the next few days while I catch up on some of the work that piled up over the holidays. There is also a vicious rumour afoot that the long postponed update to the blog might be floating to the top of the list.

Happy New Year

2004-12-31T11:14:00.000-06:00

I had hoped to finish a couple of posts today but that isn't going to happen. The weather gods saw fit to end 2004 with 8 inches of heavy snow last night with 2 more inches today pushed by 40 - 60 kmph winds and another couple of inches tomorrow. It usually takes 1 1/2 hours to clear my driveways and access trails but I've already spent 2 hours clearing half of it. The temperature is tanking and windchills later today will be pushing -40 so I need to get back at it right away. I'm also profoundly grateful that a blizzard and some crappy temperatures are the worst natural calamities I have to deal with in any given year.

The past year for me, while less than spectacular, was actually pretty decent. Several things I have been working on for a couple of years have started to come together - not as exactly as planned of course but still OK. I am saddened that, for people in many parts of the world if 2004 was a fish, they would throw it back. Some of this year's tragedies were entirely preventable (Iraq & Sudan) while others (the Asian tsunami) were not. It is hard to see how any good can come out of such miseries but without hope there is nothing much to make us carry on.

I wish all of you peace, tolerance and prosperity for 2005. And a global outbreak of sanity and cosmic justice would be nice as well. But that might be asking a bit much.

Happy New Year.

Bush Seriously Ill?

2004-12-28T12:33:00.000-06:00

Apparently so. Remember the much speculated on bulge in the back of his jacket noticed during the presidential debates? The cause of that bulge seems to have been identified. Much of the speculation centred around the possibility that he was wearing some type of medical device. The device has been identified as a LifeVest wearable defibrillator. C L Hallmark has an article and photographs at the Houston Independent Media Center.

George W. Bush apparently is wearing a medical device for "persons at risk of cardiac arrest." It is a LifeVest wearable defibrillator. He started using it sometime after his January 2002 fainting spell, which was attributed to choking. Based on photos showing him wearing the device, one can conclude the fainting was due to atrial fibrillation (AF), which his father also had. His father's AF was caused by Graves' hyperthyroidism, which his mother also has. Bush likely has AF and less likely Graves', based on his family history and symptoms. The AF may have caused a stroke or TIA (mini-stroke), of which physicians watching the debates detected symptoms. Observers have noted psychological symptoms consistent with this and with Wernicke-Korsakoff disease....

In the January 2002 pretzel-choking episode, according to President Bush, the period of unconsciousness was brief -- a few seconds. When fainting begins and ends suddenly, the cause of fainting usually is not what his doctors reported (vaso-vagal syncope) but instead is an abnormal heart rhythm such as atrial fibrillation (AF). Chronic AF is consistent with Mr. Bush's requirement for constant monitoring and immediate access to defibrillation. Atrial fibrillation can lead to disastrous consequences if the patient is capable of sustaining a very rapid preexcited ventricular response with conduction over the accessory pathway. The rapid heart rate can produce syncope (fainting); or, more important, AF may cause ventricular fibrillation and sudden cardiac death. The LifeVest the president wears terminates ventricular fibrillation or ventricular tachycardia (overspeed) to prevent sudden cardiac death. This may be the reason the president wore the device during the debates, even though he risked exposing his vulnerability, especially if the device alarm sounded.

According to the Framingham Offspring study of AF, a person whose parent had AF is 50 percent more likely to have it than the general population. President Bush's father had it during his presidency. While jogging at Camp David on a Saturday afternoon (May 4, 1991), Bush Sr developed shortness of breath, chest tightness, and a general feeling of fatigue. A White House physician discovered Bush had a rapid irregular heartbeat, ultimately diagnosed as atrial fibrillation caused by Graves' disease, a form of hyperthyroidism (overactive thyroid)....

Although atrial fibrillation usually is controllable with treatment, it may become a lasting, chronic, condition. In the president's case, it apparently has, as his physicians evidently have decided to have him wear an external device that can continuously monitor his heart and shock it back into effective operation in case of an attack.

Hyperthyroidism, hypertension, and other diseases can cause arrhythmias, as can recent heavy alcohol use (binge drinking). Some cases have no identifiable cause. The president says that he stopped drinking when he was 40, so binge drinking is not an issue. However, both of his parents have the Graves' disease form of hyperthyroidism and it is hereditary and must be considered.

The article also discusses the possibility that Bush has had one or more small strokes citing, among other things, the deterioration in his speech that has occurred over the last few years. Hallmark goes on to conclude:

The president apparently uses a wearable defibrillator, a device to stop heart arrhythmia, as seen in photographs. He has had a sudden fainting spell and other symptoms of atrial fibrillation (AF) and has a genetic tendency for it. Some observers have noted neurological and psychological irregularities and other evidence of stroke, which is a possible result of AF. Some of these irregularities could be caused by Wernicke-Korsakoff's, a disease of inveterate alcoholics. The president has an even stronger genetic predisposition for hyperthyroidism and some symptoms of it, including the heartbeat arrhythmia. Only his doctors know for sure.

With Cheney's well known serious heart problems, the Bush regime really seems to be headed up by the "cardiac kids". Although the families of 10's of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians already knew that Bush and Cheney didn't have a heart between them.

Christmas Seige

2004-12-28T10:33:00.000-06:00

It turns out that the whole "attack on Christmas" theme circulating around Wingnut Country^TM was a tempest in a ~~teacup~~ thimble. Paul McLeary over at CJR's Campaign Desk provides the details on this great anti-Christmas conspiracy:

Stories about banned Christmas carols and employers forbidding the use of "Merry Christmas" in favor of "Happy Holidays" seem to pop up each December. Over the past few days, however, the issue has been moved front and center by a hungry press, with stories popping up in the national media almost daily, and conservative television host Bill O'Reilly running a daily segment titled "Christmas Under Siege."

But wade through the wall-to-wall coverage of the story, and it becomes apparent that there are only a handful of examples -- three, to be exact -- being recycled in article after article. Many of these pieces use the same incidents in almost the same way. Some even hit for the cycle, as USA Today did today, referencing all three stories in one shot....

When not flogging the same three stories -- two of which are essentially false -- to create the appearance of a genuine national trend, the media is busy interviewing the same outraged representatives of a few conservative family groups trying to put the Christ back in Christmas.

Steve Gilliard had slighly different take:

Ho, ho fucking ho

What's all this shit about Merry Festivus?

Fucking assclown Christians needing to feel like vicitms in a country where four out of five people believe in Jesus. They're as silly as white surpremacists who think White folks are oppressed people.

When I saw a black minister saying they would only shop in stores where people said Marry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays because they were "taking Christ out of Christmas", I just want to ask, where the fuck have you been the last century or so. Santa Claus is an invention of Coca Cola. In most Christian countries, St. Nick is an actual saint.

I just saw the story of a GI who played St. Nick for some Luxembergian kids in 1944. And they invite him back every so often. At the time, many of the younger children had never celebrated Christmas during the war. So the homesick GI's handed out candy, cake and whatever they had to the kids, many of whom hadn't had much during the German occupation. The amazing thing is that the whole thing was caught on film. The soldier, who was a kid 60 years ago is in his 80's now, with a bunch of dead friends in the US cemetery in the area. All of the Americans who died in the assault on Germany are buried in five massive graveyards in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland

Now, that's about the Christmas spirit, not some whining about how Jesus is being ignored by retailers.

Not being an idiot, I also realize that New Years is next week. Which is also a holiday.

The whole new Christian cult relies on a never ending sense of victimization. Not a geniune belief in Christ, but this "I listen to rock music, I look cool and I follow Jesus bullshit" or more accurately, that people won't laugh at me when they find I go to church. Amy Grnat was on Nightline last night and it was all she could do not to roll her eyes at this crap. She told Koeppel "you know I was an English major", suggesting that she both retained critical faculties and wasn't a halfwit. Just because Jesus is involved doesn't mean it doesn't suck.

These people thrive on victimization and isolation, as if Americans are being attacked for having faith. Oh, there goes the poor Christian. No, there goes the annoying asshole. These people want to oppress others, not talk about faith and service and compassion. A bible which looks like Seventeen? Talk about uncritical thinking.

Belief is not a marketing tool to get you to buy unbiblical books like the Left Behind series, about the misreading of Revelations. No, there's no rapture in it. It was invented by some crazy English guy in the 1700's. Most of it is a sort of American fashion. Protect us from the cruel world and it's nasty economy and those scary Mexkins and negroes. Let us hide behind you in segregated "Christian" schools. The people marketing Jesus as a security blanket and not a call to faith are hucksters, not religious. When I see Jesus action figures, I'm seeing a scam.

Chrisitanity, at least to me, is about charity and selflessness, not proving how good a groupie you are.

One of the problems with Gilliard is the way he continuously pussyfoots around issues. I wish the guy would just say what's on his mind.

Paulie, Track Star

2004-12-28T10:04:00.000-06:00

I watched the annual ~~softball session~~ interview with PM Paulie on CTV last night. As expected, it was pretty much an hour long weasel fest. There were a couple of tidbits of information but most of the time Paulie had his track shoes on and ran like hell from anything that looked like a firm answer. Robertson and Oliver tried early on to pin him down on a couple of his non-answers but finally gave up and let him skate. I wonder if half a dozen Canadians off the street would have been so easy on him or if they would have turned it into a game of "whack a weasel"?

Priorities Priorities

2004-12-28T09:55:00.000-06:00

The pictures of the aftermath of the Asian tsunami are difficult to comprehend. I can only imagine what the devastation really looks like on the ground as the death toll heads to a possible 60,000 (and that's just from the flood itself). Canada has committed $4 million to the tsunami relief effort which, in light of the magnitude of the disaster, does not seem overly generous. That is until you compare it to the contribution of our neighbours - a whole $15 million when Bush's ~~coronation~~ inauguration next month is slated to cost $30 - 40 million plus the cost of security. This is prompting some grumblings from the UN about the post Christmas reappearance of Scrooge.

U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland suggested that the United States and other Western nations were being "stingy" with relief funds

Australia has managed to pony up $10 million which is a pretty major effort considering the state of the Aussie economy. Maybe PM Paulie could stay home for a couple of months and we could up our contribution.

It seems that Steve Gilliard is on to something:

I was watching ABC News and every picture had a white person in it. They talked to white people. The fact that entire provinces were wiped from the earth, people had lost their homes and their families and the economies of several countries were torn to shit with no warning, all I'm hearing about is how tourists had vacations ruined.

The fact that they will all go home to clean water and standing homes, and that only the richest Westerners can even visit these places, seems to have escaped the news, except as horrible pictures. The idea of talking to wogs and finding out how they feel about losing everything is not nearly as important finding out how Oprah's designer buddy and his boyfriend survived in their luxury hotel most locals can't even enter.

If you would like to do something Pogge and Terrible Timmy have links.

Breaking News

2004-12-24T13:04:00.000-06:00

From the True North News Service 22:00CST - 12/24/04

NORAD officials report that an unidentified incoming missile was detected roughly 30 minutes ago. US Ballistic Missile Defense Command was alerted. A missile was launched at 21:45CST to intercept the incoming terrorist threat. However, true to form it crashed into the Bering Sea approximately 90 seconds after launch. Unnamed sources close to the Canadian Defense Department inform True North that Santa Clause will be able to continue his flight uninterrupted after safely entering Canadian airspace.

-30-

Have a Very Merry UnChristmas

2004-12-22T17:29:00.000-06:00

I am vaguely amused watching the annual joust between the forces of political correctness and various traditionalists over Christmas. I say vaguely amused because that is the limit of the enthusiasm I can generate on the subject of political correctness. In my world, PC still stands for "personal computer" not "politically correct". I am not now, nor will I ever be, a chronologically and horizontally gifted and follicle pigmentally challenged male person. I'm a fat gray haired old man. Get over it. I have.

I have always considered political correctness to be largely the domain of those gifted with too much free time and challenged for something useful to do with it. I am not advocating elevating insensitivity to a virtue but I'm tired of the pompous, humourless people who think everything, including getting up in the morning for a piss, has to be some kind of a political statement. There is a world full of real problems out there I intend to spend my time addressing. Semantics for the sake of semantics isn't one of them. Calling a garbage man a "sanitary engineer" doesn't make what he picks up smell any better nor are the psychic wages of any value at the grocery store.

Having been a devout atheist since childhood, Christmas and how to deal with it has always been problematic for me. When I was young, I went through the motions because everyone else did but I never really felt comfortable celebrating something I didn't believe in. At some point, I got militant for about fifteen years and refused to have anything whatever to do with Christmas. Now, at this point in my life, I really don't give a tinker's damn.

The winter solstice is something that connects deeply into our most primitive fears. Celebrations of the end of one life cycle and the beginning of another go far back into pre-history - millennia before the rise of any extant religion. That Christianity would appropriate the winter solstice celebration and wrap it with the trappings of its own mythology is hardly surprising nor is it unique.

So how do those of us who are deity challenged handle this time of year? I suspect the answer is different for all of us. My wife and I take our tree seriously. No we don't actually call it a "Christmas tree" and certainly never a "seasonal tree". When one of us talks about "A tree" or "The tree", we both know what it means. We're partial to a balsam fir about 7' tall and 4' wide. It takes us about 2 days to decorate it with wildlife scenes and scenes of children playing - many of them we hand made. The upper section is decorated as a mountain top and it's topped not with a star representing an astrological grand conjunction but with the figure of a follicley, chronologically and gonadaly gifted person (translation:bearded old man) representing the wisdom of the world and the fond hope that, someday, humans might actually learn to put it to use. We enjoy our trees all summer and our living room looks like a jungle anyway. The tree indoors is a natural extension. It's fun to do and fun to look at. Along with a wood fire and a shot of brandy, it's a great way to buffer ourselves against the -36 (-33F) outside -48 (-54F) with a wind chill) and the fact that there are still 4 more months of winter to come.

We also use the extra time to spend with family and friends we never seem to find enough time for. If it turns out to be a "Christmas" dinner, we really don't care - that's their meaning not ours. Somehow none of us seem to feel the necessity of imposing our definition of the activities on everyone else. I guess that might be some of that tolerance and respect stuff we keep hearing about.

We even indulge in a little ritualistic gift giving not because it has any symbolic value to us but because it does have for them. This is especially true of my young nephews - they are kids; they have been brought up in a religion; and they have a whole lifetime to wrestle with the concept of religion and decide if it is something of relevance to their lives. Raining on their parade would benefit no one.

Of course Christmas (and Christianity) are rife with hypocrisy. That fails to distinguish them from any other organized religion or its celebrations. Most of us who are religiously challenged don't have much grounds for hiding behind the tree looking morally superior when it comes to the subject of hypocrisy either. A billion or so people spending a couple of weeks talking about peace and goodwill isn't a bad thing. It would be a much better thing if they actually spent the time practicing them. But if enough people talk about peace and goodwill for long enough, perhaps some will put them into practice. I can't see how that would hurt anyone.

So feel free to offer whatever good wishes you like. Happy Holidays. Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. Or any thing else at any time of year. We'll be glad to return them in kind. Because we care about your religion? No. Because we care about people. And, if I remember correctly, isn't that sort of what the whole exercise is really supposed to be about?

So relax. Enjoy. Best wishes and a happy whatever you choose to celebrate (or not) to all of you.

Eat Drink and be Merry.

2004-12-21T21:00:00.000-06:00

Then do it again. Before you head out for any holiday festivities be sure to read canadiancynic's Dietary advice for the holidays