progressive

i've left this space dark for some time now. for the last month or two i've been posting at canadian cynic. cc has been one of my biggest supporters in blogville. much of the traffic i ever received here, at the terminal velocity of sausage, came through links from his site and his recommendations, for which i am most grateful. when i got the invitation to join canadian cynic i was more than flattered and i hope my snark-fu lives up to the standards that fans of the site are used to. again my gratitude to cc for his continued support and for the opportunity to reach a far larger audience.

recently there has been a tempest in a piss pot. i won't go into details, as i'm sure most readers of the progressive bent will have had their fill of the robert mclelland saga. as an affiliate of the progressive bloggers i wanted to express my distaste for the handling of this shmozzle. while absolute power corrupts absolutley (hi george!), a little power will happily corrupt little people (hi warren and jason!). mclelland is an abrasive character and his comments were uncalled for. he has since apologized. i don't believe that he's an anti-semite but i am troubled by the ban of his site from prog-blogs, it smacks of politically correct conformism. and that ain't too progressive.

i have certainly said some very offensive things about people, i've just been lucky enough to say awful things about folks that are safe to lay into, o'reilly, bush, harper etc. i am not comfortable with israel being the great western sacred cow. not that i care if i get tossed from an aggregator, but let me make myself perfectly clear:

i support israel's right to exist, always have done.
i deplore israel's ultra-militaristic stance.
i am disgusted by israel's recent actions against lebanon and ongoing crimes in palestine.
i fear for the good citizens of israel as their leaders continue abusive policies that feed into the cycle of violence.

the notion that israel should be immune from all criticism is a disservice to israel. under the veto umbrella of america, israel has had a free hand in dealing with her neighbours without fear of repercussions. israel has become the ultimate international welfare state. as america's citadel in the desert they have been funded and armed to the teeth and have too often used force indiscriminately. there will never be peace in the region until all sides agree to make peace. those sides will not come together without conciliation and compromise. peace for israel will not be achieved through continual violence. that isn't anti-semitism, it's common sense.

to be honest i don't hold out a lot of hope. there are larger agendas at work, power and money and influence. just as in america, the will of the people is forfeit to the will of the powerful. israel deserves a great deal of criticism, as do her enablers (hi measured stephen!). my heart goes out to israelis of good conscience, you are ill served by your government and their friends in high places.

update

just a quick note. over the next month or two, i will be finishing the recording of a new album of original songs (about bloody time). at that time i will launch a new site and with it a new blog, where i will archive some of my favourite posts from the terminal velocity of sausage. for the time being, my online presence will likely be limited to commenting at some of the finer leftward sites of ill repute, like canadian cynic's joint.

on that note, i must say i'm honoured that cc front paged one of my recent screeds. i will try to make more of an effort to keep updates and announcements coming. at least until battlestar gallactica season 3.0 is released on dvd. then it will get quiet again. because i'm a nerd. cheers and thanks for coming by.

oh and hello to cycare in san francisco.

the evil that men do

it isn't often that i wish harm to come to a person. serial teen stalker and congressman mark foley of florida has single handedly launched a shit-storm that may well take down the republicans in november (one assumes he was typing with the other hand). his sinister lechery has been his undoing and there can't be anything but well deserved ruin on his horizon. justice has a funny way of working. i won't shed a tear for this creep when the harsh realities of a diddler's life in prison impress themselves upon him. i doubt even his wealth and former influence will secure him a trip to a country club prison. somewhere there's a "general population" waiting to embrace him. he might want to do some research, rent a "scared straight" video or two.

but as sick and evil as the man is, his doom is written. for those who enable and excuse such vile acts, well, let's just say that i'd like to see your fingers broken. call it a down payment on what you deserve. for each and every leader of the values voter's party that stood by and allowed this man access to vulnerable youths, i wish you a holiday on the wrong side of he green zone walls. the scrambling and wheezing to seek cover and deflect scrutiny is a partisan sham and a pathetic spectacle. the republican leadership knew about this situation for at least a year. and by failing to act are complicit. they lied and skulked and allowed the innocent to be placed in harms way for the sake of the party and power. i suspect the voters might have a message to pass on to dennis hastert and co. sure, america might turn a blinkered eye to torture and civil liberties drying up. but giving cover to powerful man stalking teens, well that's a line that most american families won't have crossed without bloodshed.

which brings me to the next scale of reptile. matt drudge. for the most part i ignore drudge as a disreputable mouthpiece, spitting and spinning venom for his masters. the following paragraphs were transcribed by jane hamsher of firedoglake, the original clips can be heard on crooks & liars. this fucking cretin has the gall to drop the blame for foley's ugly acts on the victims. in the process he throws an entire generation of youth under the bus. he calls them beasts that led the poor, impressionable congressman on. well when it comes to sick, vulgar generalizations it doesn't get worse than this.

never mind that the "beasts" he refers to are adolescents. the kids in the congressional page school are the very best and very brightest of america's youth. they are often the children of families of real influence and achievement. in this instance they are the children of republicans. well mister drudge, you are one sick and stupid fucker. i personally hope that foley's vile behaviour remained virtual and never became actual, that he never got further than his cyber stalking. but regardless of that, there are many, many parents who must be heart sick at the revelations coming out of d.c. and if one of those parents should happen to meet you some dark night and knock you to the ground, prop your chin on a curb and stomp your teeth out...well, you'd have it coming. the following are the words of matt drudge, teen stalking apologist:

"Clip #1: And if anything, these kids are less innocent — these 16 and 17 year-old beasts…and I've seen what they're doing on YouTube and I've seen what they're doing all over the internet — oh yeah — you just have to tune into any part of their pop culture. You're not going to tell me these are innocent babies. Have you read the transcripts that ABC posted going into the weekend of these instant messages, back and forth? The kids are egging the Congressman on! The kids are trying to get this out of him. We haven't got the whole story on this."
"Clip #2: You could say "well Drudge, it's abuse of power, a congressman abusing these impressionable, young 17 year-old beasts, talking about their sex lives with a grown man, on the internet." Because you have to remember, those of us who have seen some of the transcripts of these nasty instant messages. This was two ways, ladies and gentlemen. These kids were playing Foley for everything he was worth. Oh yeah. Oh, I haven't…they were talking about how many times they'd masturbated, how many times they'd done it with their girlfriends this weekend…all these things and these "innocent children." And this "poor" congressman sitting there typing, "oh am I going to get any," you know?"

sick and tired

over the past couple of months i've considered letting this blog go dark. i've only posted when the whim hit me in the past and to be honest i've been without that whim for a while. let's face it, there are no shortage of opinions on the net. pretty much every topic i consider is covered a multitude of times. it isn't hard to feel like i'm just one more echo in the vast chamberpot of blogsylvania. and then i find something that just makes me wonder, what effect might these many and disparate voices have in the big, bad world.

i popped open my site meter today and to my surprise i'm still getting visits. not a lot of visits, but people keep showing up looking for who knows what. well, most of them seem to be googling terminal velocity in a variety of forms, some quite troubling. and then there was this visit from some evil gnomes. why would someone from the world bank offices in washington d.c. be bothering to stop in at my humble screed shack? well it turns out that they're looking after the interests of our lady of the supertanker. the google search string they were referred by? "peter mackay admires condoleezza rice". interesting.

now this isn't my first condi comment that has generated an interesting visit. a while back i posted a comment on jesus general's site, something i wrote about condi being able to put new wrinkles in a porn stars cock at twenty paces and maybe something about starched cardboard lingerie. that one got me a visit from the u.s. department of justice. i'll go into my archives later and see if i can track it down. i'll admit, that sent a bit of a chill down my spine. given the state of this world, the last folks i want watching my virtual butt are the minions of the u.s. attorney general in charge of justifying torture.

but we live in strange times and with crooked regimes here in canada and in the states working overtime to redefine freedom as shutting up and doing as your told, i figure i am wasting the freedom i have by not speaking out when the mood strikes. and so mr. harper and his new canadian government can kiss my rump. i'm sick of being lied to. i'm sick of learning that you are hosting secret meetings with the likes of dirty don rumsfeld and the neocon villains from our south. i detest the notion that our stop gap, flailing minority government is secretly plotting to marry our nation to the interests of the american state and it's corporate agenda. i'm pissed off that the ideological tweezer-heads taking up temporary residence on the ruling side of our parliament are breaking the laws of this land to suit their own ends. i'm disgusted that the pm and his lackies are exposing the names of individuals who choose to exercise their rights under the freedom of information act. i'm appalled that the supposed conservative accountability regime is firing bureaucrats for failing to show fealty to their ridiculous "new canadian government" agenda. i'm tired of seeing an orgy of patronage appointments. my guts turn at the news that the conservative party of canada broke campaign finance laws and failed to report millions of dollars of revenue. i'm just sick of all of the bullshit.

so mr. stephen harper and mr. stockwell day and yes, you too mr. puppie dog eyes for condi, peter mackay. this tiny blog is putting you on notice. you do not represent the nation's interests. you must be removed from power. your scandals are just as foul and fetid as those of previous governments and your agenda is far more odious. the neoconservative experiment is failed. i will do what little i can to see that your petty reign ends at this great land's earliest convenience.

to those of my occasional readers that happen across these words, please click on the red ribbon in my sidebar. help prevent the deeper integration with american policies and interests that are the real agenda of the conservative reform alliance party. we must educate ourselves and act before we are all sold down the river, before our rivers are sold down south.

mackay wanna cracker

somehow, condi's biggest fan has managed to repurpose the direct quoting of his american counterparts into an independent canadian response. it just seems strange that our foreign policy (so named because it comes from a foreign country) is wrapped in denial. this article lets weepy pete bark into the canyon, from which condi's voice returns. mackay needs to get shuffled. Updated Mon. Jul. 24 2006
CTV.ca News Staff

"While Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been criticized by some for siding with Israel in the current Middle East fighting, Foreign Minister Peter MacKay says Canada has not abandoned its traditional role as a mediator and neutral voice in foreign affairs."

except for that mediation and neutral voice stuff, this is all true. because nothing says neutral like you started it, you're all terrorists or enablers, a blitz is a measured response, we don't demand an immediate cease fire and the destruction of a national infrastructure is a defensive act. okay then. so how about that independent sovereign response...

"Speaking on Question Period Sunday, MacKay said Israel's offensive in Lebanon is a principled response to a particular set of circumstances. "A ceasefire and a return to the status quo is a victory for Hezbollah," said MacKay, answering questions about why Canada has not joined other countries in calling for a cessation to hostilities."

check. condi says, "a cease fire would be a false promise if it just returns us to the status quo.'' and weepy says, "A ceasefire and a return to the status quo is a victory for Hezbollah,".

"He also rejected the claim that Canada is simply parroting the U.S.'s traditional pro-Israel position. "The Prime Minister has taken a very independent sovereign decision to participate in world events in a way that we feel is cognizant of all the circumstances including the history, the ongoing struggles throughout the region."

george the lesser said israel has a right to protect itself and stephen says israel has a right to protect itself. you say potato and i say potahto. we are honestly expected to believe that the new canadian attitude toward a humanitarian crisis and escalating acts of war is to let the people of lebanon hang? our foreign policy is framed by paraphrasing of the world's most powerful failures. we as a nation are sanctioning the devastation of an entire country in response to a border skirmish and hostage situation. well screw that. i for one do not support the scale of the israeli response to this crisis. hezbollah needs to curtail it's radical military wing and seek more adult solutions to problems. not unlike the ira, they have a foot in both the legitimate political realm and in the vulgar, criminal world of terrorist violence.

in the mean time, the entire population of lebanon is thrown into disarray, their economy smashed, their people terrorized and along with tens of thousands of canadians and other foreign nationals, they are now held hostage by israeli assaults. our response has been a katrina worthy comedy of errors. except that it isn't funny. the conservative government's reaction to these crises has been inept, clumsy and half-baked. they appear to be incapable of learning from their mistakes.

"Canadians are only allowed one piece of carry-on luggage and pets will not be allowed. They are also told to bring adequate medication for a minimum of 72 hours, and all passports and important documents. There was confusion throughout Sunday about whether the evacuees would be rescued from Tyre, one of the most dangerous places in the conflict. Canada's ambassador to Lebanon said a ship would arrive at the port on Monday. The Foreign Affairs Department later called the statement "premature," and then finally confirmed the plan."

even with the obsessive desire to centralize all command and control in the pmo, these dimwits can't get their act together. this minority government does not have the mandate to utterly rewrite canada's international role. they need to get gone. the conservative reform alliance party experiment has failed. we need an election this august.

learning limited to that which supports presupposition

cathy from canada points at this bloomberg article. i think it is now official. the world's gone mad.

excerpts from the article are by:
Janine Zacharia in Jerusalem
Mark Drajem in Washington

"Rice Seeks `Robust' Lebanon Force to Oust Hezbollah
July 21 (Bloomberg) -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she wants a "robust'' international military force to try to oust Hezbollah forces from southern Lebanon, as she prepares to leave on a diplomatic mission to the region next week."

pardon me? a robust international military force comprised of the usa, israel and...anyway, they just want to stop by and oust those nasty buggers. bloody menace, the lot of them. so, shouldn't take long. roust the scoundrels, gin and tonic then home and put the kids to bed.

"Rice said she will leave July 23 for meetings with Palestinian and Israeli officials, and then will meet with other nations in Rome to discuss the fighting in Lebanon."

so, after two weeks of bloodshed and misery the condonator springs into action. there's your freakin' progress kids. time for the diplomaticizing. condi's going to meet with palestinian and israeli officials. check. question, is that together in the same room, at the same time? i'd watch that on pay per view. i suppose condi's packing the black riding boots of crushing resolve for the morning session and the stilleto pumps of carnal fury for an afternoon of consensual coalition action. then it's off to roma for some chit chat with those other bores and then some shopping. i mean good heavens, rome. italy...shoes, boots and accessories, come on now people.

"We do seek an end to the current violence and we seek it urgently,'' Rice told reporters at the State Department. Still, "a cease fire would be a false promise if it just returns us to the status quo.''

so urgently that she has just been wringing her hands and fretting for two whole weeks because a cease fire is just a trick. it makes you believe that the cessation of armed aggressions is a step toward peace. it is not so. why, to stop the air, sea and land assault on lebanon would send the wrong message. with new ultra-diplomacy, best to negotiate while the killing and destruction continues. makes it more piquant, those saucy pleas for mercy, sanity and restraint while every tick of the second hand promises new death from above. now that's how you dictate terms.

"Hezbollah is the source of the problem,'' Rice said. No diplomatic solution can allow Hezbollah to stay in place, she said."

hop it you scruffy shi'ite bastards. because let's face it, hezbollah, despite its reputation for looking after the general welfare of lebanese in distress, their proficiency in dealing with emergencies and public organization are still a bad lot. the fact that they won over twenty seats in the lebanese legislature only highlights their duplicity and savagery. how dare they corrupt the roadmap to a democratic future by winning in popular elections. how dare they train and arm themselves against the prospect of hostility from a neighbour state. maybe saying that hezbollah is the source of the problem is a little simplistic. like this is some sort of unique event out of the blue. no backstory, no preamble, no history. they fucking started it. two. not one but two reservists they kidnapped. they killed a few more too. worse, they wounded the pride of a fierce and powerful enemy. only fair to destroy every hard won asset and vital service in the nation.

seems the new consensus reality in washington and tel aviv is that it is just fine if they hate us into eternity, as long as they fear us while they do it. but fear has to be earned and sad as it is, it's time for some folks to die. and let's not confuse fear with terror. terror is bad, fear is instructive. don't you worry though, according to the new math, a lebanese innocent isn't worth a tenth of an israeli innocent. because they started it. heck and all, they were harbouring the terrorists. you see, when radicals cross your border and they attack your patrol, kill a bunch of folk and abduct two soldiers the appropriate response is to destroy the national infrastructure of an emerging, democratic nation and punish the entire citizenry. just like in turkey. where the kurdish militants have been making raids into turkish territory and killing and engaging their patrols. why the poor turks have no real recourse but to mount an artillery and air assault on northern iraq and kurdistan. lord knows, and condi too, that iraq is where the terrorists are. so turkey will only be helping out by fighting them over there, instead of over here. the only problem with this calculus of aggression is that it relies on the supposition that whoever is running the numbers, is going to be in the right. goose, meet gander.

what about us? we're a mighty nation too. israeli fire killed eight canadians, wounded several more and placed many thousands of our people in peril, facing great hardship. by the new rationale, we are duty bound to attack israel. we almost have to, to save face with the other big nations when we go out to play at recess. so we must send our best boats and some guys and gals, then kablooie! we'll drop some old helicopters into their ports, totally disrupting traffic while we fish them out. that'll show 'em. then we'll be right pissed because the other nations, even the shitty ones, are laughing at us. so peter mckay will be burning up the blackberry lines begging condi for an invite to rome, just so he can be near her again. poor peter. he must have an absorbent dog with the amount of tears he sheds at the rejections of strong women. poor doink can't even court a domme to submit to. but really, where is the canadian outrage that israeli fire killed an entire canadian family, caused terrible wounds to their relatives and stranded tens of thousands of canadian citizens in a war zone. where is the call from our leaders for an immediate cease fire on humanitarian grounds and to repatriate foreign nationals?

um, the statesman with a minority ain't going that way. sure, it's regrettable that canadians perished and suffer in fear and mortal danger. but since it was all in self defense and measured, everything is good. tell you what mister stephen harper, measure isn't the problem here, the problem is the dispensing of that measure. let's not forget that a kiloton is a measure, a megaton is a measure and while those sound like wicked measures indeed, blood is still measured in pints and liters spilled. this nation faces a terrible cross road, stephen harper would have us veer away from our tradition of peace keeping and send us down the ugly path of military activism. in a cp interview on the ctv website, harper had this to say:

""I think in the last few years, Canada's position on a lot of foreign policy matters was to wait for a consensus and then get along and go along. That's not the approach we're going to take,'' he said. "We're going to increase Canada's capabilities and take very strong positions and push for the kind of direction internationally that we want to see.''

yeah. fuck consensus. none of that liberal pussy diplomacy stuff. nothing worse than a bunch of namby pamby do-gooders, trying to broker peace and seek resolutions to problems. we need to arm up and start shoving some folks around. we won't get respect or results if we aren't willing to toss some of our kids into the chipper. only a nation of pussies can travel the world and be met with warmth, respect and welcome. we want those friggin' belgians to tremble when they see a maple leaf coming their way. i don't suppose stephen might inquire of the people, the constituents, how they feel about retooling the goals and gear of our forces? wouldn't this be a time for one of those free and open votes or a referendum? eh, not so much:

"He said Canadians will come to realize he doesn't make decisions based on popularity considerations -- but on their merit."

merit as determined by big stephen. hey, last time i looked canada was a parliamentary democracy. we don't have a president. did i miss the decree? and just as a side note, mister harper, you are running a minority government. you seem to be grasping beyond your reach.

"He believed Israel needed to retaliate aggressively following the capture of its soldiers by Lebanon's Hezbollah militia and he isn't budging."

my canada doesn't stand behind the murderous onslaught of israeli assaults against a largely defenseless population. my canada doesn't support overwhelming aggression of the strong against the weak. my canada isn't an asshole. back to you stephen.

"One thing Canadians will increasingly understand about me is I will make my own decisions,'' he said.

well given your track record so far, big guy, how 'bout we get someone else to make decisions for a while instead. i think it is time that the harper experiment was ended. i'm ready for the polls. these visionaries and merchants of strength brand foreign policy have turned the world into a powderkeg and all they want to do is play with matches. if our children and grandchildren are to inherit what our age calls a legacy, they have my apologies and my pity. sorry kids we fucked up.

the end of war as we know it

sad as it is to say, much of the human march to progress has been powered by our bottomless desire to kill one another. i have been struggling lately with issues big and small. what to do, where to go and what the hell comes next. i've experienced some big changes in the last few years, from exhilaration to grief and back a few times. like everyone else i have my wants, desires and needs. like everyone else my aspirations aren't quite met. by global standards, i live like a king.

everywhere i look there is an undercurrent of chaos. sure, we're pretty well insulated on our own continent but that insulation has affected our grasp of reality, proportion and consequence. there are entire new schools of buzz-verbiage being born to market the new era conflicts that are boiling over in the world. as a fan of speculative fiction it is increasingly difficult not to see the world through a dystopian filter. we hairless simians are making a royal fucking mess of things. and we tell ourselves all about it on cable, where we're always the good guys.

i really want to be able to support israel. i want to cling to the notion that i grew up with, that israel was a brave land, forged in the wake of great suffering and persisting while surrounded by enemies on every side. and i still believe that for the people of israel, much of that remains true. however, their political and military leadership have been keeping the fires of unrest, fear and anger stoked. they have assembled massive high tech firepower and a deeply skilled force to wield it. the operating principle has been, better too much too soon rather than too little too late, when it comes to fighting.

for a long time that has been a pretty effective strategy. but as the great military thinkers eventually must realize, the paradigm has shifted. the new war is not just about the devastation of real estate and ultrasonic delivery systems. the trillion dollar fleet won't keep you safe anymore. it hasn't kept us safe for a while. nation states no longer have an exclusive on making war. i blame george lucas.

i claim no expertise. i am not a journalist. i am not an academic. i have no special access to information. but i am a natural skeptic and at least moderately bright. we all live together in this much touted global village. we can no longer ignore the 400 lb. guerilla in the room. as the technology to deliver ordinance has become a fetishistic cult of the west's military elite, a simple fact remains, an ox cart full of fertilizer and diesel will blow the hell out of anything it gets close to.

shortly after the day that changed everything in all of history, when the worst thing ever in the world took place on 9/11, i got into a heated debate. i said that we (the west) wouldn't be able to win this war. not a popular position to hold, i was called every name in the book. but i suspect i'm being proven right. if the goal of the terrorist is not simply to incite terror then other motives must be put on the table. what might a terrorist hope to achieve? economic damage? check. i recall one report (sorry, no citation, going by memory) that stated the cost of the terrorist operation on september 11 was in the area of $100,000. america has poured billions upon billions of dollars into the sands of iraq. with all of the missions accomplished, corners turned and last throes thrown, they certainly haven't won. bin laden is still at large. afghanistan is not won. hearts, minds and lives are lost and domestic approval is slipping away.

punishing a nation and a people, be they iraqi, lebanese or fijian will not win the big new war. it will make more enemies and prolong the conflict and the cost for all involved. history is rife with tales of defeat for those that failed to grasp shifts of strategy and technology in conflict. cavalries destroyed foot soldiers, artillery wiped out cavalries, fortifications stymied invaders, siege engines broke the castle walls and so we measure progress. montgomery didn't beat rommel in north africa by refusing to learn and adapt to a dangerous enemy. the global guerilla war is a recent innovation. if one's enemy holds a massive conventional advantage, don't fight conventionally. it ain't rocket science but it works. in military terms an ied doesn't cost much at all. the humvee and the crew it takes out cost big, both short and long term. advanced hardware is never cheap, especially when it has to be shipped overseas. a cost can't be placed on a life lost, although one could quantify the price of life-long care for the wounded.

bottom line, you can't fight a national war against a stateless enemy. alas and alack, i hear, whatever shall we do? these terrorists are illegal combatants. they don't even have matching outfits and they don't wave a flag. what do we do? we scoop up anybody brown in that brown land and fly them to the prisons of the disappeared. we strip them of identity, dignity and we torture and debase them. in the name of liberty. we invade their lands and wreak havoc all the while promising reconstruction and the glories of democracy. we deliver havoc in spades, reconstruction and stable democracy, not so much.

why do i use the royal we? i'm canadian, i have the right of the small excuse, we didn't follow uncle sam into iraq. but we are in afghanistan. we are there as combatants. until recently, canada was a nation of peacekeepers. unlike the american forces, our men and women have a tradition of being trained for that role. it was a noble calling and one of which i was very proud. it is a role i would like to see canada return to but until that time arrives we are part of this global mess. we are legitimate targets, conventionally and otherwise. we in the american west have forfeited the moral high ground, largely through the policies and actions of an american leadership of ideological fantasists. it disappoints me to no end that our prime minister is an empty suit echoing the words of george w. bush, a lame duck and a failure.

what comes next? i don't know. the scary thing is that nobody knows what comes next. not the commanders, the leaders, nobody. what might happen is a horror show of slaughter and escalation and regional upheaval. and even we godless pray that it doesn't come to that. i think it is high time that rational voices were heard in our nation's capital. the world has become a very small place. if we don't learn to coexist, we all lose. the failure of diplomacy, hell, the abandonment of even the pretense of diplomacy, will be a black mark in the pages of history. the geopolitical landscape has shifted. in an age of extranational corporate entities busily working to exploit any and every opportunity to make a buck, it shouldn't be a great shock that other interests adopt the model. political, social and religious movements can exist and act on the outskirts of jurisdiction. the rules have changed.

what isn't going to happen? america is not going to tell israel to step away from the trigger. we are at a critical juncture in world affairs. the precious insulation and isolation we have enjoyed is now at risk. as of this writing oil prices have settled around the $75 mark and that stings. if things in the middle east escalate, if the conflict spreads, the oil powered gluttony we enjoy gets complicated. the accumulation of material goods is a poor metric for success. conspicuous waste and avaricious greed might be the footnote on our page in the dusty books of the future. how are your victory garden skills, apartment dweller?

the road map

just when you think that the world glut of stupidity has to peak, some wildcats hit a gusher. israel and her many enemies (neighbours) have decided to ramp up their efforts to make their own lives a bloody misery. and in the process the world watches and waits and hopes that the madness abates. at least, those of this world that aren't lusting over spoils, vengeance and conquest. within mere hours we learned with the stunning accuracy of uncorroberated assertion, that the hezbollah are planning to move the kidnapped israeli soldiers to iran. because that should be easy.

i've skipped across the blogs and newsnets in the last hours and thiat story has taken root as the meme de jour. that's the plan. it says so, right there in the imaginary ink. now, i don't know. maybe it's true. maybe that's the plan. but since the source is an israeli pol and since he offered no evidence or documentary support, it remains no more than an assertion. the sort of assertion that buys time and licence to try out some nifty bombing runs. pop. pop. right down the centre line of the beirut airport runways. meanwhile, crazed zealots are whipping rockets across the border into israel. i think with rather less precision than the idf demonstrates.

and all of these big men on both sides with their scowling, rhetoric and threats are killers. of course they don't want civilians to die but they made us do it. see that's what they do, they hate us and we must defend ourselves. well it is high time that a lot of grown ups had a nice long time out. a quiet time to think about their actions. but that won't happen.

the more things change, they're still screwed. there are no innocent parties here, except the poor bastards getting blown up in their homes, at work or on vacation. hezbollah are a gang. they are also a poitical force. their tactics are base, violent and oppressive. israel is a modern, advanced nation with lots of high tech military support. their tactics are base, violent and oppressive. within a few weeks israel has grossly over reacted to two events. they didn't just go after the palestinian kidnapper, they took out infrastructure vital to the well being of the larger population. in both instances the israeli response has been disproportionate and excessive. for the most part, the international community agrees. but the united states vetoed a resolution of the security council condemning israel's gaza incursion. they were the only nation to vote against, with four countries abstaining. and as a canadian, where do we stand? stephen harper repeated mr. bush's line that israel has a right to defend herself and the other guy started it, so there.

maybe the glory of this whole fetid mess hasn't reached me yet. maybe the ominous prospect of a pan-middle eastern conflict is part of the road map for peace and democracy in the region. call me crazy but i don't see it. as far as i can tell, israel needs to consider working toward a sustasinable peace with her neighbours. this endless cycle of reprisals, counter strikes, interventions and theft of territory has to stop. if it doesn't then the blood will continue to flow. for lebanon, the israeli demand that they deal with hezbollah is as much as ordering them to resume the civil war that devestated the country. as for the palestinians, israel needs to work toward an equitable peace. all of these security walls and oppressive tactics serve only to maintain hatred, tension and fuel further crises. the palestinian state needs an ally, a powerful friend whose help might build a nation and restore the pride of a people. that powerful friend should be israel. old wounds heal slow but they do heal.

morality and notions

now we enter deep and troubled waters. this post is going to require a certain care as it is in response to my nephew. i love him dearly but we have very different world views.

"In recent years the debate on abortion has shifted direction such that there is (sic) very few who question whether a life in development is a actually a life; in fact, there are even less who consider 'autonomy' a marker for sentient activity."

needs. more. clarity." in recent years the debate on abortion..." okay, which debate would that be? are you seriously positing that there was a question about whether an embryo was alive? of course its flippin' alive. it is in the process of forming a new being. that requires it be alive. now when it comes to making assertions about the opinions of others, you should provide a factual or statistical proof. we could bicker to the ends of time over beige terms like autonomy, sentience and what the demarkation points might be. but that's just so much farting in the bath.

so you lose a point for making a vague and unfounded assertion about what the people think and what the even less consider. two things: i don't really care what all those folks do or don't think, we each get one vote. gathering a huge number of people around a bad idea doesn't make it a good idea. and i really don't care about the debate or the main debaters. this is such a very emotional issue that when it comes to forming my ideas and feelings, i tune out a lot of the rhetoric. the most heated voices come from the extreme ends of the spectrum. they are of no use to me. i listen to my heart and to my gut.

"Now, I understand the logical extentions here: majority consent does not necessarily prove truth, and minority dissent does not establish a valid counter-claim. Fair and fine. However, since you have stated your opinion on this issue, I wonder if you wouldn't mind commenting on a) the definition of conception, and b) what, if any, effect you think abortion has on the man who helped conceive the child (assuming the circumstances are normal; i.e., not a rape case)?"

a) i'm not a mystic. conception defined: there's a lot of jockeying for position, followed by a brief and occasionally vigorous bumping into each other. hormones flood the bloodstream, nerves jangle and oops! a teaspoon full of micro tadpoles set off to escape gravity. sometimes a lucky little squiggle burrows through the ablative armoured hull of the egg-ship. all biochemical hell breaks loose and the zygote starts to subdivide. conception is the starting point. i've conceived of some amazing ideas for films (at least i think so) but i won't collect my oscar until i've actually written the script and had it filmed.

b) well let me tell you, it is an awful experience. and there is no normal. it is not a cavalier whim. it isn't an easy alternative to contraception. it is a sad and unfortunate reality. i've shed many tears and wondered many what ifs. but i know in my heart that we made the right decision. we were both young, deeply damaged and utterly ill prepared for the responsibility of parenting. we would have been a train wreck.

"I ask these things not because I want to draw attention away from the larger part of your article (fair-mindedness about political parties and their leanings), but because I disagree that a woman should have autocratic control over the continuance of a 'person' growing within her; a male partner, in a consenting relationship, is an emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually valid participant in the 'life' of that fetus. And from a political standpoint, that seems, to me (and I'm no-one in the political world), to be fair-minded; wouldn't you agree?"

nope. flat out, no. let's get primal a moment shall we? women are valuable. men are expendable. women in early societies were protected because they could bring life, but only so much of it each. men however will get their dribble everywhere if they aren't watched. the biological imperative is to spread your damp pollen far and near. the woman's biological imperative is to attract the best quality donor. we are social creatures, we have invented all manner of lore and mores to help us to get along with each other, with the world. suppose, if something that cured a terrible disease was found in your white cells, could sufferers seeking a cure be able to claim that the rarity and efficacy of the substance warranted keeping you for harvest? that's a life and death matter, too. sure it may be your body but what about their lives? regardless of relationship, if a woman decides to carry or end a pregnancy, it is her body and her final decision. everything else is bargaining.

i don't for a second buy the notion that three minutes of huffing and puffing entitles a man to any scintilla of claim or control over a woman's body. period. in a consenting and mutual relationship, you are free to reach your own accommodations and live however you please. in such a case as yours, you cherish your kids and you share the experience of their growth with joy. and that seems like a good way to have kids. that isn't the option a lot of people have. you don't have to agree, or approve of the decisions people make. but like most everything else that goes on behind the closed doors of people's lives and troubles, it just isn't any of our business.

humans are sexual beings. we are hard wired to rub against one another. unwanted pregnancies will occur. all of the indoctrination and all of the abstinence posters in all of the buses of the world won't prevent boys and girls from doing the awkward. if you want to cut into the number of procedures, we have that goal in common. promote sexual health, education and hygiene. teach them what it is, how it works, what the implications are and how to do it safely. make it a thoughtful act before it has to become a tragic act. young people are very sophisticated. if they aren't given the complete facts, they'll surely act on no facts or distorted ideas of what the facts might be. as with so much in life we need to hope for the best and plan for the worst. sex is a normal and natural side effect of adolescence. it also has serious health implications. you'd say i was crazy if i insisted that young drivers not be told how to operate a vehicle before hitting the streets. that would be dangerous and irresponsible.

oh by george

people magazine online managed to get a brief interview with the most powerful illiterate in the world, george the lesser. who knew that this titan among us was not merely the decider, but the debate solver as well.

exerpted from people without permission, the original interview was written by...well there's no byline. really. i don't care if it is a piece of crap like people, a writer deserves a byline. and when a pixel rag like people online gets an interview with the president (respect the office, the man is not the office), the writer should get some bragging rights. anyway, here's georgie:

"Do you think Gore is right on global warming?

I think we have a problem on global warming. I think there is a debate about whether it's caused by mankind or whether it's caused naturally, but it's a worthy debate. It's a debate, actually, that I'm in the process of solving by advancing new technologies, burning coal cleanly in electric plants, or promoting hydrogen-powered automobiles, or advancing ethanol as an alternative to gasoline."

why right this very minute in the engine room of the uss ship of state, chief engineer cheney is reconfiguring the plasma emitters through the ice in his huntsman's cooler and straight into the deflector dish. captain george t. berk earnestly stumbles over his lines, the dramatic music mounts and right before commercial they fire the beer cooled plasma through the deflector dish and voop! debate solved. roll the credits. show's over folks, go on home. climate debate solved. i really hope that the man who would be a hedge doesn't really believe that he can solve the climate crisis by "promoting" something that's years from implementation. but i'm afraid, very afraid, that he does. somewhere in the thicket of his head, there's a little voice chirping away. and poor george thinks he saved a tree when he got his ipod. its a new technology see. now where does the coal go in?

getting warmed up...

johnnykap johnnykap...from the thread at ms. z's

"I'll check out yer blog. Why do you progressives distrust people who believe in god? I just finished recording a couple of guitar solos in my own recording studio (200 takes!), and I'm not asking for any government handouts. "Yes, I'd like $300 for a new whammy bar on my guitar, please." Krike. I'm taking the risk, I get the reward. And that reward is chicks. You also implied cons are not capable of manufacturing art. I stridently and vehemently disagree."

are you ready? here goes. progressives distrust shifty people. i distrust the guy trying to push a sketchy used car and divert me from a better deal. i distrust the smiling lady in the power suit edging me into a transaction that i'm assured is beneficial. but we've all seen fine print before. i take careful stock of the people i interact with, i fancy myself a good judge of character. i work with the public, i work with performeers and i work with promoters, hustlers and producers of varying integrity. i don't give a bunny hop flying toot if they worship jesus, allah or a neighbour's lawn ornament. i don't care if they are green party green, ndp orange or conservative blue. it ain't my fault that there's a lot of slippery characters using the jesus gimmick to get ahead.

you've made some broad and damning assertions that are just so much brown waste. i can't and don't speak for the greater population of progressives, lefties, libs, commiepinkoratbastards or anyone else. i can and will speak for me. i don't trust people that believe with all their little hearts that they should get to legislate from the pulpit. i distrust people who misuse their influence. i distrust people who would impose the strictures of their faith on me and mine. church and temple are for worship, places to speak to and of god, as you may freely choose. government is not.

our government made a deal with the churches and religious assemblies that prosper in this land. they keep their noses out of the political arena and they are exempt from taxation. that my friend is a sweetheart deal. it is also a very wise deal. it is also a deal that keeps government out of your worship. imagine the lamentations if ottawa decided that the book of revelations was a dangerous piece of literature that would need to be redacted from the bible. all those images of terror, violence and destruction. might give some folks the wrong ideas, get them trying to bring on the end time.

the problem that a lot of people have with the christian lobby is that it is also not representative of the greater christian population. it tends to be fronted and heavily backed by a new breed of fundamentalist fervor. slick, big money pressure lobby christianity. so what, everybody has a lobby now. thing is that devout and honourable christian families live by their word. they accept that the price of freedom includes allowing others to make divergent choices from your own. a fundie, right wing sharia rule isn't acceptable to me. or a lot of christians, for that matter.

what people do with their own lives, with their own bodies is none of your business. if a gay couple decides to marry, then they are taking the same crap shoot that any other couple agrees to. they have love, they have hope and they seek to bind their lives to one another. they will share their good times with joy and lean on each other in times of sorrow. and if they're lucky, they'll grow old together and live a happy life. or maybe they'll be like the vast number of failed hetero unions that end in separation and divorce. who knows?

but suppose they do live a long and committed life, why should they be denied the dignity of sharing every aspect of those lives together? for example, some aquaintances in the film industry had endured together for many years. they'd been as good as married for more than twenty five years. they worked together, lived together and travelled the world together. they were as married as any couple i've ever met. one of them was diagnosed with cancer. it went fast and ravaged him in less than a year. both of their families had shunned them, shamed them and disowned them decades earlier.

when the time came and he lingered in the icu, his family had arrived, taken over and barred the man he had spent his life with from the room. he wasn't next of kin. when he died the family contested the living will. the house that they had bought together was sold. the funeral arrangements they had made together were stopped cold. their possessions were distributed. the family insisted on an open casket, church funeral. guess who wasn't invited. they made a bitter and terrible mess out of a man's life and they desecrated the last wishes of a man they had abandoned...until his money became vulnerable. sadly, they took all of these measures under the sanctimonious crowing of their faith in the lord. they were determined to inflict their idea of salvation on their child, when he could no longer choose for himself. his partner in life was destroyed, by their well meaning spite, both personally and financially.

as a christian (um, getting chicks with the lord, are we?) you have the freedom to worship as you please. you have the freedom to live as you like and make your own choices in every regard. you will, one day, get over being a horndog and you'll start to think about settling down. you'll look for a girl that shares your dreams and values and when you wed, you'll live by the laws of your god and abide by the laws of your land. your marriage will be sanctified before god and family and friends. hey congrats. now if two men that you don't now, and will never know, decide to marry, you know what that does to you and your marriage? nothing. not one thing. you are responsible for not straying from your wife. you are responsible for contributing to the love and nurture of your household. i don't get to tell you how to live or what is acceptable.

you are not responsible for the choices made by other people and you don't get to make those choices for them. you don't get to legislate your morality, no matter how gosh-darned convinced you are that the big something or other in the sky is on your team.

as for your other misreading of my words, i never said or implied that a conservative can't make art. i was quite directly addressing the culture in a larger sense. art doesn't just show up one day. art reacts to culture, helps shape it and communicate it to the larger body of the citizenry. i am also not talking about handouts. no more so than any other industry, anyway. you got your energy sector incentives, your manufacturing sector perquisites, you got your high tech sector bonuses. and let's not forget the agricultural sector, subsidy of industry is vital to the business health of the nation. am i really having to explain this to a conservative?

if we make canada attractive to business, we will prosper. right? isn't that the free market mantra? well take a look at the cultural sector. plonk your whiny butt in a chair and google if you have to. arts and culture is huge business. mega-billion dolar huge. and do you know what happens with most of our successful culture sector creators? they leave. know what happens when they leave? the profits they generate are reaped elsewhere. further, in speaking to the art of the time, you may soon witness the gutting of much of our public culture. copyright and fair use are on the block. and the cbc is always in the cutback gunsights. bev oda, mighty canadian conservative heritage minister is in the pocket of the foreign owned media lobby. as was sarmite bulte, the liberal pegged to have had that job if the libs had won.

so what i'm telling you is this, johnny. culture is important business and it makes the nation much more attractive to other business. you don't think that it was a mistake that andrew carnegie endowed a foundation and gave his name to one of the world's most important and legendary concert venues. you don't think it was a happy accident that emperors, popes, and magnates have patronised the arts. that patronage has given the world da vinci, beethoven and sesame street. a culture that doesn't support its art and artists is a dead culture, an outlet mall. i'm telling you that harper and the new kids on the hill, don't get that. watch and wait johnny. and don't forget to say your prayers.

a quick note

welcome to all those visiting via the star of the star, antonia z.

i will be putting up a response to a comment on my last post this evening. hi christopher!

another outsourced post

once again i have run off at the mouth in a thread at antonia's place. since i seem to be writing more there than here i thought i'd drag it over.

what follows is in response to a comment from johnnykap:

"Lazlo, most of what you write could just as easily apply to conservatives as well as liberals. I, too, agree that a woman's body is her own. Just like a man's body is his own. By logical extension, should we not apply that same standard to an unborn child living inside a woman? Is that not the child's own body?

Do you deny the tremendous benefits Canada has gained under Nafta? Take a look at the trade and job figures since BM the PM put that into effect. Why didn't the progressive gov't following him cancel it?

As for putting the squeeze on the US wrt oil resources, that doesn't sound like a very neighborly, progressive way to behave. Sounds like crass capitalism to me. Every man for himself. Nothing wrong with that from my perspective but it looks like you want it both ways.

Other than those 3 minor disagreements, you and I could be brothers."

johnnykap, as i noted earlier, the difference between most lefties and righties is an artificial divide. i believe that most right wingers want the best for their country, their communities and those they hold dear. same goes for the lefties. we have the same destination, we're just bickering over how to get there and what it looks like.

as for nafta, we held up our end of the deal and the americans didn't. they broke the contract. we are thus in a position to call it void and to renegotiate. i keep hearing rhetoric about strong conservatives and values and how the right is good for business. well. how is it that harper and his kitty-kat team of hardnosed business-first back slappers can script a "deal" to end softwood disputes that undercuts canada to the tune of a billion smackeroos. after every ruling has gone in our favour, they still run to their 'must appease george' button and push it like frantic cowards. the only time that the left rolls over and capitulates, is in the fantasies of the right. see, we're still here and we're still fighting. we aren't giving up or going away. there's wisdom and tenacity in both camps.

don't believe for a moment that because bush says it, karl twists it, and the drums roll...that what you hear is true. everything you think is massaged. all of us have our biases. we all have to deal with a cacophony of opinions from those that wish to sway ours. both friendly and opposed. we're appealed to emotionally, viscerally and constantly. i still look both ways before crossing the street. and as a leftie, i can assure you that despite our values and compassion, some of us can be bought. if you trust that the ideology of free market rule and economic domination won't be riddled with greedy pigs, then you're just daft. weakness and greed are unafilliated traits. they afflict equally.

even the noble greeks, who gave us the very idea of democracy, chronicled the flaws of the greats and the gods in their invention of theatre. comedy, tragedy, democracy, science and architecture all originating in an astonishing burst of culture. and notice how vital the aesthetic is to that list of firsts. where is the art going to come from under harper? i'll give you my guess, it will come from under cutbacks and abandonment and it will be art of protest. the architecture of the liberals might be the iconic paper bag but i suspect we'll get no more than a cardboard box from the current brand of conservative.

canada has never lacked for courage. we need to have the courage to defend and build our own unique culture. we need to fund the arts and the arts need to be made viable. the creative sector is another of canada's major natural resources and drives a huge portion of our economy. i've spent many hundreds of days on films sets and in recording studios. we have all the talent, the technology and the craftspeople to do enormous international business, without leaving home. we need to shift our national psyche from being the neighbour's quaint pal, to being a solid competitive alternative.

being a liberal (by leaning not by party affiliation) doesn't negate my interest in seeing canada get a good deal in trade issues. nor does it dismiss my personal interest in achieving prosperity. i see no disconnect there at all. another concern of mine with nafta is the quite real possibility that harper will go to extreme lengths to please his heroes in the american administration. i fear that if pushed harper and his gang of witless turnips will put our water resources on the table. that would be a disaster for this nation and our environment. i don't trust our current government. in fact, as crooked as the liberals were, i trust harper far less. i just don't think he has the spine to stand up to the neo-cons that he so admires. and really a government that puts my safety and security in the hands of stockwell freakin' day, is a broken government. ideologues are vulnerable to mistakes, just like everyone else. they are, unfortunately, blind to the pattern of their mistakes. the grand unifying theory of how to govern will multiply its own flaws throughout a system. ladies and gentlemen, george w. and co.

contentious issue the next, a woman's control over her reproductive system. her body. her decision. the unborn child isn't a child for most of the journey. it is not autonomous nor is it a potentially viable human until the last months. my recommendation: first trimester, abortion on demand, no questions asked. second trimester, abortion with consultation and counselling. third trimester, abortion if continuing the pregnancy threatens the life or health of the mother. but. i'm male. so at the end of the day it should be a decision framed by women, for women. 'nuf said.

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and i would like to extend my personal thanks to antonia z. and her commenters for their support and encouragement.

gears and wheels

i went on a bit of a rant over at antonia's. seems the turnip heads are spinning the canada is so mean to america and christians churn. so i popped off and it seemed worthy of dragging over for my blog, thus saving me from having to screed anew.
____

cripes.

you proved my point when you said what you said about what i said, so there nyah. here's the bottom line my fellow poltroons, it doesn't matter what colour hat you wear. whether it be conservative, liberal, socialist, republican or take your pick, corruption, dishonesty, greed and weakness will gather to feed. power, money and influence are attractive, even seductive. like any narcotic, power is addictive and has deleterious effects on the user. the rest is distraction or bureaucracy.

america is a great nation. never before has so much sheer power been amassed by a single country. sprung from revolution, bold and brash, america changed the geopolitical map of the world. from uppity colony to leader of the western sphere in seven generations time, amazing. america has been a land of innovation and achievement in technology, the sciences and a mad experiment in personal liberty. there is very much to admire in america, her history, her peoples. hell, some of my best friends are american.

america is also a diverse and divisive place. american sentiment for america runs long and deep and is expressed by america with great vigor. an early comment noted that canadians identify as being not-americans. well that isn't such a bad thing. what ensued was the fatuous assertion that failing to adore america is the same as hating america or worse, americans. bollocks. i think that most canucks are wise enough to distinguish between the person and their origin. we accept people from around the globe. they come for opportunity and freedom. some find it and some fail. i'm a first generation canadian. i love this land and i've seen much of it. regardless of politics, canadians are generally a good and friendly people. so are americans.

imagine for a fraction of a moment the caterwaul that would rise up from our southern neighbours, if their televisions were pumping out up to 80% canadian programming. hinterland who's who and the king of kensington in prime time. the streets of hollywood would run with media blood. and yet when we dare to take pride in our own, it must somehow be at the expense of the bigger and the better, the american? fuddle duddle.

for the most part, we don't know about our own doings because we either don't blow our own trumpets stridently or often enough or because we are a small population, strung across a narrow band of temperate land the width of a continent. we live next door to the world's largest exporter of tinsel and bunting. i knew the stories of george washington, the cherry tree, the war of independence, the boston tea party, honest abe and old ben franklin before i ever heard of sir john a.

i don't hate america or americans but i reserve the right to get pissed off at them when they do stupid things on a global scale. i get to keep my occasional snicker, sneer or contempt for their politicians, blowhards and high volume bloviators. and i can sure as hell love that canada is a different land, with different peoples and traditions. i love that canada does have the international reputation of being fair, polite and generous. i love that canada has always been a well of talent and creativity.

and on that point, i give you johnny kap, master of his own thumbs:

"And endless specials about Bethune and Degrassi. The Tommy Hunter show and The Beachcombers? You'll slag US tv as you put that stuff out on the taxpayer's dole. "

jeez, i tell you, if i don't get my six hours a day of the beachcombers i just get cran-kee. um, john, you are speaking out your rump. while most television is twaddle, canada has done pretty damned well at it. davinci's inquest is syndicated around the world, due south was syndicated around the world, monk, shot in toronto, has lasted well as a surprise network hit. canada has and continues to produce media talents of international repute. we have played a big role in every aspect of the development of the film and televisoin industries in north america. from mary pickford, america's sweetheart, a canadian girl and co-founder of united artists to james cameron, norman jewison, atom egoyan, canadians command respect on the international stage. and yet we begrudge them that respect at home?

it seems many of our americanadian friends would rather we kick up our dainty toes and surrender to the all consuming consumption of america. well, up that nonsense. my canada is the place that gives the world writers, directors, actors, singers and innovators. my canada has a lot to take pride in and we have our flaws. my canada isn't the united states, their example of social governance isn't my cup of tea. unbridled capitalism thrives on an absence of compassion, i prefer a little socialism thrown in with my affluence thanks.

and lest we forget our sisters of eternal suffering, take a bow cin:

"...am a well-educated and intelligent woman, but heaven forbid I should make the sign of the cross in a public restaurant and then silently pray grace -- then I'm a moron. People have done everything from give me dirty looks to snidely ask if I'm an American tourist (for goodness' sake, something like 80 per cent of Canadians were once Roman Catholics -- and now I'm an outsider for practising that faith!)

This experience is echoed by many other Christians, RC or not, in this country. All you have to do is ask."

now this is just my opinion and all, but when you perform a religious ritual in public, you are probably visible to others. the sudden stillness of the bowed heads will attract attention. you are sort of putting on a show of your observance. now some folks are just rude and some are even stupid. well, guess what, they'd be rude and stupid whether you were at prayer or not.

but since you're feeling so awfully persecuted, i'll lend you my weeping towel. people give each other dirty looks all the time for all kinds of reasons. i work in the entertainment industry and i work as a waiter to make ends meet. i've got really long hair for a guy, hell i've even played christ. i've been called every name in the book, to my face. i've been followed in stores and treated like a bumpkin in business dealings. but i too am an educated man and i don't suffer fools well. i've been treated like poop by people that you would likely consider decent and upstanding.

the cafe i work is owned by a korean couple, they worked their rumps off to get ahead. we are located by two universities and a major high tech industry area. we cater to all manner of folk. from married lesbians to the delegates of a major lutheran conclave that i served today. some people say grace, most people don't, nobody cares. we are your stereotypical organic cafe with lots of veggie options, a bohemian hangout. i've worked in the restaurant biz for more than twenty years, why is it that i haven't witnessed this terrible anti-christian shaming campaign? could it be that you're just a tad sensitive? paranoid.

but it seems you're pretty quick to leap into judgement. how on earth do you know that someone with a grimace on their face didn't just bite the inside of their cheek as you looked up from prayer? well, if you have your special faith powered decoder ring of all experience, i suppose, you can see into the hearts of others. but then, perhaps, just maybe that troubled expression came from that individual recognizing his or her own failure to offer appropriate thanks to their creator for the bounty of food. maybe they just have gas. maybe you took offense because that is what you wanted or expected to do and maybe you got in a pity snit over your own good example. i don't know, but then neither do you.

i guess what i'm trying to say is that when you look for offense, you will surely find it. and just what are you doing peeking at your fellow diners during grace, naughty thing? perhaps it isn't the ritual itself but your performance of it. perhaps you make something of a small spectacle of your moment, a silent challenge to those around you. perhaps you come across as smug or prideful, i don't know. but honey, i doubt that you'd be the last to tsk-tsk and glare at a couple of married gay men holding hands and enjoying a romantic dinner. so really, stuff your woebegone sanctimony, or heavens forfend, your pride might be the precursor to your fall.

what does it mean,

when the sky turns funny colours? i'm looking around at the newly arrived things in my space. his things, family things, things that don't seem quite at home here yet. i should be on the phone wading through voice mail purgatory to defend the honour of some of these things against their undignified handling. but i'm just bone tired and i physically dread having to make the call. so i'll use this post as the willing up period. i'll write until i stop and then i'll call. there, i have a plan.

i suppose it is a simple function of aging, that death seems to make you his guest more often. but even with extra practice, loss is never easy. i am not easy. hindsight might be 20/20 but you can't do a damn thing about what you're looking at. so it is with people. perhaps the greatest value in losing one close, are the questions we then ask of ourselves, while the feet are on the surface of the grass. there are the moments you'd change, the things you'd say or not say, followed by the string of what if and how else scenes those lead to. if i had stood up for myself, if i had been kinder, if i had cared more, or less...what then? i might have been easier. i might have been different. i might have traded up for more refined flaws. still, it's never too late to effect change. or tease the cat (caution: contains sharp things). a wise man once said, "you am what you is", but that ain't a fixed quantity.

and right now i'm bone tired. and since i'm still planetary topside, i'd like to take care of a few things. people, it is good you are there. in the last month, i have seen more of my family than i have in the last decade. we spent time together. and as dysfunctional a mob as we are, we're okay. nobody descended into wierdness and we got to talk. my sisters are both very different, very bright and decent people. i'm still me. i work with people who are younger than i've ended up being for a while. strange how being around family makes you the kid again. i've always loved my family but i'm just now getting to really like them. they have crazy children and interesting lives and they aren't evil. i think that's mostly a positive. we've each been through a lot and emerged relatively human.

my sweet neglected friends, who put up with me, my thanks and love. the demands i place on your patience are unreasonable. i know that you are there and i rely on your beauty, wisdom and filthy senses of humour. i'm not making a list, this isn't an indie cd but i owe a lot of people some attention and i'm going to try my best. to my readers, visitors, friends and sparring partners, thank you. i may forget to say it as often as i should in the future but thank you.

and when the sky turns funny colours, it just means that there's a few more colours you can check off your list, a little more joy and brilliance in the world. if only for that moment.

now if you'll excuse me, i have a call to make.
cheers,
lindsay

ups: delivering disappointment

because customer service is for fools. at the end of my last trip out west to clean up my father's affairs and effects, i had the task of boxing memories and mementos. african carvings and masks that i had given to my mother over the years, art supplies, special books and heirlooms. now i'm not a rich guy but since we were cleaning out the condo, i had to get these things back to ontario. so off i went to the ups store. i bought myself a sturdy box for what turned out to be something insane like $13. but it was heavy duty, the sort of thing you'd trust your valuables in. now here is where i appreciate the many, many moves that a post-army brat experiences. i can pack.

so i played a careful game of 3-d tetris and i fitted that box with ocd precision. it was a 20" cubic mass, weighing 69 pounds. you want metric, buy a calculator. i tape that thing and then we tape it some more. we take it to the ups store and i pay the nice man to send me the box. i insure it for as much as i can afford and i leave it in the hands of the professionals.

a week and a few days pass and i buzz the delivery guy into the building. when i open the door, there is my box. it is no longer a cube. it looks as though it has been taught to roll. it has been split open and is now a squashed mass of soft cardboard wrapped in a cocoon of shipping tape. being a clever and somewhat tense character, the delivery guy takes advantage of my obvious shock. he pokes the electronic tablet under my nose and i sign in a sort of dazed, automatic response. he scurries like a rat at a clog dancing party. smart boy.

now nothing was outright destroyed but there was lots of minor damage to things, much of which can be repaired. but that isn't really the point. the point is that a huge company can get away with all manner of grossly unprofessional behaviour. now i am faced with the prospect of an endless string of frustrating interactions with these fuckers to try and get some satisfaction. and hey mister too many commas in my writing, how'm i doing? dick. anyway. i am going to wait until my temper drops a little before i play a game of chirpy recorded options and telephonic bullshit. i am not going to lose my cool on the phone. i've taken some pictures of my package and they will be posted. i will post a regular update of my dealings with their resolution agents and we'll see whether the insurance i paid for was a worthy investment.

it never fails to astonish me when people crow about leaving everything to the market. the free market will sort everything out. big companies are self correcting, they will lead us on the path to smaller government and a prosperous future. well, from where i sit, most major corporate entities are amoral mobs. the cloak of incorporation allows people to act with all of the fellowship, regard and decency of jackals. well fuck that. as much as i dread having to deal with these fuckers, deal with it i will. i won't shut up until they make things right. there's no such thing as bad press, if you're the rolling stones. and hey, if ups gives me too rough a time, i'll just see how much their competitors will pay for pretty pictures of squashed boxes.

shake shake shake

dateline k-w 7:37 am: over the last few minutes my building has been vibrating. did southern ontario just have an earthquake?

in other news, i have decided to start the slow and difficult process of extracting my head from my own arse. the last little while has been pretty blurry. i have intended to write about the passing of my father but i find myself too conflicted. this has become something of a block. so i'll get to it later when my feelings and thoughts are more settled. while i go about the process of consolidating my feces, sporadic posting will now resume. you have been warned.

thank you.

john gibson, thinkerer

i had just finished this before i got the call. since i can't seem to sleep, i thought i'd post it.

well here's my ol' pal john gibson truthing the shit out of the news. sometimes, when i don't have the energy to strike my forehead a ringing blow off the desk edge, i like to turn to gibson. he takes the brain numbing concussion out of disoriented rambling and posts it for all to see. throw aside the ice pack, there's no goose-egg swelling because reading unfiltered gibson actually shrinks your cranium. thus, you fox lovin' ladies will be able to shop for fetching new purety bonnets, in ever more delicate sizes, whilst the men folk gather around the teevee set and yell, "turn left!" at their favourite nascar-cars.

what makes deconstructing gibbo's chittering idiocy a fun challenge, is that he'll often self destruct before you get to a punchline. fear not brave reader, together we will take a tour of that capacious noggin, squatting on john gibson's wattled neck, where there's enough room between neurons for decorative landscaping. and john gibson loves him some shrubbery. for the purposes of this exercise, gabbo's words will be in quotations and i will interject inside the brackets

"Washington Post, New York Times on Zarqawi, Bin Laden's Side?
Thursday, April 27, 2006
By John Gibson" (on the Fucks News Interweb Site)

"Karl Rove was in front of the grand jury for the fifth time Wednesday in the matter of the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame."

[and gibson comes sliding out of the gate with a soft peddling misdirection. mr. rove's fifth trip to the stand was only tangentially related to the exposure of a cia operative. mr. rove's visit with the nice jurors has every indication of being the preamble to an indictment being handed up. that would be, in the matter of karl rove perjuring himself to the grand jury, lying to congress and investigators and likely a few other piffling matters. nothing a shiny medal of freedom won't cure.]

"She's the one married to Amb. Joe Wilson who she sent to Niger to investigate Saddam Hussein trying to buy yellow cake, an ingredient for a nuke bomb."

[okay. she sent him to niger. she, career cia agent and operative, sent him, a career member of the american diplomatic corps, overseas to investigate a matter of pressing urgency. she sent joe wilson, a former united states ambassador on a vital fact finding mission, to investigate the potential sales of nuclear material. their relationship is not relevant. his regional connections, experience and credentials made him a good choice for the mission. she had enough clout in the cia, and thus in the administration, to dispatch a former ambassador on a covert mission, with american national security at stake. i just want to be perfectly clear. if valerie wilson nee plame, had that much power within the top levels of the national intelligence community, if her word was enough to send diplomats jetting off to africa, then she must also have had significant clout in the eyes of the vice president's office.

i mean, cripes, unless the very highest levels of government, on the brink of war, were being run like a hippie cafe, then these geniuses must have had their top people on the job. finding out about the illicit movement of fissionable materials, to a sworn enemy, is the sort of thing they would have been right on top of, right? we're talking about preventing a madman from getting the sort of uranium that can be used to make an atomic bomb. we're talking about preventing brief case bombs from turning a major american city into a firestorm of radioactive fallout, a whirlwind of shattered glass, a toxic graveyard. they'd take that pretty seriously, right? some chick at the agency doesn't just get to send her boyfriend on a mission, right? so if she has that kind of clout in the world's largest and most powerful clandestine organization, then it kind of follows that revealing her identity is a very bad thing. just saying.

so why would a woman with this level of power, choose to send her husband on a potentially dangerous errand on behalf of national security? i doubt it would have to do with joe wilson's service, after all, this is what wikipedia has to say:

"Wilson was a member of the U.S. Diplomatic Service from 1976 through 1998. From 1988 to 1991, he was the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. He was hailed as "truly inspiring" and "courageous" by George H. W. Bush after sheltering more than one hundred Americans at the embassy, despite Saddam Hussein's threats to execute anyone who refused to hand over foreigners. As a result, in 1990, he also became the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein (Wilson, 2003). When Saddam sent a note to Wilson (along with other embassy heads in Iraq) threatening to execute anyone sheltering foreigners in Iraq, Wilson publicly repudiated the dictator by showing up to a press conference wearing a homemade noose around his neck. Saddam offered a public apology for the diplomatic note.
Wilson later served as U.S. ambassador to Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe under President George H. W. Bush and helped direct Africa policy for the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton."

well, mr gibson, i'm stumped. i can't imagine why it would seem like a good idea to send an anti-war-that-hadn't-started-yet, hippie, pacifist pussy on such an important errand. it's obvious that wilson was on the side of the terrorists, a weak man, a coward. if only that chick hadn't sent him, we wouldn't have to deal with uncomfortable truth.]

"If Karl Rove had something to do with revealing her name, he might have broken a law."

[allow me to rephrase, if karl rove had something to do with revealing her name, he compromised a covert intelligence officer in a time of impending war. if he lied to investigators, the fbi, the office of the special counsel and the grand jury, as well as to the people of the united states, then he is a traitorous, greasy little pig. if he did those things, he'll have to hope that he can get an extra carton of smokes smuggled into the joint, to buy his rectal chastity.]

"I'm on the record saying he should have gotten a medal for exposing the cabal of CIA agents who have been actively working to undermine the administration's Iraq war policy."

[so, hanging a career operative, her front company, her network of contacts and her associates out to dry is a good thing. and it is good because that secret cabal has been exposed to the light of day. that is obvious by the rash of firings and arrests, clearing out the traitors and bringing them to trial for high crimes against the state. why, it is all over the news, isn't it? because if they found a seditious cabal in the agency, they would be in jail, right? because, it is against god's law to undermine a war policy, especially before you even go to that war. think about the troops. how dare those vile bastards attack the president with their evil machinations? how dare they tell him the truth, when it isn't what he's decided to believe. hang 'em all, i says.]

"Now it's true that Mary McCarthy has been fired from her supervisory position at the CIA for allegedly leaking classified information. She denies it, but the CIA thinks she might have been a source for the Dana Priest story in The Washington Post about secret CIA prisons."

[look out kids, big story john is making with the rhetoric. now it is indeed true, that mary mccarthy was fired from her job, just shy of her retirement. and it is alleged that it is connected with leaks to the media. on the other hand, when the winds of news change direction, so does john's tone. why, only a paragraph ago, the cia was housing a veritable cabal of dissidents. and gibson has taken numerous opportunities to decry the secret spooks of the cia, wrecking america. suddenly they are given a weight of credibility. she must be guilty of the crime, because john gibson so wants to have the creamie, moist satisfaction of watching a spook take a fall. and really, presuming she leaked the leak, how can she hate america so much that she would expose a network of secret, offshore torture prisons. she denies it, but the cia thinks she might be a source, therefore she's guilty. case closed, gibson's convinced.]

"She has been applauded by Sen. John Kerry and others on the left for exposing the truth."

[it is about to get good. but first, let's play guilt by association. there are a few things that america, and we in the west, will not stand for and one of them is the truth coming to light. another is having a decorated veteran, who serves his state in the senate, and who very nearly bumbled his way to the presidency, applauding that truth being bared. not because that blatant, ugly truth is a blight upon the name, the very spirit of what western democracy stands for. no, because it hurts the great cause, the ideological march of the blind, susurrating mooks that follow bush at high speed toward the abyss.

if we let ourselves know the dirty truth, then we have to question ourselves. we don't like to question ourselves. we like things nice and simple. we're the good guys. easy. except, torture isn't good and good guys don't torture. secret prisons in shady lands aren't good. good guys don't snatch people up and secretly fly them to the neo-goulag, without charge, without representation, without geneva convention protections, even if we are sort of sure that they are bad guys, maybe.]

"Let's see. The anti-Bush people want Rove frog-marched across the White House lawn, but it's OK for McCarthy to expose a secret interrogation program. In fact, she got a Pulitzer and The Washington Post thinks that's right and proper.

[wow. just wow. that is almost bulletproof. how do you lampoon someone that is already bounding across the plains of absurdity like a retarded gazelle? it ain't easy, but we do it because we must. point, the first, the anti-bush people are now more than two thirds of the population of the greatest country on earth. the thing is, it really isn't about prince george the dumber and his magical policy giving voices. it is much bigger than that. it is about people realizing, that you cannot win the truth with lies. you cannot protect a constitution, by performing your toilet with it.

but the news isn't all bad. seems mary mccarthy has now won the pulitzer. who knew? let's just chalk that up to mr. gibson being semi-literate and not as smart as some foods. but what of poor saint karl. the evil lefties want to see him arrested. is it because we hate george? no. we detest george for a lot of reasons. we'd like to see karl meet lady justice, because there is evidence that suggests he lied to a lot of people you are not allowed to lie to. the special counsel, the grand jury, the fbi, even canadian kids know enough about american justice (we have tv now, next year we get inside plumbing!) to understand that covering up crimes, perjury and obstruction are serious, deep in shit offenses.

here's how good leak, bad leak plays for everyone who isn't george bush or a proxy. leaking classified information and exposing the identity of a covert intelligence officer, to smear a dissenting voice and to cover up a campaign of lies, well that's bad leaking. leaking classified information to expose a secret regime of invisible torture prisons located in cut throat nations, exposing crimes against humanity, even at the expense of your job, your reputation and your pension, why that would be good leaking. hide crimes = bad. expose crimes = good.]

"Plus, Rove frog-marched, but not much interest in finding the leaker who told James Risen about the secret NSA wiretapping program that listened to Al Qaeda talking to Americans. That leak was fine to The New York Times and The Washington Post and the others howling for Rove's head."

[plus and also too. what about that other guy with the unwarranted wiretapping of american citizens, where the government was secretly helping themselves to your phone calls, your emails, your text messages and so on, because maybe somebody, somewhere might have maybe been talking to someone somewhere else that might be bad? well, what about that? yup, wiping one's electronic jackboots on the constitution can surely be justified by the enormous success of the program, to find terrorists in america. what is likely one of the world's most ambitious data mining operations has caught how many bad guys? well, there was the one crazy guy who wanted to take down a bridge with a blowtorch. your privacy, a small price to pay. the constitution and the rule of law, a bargain at twice the scandal. really, a shame about the constitution though, even as a damned foreigner, i can recognize it as one of the world's great documents.]

"I thought Rove should get a medal. They think the CIA agents working against Bush should get medals."

[rove is a political stooge, a bully boy. he has lied and smeared and cheated his way to a powerful position. he has his grubby, little fingers in every scum crusted nook of america's least competent and most corrupt administration. if people want to see him perp-walked it is because they think he did the crime and deserves to face the muzak. if people take delight at the prospect, it is because rove is a wretched bully, a scumbag. and just like in the movies, people like to see the nasty creep get his comeuppance. if people are applauding those that leak state sanctioned crimes, it is because they are the one's upholding american values. it takes a lot more guts, to go against the most powerful boss in the world, to save your country from disgracing itself, then it does to stab people in the back for political gain.]

"Add to that Zarqawi and bin Laden threatening us again this week.
Zarqawi said the worst is yet to come. Gee, he plans to trump 9/11."

[sweet jeebus. the bad guys want to hurt us. mr. gibson, you terminal fuckwit, bin laden wouldn't be an issue if your neo-con heroes had dealt with afghanistan first and properly. the state that sanctioned 9/11, that gave and gives bin laden a base to operate from, has been bungled through disinterest and will continue to bite you and us on the ass. if all of you jesus freaks had a lick of imagination and understanding, you could have devoted a fraction of the resources squandered in iraq and fixed afghanistan. but the real truth is that the neo-cons don't give rat shit one for justice. it is all about the grand design, a wonderful fantasy of an american led and dominated world. and it won't exist for all of the praying and wishing you can do. but maybe there is a clue here, buried in the nightsoil of mr. gibson's hapless bleating, if it takes a recording to remind a tragically stupid boob that the enemy still wants to fight back, then maybe they really did believe that the terrorists would forget that america would try and monitor their communications.]

"We've got a lot of dots to connect here, don't we?"

[when john gibson master the craft of dot connecting, he will take up colouring.]

"Terrorists want to kill us. Bush wants to get them first. The liberal press wants to expose his efforts to do that and stop him. And when one of his assistants exposes the felonious leakers hiding in their CIA offices, the lib press wants him hanged but the others left alone."

[paging ms. plame's lawyers. ms. plame's lawyers to the white courtesy phone. the job of the press is to report the news. news doesn't get bigger than the administration doing crime. if the press wants anything beyond a big scoop, it might be to live in a land where the law is still the law, even for the president. but if you look at gibbo's twisted rationalizing and mashing of fact, it appears he is accusing valerie wilson of being a leaker. and he has repainted karl the sneak as a heroic defender of national security. a pretty nice bucket, too bad it don't hold water. i would suggest someone at fucks news do a little proof reading. don't they employ a copy editor? gibson has gussied up a big lie, with ribbons and all, but if he is saying the plame was a leak and outed for that reason, he might want to have something to back that up. that's civil litigation kinda fun.]

"So would I be right to conclude that The Washington Post and The New York Times are on Zarqawi and bin Laden's side?"

[i'm sorry, your dots can not be connected at this time. please put down the crayon and try again later. mr. gibson, you've never been right before and you certainly aren't starting now. you're a liar. you're barely coherent at the best of times. and throwing blanket accusations at people in the media, that occasionally attempt journalism, only points out your lackluster efforts.]

"The trail of crumbs sure heads in that direction, but I guess it would be too much to say that."

[the trail of crumbs is generated by bits of pretzel falling from your rumpled suit, as you stumble like a mindless drunk in a loose circle of lies and over reaching suppositions.]

"Wouldn't it?"

[have another sling john, they're fruity! and should the fates bring my words to your beady, pig eyes. well, fuck ya.]

"That's My Word."

[mine too.]

a silent moment

not that i have been writing a lot lately, but i'll be running silent for a little while, due to the passing of my father, herbert james leonard stewart.

of liberals and leaders and things

my humble suggestions for leadership of the liberal party of canada:

my first draft pick for liberal leadership (insert drum roll) the right honourable mr. joe clark. there is no love lost between harper and clark. harper is one of the authors of the dissolution of the federal progressive conservatives, clark's beloved tories. clark can't be smeared, there's no dirt on him. with him up front, the sponsorship scandal finally folds into the dust of history, void as a political issue. he comes from the west and has maintained a solid base of support there. he is well liked and respected nationally. his return to the scene would be a clarion call to disaffected moderate conservatives, that perhaps the air is saner on the other side of the aisle. i never felt that clark was given a fair shake. his short-lived minority was doomed by the backstage machinations within his own party and then by the trudeau liberal steamroller.

over the years, clark has maintained a solid public profile and has gradually become an elder statesman. he has the gravitas that a putz like harper will never know. "joe who?" is a thing of the past. clark has faced the character assassins and muck rakers, he has been beaten but remains unbowed. he faced his political adversities with dignity and quiet strength, a strength that canadians have come recognize and admire. for the liberals, he would be a very clear break from the old boys club. clark would serve as an ethical centre for a team that really needs a coherent voice, to regain lost trust. for harper it would be a nightmare. clark would appeal a large portion of his caucus, how many would need to cross the floor, to sink the conservative reform alliance party? hell, drafting joe clark would be worth every effort, if for no other reason than to watch stephen harper's head explode.

joe clark is a known quantity, he has the respect of the people. he is smart, he's been there and he knows the game and a lot of the players. would he accept if asked? i don't know, let's ask him.

my second draft pick for the leadership of the federal liberals, none other than mr. stephen lewis. you want respect both at home and around the globe, stephen lewis. i've heard his name being bandied around as a possible nominee for a nobel peace prize. he is brilliant, passionate and articulate. giving him a call would also add the special bonus appeal of both harper and layton's heads exploding on tv. lewis survived a career in electoral politics and has gone on to be a revered and capable ambassador for our nation. his work in the areas of global justice issues and aids prevention have won him more than respect. he is, in a very real sense, a world leader. having served our nation as ambassador to the united nations, deputy executive director of unicef and now as u.n. special envoy for aids/hiv in africa. his service has not all been about health care and humanitarian outreach. mr. lewis also served at the behest of the o.a.u. (the organization of african unity) as part of the "international panel of eminent personalities to investigate the 1994 genocide in rwanda and the surrounding events". that grim task has surely given mr. lewis a graphic understanding of what can happen when things go very, very wrong in the world.

the neo-conservative claim, on all things marketed as "values". would be a very shaky stance to adopt, when opposing a man of stephen lewis' stature and reputation. with either individual, i as a voter, would have no hesitation in supporting them on the basis of their ethics and integrity. as a television viewer, i would dearly love to watch harper squirm under the lights during a debate with either, in what i hope will be an election that can't come too soon.

i'd love to hear what you folks think. am i having too much of the kool-aid? do you have other suggestions? hit the comments.

grotty harperotic control mechanisms

i have a feeling, that a great deal of the energy, of the new federal government, will be spent identifying enemies and political threats. i am struck by the speed with which the conservative election platform has been jettisoned. open, ethical and accountable? the un-tories ushered in the dawn of western conservative rule, by immediately walking emerson across the floor and appointing a crony to ministerial office, regardless of his not being an elected representative. meet the new boss, same as the old boss. but what i find most chilling, is harper's authoritarian clampdown on speech.

if this is the way the harper gang operates as a slim minority, imagine how ruthless they will be, should they attain a majority. after dictating to the press corps, how they will be allowed to question the leader and who might speak, he stomped off when he didn't get his way. for the press, access is the job. one might question the strategic brilliance of alienating the people who write the newspapers we read and live in the tv boxes we watch. one might. then once upon a time, there was the promise of fair and open votes on sensitive, emotional issues. now, there are imperial edicts, none in caucus may speak their hearts or minds. they will receive their talking points and woe be unto those that stray from message. the promise of public abasement awaits, hell, peter mckay, minister of foreign affairs, has already had the public retraction and humiliation therapy. i wonder, how likely is it that a con mp will feel safe voting against stephen, in one of those open votes? i wonder, how in the hell am i supposed to place my trust in a person, charged with the task of representing our nation on the world stage, when he's forced to snivel on a leash by his boss? while the cameras roll. who then chooses to snivel before a bigger bitch, to carry the canine analogy.

(okay, let's not even get into mckay's gushing performance with sweet, slaughtering condi. it was like he'd won a date with the most fabulousest star, by writing in to tiger beat magazine, the neocon special edition. i can't help but wonder if the boots he was licking, were the same ones she was shopping for while new orleans drowned.)

but it ends not there. federal employees, bureaucrats, lend me your ears. you are entitled to your opinions, but keep them to yourself, if you know what's good for you. you will be given policy, do not stray, do not opine and what ever else you do, do not speak from your expertise. scientists of the land, raise up your voices in great dirge, for lo, shall your programs fall beneath the scythe. and should you write any sort of book, well you had best not express your credentials in promoting same. heavens forfend that one's job as a respected scientist, in the employ of the people of canada, lend credibility to one's work of fiction. even your fiction must not wander from the fiction of policy.

oh, and that silly environment and those silly climate scientists, hush. the sky isn't falling yet, our kids will clean up after us, once we've pillaged the land and lined the pockets of our conservative britches. the prime minister is an economist, he knows how very important it is for the wealthy to make money. look at the nice air, aren't the colours pretty? if the public is worried by scientific findings, then slashing all of the programs will put them at ease. there will be no more findings, at least none that stray from policy. are you listening generals? let's have no more of those honest statements rooted in years of training, experience and savvy. let's not have any of those "opinions" you picked up by having your feet on the ground, placing your life and the lives of those you lead on the line, not when it might run counter to policy. how about you just drop your notes off and we'll check them for political accuracy. there's a good lad. (there would be serious money in a cage match between general hillier and average harper)

this is rule by threat. first the party, then the caucus, the press, the bureaucracy, the researchers and the military brass, being told what the fuck is what, or else. all roads lead to the pmo. memo to mister harper, you are not the president of canada. this fierce effort to exert control over every message, every employee and department of the federal infrastructure is just spooky. what happens to those, among the many thousands in the employ of the canadian public, who dare to veer from harper approved policy? setting the stage for a purge perhaps? so, who does that leave? us. you and me.

since i noted the other day, that the privy council had stopped by for tea and a snoop, i've had a pair of visits from gov.ca brand gtis employees, government technology and information folks. considering my site has been pretty dormant of late, i wonder what these cats are looking for. because it just wouldn't do for stephen harper's servants to be reading left leaning sites for fun, not on stephen's computractors and not on stephen's acres. now, i don't claim to know who within or why my government is interested in my blog, but i'd sure be interested in knowing if other bloggers are seeing an increase in gov.ca traffic. to quote tom waits, "what are they doing in there? what are they DOING in there?" i'm looking forward to the witch hunts after the first leaks start to appear.

and on a sad note, i also had a visit from someone in the cbc. that always kind of tickles me, because i thank the stars for the cbc. the cbc has done and continues to do more for the identity of this nation, as a nation, than a hundred stephen harpers will likely ever do. the cbc shows us our own films, exposes us to our own music and is not held utterly captive to the caprices of the commercial marketplace. the cbc gives canadians voice. in doing so, the cbc has gained respect around the world and has been vital in launching the careers of countless emerging artists. the sad part is, given how the harpernauts are hustling, the venerable cbc is likely to be gutted on the double quick. should that happen, i will weep for every song we'll never hear, every performance left unseen and every voice left unheard.

i wouldn't be surprised to see the cbc take a big hit in the wake of threatened copyright legislation. that stinker has likely been rushed along, since six of canada's major indie labels abandoned the cria. the supposed canadian recording industry association is now exposed as being simply a very rich and far reaching lobbying organization. one run by and for the financial benefit of the four major, multinational, digital media conglomerates and fronted by a bevy of comingled associations, organizations and groups like socan, of which i am a member. this is a huge issue for canadian artists, educators, private citizens and consumers. i strongly recommend visiting michael geist's excellent site for more on this soon to be pressing issue. oddly enough, i have seen a big spike in traffic coming from a link on mr. geist's site, to a post i wrote before the election. something is in the air and it smells like flop house stairwell.

will google for food

a week or two ago, i went for a snoop through the old site meter stats. i know my output has been meager of late but the meter still ticks ahead a bit at a time (thank you, oh faithful and curious). one of my visits was from gov.ca. when i looked at the details, it was a referral from a google search. the searcher was in the office of the privy council (the parliamentary authority on all things plumbing). the search string was: stephen harper matthew john. this morning i decided to retrace their steps, see if i could intuit what they were after. no such luck, with such a broad search, using proper names, it could have been anything. so as i clicked through, i thought, how far into the dust did this important functionary crawl? so i kept clicking. my humble screed bunker didn't appear until the 74th page of results returned. our tax dollars at work. how much does a low level employee at the privy council make? what the hell are they looking for when they are dropping by my temple of inconsequence? after scanning through more than 740 hits, they clicked on me. how much further into the depths of google did they creep, how many sites did they visit and why?

i'll never know, but since i have attained such a lofty audience, it only seems right to help make their lives easier. so i have put together a few search strings to speed their investigations along:

stephen harper soft white meat
stephen harper gay rodeo costume
stephen harper open transparent ethical negligee
stephen harper free votes for muzzled caucus
stephen harper campaign promises orphaned
stephen harper licks bush, tastes of chicken
stephen harper, jesus and a homo go into a bar...
stephen harper drunk as snot
stephen harper rub and tug saloon
stephen harper squatting
stephen harper punishing ministers (kinky bitches and stiletto fat boys)
stephen harper ogles livestock
stephen harper who is matthew john and why do you care?
stephen harper fuck kyoto me and jesus need oil

i hope this helps with the important work being undertaken by the new government. god speed fibbers.

the great decider

i was going to do a complete rewrite of this classic song. the original lyrics by Buck Ram, as taken from the roy orbison version, only needed one word altered to achieve full comedy value. i couldn't really have done better. sing along kids! photos were snarfed from other sites, sorry i don't have attributions, if the shots are yours, let me know and i will be happy to credit you or remove them, should you so wish.

Oh-oh, yes I'm the great decider
Deciding that I'm doing well
My need is such I decide too much
I'm lonely but no one can tell



Oh-oh, yes I'm the great decider
Adrift in a world of my own
I've played the game but to my real shame
You've left me to grieve all alone



Too real is this feeling of make-believe
Too real when I feel what my heart can't conceal



Yes I'm the great decider
Just laughin' and gay like a clown
I seem to be what I'm not, you see
I'm wearing my heart like a crown
Deciding that you're still around



Too real is this feeling of make-believe
Too real when I feel what my heart can't conceal



Yes I'm the great decider
Just laughin' and gay like a clown
I seem to be what I'm not, you see
I'm wearing my heart like a crown
Deciding that you're still around

banging the drum

one of the problems, with an active imagination, is a lack of braking power. i've been walking through life for a while, with a creeping sense of dread, as grim scenarios dance across my brain screen. the most powerful country on earth has become a nation of the blind leading the stupid. we are no longer living under a nuclear umbrella, we are huddled beneath a looming thermonuclear thunderhead. so. what the fuck do we do? we do nothing. we get in cars and we drive back and forth like sun maddened ants. we shop and we groom the fat children, that we raise like so much talking veal. we live on, in the lavish excesses of hot buttered denial. my gut instinct is that here begin the last throes of american empire.

indeed, those who fail to learn from history, seem doomed to repeat it. i shouldn't have to point out that history is only three years old, when it comes to pre-emptive war in the middle east. operation iraqi cakewalk? ah, the good old days. mission accomplished. since that all went so screamingly well, why not fire up the band and sing those sweet songs of regime change and roadmaps. i mean, there's precedent now for attacking sovereign nations, based on lust, lies and fear. the most dire security threat to america and the regime that needs to change, is american. they've lost the global battle for hearts and minds.

the worst lies are the simplest ones. we are right. we are moral. we are mighty. what makes these lies so dangerous are the kernels of undigested truth, like bits of corn, in the steaming feces of manipulation, ideology and agenda.

are we right? well, what about 9/11? bali? london? spain? these were all heinous acts of vulgar terrorism. they are crimes worthy only of condemnation and the harshest penalties. and what about the taliban? as state sponsors of attacks on civilians, for harbouring al qaeda and bin laden, they were brought down...sort of. as an anti-war pacifist, i supported the multi-national deployment of forces, including canadians, to depose a criminal regime. justice be done, with the added hope that the impoverished and repressed population might prosper, once freed from the rule of a mad theocracy. in the mean time, america needed to see someone get the fuck blown up. vengeance is always a big seller, regardless of god or politics. ill considered war generates a truly vicious cycle, a perpetual violence machine. it can go on and on until one or both sides are beaten, exhausted, broke or dead. their assault begets your reprisal, which begets their retributive strike, which cries out for your armed response, which leads to their decisive action. and so on, until you've run out of ways to say, we murder each other.

are we moral? both sides can sing this song! "by the sweet saving grace of the sacred and divine, we are. we are right and we are moral." as in the scenario above, as both sides pursue an ever increasing body count, their respective wringers of hands can fill the air with their cries, "how can we not detest them, see what they do, the innocents they kill. they are mad and corrupt, they hate us and we must defend ourselves. they are animals." and in beautiful unison they can raise their voices and cry out "god is with us." bang-bang.

are we mighty? yes we are! our side ('cause you're either with us or against us) has guns and guns and guns, oh my. plus ships and planes and bombs and everything. to be sure, the west has assembled a mind twisting array of the most advanced weapons, ordinance and delivery systems imaginable. only problem is, that high tech orbital armada costs all the treasure in the world. and it doesn't work. sure, they explodes with great fury and make for gripping video but they don't defeat a people, an ideaor a cause. they don't bring positive change. regardless of surgical precision, gps guidance and all of the buzz wordage, the price of overwhelming air superiority is dead people on the ground. all of the might and technology we can muster won't defeat a determined resistance. it hasn't happened in afghanistan. it hasn't happened in iraq. and as sure punks like tea, it won't happen in iran. you can't kill what you can't find.

iran. there is no more sure recipe, for disaster in the middle east, than an attack on iran. americas forces are already overburdened, under equipped and taking damage. they are also stationed across the street from iran. given the neocon's illogical assertion, that it is just to attack a potential enemy, because they might attack you...maybe. what then is to prevent iran from placing their state security ahead of george bush's roadmap, fantasy and cocktails. after all, if you decide to go looking for a fight in crazy town, you will be obliged. the way things are sizing up, it does sound like the calliope of doom is churning out the discordant strains of a prelude to stupid death. an attack on iran would turn iraq into a charnel house. more than 100,000 forces on the ground, a native insurgency and a new enemy. iran is not iraq. even a psycho like saddam, learned to fear the maniacal violence of iran at war.

a present from rubetown

interestinger. supposing that anyone flits past my little window, here on the interweb anymore. i've been sitting on the sides, watching and reading. sometimes, i just don't have a lot to say. i write for the joy of writing. but i also need to have something to say. there have been no shortage of issues and topics and that is part of the problem. sensory overload. lately i've been feeling the itch to shoot my mouth off. as with past vacations from regular posting, i began by posting comments in the blogs i visit, in response to writers, whose writing has the power to shake me out of my torpor. driftglass is one such writer. as i was reading the comments on a recent post, something caught my eye. it was the name of a commenter, l. brent bozell lll. mr. bozell leads one or several or a succession of foundations designed to inflict fundamentalist constraints on freedom. in a word he is a bottom-feeder. i'm sure that there is no coincidence in the relation of the word fundiment to fundimentalist.

now when i saw the name i was surprised. what is a big time, money hungry shill for repression doing, trolling liberal blogs. the tone of his comment seemed right, a hectoring declaration of victory and moral superiority, smug and stupid and wrapped with a bow:

" L. Brent Bozell III said...

You liberals understand nothing about morals, values or the heartland or America or what makes us the greatest country in the world. All you have is hate, no ideas, and you discrinimate against people of faith with your bias. If you hate it so much, leave. You are the cancer, not us. We won, and you lost, and there are more of us than you elite coastal latte-sipping class warriors. You are nothing. Please be quiet now while we return America to her former glory."

sounds like a deluded, red, white and blue balled idiot to me. so i pointed at him and snarked thuslike:

"pretty shaved ape said...

well well well...brent bozell. the appearance of this reptillian priss would seem to indicate that there is a fear in the hen house. mr. bozell is what bill maher might describe as a consumate scold. he leads campaigns of email, fax and letter deluges to media and government. he longs for the carefree days of yore. an imagined yore. a fantasy of america as a land where the black folk lived somewhere else and knew their place. where women were demure and modest and took pride in their cleaning, birthing and the servicing of a daddy lancelot hero figure, that also never fucking existed.

bozell is one of the cretins who insists that his morality is the only morality. of course he isn't above lying through his teeth to get the job done. google his dealings with vince mcmahon's wwf. bozell wants to control what you can see, what you can read, how you live and what gets believed.

i submit to you, drifters and glass, that brent bozell is the enemy. big as life and right on the doorstep. he is what you will fight. learn his methods and understand his tactics. you will see them soon, in all of their dung-mole glory."

well that was jolly fun. assuming that this was indeed bozell and not someone assuming his identity, i got to lip off to a hate mongering, fear merchant. but it seems this wasn't a drive-by, as bozell countered my rhetoric with the following stinging refutation:

"L. Brent Bozell III said...

Respectfully, shaved ape:

Fuck you.

We are the real Americans, and you lost and please go and die."

oh how i laughed! being told fuck you by brent bozell (or his doppleganger) was like getting an award. so i wrote the following acceptance speech:

"pretty shaved ape said...

"L. Brent Bozell III said...
Respectfully, shaved ape:"

actually herr bozell, your respect isn't worth a damn thing. so how about you roll it all up into a tight little ball and clutch it to your heaving breast. the next time you fall onto your fainting couch, at the terrible realization that others will think and do as they please, despite you, you can unfurl your "respect" and use it to wipe the spittle of indignation from your chin.

"Fuck you."

oh. oh gosh. that seems rather profane, coming from a champion of decency. you wouldn't want your inbred flock of prudes to hear you use that sort of vulgarity. of course, hypocrisy is your calling card. terrible of me to upset you so, most unkind of me to point you out for the cheap liar and hack that you are. let's have a look at your street creds shall we...

"Bozell-created and run org forced to pay $3.5 millon for false claims against WWE Smackdown
The Parents Television Council (PTC), created and run by Bozell, has been forced to pay $3.5 million to the WWF, for falsely claiming that televised wrestling was responsible for the deaths of four children."

aw, isn't that special. that tidbit was snipped from a profile and roundup of your smear tactics:

bozealotry

there is no shortage of evidence of your calumny. google is a wonderful thing. you are a small minded, petty and pitiful creature mr. bozell (assuming, of course, that this isn't an imposter). you and your ilk will always be with us. you feed on the fears and stupidity of an ignorant base. fear and stupidity aren't going away any time soon, so you'll never go hungry. but that is the charm of freedom. i can accept that you, or something like you, will always be with us. bitter, repressed and repressive, you are free to squeal and root for filth. you are free to lie and bamboozle and campaign for your brand of crippled decency. and i remain free to point out your lies, smears, hatefulness and deceit. you'll notice, mr. bozell, that i have not stooped to your tone. i am not swearing at you. i am not using curses or profanity and i guarantee you that i am more than capable with gutter language. i shall leave it to you to prove your own disgrace, hypocrite.

"We are the real Americans, and you lost and please go and die."

well, i'm not american at all, i've lost nothing and i keep on breathing. it is real americans like you, mr. bozell, that cause we, in the rest of the world, to shudder. it is real americans like you, that have diminished your great nation in the eyes of the world. it is real americans like driftglass and the many, rising voices of reality, sanity and intelligence, that give us hope that america might cure herself of the parasitic, hateful infestation of real americans like you."

i feel so much better.

update

okay. one of the reasons i haven't been as bloggy of late has been resolved. sort of. about a month ago i found a small lump on my back. having lost my mom to breast cancer, i decided to get it checked. well, turns out it is just a twist in a strand of muscle. perhaps a result of scar tissue from my several bouts of failing to defy gravity. follow the instructions on ladders kids, dismount slowly. anyway, chronic pain has been a factor of my reality for more than twenty years and sometimes it just nags. given my normal state of distraction, the upwelling of discomfort makes it hard to concentrate. i just haven't been my usual delightful self lately. even so, it is a bit of a relief to learn that the new pain, is just more pain. um, huzzah.

i will have more to say about many things soon. cheers all.

the best and the brightest!

having fun with a demo of comiclife. i've been busy, scattered and strewn but i shall return to more regular screeds soon.

dem cats

when in doubt...post something or other...more soon, honest.

canada's national hockey team

congratulations to canada's national hockey team, olympic champions and role models, our women. hard work, talent and dedication paid off yesterday, as the olympic hockey tournament came to a close with canada taking gold over sweden. congratulations to the swedes for stepping up, taking silver and bumping the american squad, who settled for bronze. the swedish upset of the favoured americans, indicates a giant step forward in women's hockey, internationally. i hope we can look forward to further growth in the sport and greater competition. the team, a mix of seasoned veterans and brilliant youth, combined to provide four lines of potent offense, unselfish playmaking and stalwart defense and netminding. the team will see big changes between now and vancouver, but the core of our future team is there, on the "kid line". thank you team canada, for carrying canada's hockey legacy forward with poise, you've done us proud.

don cherry is a pussy

for those who stop by, yes, i still exist. i've taken a rather extended break from blogging (again) but i'm back. the world keeps spinning. i caught a bit of olympic coverage on the cbc, today i saw alberta's own mellisa hollingsworth-richards take bronze in skeleton. holy crap. i hope i never witness a crash in that sport. they fly down an ice track, face first with chins an inch above the ice. the speeds were amazing. canadian men and women took silvers in team pursuit, a speed skating event making its olympic debut. i was confused by the start of the first race, as it looked like the two teams were skating in opposite directions. turned out to be a quirky editing effect. the teams start on opposite sides of the track. it makes for quite an interesting race and exciting finishes.

the other day i watched the canadian women's hockey team pot a dozen goals. they are in a class apart, making plays, controlling the puck and creating offense. after tuning in for an update yesterday, i was informed in that breathless announcer tone, that i should stay tuned for a condensed replay from the men's hockey game. so i changed the channel. fuck the nhl all-star olympic lie. i won't watch it. the sale of the olympic ideal to the highest ratings grab and big endorsements makes me ill. the presence of nba or nhl stars, diminishes the olympics. without the idealism, the spirit, of the olympics, its just more television. no wonder 'american idol' is kicking the games' ass in the ratings. as a competition, it is every bit as valid and meaningful as the modern pro-sport olympics.

i've had issues with the nhl since just before the lockout that squandered a season. in particular, the response to the criminal assault by todd bertuzzi on steve moore. i had never been ashamed to be a hockey fan, before i saw the dirtiest cheapshot attack i've ever seen. bertuzzi should have been banned from the game for life. at the very least, he should not have stepped onto the ice for even one shift, before his victim was able to do the same. bertuzzi was convicted of assault for the attack and got slap on the wrist justice, a fine, probation and community service. its nice to be rich and famous.

the fact that bertuzzi is back with the canucks this season, is just a disgrace. i want to love hockey. i grew up watching it, playing it and i had that dream of one day making the bigs and hoisting lord stanley's mug. like a million other kids, i was pretty good, but not good enough. c'est la vie. since the return of the nhl, i have watched exactly one game (leafs won). i won't be watching any more. i discovered i could live without the game, when greedy owners fought greedy players to a standoff, wasting a season and thumbing their noses at the fans. so fuck the nhl and their criminal enablement program.

hey wayne gretzky...fuck you. as ridiculous as it is, to field a professional team for the olympics, hockey canada honcho, wayne puts bertuzzi on the squad. well, mr. gretzky, you've had a tough year. your wife has a little gambling secret, your assistant coach has a little bookie operation and your family has suffered losses. but what in the name of fuck were you thinking? for the record, todd bertuzzi does not represent my idea of a canadian olympian. he's a felon. he committed his crime on the ice, against a fellow competitor. bertuzzi's presence in turin cheapens the effort, the devotion and dedication that characterizes the canadian olympic athlete. he embodies the exact opposite of the olympic ideal.

the other day, steve moore, bertuzzi's victim, and his family filed large civil lawsuits against bertuzzi. sums mentioned were in the fifteen million dollar range. i hope the judge finds in favour and doubles the award. between all of the scandals, hanging over canadian hockey, there's been something of a media circus. even the usually composed gretzky looked bedraggled. and what's a media circus without a clown? enter semi-literate loudmouth, bigot and walking eyesore don cherry.

it seems cherry doesn't care for the timing of the moore lawsuit. so he whines like a little pussy. in his usual erudite style he whinges, "[It's] easy for me to sit here and talk, and this here, but I do not like, and this is me personally, I do not like the timing," awww. hey don cherry, fuck you. after years of pissing on europeans and quebecois players and calling people crybabies, you might want to engage in sucking it up and shutting your beer hole. cherry goes on to sob into his fluorescent hankie, "He puts this out knowing it's going to get big headlines and stuff," he said, adding that up to that point he thought Moore and his family had played it pretty smart. "You don't do things like that." "What [ Bertuzzi] did was a thousand per cent wrong, but to [file the suit] while he's over [in Italy] and when the Olympics are on, I think it was wrong."

will the suit attract more attention due to timing, yes. that's good lawyering. and since bertuzzi picked his spot, blind sided a man, broke his neck in multiple places, knocked him into a serious concussion and likely ended his promising career in an act of cowardly violence, it only seems fair that he gets torpedoed on the big stage. according to the man that shops where rodeo clowns shop, moore should have filed suit at a more convenient, quieter moment. you know, sometime like august, when nobodiy would notice. but apparently, you don't do things like that. like what mr. cherry? like, if you break my neck, i should await your pleasure before seeking redress. fuck you and bertuzzi. the nhl, the canucks, bettman and the hockey mafia have all tried to sweep moore under the rug, an ugly incident best forgotten. well, steve moore should be in turin holding a press conference outside the arena before every game. more lights, more cameras, more criticism, more headlines. it is high time we shone a light on the dirty secrets of the great game, otherwise there's no hurry to clean it up.

put sportsmanship back into sports. and won't you please give to help provide a weeping pussy like don cherry with fresh, clean tissues.

mugwumps

i keep waiting to have some vital flash of insight. nada. we await the conservative, wallflower debutantes, as they prepare for their grand debut. meanwhile, somewhere in an office, a mugwump sits. passive, fat and dull, the thing don't care. all it wants is more. is that really so bad? more access, more control, more power, more money and more, so much more. more is the only thing worth having. the mugs like people that understand what getting more really means. the wumps just like getting kissed. kissed by politicians, like the deposed sarmite bulte and now, more ominous, the stealthy bev oda. ctv's question period, this past sunday, ran through a skit, looking at potential conservative cabinet appointments.

interesting, they said thumbs down to a retired general for the ministry of defense, due to his connections to defense contractors and lobbyists, an apparent conflict of interest. only a moment later they gave a big thumbs up to bev oda for heritage minister, due to her connections in the "cultural community". that would be the cultural community of giant multinational media conglomerates. yeah, the kind of folks you see playing the cafe circuit. the attack on fair use and copyright continues, as oda is apparently keen on those fancy, american style copyright "reforms". as encouraged by the campaign cheques from the usual suspects, the association of friends of sam bulte. well, ain't that special.

on a more positive note, i finally got to listen to the drum tracks recorded by arun pal a week ago. the second piece, "sometime: song for matthew john", is a painful celebration. the song is a memorial to our friend matt osborne. matt's voice was too big for his heart to sustain. he passed in his sleep, he was only 31. matt was the kind of talent that bev oda's new pals don't look twice at. he wasn't slim and pretty, he didn't slot into an easy marketing niche. matt was a rivetting performer. he could get more out of an acoustic guitar than most anyone and his voice, man oh man, his voice. matt was coming into his own as a songwriter, he was always good but the material he was working on, it was a huge stride forward. under the loving hand of arun, matt's band and friends, the album, "matthew osborne", was finished and released.

matt was a special cat. he loved music, all of the music. he was the musician that would show up at your gig, lurk by the door, away from the social chatter, and really listen to your songs. he always had an informed opinion, he'd notice things, sing them back to you and offer gentle and considered criticism. matt loved music enough that he'd spend nearly as much time helping young players with their first gigs, as he spent promoting his own. i was floored one night, when in the middle of a set, matt launched into one of the songs off my first album. he played the hell out of that song. matt left some of that legacy of music with us, on cd and in the hearts of the players and audiences he influenced. find out more by visiting matt's site. in an effort to maintain matt's love for music and we fools that make it for you, a trust was established, the matt osborne musicians trust fund. the fund offers aid and assistance to performers and emerging talents within the region. all mechanical and performance royalties from the song "sometime" will be assigned to the trust.

sometime: song for matthew john

well you know we all got to go, sometime
and its a crime when sometime comes too soon
so when you go, won't you blaze that path to glory
and when its time we can follow you through

sometimes never more is what we question
sometimes ones we love are passing through
sometimes never more is all the reason
sometimes nothing more is left to do

when you look back down from where you're going
sing a song and let your voice ring true
raise the wind, for a duet with the thunder
and the rain will wash the tears we sing for you

sometimes never more is what we question
sometimes ones we love are passing through
sometimes never more is all the reason
sometimes nothing more is left to do

when the piper sounds the call for saints and sinners
and the hounds address the moon with doggie blues
then your song will echo on, into the nightime
and we'll all still sing along, along with you

sometimes never more is what we question
sometimes ones we love are passing through
sometimes never more is all the reason
sometimes nothing more is left to do

exercising the old franchise

in the comment to my previous post, "my fellow canadians", jeff said...
"Strong Leadership. Vision. Intestinal Fortitude. Lower Taxes. Individualism. Ingenuity.
Accountabilty.
Vote Conservative."

hey jeff, how goes that moderate stance? i can tell you i didn't vote conservative for the following reasons:

leadership - i don't think stephen harper is a strong leader. rather, i don't think he will become a strong leader, as he hasn't led much of anything yet. his recent waffling around issues that he built his base on, troubles me. either, he is willing to sell out his ideals in exchange for power, thus abandoning his base, or, he's wearing the guise of a neo-centrist to lure disenchanted liberal voters. the proof will be in the pudding.

should he form a government, he will be charged with leading all of canada, not just his original western, neo-conservative base. if he leads from the center and doesn't go after ssm, abortion and similar socio-moral issues, he will be perceived as a traitor. and if he does, he will be seen by the rest of the nation, that took a chance and gambled, as a liar and hypocrite. his transition to power will not be an easy period for him, the party or the nation.

vision - well, my vision of canada and what i can glean of mr. harper's vision, are pretty much opposite. for me, the largest issue i have, is the fear that harper will plant a big wet kiss on george bush's rump. i strongly believe that even closer economic integration with the united states is a very bad idea. even worse, would be integration of foreign policy. i will puke bile and spit fire if we get roped into the ridiculous, failed missile defense scheme. so allow me to skip ahead to...

individualism - as a canadian, i don't feel we lack for identity. that a small nation has managed to hold itself apart from a titanic neighbour, is testimony to our character. we are still, so far, distinct from our southern neighbours in many ways that i see as positive. i suspect that the harper conservatives will be fluffing the pillows for a closer relationship with washington. hell, i suspect that harper will be doing lots of fluffing in washington.

intestinal fortitude - well, harper did let himself get photographed in the cowboy suit. and he tried his best to play football and catch. it remains to be seen whether he has the dangling pals to operate on the world stage. the cpc is an unknown quantity. given that the party is a new entity, harper will have a task ahead in assembling his caucus. he leads a factional alliance and the stakes will be much higher. also, he wouldn't discuss what his cabinet might look like and that rings my "don't trust" buzzer right away. as an artist, i learned the hard way how much planning needs to be done before taking a major project public. if he hasn't thought about a cabinet, he's a fool. and i believe that refusing to speak of it on the stump is a deceit. if i shop for a new car, i want to know what's under the hood, what is driving the thing forward. my take, it was just a cheap way to avoid scrutiny.

lower taxes - ah, lower taxes. sweet balm of the easily fooled. this is political sleight of hand. the problem is that tax cuts don't generally put money in your pocket. i lived through the harris tax cuts. those taxes went along with cuts of service and downloading of responsibilities to municipalities. what the province didn't take off your pay (which as a low income person, amounted to sweet fuck all in savings for me) was shifted into property tax hikes that smoked the middle class, home owners and small businesses. the shift of responsibilities to the community level, put huge stresses on infrastructure and led to travesties like walkerton.

ingenuity - i know it when i see it. i sure don't see anything ingenious under the cpc banner. middle managers and pocket ideologues maybe, but in this case, i'll give you a bye. i'm guessing you chose the word as a nice platitude.

accountability - with pretty much no track record, harper hasn't much to account for. yet. but have faith jeff. he will be held to account (i haven't seen any results, so far, so i'm presuming a cpc lead). should harper form the government, it will be closely scrutinized. my fear is, that if the cpc screw up, they will ruin any form of viable opposition to the liberal party, for a long time to come. as a liberal (and i don't mean the party, i didn't vote for them either) i believe we need a strong voice to the right. i also believe we need a strong voice from the left (again, not the liberals). more than that, i believe we need to fix our system of government. we need to move toward proportional representation, so everyone's vote counts, and so elections aren't pretty much over when the polls close in manitoba.

from what i know of you jeff, you voted your conscience. i can respect that. let's hope your conscience wasn't wrong.

my fellow canadians...

today we vote. please apply your conscience in the exercise of your franchise. i won't try to tell you how to vote. my leanings are perfectly evident, for those who care to read my screeds. as a nation, we are at a turning point and there are many issues ahead, that will shape and impact our lives. try to look beyond the rhetoric of the moment and imagine the governance you seek for the future. what kind of canada do you want to live in? vote wisely friends, tomorrow is too late to reconsider.

a koufax to grind

well, here i am nominated for 'best new blog' in the koufax awards. now, i'd be fibbing if i said i had a doughnut's chance at headquarters. but it is kind of a treat, even to be listed among so many great blogs. for my dollar, which is worth at least a buck, i'd have to aim the magic voting wand toward driftglass, simply a clearing house for brilliant rants.

now i do have my moments, and i'm pretty happy with the reception i've received since i opened the screed bunker. but for consistent quality and ultra-high fiber, regular posting, driftglass is in a class apart. that being said, i will gladly encourage you to visit wampum when the voting begins and throw me a vote of support. i'd be delighted i were crowned 59th runner up, before the top eight slug it out for the prize.

for those of you, dropping in to consider the candidates, perhaps you'll get a post xmas snicker from this o'reilly factor christmas tale. lest we forget the christmas warriors, before the last copies of john gibson's "book" are remaindered.

remember, a vote for me is a vote for obscurity. support the unheard of!

in the pocket, sam bulte update

oh good grief. sarmite bulte is threatening to sue michael geist after the election. the former liberal member of parliament (tea leaves anyone?) is mighty pissed off that mr. geist, a law professor, has called her on her close financial ties to industries that stand to profit by her influence. industries that are, this very evening, throwing her a $250 dollar a plate payoff, by which i mean fund raiser. they're practicing a little profit sharing, with the, um, honourable ms. bulte.

in responses to questions about her cozy relationship with big american media congloms, she trots out the standard fibs. the lobbyists aren't a special interest group, they are her friends and she is supporting the arts. bollocks, twaddle and tripe. the globe article, by roma luciw, buys into bulte's hype:

"Arts groups have been lobbying for increased protection from Internet piracy, specifically for tighter controls on people's ability to download and burn music and movies."

first off, the lobbying is not coming from arts groups. period. that is a lie. the lobbying is coming from multinational, entertainment concerns and their canadian branch offices. the term arts group, in most minds, including mine (a working canadian artist) indicates a small friendly association of artists and their supporters. an arts group is not among the organizations listed below. these are industrialists, not artists. it is misleading and offensive to suggest that this is a show of support for the arts and by artists. these lobbyists represent rights holders, who unfortunately are often not the artists. these people buy, sell and use artists. at best, i suppose you could say, they're pretty damn crafty, but i don't mean that to sound complimentary.

"The hosts of the "artists and creators" event is an impressive list of the who's who in the Canadian music, publishing and film communities: Doug Frith, the president of the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association; Graham Henderson, president of the Canadian Recording Industry Association; Jackie Hushion, executive director of the Canadian Publishers' Council; Danielle LaBossiere, executive director of the Entertainment Software Association's Canadian arm; and entertainment lawyer and TV producer Stephen Stohn."

impressive? not really. these are business people at work. where is the support of major, minor or unheard of canadian talent? oh, there it is...

"Ms. Bulte is open about her close ties to the arts community. Her website has a link to tonight's fundraiser and her election brochure features a photo of her and Ms. Timmins."

the delightfully monotone margo timmins, wife of one of the industry event sponsors and a woman whose career was founded on the tape trading, independent, street level buzz that formed around the cowboy junkies. their debut, "the trinity sessions" was recorded for about the same amount of money it costs to have dinner with bulte and her pals. if margo looks into her heart, she must realize that her privileged position in our society was paved by the sort of behaviour that she is helping to squash by appearing.

"All of my friends are having fundraisers and this one is no different," she said. "It a fundraiser that four individuals are chairing. They happen to be members of the cultural industry. I happen to be a huge supporter of the arts."

if all your friends jumped off a bridge...perhaps the 'exploitation of culture' industry would be more accurate. funny, for a huge supporter of the arts, she isn't interested in hearing what artists have to say.

"I will not be silenced by zealots like Michael Geist and political opportunists like Peggy Nash who are making something out of nothing," she said, adding that she believes Mr. Geist's comments are nearing the point of being defamatory. "I am not going to sue him before the election but dammit, watch me after the election."

translation: i'm watching my golden egg get scrambled and after i lose my seat i want revenge. nobody catches me just this side of graft and gets away with it. hmm, is it defamatory to say that sarmite bulte is a liar? because i do believe that while she might lull herself to sleep, imagining that she supports the arts, it is still a lie. it would be like me saying that i support canadian culinary excellence, by taking a cheque from wendy's.

well, here's a word for sam bulte, you're a big deal member of parliament. the canadian taxpayers give you money and voice. next week, it won't be michael geist, it won't be us zealots, it will be the humble canadian voters that silence you.

see what some other canadian artists have to say:

matthew good

fading ways music

courage and honour

from the national post a story of incredible courage

"Tim Lai, with files from Lora Grindlay, CanWest News Service
Published: Monday, January 16, 2006
EDMONTON - With part of his leg blown off, Master Cpl. Paul Franklin wrapped a tourniquet around his thigh, then went to help three other wounded passengers after a suicide bomber destroyed the military vehicle he was driving.
"He's a medic, so he had the wherewithal to do that," Audra Franklin said from her home in Edmonton, proudly describing her husband's heroic actions yesterday in Kandahar."

i have nothing much to add, but to say that paul franklin's name, needs to be spoken and remembered in this country, with pride, as an example of courage and grace under fire. a safe and speedy recovery to you, master corporal. you do us proud.