Jim Flaherty Is Dead

After attempting to kill the CBC by slicing its budget to death (while financing private-sector TV networks like CTV and Global), I was hoping the network wouldn't cover Canada's Conservative former 8-year Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's death except by holding an office party.

Instead, they first reported on his death like it was just anyone's, then ran a whole other story to say he will have a state funeral in Toronto.

I understand the ''state funeral'' part, not because he was in charge of running Canada into austerity until just a few weeks ago, but because his friends and Party are still in charge and that's what those people do: spend our tax dollars amongst themselves.

But why Toronto? Hold it in Ottawa - the capital - where he worked and did his evil deeds. Picture this:

Flaherty died of a heart attack Thursday. Colleagues, including opposition MPs, are remembering him as a generous friend who could spar heatedly with someone in Parliament and later laugh over a drink outside the House of Commons.

Laugh over a drink. ''We sure screwed most Canadians on that one! No more benefits for the unemployed, let's toast with this 15-year-old bourbon!''

I don't mean to be an asshole, but the media overall are acting like fucking fanboys now that he's dead, and even the NDP's Thomas Mulcair saying how ''great of a man'' he was though pretty much every single thing Mulcair supposedly stands for and has been fighting for his entire political career was in complete and total opposition to Flaherty's views.

One piece stands in contradiction of them all, and I can't just quote from it since all passages are important, so here it is, from Socialist.ca:

Flaherty was part of Mike Harris’ government in Ontario, whose cuts to water inspection services led to an E.Coli outbreak that killed seven people in Walkerton, Ontario. The same government imposed massive cuts to welfare and social housing, killing Kimberly Rogers in the process, and years later people continue to die from homelessness.

Flaherty was also part of cuts to healthcare at both provincial and federal levels. As the Council of Canadians wrote last week in an article titled Broken Promises and Abdication: Flaherty’s Healthcare Legacy, “March 31 marks the end of the 2004 Health Accord and the last day Canadian health care will have equalization payments to have-not provinces, national standards, and federal funding tied to achieving set benchmarks. March 31 is also a day to mourn the fact that we remain the only wealthy country with a universal health-care system and no national pharmacare plan.” Healthcare cuts kill, including the Tories' inhumane cuts to refugee health--denying basic health care to people who had fled rape, torture and war.

Flaherty was also proudly part of the Harper government that turns its back on global health crises—boycotting the International AIDS conference in Toronto, imposing a maternal health plan denying abortion, cutting humanitarian aid to Gaza, and defunding Sisters in Spirit that investigates missing and murdered aboriginal women.

While destroying social services, Flaherty and the federal Tories have poured billions into the military, which has killed countless people in 13 years of occupying Afghanistan, the bombing campaign in Libya, and the UN occupation of Haiti. At the same time, Flaherty’s budget policies included the New Veterans Charter—cutting benefits from veterans despite an epidemic of suicides and protests across the country.

Flaherty also pioneered the technique of using omnibus budgets to hide life-threatening cuts, from Bill C-45’s attacks on environmental protection and indigenous sovereignty that sparked Idle No More, to the more recent Bill C-4 that attacks workers—including their health and safety.

We mourn these countless victims of Flaherty’s policies of austerity.

Too soon? It's never too soon for the truth.

Africa, Unite!

Why do I always get myself in these situations?

I cut down my Facebook friends' list from 5000 to 3500, and still I'm left with idiots strangers I usually completely disagree with.

Case in point:

Like, how is sympathizing enough when they are fucking staving to death? Are you eating popcorn while watching them die as entertainment?

In any event, here's what I wrote as a retort - honestly, I thought I was just going for one paragraph, didn't think it'd get this long:

I know I was wrong to use what I perceived was racism on their part to reverse-argue with them using false-racist analogies. And I didn't go any further on there because it already seemed like a long blog post.

This is what I was alluding to in my last post. Well, not really, but it's fuel to the fire. People are cruel, insensitive, self-centered assholes who care about no one but themselves. If it doesn't affect their own little fucking world, the want nothing of it; but when it does hit home, then everyone should come knocking, and there better be a fucking telethon on every TV station in the world, broadcast live on fucking YouTube, 'cause shit is BAD and they need help!

This is what governments should do: take part of your money to offer services which wouldn't make sense for you to take care of on your own, shit they have a better system in place to assemble and get going: emergency relief, streets and infrastructures, schools and education in general, hospitals and health systems, police and national defense and prisons, fireworkers - anyone covered by 9-1-1 - and helping folks like you live their fucking lives - on your street, in your neighbourhood, in your city, your State/province, the whole country. And making mutually beneficial deals with other countries, and helping some of them out when they're in trouble so they can help you out when you're in trouble.

The minute it stops working and your money goes to shit (or corruption), what should happen, is the system should come to a complete halt, and folks should get to decide whether it's time for a re-haul, a reboot, a new philosophy, or none at all. If it's ''none'', then you shouldn't have to pay a penny more in taxes, and there should just be two laws: 1. don't steal; 2. don't kill. Everything else should be free game. Sounds like a Republican wet dream, a Libertarian manifesto? Think again - it's from every  anarchist handbook. Funny how it makes more sense than the shit we're living in every day, doesn't it?

''Why don't we take care of our own problems first?''

Yeah, every time we try, we're either screwed by politicians or by some of the folks we're trying to defend:

Montréal:

Hiding their identification numbers

Turkey:

Occupy (Oakland and Wall Street):

Once again, Yan (and countless others) is right: this world isn't worth saving. The minute you're out of line, they will break you away from their system, and shove you into the correctional system, which no longer corrects prisoner's behaviour in order to rehabilitate him back into society; no, it corrects the statistics, protects the status quo by eliminating dissidence, so that they end up getting what they want - their opinion to be the majority and the de facto Rule Of Law - even if they need to remove the actual majority to get there. Louis C.K. has this great line:

I read something in the paper that really confused me the other day. It said that 80 percent of the people in New York are minorities... Shouldn't you not call them minorities when they get to be 80 percent of the population? That's a very white attitude, don't you think? I mean, you could take a white guy to Africa and he'd be like "Look at all the minorities around here! I'm the only majority."

And we're back to Africa. Which Barack Obama said we should help feed. What a world-weary socialist.

Sure, I digressed, but I came back, didn't I? And I found a way to put colourful pictures in the post...

Deadly Foods From The Gulf Of Mexico

The April, 2010 BP oil spill still causes damage to the area's wildlife, and the crap it causes goes right back to our plates... as usual.

Fish rotting alive

Cancer-ridden shrimp

Eye-less shrimp

I won't just copy-and-paste the whole article, it would be unfair tot hose who wrote it, but passages such as hese abound:

Among the disturbing mutations: Shrimp with tumors on their heads; fish that lack eyes or are missing flaps over their gills; fish with oozing sores; crabs with holes in their shells; crabs that are missing claws and spikes, or are encased in soft shells instead of hard ones.

Keath Ladner, a third generation seafood processor in Hancock County, Mississippi, is also disturbed by what he is seeing. "I've seen the brown shrimp catch drop by two-thirds, and so far the white shrimp have been wiped out," Ladner told Al Jazeera. "The shrimp are immune compromised. We are finding shrimp with tumors on their heads, and are seeing this everyday."

It's not just the oil spill itself, but also the oil dispersants used to clean up the mess... sure, to the naked eye, it looks like the oil ''left the water'', but that's just because dangerous chemicals just separated their chemical components.

Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts can include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia and cardiovascular damage. They are also teratogenic - able to disturb the growth and development of an embryo or fetus - and carcinogenic.

And, of course, both BP and local authorities are hiding behind government regulations (or lack thereof):

"Seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is among the most tested in the world," the energy company says in a statement. And "according to the FDA and NOAA, it is as safe now as it was before the accident."

Al Jazeera contacted the office of Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, who provided a statement that said the state continues to test its waters for oil and dispersants, and that it is testing for PAHs. "Gulf seafood has consistently tested lower than the safety thresholds established by the FDA for the levels of oil and dispersant contamination that would pose a risk to human health," the statement reads.

Well, then, let me ask this: is it, maybe, that the FDA's requirements are too low? Why satisfy yourself with the lowest possible standard when you know for a fact they aren't adequate? This could be the one chance we have to get FDA standards up to par, but instead, we'd rather let our people eat poison for a few more years or generations. It's no wonder the U.S. accepts radioactive food from Japan, seeing as the FDA accepts between 4 and 10 times the radiation levels the Japanese authorities do.

Against The Institution Until The Need For Said Institution

Conservatives in general have a nasty habit of being against ''big government'', subsidies, taxes/services... until the need to use them, themselves, arises. We witnessed that in the wake of Hurricane Sandy when a few of the Republicans who denied expediting relief aid to New York and New Jersey victims were the same who'd received it in the past for other natural disasters.

This time, irony caught up with famed Libertarian and former Republican candidate Ron Paul, who had said this about the United Nations in 2003:

The UN increasingly wants to influence our domestic environmental, trade, labor, tax, and gun laws. Its global planners fully intend to expand the UN into a true world government, complete with taxes, courts, and a standing army. This is not an alarmist statement; these facts are readily promoted on the UN’s own website. UN planners do not care about national sovereignty; in fact they are actively hostile to it.

Yet, Paul registered a grievance this week to the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization to obtain the rights to to websites created by fans, RonPaul.com and RonPaul.org. The owners of the domain names - obviously fans of free enterprise - are willing to sell him the rights, but he wants them for free.

I guess he wants to use their ''courts'' to win an exemption from his ''domestic trade laws'', under which both sites' names were rightfully purchased, and fails to acknowledge the ''labor'' the webmasters have put in it - obvious thousands of hours of it, filling the website with content and managing a 150,000-strong mailing list...

And that's the main problem with these failed politics of the Right, in general: by lacking the foresight to legislate/prevent/save, they're always caught back-tracking when Life hands them a curve ball.

This is a relatively cute, unimportant subject for which the loser will just be left empty-handed, but when it's applied to big stuff, like health, hard individual economics (bankruptcies), the quality of food and water, crumbling infrastructures - stuff that can be of ''life and death'' importance at the end of the day, then their politics become dangerous.

Truth: You Tell Me

Fucking politicians. Especially those who don't just lean to but are far into the right: fucking liars when it suits them, and predators the rest of the fucking time.

And assholes all the time.




We have cameras, motherfucker, and they're hooked to shit that stores whatever they fucking record. We have hard fucking proof of how much of a hypocrite you are in front of TV news crews compared to how bad a dick you are with your friends in your majority fucking government when taunting your opponents and trying to scare the voting public. Or the elderly among them, anyway.

There are probably more child molesters in your fucking Cabinet than there are roaming the streets of Canada. Sometimes I'm glad you're building more prisons, because we'll need the place to store all of you elected officials when we decide we've had enough. And if you bring the death penalty back, well... karma's a bitch, man.

My City Of Ruins, Part 25

One piece at a time, we're going to crumble into the river that surrounds us.

This time, part of a tunnel structure - designed to block the sun out of drivers' eyes - just fucking fell on the highway.

Add that to overpasses crumbling, two bridges in need of immediate replacement - including the one that receives the most vehicles in all of Canada on a daily basis - and slowly wonder where all the payola money has been going. We've paid for these structures a million times over and yet they fall before our eyes, at half their life expectancy.

So many people have to account for this, from the shady construction companies who built them to the blind government officials who paid for them to the governing parties who were supposed to invest in their maintenance.

Remember when we used to chop the heads off our leaders, or carried pitchforks and lanterns to their houses, or feathered-and-tarred criminals? Good times.

Bulgarian Lotto Feeling Lucky

In these times of rampant corruption (see my recent piece about Van Halen's manager and most of the entries regarding my City's administration), it's nice to see transparency like this...

Maybe you've heard, likely not, but in Bulgaria, the same 6 lottery numbers came out as winners twice in a row, a likelyhood of 4,000,000 to 1. Four million. To one. You know, Vegas odds!

An investigation was called by Sports Minister Svilen Neikov, and no wrongdoing was found. Those who conducted it are the same people who run it, so it's fair to say they're trustworthy, I guess - or they would have asked someone else. Right?

I'm so happy we have the internet at weird times like these, so at least we can let the news fly around the world to make us more cynical, rather than just ignorant.

Now back to news about Megan Fox...

Dogs Of War: The Upcoming Canadian Elections

A friend of mine weighed in on the upcoming Canadian elections. His thoughts make sense, eventhough I only half-agree with most of what he says. If you're curious, understand French, and are a member of Facebook (really, who isn't?), feel free to have a look, here.

Me, it just made me want to compare each major party with a breed of dog...

Let me start with the admission that I know precious little about dogs. I love them, well, some of them, anyway. I can differentiate a few breeds, but nowhere does it approach what I know on other topics, like sports, music or film. Or ladies. It’s out of the bag, so to speak, but it changes nothing, and matters not.

You might have heard elections are coming. And I don’t mean the Obama-McCain fiasco-in-the-making, I mean the good-ole tired Canadian Politiks, the four-party system that’s so good at keeping itself in check that it forgot to go forward since 1995.

This time around, the so-called Top Dogs are the Conservatives. Oh, yes: they united the Right and all they got was a minority government. But a minority government that did a lot in repressing women’s rights, stopped contributing to the arts, made Canada look like the U.S.’ lap dog in ways unseen since… ever. Oh, there were times in the 80s, but not to this extent, and especially not with a U.S. government so despised worldwide.

However, in doing so, the Conservatives showed us who they really were. You see, they’d been barking in the shadows of power for years now, first as a distant voice you could barely hear, then growling louder and louder until, united, they became the Official Opposition, where they could bark every day in the press and get their points across against a government that was begging to be euthanized.

All these years, we thought Conservatives were big, mean, rabid Bulldogs. Turns out they were even more dangerous – they were a castrated Chihuahua intent on exacting revenge on the whole world for belittling their manhood. Think ‘Revenge Of the Nerds’, but instead of nerds, take the fuckwads from Columbine High School – bullied momma’s boys whose dads had big guns in the shed and got tired of being pushed around.

So they barked louder than their little bodies could handle, and they cut funding to just about everything they disagree with, passed anti-corruption laws that even they don’t respect and instilled fixed date elections, which the also won’t respect. Oh, and they got us damn near a recession just last quarter.

What’s their opposition, though? Since the inception of Canada, the Liberal Party has been in charge more often than not. So much so that the word ‘liberal’ ceased to apply to them per se, as they were more intent on ‘conserving’ their seats in Parliament at times than changing the world, Lester B. Pearson-style. They needed money and strong friends for that – and we have the Sponsorship scandal to prove that it worked.

A complete makeover was needed, and it’s the only way a thinker like Stéphane Dion could end up in charge. He’s clearly not the strong-arm type that Chrétien or even Martin were, but the party had to show it wasn’t just going to be more of the same. He’s the guy who comes up with a few ideas of his own, and also the one who can reinterpret even smarter people’s ideas (read the NDP, Bloc and Greens) and make them more digestible for the masses. He’s turned the Liberals into German Shepherds – police dogs that work on the side of the law, of the just. Or so he thinks.

Which brings us to the Bloc Québécois. Created on the eve of the last referendum, most Canadians are unaware of what it represents, apart of course from its ultimate goal – the secession and independence of Québec. People have trouble seeing what good it can do in Ottawa other than cashing in some of the Queen’s money while stalling politics, mainly because it’s the discourse the former Liberals used in rejecting their propositions publicly – then taking full credit when passing them as progressive laws themselves in the mid-90s. Stephen Harper also usually dismisses them as a useless party because ‘it will never govern Canada and thus is irrelevant’, and that Blocers can complain all they want about the country and the system, they can never be in charge, so they are screams in the dark. In that manner, the Bloc is basically a Labrador, a seeing-eye dog, smarter than most other breeds, but always forced to maneuver in the dark, leading the blind.

If only people knew that had Gilles Duceppe been a Liberal (and, thus, in charge at some point in his career), his ideas would have made him the most loved and respected Premier in at least 50 years. It would have advanced Canada in worldwide opinion to the level of opinion leader, rather than follower of the wrong. He always defended First Nations, pushed for greener measures, equal pay – and rights – for women, better distribution of Employment Insurance benefits to the workers who had paid for them in the first place… you know, the type of moral issues that makes the United Nations listen to you when you oppose the illegal invasion of a particular country - and elicit action. There’s a reason Quebecers vote for them massively and elect between 35 to 50 people at any time or during any political climate – their record for supporting minorities and equality speaks for itself. Not as morally corrupt as the two bigger parties, the Bloc were actually the ones who broke the Sponsorship scandal.

Which makes the NDP the Golden Retriever. Just like the Labrador, without the threat of secession. But the same leadership qualities, the same brains, the same dedication for working for others and the greater good. The same stance on staying clean, following the right path; you won’t find many closeted homosexuals, pedophiles, thieves, election-riggers and bribed members here (usually the Moral Leaders of the Right end up in those, ironically). And like the Bloc, the same sense of working in the dark, from the sidelines of power, having their best ideas stolen by the Liberals because their visibility in the media is lacking.

There’s now a fifth member who wants its voice heard, the Green Party. It’s just too bad they’re a one-trick pony at this point, especially since the Liberals are now viewed as environmental-friendly, and the Bloc and NDP have been waiving the green flag for over 10 years now. Little poodle wants in on the fun, but can only do the one flip it was taught in the circus. Anyhow, no one votes for the Greens, not really; they send messages to their favourite party, but in a tight race, they get less than 1% of a riding’s votes.

Now, they say surveys are showing the Conservatives in a slight lead, or tied with Liberals. But we all know how it works in Canada: the percentages don’t mean anything, because every single election, one party ends up with a third of the votes but just a handful of elected officials, losing most districts by a slight margin and winning by huge ones, so many votes are lost and really just don’t count.

It’s time the Conservatives taste that medicine, especially in Ontario and Québec. We’re ready for another minority Liberal government, with an almost equal opposition for the Conservatives, Bloc and NDP – leaning enough to the left to restore our place among progressive leaders in the world, but with enough of an emphasis on family and security to feel safer in our homes – or at least in Albertan homes.

If the Conservatives get a majority government, after seeing what they were able to pull off with a, let’s say, cerebral – rather than aggressive – opposition… we’re fucked. Think: no arts, women in cages (or prison, for abortions, same thing, really), over-bearing religion, active participation in world conflicts, tax breaks for the filthy rich, guns in the hands of those who intend on using them… and the Olympics right around the corner. Feels like 1936 all over again, doesn’t it?