happy Halloween

 go easy on the treats, folks!

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This will not stand!

"You won't recognize Canada when I get through with it"
-Stephen Harper

Not content with running roughshod over the wishes of the majority of Canadians and eliminating the long-gun registry, ignoring the majority of wheat farmers and cutting the throat of the Canadian Wheat Board, the Harper conservatives are now starting to tinker with national symbols.

Dam the beaver — use the polar bear as official emblem, Tory saysOTTAWA—A Conservative senator says it’s time Canada was symbolized by something more majestic than a buck-toothed rodent.
Senator Nicole Eaton wants the polar bear to replace the beaver as an official emblem of Canada.
She says the polar bear is Canada’s “most majestic and splendid mammal,” and a powerful symbol in the lives of native peoples in the North.
She believes the furry, white carnivore’s “strength, courage, resourcefulness and dignity” is an appropriate symbol for modern-day Canada.
By contrast, she derides the lowly beaver as a “19th century has-been,” a “dentally defective rat,” a “toothy tyrant” and a nuisance that wreaks havoc on its environment.

I suppose next they will want to change the flag to a circle of 10 white maple leaves on a blue field in the top left corner over a field of red and white stripes, or maybe just bring back the Red Ensign, since they seem to want to burn down anything that has happened since Diefenbaker was prime minister. Tweet

Keeping occupied

Cartoon shamelessly stolen from Alison at Creekside, who got it from LeDevoir.

It appears the Occupy Wall Street movement is starting to crumble a bit around the edges. Some of the reasons are the external ones you might expect - like the Oakland police launching tear gas into an unarmed, nonviolent crowd or the steady drip of arrests and trouble sparked by police agent provocateurs and the constant efforts in the press to insists the protesters don't know what they want or understand what they are protesting about (which is, not to put too fine a point on it, utter bullshit).
Then there are the more practical reasons. The weather is turning colder and the resources that make the protest possible are running low. Simply put, most people cannot afford to spend week after week camping out in Zucotti Park or wherever else is being occupied.
Unlike the Teabaggers -- who just rolled up on their mobility scooters or arrived on Koch-sponsored bus tours, got shouty about keeping the gummint out of their medicare and waved badly spelled signs for an hour or two and then went home to watch FOX News, clean their guns and wait for their next social security cheque--the Wall Street occupiers are mostly people of working age who would rather be working. Some of so-called professional protestors or full-time activists, some are  college students, some are returned vets, some are just regular people with nothing left to lose, but most of them would much rather be working a paying job than freezing their butts off and getting threatened with a macing in the park.
No, the main threat to the occupy movement at this point seems to be the movement itself. You can only live in the parks and public squares for so long without bathrooms. The democratic nature of the movement can only be hijacked so many times by malcontents, purity trolls, single-issue hostage-takers and anarchists before the organization starts to pull itself apart. And don't lets get started on the drummers. As in any bottom-up movement, the center cannot hold indefinitely and as in any liberal movement where everyone's opinion is given equal time and consideration from the moderate to the most radical, cohesion has limited lifespan before groups start to splinter.
I think the movement is making their point, but would be better off to push hard while they still have momentum in the short term for some kind of concession in Washington that would let them declare victory and go home before attrition and cold weather whittle down their numbers or the powers that be decide that the short term PR problems a violent sweep by riot cops would bring is a lesser evil than the PR nightmare of Occupy Wall Street carrying on through Christmas.
One possible move the occupiers around the country should consider is a collective march on Washington or Wall Street in the style of the Bonus Army. You think the 1% are worried now, wait and see the panic when a million or so people from around the country converge on a single power center in numbers that would overwhelm any possible police response
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both need braaaaaaains

There is a rare seasonly-themed event this week that I would love to attend, You don't often see seasonally themed events for political wonks, but this one promises to be a classic
Daniel Drezner, a professor at the  Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University is speaking about his latest book at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo tonight. His latest book being Theories of International Politcs and Zombies.
I haven't read it (yet) but thanks to my extensive study of political science and repeated views of The Walking Dead, I have learned to tell the two apart. The trick is that one is a staggering, putrid, rotten, mindless creature that destroys anything it can touch and has a seemingly insatiable appetite for human flesh, the other is a zombie.
Leave your jokes about the UN, the G20, the Commonwealth, the conservative base, the GOP leadership race and the undead in the comments.
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In other news, the sun set in the west today and is widely expected to rise in the east tomorrow...

I'm shocked, just shocked that Christie Blatchford said something stupid, mean-spirited and offensive about not-police people who work hard to help people in need.That hasn't happened since her last column.
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I smell Nobel prize!

Dear Nobel prize panel,
Never mind handing out prizes for curing cancer or ending war, a solution has been found for the greatest modern plague known to the western world: idiot trolls on internet comment threads. 
While this blog has largely been free of such dumbassery, such people have long since ruined the comment threads at any major media outlet from the Globe&Mail to Youtube (possibly the stupidest, most ill-informed and downright hateful commenters anywhere outside of the right-wing echo chamber blogs coughsmalldeadanimalscough)
All hail the wonder that is OUTKUBE!

your truly,
Rev.Paperboy

P.S. Sorry for not writing to you in Swedish or Norwegian, but since you usually give the literature prize to someone writing in English, I figure you must all be fluent.

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Viva the usual suspects!

92 years old and he is still fighting for the 99%. His machine "surrounds hate and forces it to surrender." FSM bless Pete Seeger and his fellow travellers!


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the birth of the tea party movement

Before Archie Bunker made bigotry just another endearing trait of old white guys, like flatulence or Republicanism, there was Joe.


While Archie Bunker was eventually redeemed and learned to think past his prejudices and was, in reality, a very clever move by Norman Lear to subvert conservative bigotry, "Joe" was a little uh, darker. The sad part is, today's Tea Party Conservative thinks of Joe as a hero and seem to view the movie as a documentary. And FSM knows, today's so-called centerists like David Brooks and the Sunday morning talks show types love to punch the dirty hippies.

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Friday blues!

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I'm pretty sure this is one of the signs of the apocalypse

Holy Shhhhhhhhhatner!


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Don't know if I got the job, but it was a swell interview

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Stay klassy Flyers fans

Ah the city  of  brotherly love. We knew Philly sports fans hated Santa Claus, but who would have imagined that they would boo an anti-cancer campaign?
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Hipster music fail

So I'm watching Saturday Night Live for the first time in ages and Ben Stiller, whom I generally enjoy, is doing an admirable job as host and I'm enjoying the Zoolander  gags and Weekend Update is pretty good and then the musical guest comes on. A band called Foster the People.  And I'm thinking, meh, a bunch of skinny white dudes in sorta asymetrical haircuts that look like they have very carefully cultivated the suburban casual milqtoast nerd-chic look. Guitar, bass, a couple of  eighties-sounding keyboards, in fact they have a very retro-new wave kinda sound,  very dense wash of echo-y repetitive riffs with incomprehensible lyrics sung in a slightly over-theatrical way. Not my cup of tea, but hey, I'm an old fart now and maybe this is what the kids are into when they aren't playing Xbox and wondering if we really have always been at war with Afghanistan. The band has a certain angsty, Human League, Radiohead kinda charm in a pretentious way. Then I notice the horn section is mic'ed and that they appear to be miming a keyboard line, hmmmmmm. Then I hear it, that high pitched honking whine of a soprano or maybe alto sax. The camera pans back and there he is, the biggest selling instrumental artist of the modern era, which is to say of all time - Kenneth Bruce Gorelick.
No, he has not been added as an ironical sampled aside to give the band ironical hipster cred, he is there, on stage blowing a smooth jazz solo that immediately makes me wonder if I have enough scented candles in the house? why do I suddenly want a mayonaise and wonderbread sandwich and a glass of luke-warm near-beer? Is my favorite colour taupe or beige? which floor of this office tower the accounting department is on and hey, how did I get in this elevator any way?
What the hell is this? Was Chuck Mangione all booked up? This stuff makes Ray Coniff and look edgy and hardcore.
That whirring sound I can hear is probably John Coltrane spinning in his grave.
Foster the People - the stench of boring suckitude is upon you!
Repent, and do an album of Sly and the Family Stone covers with Bootsy Collins before it is too late for you to be saved!
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Election Predictions

The polls close in a about 40 minutes. I'm betting on a slim Liberal majority or minority and a surge for the NDP.

My two bets in the office pool:

Libs 56
PC 30
NDP 21

OR if Tim Hudak's hateful campaign of wrong-head libertarianism, xenophobia and homophobia, backed up by as much help as the Harper cabinet could throw his way resonates with the remaining Rob Ford fans in the 905 belt

Libs 50
PC 37
NDP 20

Either way, I think we can expect another four years of Premier Dad, which, while he isn't my first choice either locally or provincially, won't be that bad. At least not when one considers the Mini-Mike Harris alternative we thought we were facing at the start of the campaign.

Credit where credit is due dept.-- the National Toast has a good graphic on which industries give how much to which parties.

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saving summer in a jar

We took my visiting in-laws to the farmers market last week and bought a bushel of sweet red peppers. My mother-in-law couldn't figure what the heck I was going to do with them all or how we could eat a whole bushel before they spoiled. Fortunately, I had a clever plan.

wash them

roast them

give the peppers as much heat as the grill will muster and turn often until they get black on the outside, then take a sharp knife and scrape off the blacken outer skin (some people pop them into a paper bag straight off the fire to make this easier) scrap off the pips and cut the peppers into strips. Try not to eat too many. They will be candy sweet at this point, so that is harder than it sounds. About a quarter of ours magically vanished before the final step.

sterilize the jars and lids, pack the peppers in with a couple of cloves of garlic and enough olive oil to top up the jar. Put the filled jars in boiling water for about five or ten minutes, then remove and tighten the lids. As they cool, they will seal

Viola, summer in a jar.

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Dick

 Poor, poor Dick Cheney. He feels he has been grievously wronged and is waiting for an apology. How dare the uppity Keyan Muslim socialist usurper suggest that President Cheney and his fatuous meatpuppet Dubya (who is either too drunk to be allowed in public by his keepers or may actually have enough brains to keep his fool mouth shut since leaving office) overreacted to the events of Sept. 11, 2001!
Just because Dick Cheney and his pals murdered a couple of hundred thousand people in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, a country that the United States continues to occupy and will for the foreseeable future. Just because Dick Cheney and his pals embraced torture, made people disappear into secret prisons, practiced assassination, suspended habeas corpus and generally wiped their asses with the Constitution all in the name of security,
Just because Dick Cheney and his pals played on the fears of the traumatized American public to empty the U.S. treasury for the enrichment of their friends in the oil and security industries.
Just because Dick Cheney and his pals, for their own political advantage, engendered a climate of fear and elevated the domestic security forces to the point where every tiny one horse town now has have its own SWAT team and armoured car, police feel free to mace peaceful protesters and taser children, and fighter jets are scrambled because someone swarthy spend a few too many minutes in the airplane's toilet or happens to mutter to themselves in a language other than american.
Just because Dick Cheney and his pals shrieked "traitor"  and evoked the holy martyrs of 9/11 (the most important, specialest and utterly innocent people to have died at any point in history, not like those sneaky dirty throngs of African kids who starve to death every day or those terrorist Palestinian kids whose schools and homes the Israelis keep blowing up)  any time anyone even expressed the mildest of doubts about anything the administration did from tapping everyone's phone to cutting taxes for millionaires.
Just because of all the blood Dick Cheney spilled, the treasure he squandered and stole and the myriad horrors he ordered inflicted, Barack Obama had the unmitigated gall to say the Cheney administration overreacted to 9/11 and now Dick Cheney is waiting for an apology.
As far as I'm concerned he should get one, just as soon as he personally apologizes, face to face, one at a time to every single person left alive in Iraq. Just as soon as he apologizes to Valerie Plame and about 300 million other americans - I imagine the guy he shot in the face would at least like to hear an "oops, my bad" - for the various ways he has screwed them and made their country a worse place.
After he gets done making all those apologies, then I think Obama should apologize to Cheney and clarify his remarks......... preferrably while testifying at Cheney's trial at The Hague.

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Truth will out eventually

They've tried sandbagging the parliamentary committees involved, they've tried smearing the witnesses, they've tried wrapping themselves in the flag and "our brave men and women in uniform" - they've even tried shutting down Parliament. But the government's complicity in and attempts to cover- up the torture of detainees in Afghanistan is not going to go away. 

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Sad, but true

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What's good for the goose is apparently criminal defamation to the gander

Apparently it is okay for neofascist dingbats to smear the reputation of a respected academic, trade unionist and blogger by spreading lies about him being a supporter of the Taliban,  but if you say mean things about a police spies and agent provocatuers, well....

Activist charged with criminal defamation over posting about undercover officers

Police officers linked to last year’s G20 summit say a Kitchener activist defamed two undercover police officers in comments he made on a local university-based website.
Dan Kellar, 29, was recently charged with two counts of defamatory libel by officers in the OPP anti-rackets squad as he left his Kitchener home on a bicycle.
He was also charged with counsel to assault one of the officers.
Police allege he published comments likely to injure the reputation of the officers by exposing them to hatred, contempt or ridicule, or that were designed to insult the officers.
Kellar and his lawyer, Davin Charney, say the charges are an attempt to stifle dissent.
“Dissent is now a criminal activity,’’ said Kellar, a member of Anti-War at Laurier (AW@L), which calls itself “a community-based radical direct-action group committed to solidarity and anti-oppressive organizing.’’
Criminal defamation is a rarely used section of the criminal code, Charney said.
“It gives police the ability to criminalize and charge people who are criticizing the police,’’ he said.
Sgt. Pierre Chamberland, a communications spokesperson for the OPP, acknowledged the charge of criminal defamation isn’t commonly laid.
“It’s not a charge I hear used every day,’’ he said. “However, I suspect people will need to understand they own the words they post publicly.’’

 Click the headline and read the whole thing. The police spies who infiltrated the activist group were outed at some other site months ago. These charges have been laid simply because Dan Kellar said something rude about the undercover cops involved. He invited people to "spit in their footsteps and scoff at their existence" and I guess the big, brave infiltrators got their feeling hurt, because that statement drew a "cousel to assault" charge. Does that mean that if I scoff at the existence of these people I am guilty of assault? I guess they better lock up all the right-wingnut bloggers who told us that the police never use agent provocateurs or infiltrate non-violent groups.

Oh, and that respected academic, trade unionist, blogger and bon vivant, the inimitable Dr. Dawg has more

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the terrorists won

Apparently all it takes is an airline passenger eating a dodgy burrito before the flight or a couple joining the mile-high club to make NORAD shit its pants. Given what it costs to scramble an F-16 and have it fly from Denver to New York, al-Quaida could probably bankrupt the United States by slipping some Ex-Lax into the coffee urn at the Starbucks at O'Hare Airport every couple of weeks.
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