DC August 28 2004 - Martin Luther King - I Have a Dream August 28 1963 - "...And when this happens, when we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old spiritual, "Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last...."

I got a dream too - that one day before I die I will actually have a real voice in saying what happens in my country. And other people in my country will actually give a shit. Long ways to go yet, I think.

DC August 28 2004 - Tide? Or Ivory Snow? Public Power in the Age of Empire by Arundhati Roy - powerful lady, great fighter - "...Radical change cannot and will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people. By the public. A public who can link hands across national borders.... What are the avenues of protest available to people who wish to resist empire? By resist I don't mean only to express dissent, but to effectively force change..."

DC August 27 2004 - Feds to study potential terror risks "...The goal is to produce "threat and risk analyses" that will assess the current "levels of vulnerability and protection" at key federal sites in the national capital..." - etc and etc - well, if they can be repetitious, I guess I can be. The point is, as I used to hear so frequently as I was growing up (tad impatient about things I was at times - actually I guess I am now too - it seems to me we could be living altogether in a much nicer world than we are, and I do get impatient when others seem to think this is just fine - but I digress) - they've still got the cart way out in front of the horse, or something like that. That is to say, we're doing all these things to "protect ourselves from terrorists" (hahaha) - and I have yet to see any kind of study or investigation or parliamentary committee that has established what exactly we are in danger from???

I also got my share of lectures when I was a wee lad about not being so darn afraid of bogeymen under the bed or wherever - and now I look around and see the whole damn country is skitterish about something with little more actual substance than those bogeymen of my childhood. We have seen NO evidence whatsoever that "terrorists" exist - nono, hang on a minute - yes, we've seen the World Trade Center fall, and a bombing in Bali and a couple of other places - and then a HUGE amount of hysteria emanating from the American government and the corporate press of that country and Canada - but we have YET, that I recall, to see any actual EVIDENCE of anything to do with these supposed "terrorists" (oh c'mon I made up better stories and "evidence" in high school when I wanted a day off than running around waving a brand new passport screaming LOOK WE FOUND THIS MAGICALLY RIGHT ON TOP OF THE RUBBLE EVEN THOUGH EVERYTHING ELSE WAS VAPORIZED AND IT PROVES THE ALIENS HAHAHA EXCUSE ME DAMNED ARAB TERRORISTS WERE HERE!!!!). Recall such things as Powell's presentation to the UN, laying out in great detail how Saddam Hussein was plotting all sorts of things against America - and how ALL of those accusations turned out to be pure fantasy??? - and yet we haven't even seen THAT much about this so-called Al Quaeda stuff! - we DO know that Al Quaeda and bin Laden were originally American CIA assets, formed and funded by the Americans when they were trying to stop the ol Soviet Union from getting into Afghanistan (there's that old pipeline route for Caspian Sea oil to the Indian Ocean stuff again!!) - and we know that the bin Laden family is very close to the Bush family - we know stuff like this - but never, nowhere nohow has there been ANY kind of serious investigation and hearing, with presentation of evidence, with someone acting in the role of a defence attorney to make sure complete bullshit wasn't passed off as fact (man they do a LOT of that!) - never!!!

So again I ask - how in the hell can we formulate decent plans to protect ourselves against bogeymen whom we know NOTHING about except some wild stories from the obviously unstable, hysterical American government and media????

There have been NO instances of terrorism in Canada - no warnings, no threats at all - although we have had a regular onslaught from the Canadian corporate media about presumed dangers and threats - but again, as with the Americans, absolutely not a SINGLE substantial thing, all just smoke and mirrors and rumors and bogeymen.

AH well, just stuff to think about - things the Canadian corporate media obviously aren't willing to get involved with asking anyone - heck, they seem to be the main perpetrators of the EVERYONE BE AFRAID OF BOGEYMEN drive. Do you suppose....? nahhhhh hahahahaha

surprise surprise.

DC August 27 2004 - Reclaiming Democracy Primers - FHTT!! - American based again - we got a shortage of this stuff here in the Great White North that I've been able to dig up - but it's useful stuff, and stuff that can be adapted to your own uses. You can DO it - if ya want!!

DC August 27 2004 - Parrish defies Martin in U.S. ‘idiots' uproar - and through her courage we are getting a very clear example of just how the Truth is received in the Canadian media. YOU STOP THAT RIGHT NOW!!!! - and equally, same story, we have the PM saying "....this is too important a debate to be derailed by those types of comments..." - hmmmm must have grown considerably in importance, as he didn't seem to think it was worth much talk during the recent election campaign, that I heard. The story says "...A reputation for opposition to the United States was seen as a weakness of the Chrétien government...." - which in itself says quite a bit - notice the weasily wording "was seen as" - as actually most We the People Canadians thought this was one of the few things Chretien got right - but if you think about who the Canadian corporate media is speaking for (that would obviously then be someone BESIDES We the People hint hint) - and you figure WHO it was padded big Paul's "leadership campaign" with a cool $12 million or so - and WHICH group in Canada WANTS closer ties to the US - well - lots of stuff gets clearer about "news stories" like this, and the way they are spun. Ya gotta watch em ALL the time!

DC August 27 2004 - ‘Incredible washout' sees crude plunge - this is pretty wild too - they talk right up front about how "speculative activity" is causing all this craziness - and it is indeed crazy to let the activities of a few wealthy speculators, whose ONLY objective is making more money for themselves with no care or concern about what happens to everyone else in the world (who is NOT playing in their little game), have such control over the world economy. A few immature people playing "real-time monopoly" - able to disrupt the world economy. What sane government or country would allow this sort of thing? What would you say if a group of teenagers in the next block were playing a game of monopoly - and the parents of those kids had given them all the family assets to play with? Geez. Cloud cuckoo-land indeed.

????? Of COURSE we could control it - it we wanted to! It's just a matter of political will (there is no shortage of control measures for people wandering around the world - we could do the same with money) - but when these wealthy speculators buy off all the important politicians - well, this is what happens. And when We the People, who still live in sort of a democracy, ELECT these politicians who allow themselves to be bought off, and keep electing them - well, hahaha sucker. Whadya 'spect?

Yes we can change it. Think about how. It ain't ME than can make it happen - it's YOU.

DC August 27 2004 - Canadians in Southeast Asia at risk from terrorist groups, report cautions - Right. And this from the same people who, in daring secret raids about a year ago, after "lengthy investigation" rounded up 20-odd "young men of Arabic appearance" and accused them all of plotting horrific terrorist acts right there in Canada OHMYGOD - and then had to let them all go over the next few weeks (I wanted to say "shame-facedly", but no such luck - these people have no shame) when it turned out they had NO evidence whatsoever, outside of a few questionable visa applications or something - and the ominous fact that one of them, during a flying lesson, had passed within sight of the Pickering nuclear reactors - HOLY BATMAN MARTHA THAT THERE MUST BE ONEA THEM THERE TERRAISTS COME TO CANADA!!! YOU CALL THEM CSIS PEOPLE RIGHT QUICK THEY'LL SURE WANNA HEAR ABOUT THIS!!!. And these are the same people that secretly - with lengthy denials before they were forced to admit anything - provided the US government (by far the most real terrorists the world has seen the last 50 years) with information which they used to ship a Canadian citizen off to Syria for some special treatment - that investigation is sort of underway (with huge stonewalling from guess who??), but it appears their "evidence" in that case was about as solid as for the 20 guys they rounded up. And these are the same people giving TOP SECRET evidence to Canadian courts to keep a guy named Zundel in jail because he says stuff they don't like. And the same crew who think that Canadian citizens ought to be pepper-sprayed to stop them from holding up signs accusing a brutal murderous dictator of maybe being not a wonderful citizen of the world. These are the same guys who get court orders forbidding Canadian citizens to speak at protest rallies (check out Jaggi Singh). These are the same people who, just last week, spread around big stories about the horrible "organised crime" "problem" in Canada, demanding more and more money (including a surcharge on our phone bills to pay for their wiretapping activities on We the People - they're nothing if not brazen!!!) - and who will not even entertain the idea that something like 90% of this "organised crime" is created by themselves, and their drug laws, and could be basically eradicated (as a "problem") overnight by simply legalising and taxing the stuff.

Well, one hardly needs go on in that vein. They don't have a lot of credibility, these people. Interesting that the Canadian corporate media continues to carry their BS as if it had some merit, with nary a story or comment questioning why they do it, or pointing out their less than auspicious track record, etc.

But why might we suppose they are doing this - spreading rumors of terror everywhere, doing their best to make everyone afraid of living? Well, we get a clue when the say that they need more money to fight these horrible problems. We get a clue when we hear talk about biometric ID cards. We get a BIG clue if we read George Orwell. Have a boo at this for some more insights if you're skeptical - Is 'Al Qaeda' the Modern Incarnation of 'Emmanuel Goldstein'?

But finally it comes down to this - if you want this bullshit to stop, and to start living in a decent country, YOU start doing something about it. Get on the phone, write letters, visit people, talk to your neighbors, get together in neighborhood or larger groups, - tell the people doing this you want this shit to stop. Tell them you won't listen to their lies anymore - you know the real "terrorists" aren't living in caves in Afghanistan, but in the dark places of the White House and PMO and CSIS HQ. Tell them that insofar as there does actually exist some small danger from "terrorists" - it is WE who created the problem, and WE who can end it (well, haha not "we" as in you and me, at least I speak for me who knows what goes on and do NOT support it, but actively oppose it, but "we" as in the governments of the west the last 50 years) - most of these "terrorists" are just fighting back, to try to recover things we have stolen from them, and continue stealing - like their countries, or their oil, or their natural resources, or their labour through sweat shops, or their national income through odious debts. If we give them back their countries, and quit stealing their money and resources, then most of this stuff will stop - just as most of the "crime" associated with drugs will stop if we stop creating criminals and criminal activities by legalising them.

And then what would happen? Heck, really serious scary things might start happening - we might wind up with a peaceful and prosperous country, with people starting to ask some questions about why we need so many cops and laws, and why and how it is that political "parties" with the support of 20% of the Canadian people are committing the country to things like "free trade" or "missile defence" or slashed social programs and corp taxes that most Canadians don't want, or why the gov says there's no money to keep the health care system healthy, while year after year after year they hand over $20-30-40 billion of Canadians' tax dollars to "investors" and banks, and then cut the income taxes of these same people so they don't contribute anywhere near a "fair share" of the money they take from this wealthy country back to support its infrastructure, a lot of questions like that. Questions like why is marijuana still illegal, which is in turn leading to great amounts of criminal activity, when most Canadians want it legalized?

But people thinking about buying new locks for the doors, and how they're going to pay for the high insurance costs and wondering if they'll have a job next week - well, they don't have much time for questions like that, or a lot of others.

Pretty convenient, for some people. BOGEYMAN ALERT EVERYONE DOWN!!!!!

hahahahahahaha just foolin

DC August 26 2004 - Paul Martin lowers expectations for summer deal on medicare with premiers - and here we go again with the bread and circuses - the flim flammers are at it again, wasting time while doing all they can to NOT do what we want, while trying to make us believe they are TRYING to do what we want. It sort of makes you wonder what Roy Romanov was doing a couple of years ago, going across the country, talking to Canadians - at the request of the Canadian gov, mind you! - and finally publishing a report that laid out a detailed plan, based on what Canadians wanted, of what ought to be done. Man, we've heard precious little from the pols on this since then! - making clear once again that they are operating on SOME agenda - but not the agenda of We the People. Anyways, the big complaint they always have is money, but if we cancelled the National Debt Scam we'd have a lot more of that to play with. And there are other things we could do to get the health care system back on track pretty easily - the only obstacle is political will - and the political will in Canada, of course, is to enrich the corps and screw the people, whether or not they want to admit it or whether or not you find that opinion in the Canadian corporate media, it's pretty obvious from the amount of this sort of stuff that goes on.

Anyway, Paulie et al, if you really want to fix the Canadian health care system, here's the basic prescription, details negotiable as always!

• Make it clear to everyone here (primarily of course the CCCE, big pharma, etc) that Canada is a country of, by and for Canadian citizens, not MNCs, meaning those who benefit greatly from the Canadian wealth will contribute a fair share of that wealth in taxes, thus adding several tens of billions of dollars to the Canadian bank account
• Acknowledge the National Debt Scam, and institute proceedings to bring the perpetrators of this to justice, immediately freeing up 30 billion dollars, with the prospect of several hundred billion more to come as the crooks return their loot.
• Drug plan - a) buying in bulk from generic companies will save, on balance, tens of billions per year and b) funding university research on new drugs, and then NOT selling (or giving!) the knowledge so-gained to Big Pharma to rake in the billions, but letting generics produce the new drugs for a fair price to all, since the research was paid for with public money - good for EVERYONE (except "investors" - and "investors" have shown over the past 20 years they are NOT the friends of We the People, so we don't really need to cry too much for them if they have to get their hands out of this particular cookie jar.. maybe we can start working on some of the other cookie jars as well, once we take care of this one ....)
• Prioritize - health of Canadians more important than tax breaks for MNCs (you might take a swipe or two at the half-wits out there trying to claim that lower taxes for MNCs = higher income for the feds - the last decade of lower taxes lower taxes lower taxes governments crying no money gov crying no money and slashing programs left and right and up and down ought to have put the lie to that nonsense, and it's time somebody said so publicly.

DC August 24 2004 - letter time again - sometimes you just gotta write, even though you KNOW they're not gonna print it. But it addresses what I'm doing here - not letting the lies and disinfo of the Canadian press go unanswered. And this is just FULL of it. It's also telling that this is in the Star, not the Pispot, where you expect stuff like this. I mean to say, this isn't even CLOSE to rational argument or defense of what the American gov is up to - it's just a hodgepodge of ad hominem attack and lies - and as we know, successful propaganda relies primarily on keeping the message simple, and repeating it enough times until people get overwhelmed.

Editor (lettertoed@thestar.ca, irpp@irpp.org)

RE: A trait most unbecoming Canadians by Hugh Segal (Institute for Research on Public Policy, Aug 22/04

No telling what the esteemed Mr. Segal was smoking or sipping when he wrote this, but as a friend, you ought to advise him to let things like this sit overnight and reread them (carefully!) before hitting the send button - unfortunately it has now been printed in the paper with the highest daily circulation in the country, if I recall my stats correctly. Heck, as a "friend" you ought not to have printed such obvious nonsense before having a chat with the man - but that's all water under the bridge now! How mortifying! Mr. Segal accuses others, in what can only be called a condescending way, of condescending to George Bush, and evidently identifies with that less-than-shining intellect - for, it is sad to say, reasons he has made obvious in this Grade 10 (D-) piece. Being "condescending" to those of greater intellect, and pontificating utter nonsense full of juvenile "reasoning" and pointing to "facts" in defence of such wrongheaded "reasoning" that those you are speaking to know to be nonsense, is usually way embarrassing.

All in all, however, this is rather an exemplaric piece showing various "fallacies of reasoning", and thus worthy of some short comments. For instance, it is largely based on "straw dog" rhetoric - that is, accusing others of saying something they did not say at all, but which is a weak sort of argument and easy to demolish, and then demolishing it, and declaring yourself a clever fellow for taking care of THAT opponent haha! And after the straw dogs have fled, Mr. Segal turns to outright bluster - making shaky sorts of arguments at best, but making them forthrightly and then backing them up with "facts" that most thinking, more "worldly" people know to be not true at all (actually quite a common technique of the "neocons", who rarely have anything like two solid facts to rub together to support their "ideas", but excel at shouting down the opposition) - another embarrassing thing to be caught out on, especially in a widely read newspaper! [[[and the rest of this short missive here!

DC August 22 2004 - Toronto police shut down marijuana demo, concert - what an utterly appropriate story for the top of the blog as this thing hits the ether. This is exactly how the Trolls react to our attempts to get From Here to There - a completely harmless drug like pot, illegal since people started telling the authorities to go f*** themselves (GFY!) in the 60s and they needed a convenient excuse to round up and jail all these otherwise generally harmless people and otherwise boost the SS troops to deal with the feared rebellion (of course, telling an Authority Figure to GFY!! is in itself a very serious threat to that Authority Figure, and one of the very top of the list of nono's - OBEDIENCE is one of the main things we're supposed to absorb while being "educated" - YES SIR!!! is all they want to hear from the rabble, none of this GFY shit.) - but this is what we face as we carry on the journey to try and make a better world - obstruction and violence and courts and cops and jail - it's quite necessary for everyone to realise that the trolls are not going to go away easily. It's a good democracy issue too - if the people of Canada were asked if they wanted the cops closing down this small demonstration - what do you think they'd say, about 80% of em? yea democracy hahahaha!!! Cheers!

DC August 21 2004 - Martin needs activist agenda - noteworthy for "...the final years of the Jean Chrétien era, which were noteworthy primarily for arrogance, corruption, and a lack of fresh ideas..." - from the Toronto Star, the very flagship of "Left-Lib" "journalism" (using the word loosely, in any sense) in Canada, according to one Paul Jackson, in Press pariahs - Mainstream media scorns conservative columnists (more below). As the old saying goes, with friends like this .... One might equally raise some fairly pertinent questions concerning the comptis mentis of this Jackson outfit. If one hadn't already, of course.

DC August 21 2004 - Organized crime growing in Canada: report. Right jack. A few things missing from the story, IMHO, as they say. As in for instance, running afoul of drug laws makes up the great bulk of this "crime", and the simple matter of being democratic and legalising soft drugs (and getting sane about the harder stuff, as in community clinics and stuff) would knock the socks off 90% of so-called "organized crime". They know, you know it - but they can't admit it or talk about it, given that the "war on drugs" "legitimises" so much of the police activity these days. So out comes the BS, and the huffy-puffy about darned criminals and crime waves (you had a luxury vehicle stolen lately - or offered to you on the black market? hahaha thought not). Then they get off on sex slavery and human trafficking, and say they need lots more money to fight this stuff - I don't know - anybody offered you a good deal on a sex slave lately??? Money is the problem, of course - in the Brave New World of Neocon Globalisation, the number of poor people is increasing by leaps and bounds - and poor people often get desperate enough to get involved with this kind of stuff. If they had their little piece of land, or a decent job, or a government committed to looking after ALL its people rather than just the wealthy - this shit wouldn't be anywhere near the problem it is. As far as people participating in the "procurement" end of things (including "customers"), I think we ought to take some pages out of some more primitive sorts of cultures - string em up in a public place and do bad things to em in public. Yea I know the dangers of that sort of thing - soon you get a lot of people being strung up for all the wrong reasons (damned hippies! go get em!) or something. But the people doing this really are sub-human, the kind of people no civilized person wants loose in their community, and ought to be dealt with very seriously. Of course, they're also usually pretty rich, and in capitalist Canada that makes them above the law more often than not - on the off chance the cops do go after them, they'll have to treat em with kid gloves and work around their high-priced lawyers, and bribed judges and the rest of it. Who also ought to get a bit of real justice someday, but that's off topic. Anyway, a whole lot easier for the cops, as usual, to join the act - that is, go after the poor people rather than the rich. They don't fight back any where near as seriously as the rich.

As far as the street gangs go, again, most of this stuff is related to poverty, and a lot of the rest of it is the kids having the same kind of attitudes they see in their "leaders" in society - win at all costs, once you get the money you're immune, or damn close to it - they know this. The complete lack of morals shown by the globalisation crowd could have no other effect than this, on young people who want to be rich and live in luxury like they see on tv, and want to get there fast. They have not been brought up with any patience, or any realistic view of what a community is, and what a good life is - just toys and babes and money, and getting that any way at all is the message they get from the high-rollers on Bay St. What the hell would you expect from em???

This is about all you need to know of their "strategy" - "...more resources and stronger laws ... and then ... to deal with this cross-country scourge, the police chiefs want average people to open their eyes, get suspicious and take some responsibility by reporting possible criminal activity..." - there - ya see that?!?!? The reason that organized crime is spreading so much has nothing to do with poverty or laws designed to foster crime (let's not forget the new "crime wave" around cigarettes either, because of the untenable taxes on them) or the new morality-free globalisers - nononon siree jack bobsyeruncle!!! - no sir, mr and ms citizen, the fault belongs to YOU and ME and WE - because we are not doing our part in rounding up people the state wants to criminalise!! You're not doing your job if you're not squealing on your neighbor when he goes out on the back porch for a toke, you see! Let's all sneak around spying on one another!!! (Actually, this is pretty serious stuff - for they KNOW that if We the People are going to start getting our act together and get rid of the Trolls - we have to start acting TOGETHER!!! - telling us to sneak around spying on one another is a good way to take some "pre-emptive" action against that sort of dangerous activity developing too.)

And you remember the one from last week, of course - another group of these intrepid souls thinks WE should all chip in a few bucks a month to support increased wire-tapping activities. Literally paying for your own chains. I've been saying it for years. Maybe someday people will start to agree. Hopefully before it's way too late.

DC August 21 2004 Let the jockeying begin: Opposition leaders huddle - just a story, but at the bottom of which we find "...In the June 28 federal election, the Liberals won 135 seats, the Conservatives 99, the Bloc Québecois 54, the NDP 19, and there was one Independent....". And there it is folks, the perpetuation of the myth of "democracy" in Canada - not to mention reinforcing the idea that the Libs and "Cons" are way out in front of everyone else, pretty close together, and those darn old NDP are pretty much a fringe party, hardly anyone likes em, look at the paltry number of seats they got etc etc. Now who would think that in reality the Bloc, with their 54 seats in Ottawa, actually got about 25% LESS of the vote than the NDP, with their generous 19 seats? Or that the "con" party, with their 99 seats, got less than twice the vote of those same NDP - and over FIVE times the number of seats? Anybody who can reconcile those numbers with the lofty idea of government "of, by and for" the people, in a "democratic" system, ought to turn off the tv for awhile or something. (stats here, for those interested.)

D Hat Yai (huhh??) August 20 2004 Ah the good stuff just happens too rarely to let pass by. Having lunch today in one of the Japanese restaurants downtown - nice place, good food, inexpensive - go there every couple of weeks - today they were training new staff. The English of business people here usually is somewhat less than perfect - stories are legion. A nice looking lady training, one supposes, for assistant superintendent, had a name tag, large bold black letters, pinned to her blouse. And it said, above her name - wait for it - ASS-SUPER. Just like that. Really did, it happened this way. Ya can't make this stuff up. (maybe it was a style comment - it was true enough, ya gotta be here awhile to appreciate that there are other reasons for staying besides not shoveling snow 8 months of the year - but somehow I don't think so.)

DC August 20 2004 Pot Activist Jailed - and here we go again. Way over 50% of Canadians think pot should at the very least be decriminalized, so jailing this guy for 3 months is nothing more than a political statement - "You're being a bad boy and doing stuff we don't like so we're gonna smack ya!" - all the best fascistic states do this. You wanna take a wild guess at the percentage of Canadians who would toss a guy in jail for three months for giving a joint to a bud - and then tell me how these things add up to "democracy"???? Government OF the people, that is to say?? Of course, there's obviously something important I'm missing about all this, since we are regularly "governed" by a "party" receiving 20-25% of the support of Canadians, and THAT sure don't sound very "democratic" to me either - but it doesn't seem to bother most Canadians. I suppose I should get cable tv and watch more of it- maybe I'd be happier, or at least have fewer questions about stuff like this.

DC August 20 2004 Let's see - there's this National drug plan too costly, Goodale says - our intrepid Finance Minister is taking a 10 day vacation at taxpayer's expense hahaha excuse me "fact-finding mission" in Africa finding out things about poverty (do you suppose he's staying in budget hotels hahaha???) - while telling the people in Canada who voted for him (and the majority of us who didn't too, of course - they DO represent us all, right? - it's certainly all of us PAYING for these little "fact-finding" missions they seem to spend so much time on... hahaha) gosh darn there just ISN'T the money for a pharmacare program you darn greedy people!!! (and let's by golly not talk about $250 Billion or so the feds have handed the corps in tax cuts the last few years either!!! - and CERTAINLY Not the TRILLION dollars we've handed over to "investors" the last 20 years in "debt service charges" on the National Debt (Scam) or the $30 Billion or so we're giving them all this year) - now I know that a little jungle safari wouldn't cover a pharmacare program - I did do ok in math in school - but you add up all of these "fact-finding" missions taken by MPs over the course of a year and I bet you'd come up with a pretty fair piece of change, as we used to say. And for what??? Odd that we never see any of the "reports" resulting from these things - I can't say for sure without such access, but I'd bet a pretty fair piece of change myself that 90+% of anything they "find out" on these trips is available on the net, or through a few emails (if you want a bit of REAL info on what is happening in Africa, and what to do about it, you might start here - Jubilee Research). The odd trip is ok - ya gotta meet face to face about some things - but given the crappy job these people are and have been doing of running the country, with so many better options available than most of what they come up with, I just can't believe they're actually doing anything useful on these trips, at least useful for us - sure a good deal for them, of course. I sure can't remember the last time I saw a report of one of them in a paper of any sort.

- and then along the same lines we have this Goodale: Bank merger rules still in works - now I could be mistaken - being that I fall WAAAAYYYYYY under the 4.5 hours of tv per day of the average Canadian, I probably have a different take on a lot of stuff than said average Canadian (who would obviously be better informed than we conspiracy nutcases getting our info from the net and working out our own interpretations of things rather than taking our cues from what the "experts" who get air time tell us hahaha) - but still, there was an election just a few weeks ago, I believe, and I read a lot of stuff during the campaign - and I ain't got time to Google it all, but I'll be damned if I remember a single word about this bank merger stuff - now you would think, given that Canada is such a great democracy and all, and democracy means, if nothing else, that the PEOPLE decide important issues (yea yea never mind the marijuana stuff above - obviously just an oversight or something hahaha) that an election campaign would have been an absolutely perfect time to start saying "We are the (pick a party) and this is what we propose to do about the banks, who want the "right" to merger themselves into a couple of giant bank entities so the people of Canada would have even less choice than they have now..." blah de blah de blah. So vote for US because we are going to do what Canadians want!!! Rah rah rah!!! Hmmmm. Maybe I missed it one day or something. Or maybe the Libs were a little hesitant to toss out another blatant lie, being as they were already in some trouble over some previous lies, and felt that most Canadians didn't seem to know much or care much about this bank stuff - which would not of course have ANYTHING at all to do with the Great Free Canadian Media also having nothing to say about it during the campaign. hahahaha - have I exceeded my cynicism quotient for one para yet? There's a lot of red lights going off around here. haha - might have been interesting to have a list of planned "fact finding" trips for the summer too. hahaha again

DC August 20 2004 Chief justice of Quebec Superior Court quits after traffic incident - another judge caught doing the very same stuff they have been sanctimoniously lecturing others about and jailing them for for years or decades of their "working" lives. It's not just the hypocrisy that burns me about all of these cases, it's that it points out quite clearly that the judges don't really believe in the laws they are enforcing themselves - they know damn good and well they are just acting as enforcers and legitimizers of a totalitarian system, tossing people who don't toe the line the way they're supposed to in the slammer - but they feel that they themselves are above it all. Why are they charged when they are caught then? Because a lot of cops actually believe the BS as well, or perhaps some other political forces come into play at times - they're a bunch of cut-throat players at the top there, and Ceasars do fall at times, and their minions. The fact remains - if these people actually believed in the "justice" they were dispensing, it would be absolutely unthinkable for them to transgress the same laws themselves. Absolutely unthinkable. If you really believe that drinking and driving is a problem worthy of tossing others in jail for and otherwise punishing them greatly - then you just don't do it. Not ever. Period. No excuses. Ever. (I don't have time for the spiel here, but I don't think people should be punished heavily for this at all, especially the .08 shit - it's very problematical, to me, to nail somebody because you "think" they MIGHT do something wrong, if allowed to go on their way. Think about the ratio of that, if you understand legal concepts, and ask yourself then WHO is deciding what "MIGHT" means, and "something wrong" as well. Can we say "police state" and "thought control"? Do we want to go there? - if ANYBODY gets in an accident that causes serious grief to someone else, through any behavior that can be classified as "dangerous", including drinking to the point of not having sufficient control, or talking on a cellphone and not paying attention, or watching a DVD while "driving", or anything else - throw the book at em. But don't create this category of "maybe" crimes - it goes nowhere good.

DC August 18 2004 Press pariahs - Mainstream media scorns conservative columnists by a Calgary Sun "columnist" (do those who purvey blatant propaganda qualify as "columnists" in your world? - they don't in mine - opinion is one thing, but this is not opinion, it is BS and lies of the first order, and there IS a difference... - and one fairly certain proof of this is that they refuse to debate the idiotic idea openly - I have challenged these people every time I see one of these columns, and they don't even answer my letters, and will NOT undertake any sort of discussion about it - the reason being fairly obvious - they would not last a second if forced to "prove" any of this obviously nonsensical crap) named Paul Jackson, in which he does the regular routine of these guys complaining about the Canadian "lib-lefty" media. These guys, while not overly bright (that is sort of a central part of the definition of "neo-con" - a gang who believes the world was "created" 4,000 years ago, and at least pretends to believe in "trickle-down" economics and that lower taxes means higher government income - well - you know the lines about sharpest knives in the drawer, and elevators that don't go to the top floor, and a can short of a sixer, and like that....), still get to talk to a lot of people every day, courtesy of the neocon plutocracy who control things in this country, including of course the media - anyway, Jackson has been around for awhile, and you can always count on him to say completely-out-of-touch-with-reality things like "...Apart from Sun Media newspapers, the National Post, and Ezra Levant's Western Standard, conservative voices heard in our nation are few and infrequent....". Geezus as they say - one hardly knows whether to laugh or to cry at stuff like this coming from "respected" national voices - but ignoring it one of the reasons we are in such trouble here, and the mission is after all to NOT sit back while lies like this are spread around. Only one small voice - but that is one more voice than no small voices at all. I can't be bothered to go into the whole spiel proving what nonsense this is again - I wrote a very good letter in response to another of the neocon idiots in the Pispot about a year ago on the same topic. It's quite interesting they all feel compelled to do this once a year or so, when it is such an obvious lie - must be something to do with reinforcing the Prime Mythologies, like Easter or something, or We're All So Poor We Have to Privatise!!!!!! - no thinking person who partakes of the Canadian corporate media on a regular basis could actually believe it had a "liberal-left" bias these days (unless we've re-defined "left-lib" to mean anything this side of Ronald Reagan) - very much the reverse - so one cannot help but wonder what causes these periodic outbreaks of such obvious lies - in the 60s and even into the 70s there was a mild liberal slant to some parts of the media, but that has been long gone (the attitudes of most of these people are admittedly pretty neanderthalistic haha), with the exception of CBC radio (sometimes) and Toronto Star (and the Star was taken over by the corps a few months ago, and has been showing serious signs of getting all the way onto the corporate bandwagon lately). Anyway, my responses to the myth-fantasy of the liberal media in Canada to the Pispot, and another I just found in response to a Toronto Sun columnist named Bob MacDonald complaining (that is to say, lying) about the "left-lib" media in Canada, which can be found at Lib-left media - would that be Canwest??? Your Suns? hahaha!!!! (no response from the columnists to these letters, of course, and they were certainly not printed (yea yea - "too long" for the well-trained tv-soundbite people today - but check out how many thousands of words you get each week in the paper about "How to Make Your Eyes Beautiful!!!" or "Paradise Getaway on Prince Edward Island" or something - all for about the five-hundredth time - and ask yourself why we might not expect a bit of serious commentary and debate in the national media instead of pabulum every day....)