From the "You've got to be fucking kidding me, America" department:
Why try to control the spread of push-button death machines when you can dress you kid kevlar?
From the Guardian:
"No man is an island. Every man's death diminishes me, for I am a part of mankind. "
--John Donne
"There is no such thing as society"
-- Maggie Thatcher.
"She created today's housing crisis, she produced the banking crisis...In actual fact, every real problem we face today is the legacy of the fact she was fundamentally wrong"
-- former London Mayor Ken Livingstone
The video above is one of dozens, possibly hundreds or even thousands of pieces of art created during Thatcher's reign condemning her. The sheer number of artists that were moved to create critical works ought to give one pause.
While politicians and pundits across North America and in the conservative press in the UK are almost uniform in their adoration of the Iron Lady for hanging on to a former South Atlantic coaling station as the last vestige of Britain's colonial empire at the cost of hundreds of lives, somehow tag teaming with Ronald Reagan to win the Cold War by sheer force of will and steely-eyed determination, and for 'making Britain great again,' thousands of ordinary working people have taken to the streets across England, Northern Ireland and Scotland to celebrate the death of the woman who brought in poll taxes, tried to outlaw homosexuality, destroyed the trade union movement, put Northern Ireland under martial law and had prisoners tortured.
Every man's diminishes me, for I am a part of mankind, but some deaths diminish me more or less than others.
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Has up been declared down and black become white? How did this Toronto Star editorial end up in the Toronto Sun?
But it would be foolish to pretend the credibility of our police force has not taken a serious hit in recent years, due to repeated examples of wrong-doing by officers in the performance of their duties.Too many used excessive force on civilians during the G20.Too many removed their badges so they could not be identified.Too many have been caught on videotape beating up suspects and then lying about it.Too many have refused to co-operate with the province’s Special Investigations Unit, probing alleged wrongdoing by fellow officers.
What if John Hughes directed Game of Thrones?
And speaking of Game of Thrones....
What if geek troubadours Paul and Storm took over a kids' show?
And speaking of naughty puppets...
and speaking of Nathan Fillion and Neil Patrick Harris and musicals about supervillians...
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Admit it, when you saw this picture on the front of the Globe and Mail yesterday, you too were thinking the caption should have been "Despite her busy schedule, Laureen Harper still cooks her husband's favorite for breakfast every morning. "
Another good reason to vote NDP -- can you picture Stephen Harper leading the Tory caucus in song? I mean something other than "Deutchland, Deutchland, Uber Alles"?
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RIP Stompin' Tom Connors
This commercial was filmed entirely in Port Dover, Ontario in 1989 or 1990. I happened to be a young reporter at the Port Dover Maple Leaf at the time and was lucky enough to be informed of the filming in the Norfolk Tavern one night. (I'm there in the bar on the right hand side of the screen at 0:06 and 0:10, blink and you'll miss me) They spent an hour dressing the bar with open packs of cigarettes, bag of chip and plenty of glasses of draft beer. Then in comes Tom. He stood around looking stern and soulful at the bar while they shot every angle. Then in came a production assistant with his guitar and sheet of plywood. He did a half a dozen songs and then visited every table in the place for at least long enough to sit and ask everyone's names. He parked himself at table with me and the bar manager and a few guys from the local folk and blues club I set up in town, slugging back Molson's Golden and smoking and telling stories. He claimed to have written a song about just about every city in the country, at least all the one's he'd visited. Most of them, he said, would get him run out of those towns on a rail had they ever been performed in public. The ones on the records were the "nice" ones, the "clean" ones, he told us.
Incidentally, my first full-time professional newspapering job started in December 1988 in Ingersoll, Ontario, working all the hours that there were for $220 a week and all the newsprint I could eat. The editorial staff consisted of the editor - a guy about two years older than I was just out of journalism school - and me. Between us we covered all the events, wrote all the copy, took all the pictures, processed all the film, did all the dark room work and occasionally sold or created an ad. I even delivered the damn thing in the snow one week when the kid on the route I lived on called in sick in blizzard. To top it all off, every week we had to drive across snowy backroads to a central office where all the little weekly papers in the chain were laid out using hot wax, a linotype machine, xacto knives and border tape. It usually took about 14 hours to get it all done.
That central office was in Tilsonburg. And my back still aches when I hear that word.
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Some things just never get old. I first posted links to this little video back in 2005 (yes, I have been blogging since the internet was a series of strings and tin cans). But this CBC story and a subsequent twitter conversation about CSIS agents and the Jehovah's Witnesses brought it back to mind.
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Not much of a surprise that University of Calgary political scientist and nut bar Barry Cooper brags about his friendship with Tom Flannagan, Why do I call him a nut bar? Well, this is Professor Coopers take on the First Nations in Canada and presumably aboriginal people anywhere else that white Europeans decided they want to live. At first I thought the subhead was some editor's warning about the content of this op-ed piece.
Aboriginals have no claim to sovereignty
Opinion: This self-delusion is more than ideology
The behaviour of Indian leaders and the gestures of the Idle No More movement are expressions of the same pathologies found on so many reserves in Canada. Political pathology is more than the well-known corruption of so-called chiefs. Almost the entire discussion between Indians and the government is based on complaints, assumptions and assertions that have no basis in reality. They are projections of the imagination. Participants in the discussions, however, take them to be the self-evident structure of the common sense world.
BY BARRY COOPER, POSTMEDIA NEWS
Such self-delusion is more than ideology, because it combines the lowest emotions — guilt, fear and resentment — with the most exalted aspirations to rectify injustice and fulfil the wishes of God, the Creator. To put this problem into perspective, recall a classic study published in 2000 by my longtime colleague and even longer-time friend, Tom Flanagan, called First Nations? Second Thoughts.
The fantasy devoutly believed in by many aboriginals, bureaucrats and lawyers, both on the bench and at the bar, as well as by numerous academics, journalists and intellectuals, goes as follows: (1) Aboriginals are privileged because they were here first; (2) there are no significant differences between European and Indian civilizations so that (3) Indians are sovereign nations; accordingly (4) treaties were nation-to-nation agreements that (5) affirmed aboriginal sovereignty and ownership of the land. And finally, when Canadians acknowledge all the above, Indians will prosper. http://www.canada.com/news/Aboriginals+have+claim+sovereignty/7874774/story.html#ixzz2JCzxr2Tg
One assumes that Stephen Maher is out shopping for a frame for this press release from the PMO. I'm sure, in time, it will look lovely hanging on the wall next to Dean Del Mastro's scalp. Glen McGregor must be so jealous.
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I'm shocked to learn that there is payola gambling going on at FOX NEWS in this establishment
Your winnings Capt. Renault
"The arrangement was simply FreedomWorks paid Glenn Beck money and Glenn Beck said nice things about FreedomWorks on the air," Armey, the former House majority leader, told Media Matters Friday. "I saw that a million dollars went to Beck this past year, that was the annual expenditure."
Armey, who left the organization this past fall after a dispute over its internal operations, said a similar arrangement was also in place with Rush Limbaugh, but did not know the exact financial details.
Edmond Burke's famous maxim that "those who don't know history are destined to repeat it"appears to be a feature not a bug for the ascendent Japanese right-wing. Shinzo Abe seems to have moved on from the LDP's previous Fawlty Towers policy on dealing with the past, to a brave new embracing of George Orwell's notion that "he who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present, controls the past"
From the Economist
Consider the following. Fourteen in the cabinet belong to the League for Going to Worship Together at Yasukuni, a controversial Tokyo shrine that honours leaders executed for war crimes. Thirteen support Nihon Kaigi, a nationalist think-tank that advocates a return to “traditional values” and rejects Japan’s “apology diplomacy” for its wartime misdeeds. Nine belong to a parliamentary association that wants the teaching of history in schools to give a better gloss to Japan’s militarist era. They deny most of Japan’s wartime atrocities.
The line-up includes Hakubun Shimomura, the new education minister, who wants to rescind not just the landmark 1995 “Murayama statement”, expressing remorse to Asia for Japan’s atrocities, but even annul the verdicts of the war-crimes trials in Tokyo in 1946-48
In an interview with the Sankei Shimbun newspaper, Mr. Abe, a right-wing nationalist, was quoted by Reuters on Monday as saying he wants to replace the 1995 apology with an unspecified “forward looking statement.” He said that his previous administration, in 2006-7, had found no evidence that the women who served as sex slaves to Japan’s wartime military had, in fact, been coerced.
headlines we should have seen:
Former House of Representative leader Dick "Dick" Armey pulls off $8 million gunpoint stick-up.
No, I am not exaggerating. Dick Armey walked into the Tea Party office with a gun-toting "aide" and six days later, he's paid $400,000 a year for the next 20 years, just to go away. That's $8 million dollars, just so some millionaire can make it look like his anti-public health care lobbying effort is some kind of grassroots movement by bigoted yahoos. Read the whole story and ask yourself why anyone takes the so-called tea party seriously as a popular movement instead of a massive attempt by weathy crackpots to buy themselves a government. (Psst, guess what? The tea party now controls 26 state legislatures)
Also, too - scenes from the Voyage of the Damned aka the National Review Online at sea
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