Let her speak you BASTARDS!

The government of Stephen Harper is fighting tooth and nail to keep Suzanne Trepanier, the grieving widow of Remy Beauregard from being allowed to speak to parliament. The reason is straightforward; Trepanier believes that the vicious harassment from the partisan ideologues Harper's government appointed to the board of Rights and Democracy drove her husband to an early grave.

Tory filibuster keeps widow from speaking
OTTAWA (CP) — Conservative MPs are thwarting the grieving widow of former Rights and Democracy president Remy Beauregard from testifying at a Commons committee.
Suzanne Trepanier has requested permission to appear at the Foreign Affairs committee to defend her husband’s record and provide her version of events that she believes contributed to Beauregard’s fatal heart attack in January following an agency board meeting.
But Tory MP Jim Abbott’s hour-long filibuster Thursday ran out the clock on a committee decision, and Abbott made of point of reminding the committee chairman that he holds the floor when the group next meets.
Abbott told the committee that hearing from Beauregard’s widow "would be an emotional reaction to a situation over which this committee has absolutely no control."
Rights and Democracy, an arms-length, taxpayer-funded agency, has been in turmoil for months as factions on the government-appointed board battled over three small grants to Middle East rights monitoring groups that are critical of Israel.

Can there be anything more contemptible than blocking a grieving widow from speaking out because you don't like what she's going to say?

They're quite willing to let their own partisan appointees at the center of the scandal speak and expand the witness list to include 'academics', as long as Trepanier or any other actual witnesses who might say something that would embarrass the government are NOT allowed to speak.

Conservatives have agreed to hear from newly appointed president Jacques Gauthier and board chairman Aurel Braun, although both the Conservative appointees cancelled an appearance Thursday for scheduling reasons.
"The reason why we want the witness list limited to that is because we see no value in having people who can make their positions clear in public in other fora at this committee," Abbott told The Canadian Press following the committee meeting.
"It doesn't accomplish anything."
Abbott, however, said he was not averse to expanding the witness list — as long as it doesn't include Beauregard's widow and three senior agency employees recently fired by Gauthier.
"We're also completely in favour of people who may have differing points of view — professors, people of knowledge — who may have differing points of view from an academic perspective as to what should be happening."
Conservative disdain for academic expertise has been frequently stated, including a frank assessment last spring by Ian Brodie, Harper's former chief of staff, who told a McGill university forum the government actually benefits politically from such critics.
But first-hand testimony by the widow of a man whose supporters say he was harassed and maligned by stoutly pro-Israel members of the Rights and Democracy board is another matter.
"Given the extraordinary efforts that were made by some people to review Mr. Beauregard's conduct and the impact of that review on Mr. Beauregard, I think she's fully entitled to appear," said Liberal MP and committee member Bob Rae.
"I think they're frankly very concerned about what Suzanne Trepanier would say," NDP Leader Jack Latyon said in an interview.

Fox News stops even pretending

A few weeks ago Roger Ailes, former Nixon staffer and current grand poobah of Fox News shocked observers by candidly admitting that the White House has legitimate complaints about Fox News behavior and treatment of them.

But any hopes that this recognition of blatant bias by the head of Fox News would lead to real fairness and balance were pretty unambiguously dashed in the last few weeks.

Glenn Beck continues to spew paranoia, sexual panic and eliminationism at anybody who has the cancerous, vermin ridden evil to believe in such Satanic concepts as progress, justice or peace. This, for anybody who's never watched him, is not exaggeration or hyperbole by the way. Glenn Beck believes ideas like social justice and progress are literally evil and uses rhetoric that skates just up to the line of blatantly calling for the extermination of people who believe in these things.

It would be interesting to compare his broadcasts with those by Hutu radio DJs in Rwanda in the early 90's.

Glenn Beck is so crazy there's even pushback within Fox News itself about having him on the air. A lot of people working at this blatantly propagandistic news distortion machine think Glenn Beck crosses the line. Roger Ailes on the other hand, fiercely defends Beck making it clear he has no objection to providing a venue for dangerous demagoguery.

Bill O'Reilly and other Fox talking heads recently claimed that the New England Journal of Medicine had done a survey of doctors and '46% were thinking of quitting the profession if Obama's health care reform passed'. With absolutely minimal research it was discovered that this so-called 'survey' was actually a quote from a professional medical recruitment firm's promotional material. The New England Journal of Medicine had nothing to do with it and saying they did was a blatant lie.

Finally watch and be awed at this Foxbot's response to a Democratic congressman's giddy response to a CBO report saying Obama's health reform package would reduce the deficit by trillions of dollars over the next two decades.

Fox News has decided to stop pretending and just blissfully roll around in the bias snuffling happily.

Clueless irony alert

Fox news hosts shocked, (Shocked I say!) that TV can influence people to think torture is ok.

French documentarians conducted an experiment where they created a faux game show -- with all the typical studio trappings -- and then instructed participants (who believed it was a real TV program) to administer electric shock to unseen contestants each time they answered questions incorrectly, with increasing potency for each wrong answer. Even as the unseen contestants (who were actors) screamed in agony and pleaded for mercy -- and even once they went silent and were presumably dead -- 81% of the participants continued to obey the instructions of the authority-figure/host and kept administering higher and higher levels of electric shock. The experiment was a replica of the one conducted in 1961 by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, where 65% of participants obeyed instructions from a designated authority figure to administer electric shock to unseen individuals, and never stopped obeying even as they heard excruciating screams and then silence. This new French experiment was designed to measure the added power of television to place people into submission to authority and induce them to administer torture.
None of this should be at all surprising to anyone who has observed, first, the American political and media class, and then large swaths of the American citizenry, enthusiastically embrace what was once the absolute taboo against torture, all because Government officials decreed that it was necessary to Stop the Terrorists. But I just watched an amazing discussion of this French experiment on Fox News. The Fox anchors -- Bill Hemmer and Martha MacCallum -- were shocked and outraged that these French people could be induced by the power of television to embrace torture.

Sunday Linkblast - March 14

• James Laxer's Great Big Canadian Economy post
  He's always worth reading and today he crystallizes all of his thinking about the way forward for Canada into one giant mega post.
  
  
• Psychopath's brains wired to seek reward and disregard consequences
  New insights into the neurology of violent personality disorders
  
  
• The use and misuse of the word 'terror'
  What is terrorism and who is a terrorist ambiguously undefined - deliberately?
  
  
• Biological imperative for xenophobia?
  Reminders of disease cause increases in fear of others.
  
  
• 'This is not a matter of timing but substance.'
  Haaretz puts the blame for the Biden diplomatic row squarely on Netanyahu's policies.
  
  
• The octopus has no personality?
  Scientists suggest that because they are moody and don't fall for the same trick two days in a row that means they have no personality.

Abuse scandal reaches the Vatican

Michael Wolff suggests that the latest upswing of the priest abuse scandal in Europe comes right to the Popes door and threatens his position directly.

This isn't getting much attention in the US, but it's a big one: The Pope's in trouble.

Trouble, trouble. Not-going-away trouble. Run-out-of-office trouble. It's a potentially transformative moment in matters of religion and of power, wherein even the infallible turns out to be vulnerable. Some of us live for such moments.

It's the priest sex story, the same one we've already done -- and done. But now it's popping up in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, all markets which make the American news media yawn. But come on. The priest sex story is one of the best we've had. It's one of the ones that the media of our time is going to be remembered for. It's the ultimate destruction of façade; the giving of voice to silence; the catching of deer and hypocrites in the headlights. It's our triumph.

It's also, on the other hand, our shame. Because who hasn't known for generations that that's what priests were doing? And yet the story went untold. It had to wait for 30 or 40 years for public sensibility to catch up with it before it was told.

He also makes the point we all know but almost never see in print: This isn't a story about aberrant behavior that is an exception to the norm; clearly a disturbingly large percentage of priests became priests precisely for the sexual access to children.

Real Pro-Lifers

From the credit where credit is due department:

Twenty-five pro-life Catholic theologians and Evangelical leaders yesterday sent letters to members of Congress urging them not to let misleading information about abortion provisions in the Senate health care bill block passage of sorely-needed reform.

Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, a Washington-based advocacy group, said that the Senate health bill upholds abortion funding restrictions and supports pregnant women.

The letter included a page by page analysis of the Senate bill as it pertains to abortion.

The group asked members of Congress “to make an informed decision about this legislation based on careful deliberation guided by facts.”

“We believe that the provisions below provide extensive evidence that longstanding restrictions on federal funding of abortion have been maintained. Furthermore, this bill provides new and important supports for vulnerable pregnant women,” the letter states.

Deliberate Dumbing Down

Thomas Jefferson is out, the civil rights movement caused 'unrealistic expectations' and the U.S. isn't a democracy. These will become the standards in textbooks for MILLIONS of American children in the coming decades. The deliberate dumbing down of the American public is about to accelerate.

The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum's world history standards on Enlightenment thinking, “replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin.”

From the Texas Freedom Network's live-blog of the board hearing:

Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don’t buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted to students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.

Palestine's Time

Johann Hari says its time for Palestinians to unilateraly declare independance and let the chips fall where they may.

There is very little the Palestinians can do to change their situation alone. They are virtually disarmed, with a few rockets and some stone-throwing kids, against the fourth most powerful army on earth. But international pressure -- applied intelligently, without hyperbole -- can strengthen their hand, and the Palestinians are considering a move that would catalyze it. They are considering a unilateral declaration of independence, and an appeal for the world to recognize them as a state. It wouldn't cause the occupation to vanish -- but it would make the situation plain for all to see. They are a people; they deserve a state, as much as the British or the Israelis. Netanyahu talks about the dangers of Israel being wiped from the map, yet Palestine is being wiped from the map every day by his tanks and his guns. Why should they have to "earn" their right to their own land by proving obedience to an abusive foreign power?
Western governments support this erasure of Palestine: the EU with diplomacy and arms sales and by providing Israel with its largest markets, and the US with hard cash. A declaration of Palestinian independence would force them to either defend that position to (mostly appalled) electorates, or change it. Already, France's Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, has hinted that he would feel obliged to support a declaration. Would Obama veto the creation of a Palestinian state at the UN Security Council?
Netanyahu is clearly panicked. The negotiators would meet as one head of state to another -- rather than as a broken supplicant appealing to his master. He has angrily declared that the Palestinians will face "consequences" if they choose this path, including the annexation of settlement blocks. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saed Erekat replied: "The purpose of such a move is to keep hope alive... We're fed up with your time-wasting. We don't believe you really want a two-state solution."
The Palestinians want the same freedom that the Jews pined for -- a safe home of their own. They should declare independence. Then it is up to us -- the watching billions -- to pressure our governments to make it real, rather than a howl in the dark.

Should it not be just as incumbent on Israelis to accept Palestine's right to exist as Palestinians must accept Israel's right to exist?

Iceland's citizens refuse to pay banker's debts

Iceland's three hugest banks failed, partly as part of the leading edge of the crisis that hit the entire world economy, partly as the result of deliberate attacks by rumor spreading short-selling international hedge funds. Icelanders woke up to their economy in ruins, their standards of living about to take a nose dive and governments in Scandinavia and England demanding they pay the bill for excesses of the financial sector.

Iceland has held a referendum on plans to repay the UK and the Netherlands debts owed from the collapse of Icesave bank.

Despite overwhelming opposition to the proposal, the country faces years of financial pain.

Iceland's 320,000 citizens voted on whether their government should repay Britain and the Netherlands more than 3.8bn euros (£3.4bn) - equivalent to each person contributing 99 euros a month for eight years.

Britain and the Netherlands say they are due the money following Iceland's financial meltdown in 2008. But Icelanders say the terms of the repayment are too onerous and rejected the package in its current form.

The collapse of three of Iceland's biggest banks overwhelmed the country's deposit-insurance scheme.

Some 340,000 British and Dutch depositors in the Icesave online bank (owned by Landsbanki) had to be bailed out by their domestic compensation scheme.

Now these two countries want their money back from Reykjavik.

At stake is nothing less than Iceland's ability to restore its economic credibility in the eyes of the world

According to Dragana Ignjatovic, analyst at IHS Global Insight: "In order for Iceland to even hope to rebuild its battered reputation, a compensation deal needs to be reached."

Speaking to the BBC, Chancellor Alistair Darling said the UK would get its money back, if not for many years.

"It's not a matter of whether the sum should be paid. There is no question we will get the money back but what I am prepared to do is to talk to Iceland about the terms and conditions of the repayment," he told the BBC's Politics Show.

Asked about how long it would take for the UK to be repaid, Mr Darling said it would take "many, many years".

But there was never any suggestion many people would vote "Yes".

That's why the referendum became an explosive political issue.

Most Icelanders argue that they should not be penalised for their government's failure to rein in spending and for the excesses of a few banks.

As we are seeing in Greece, and elsewhere in Europe, the majority of people don't want to be penalised for the actions of a few.

There have already been unsubtle threats to link IMF assistance to debt repayment. There's a strong sense of Déjà vu to all this...

A $30 Billion Heist

There are currently two investigations under way on the foreign banks' role in illegally sending money out of the country. Acting on information compiled by Radical Party lawyer Juan Carlos Iglesias, federal judge Norberto Oyarbide authorized at least 30 raids of foreign financial entities, including HSBC, BBVA-Banco Francés, Citibank, and Bank of Boston, in which computer files, and other documentation on capital transfer out of the country, were confiscated.

Of particular interest is the charge that 385 armored trucks transported billions of dollars in cash to Ezeiza International airport in Buenos Aires at the end of November, to be sent to the United States, while money sent to smaller airports ended up in Paraguay and Uruguay. The Central Bank is also being scrutinized, for failing to adequately supervise the financial system. Oyarbide is looking into capital flight of an estimated $25 billion, and has hinted that the heads of HSBC and BBVA-Banco Francés could be charged with "misappropriation of funds, fraud against the State, and illicit association."

This is the predator/prey approach to international finance capitalism. A game with people's lives.

Some quotes from Icelanders rejecting the imposition of private debt on the public:

Óskar Freyr Hinriksson, Reykjavik

We said a big "No" in this referendum. My family's livelihood comes from selling seafood to the UK and some of my best friends are there. Unfortunately politicians on both sides have taken the Icesave matter out of context, as the over-inflated Landsbanki bank should have been bankrupted from day one of the crash. Neither Icelanders nor the UK public should pay for the Icesave crash, but each state has a tendency to move private debt over to the public and let it pay for decades. Iceland is facing now what the UK, EU and US are facing very soon.
Ivar Palsson, Reykjavik

I voted "No". This referendum was not about rejecting a deal, as a new one is being negotiated as we speak. This vote was about ordinary citizens in a democracy saying "we will not accept socialised losses for the masses". The outcome is a token of the people's unhappiness with a flawed system.
Jon Audunarson, Reykjavik

I voted "No" because I just can't see the logic in a taxpayer like myself bailing out a private bank that runs on profit. It makes as little sense as me bailing out a jewellery store that is going broke. The bottom line is that it has nothing to do with me so therefore I should not be forced to pay for their mistakes.
Saevar Gudbjornsson, Reykjavik

Why does it have to be Either/Or?

So the coordinated response from those opposed to Israel Apartheid Week included pamphlets and posters focusing on the evils of the Muslim world.

A spokesman for one ICC member organization questioned the usefulness of direct efforts to counter Israel Apartheid Week's campaign.

"Putting out 10 reasons why Israel is not an apartheid state when the Israeli defense minister said in the last several weeks that Israel is in danger of becoming an apartheid regime may not be successful," said Noam Shelef, strategic communications director of Americans for Peace Now and its liaison with the ICC. Shelef was referring to a February 2 speech in which Ehud Barak said that Israel "will be an apartheid state" if no peace deal is reached and Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza do not gain citizenship rights in their own state.

"I think we need to have a real discussion about what the policies are that are problematic - that put Israel in danger of becoming an apartheid state," Shelef said.

But StandWithUs, another ICC member, took a different stand, in favor of confronting the Apartheid Week advocates directly and going on the offensive. A booklet it produced to help pro-Israel activists respond to Israel Apartheid Week bore an image on its cover of Neda Soltani, the Iranian woman whose videotaped death at a Tehran election protest last June was seen worldwide. The booklet argues that the term "apartheid" should be applied not to Israel, but rather to Muslim societies in the Middle East, based on what it describes as gender inequality, political repression and discrimination against gay men and non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.

"Unfortunately, the [Palestinian Authority] still uses many of the apartheid practices described in this booklet on their own people," the booklet states.

"I personally don't think that's helpful at all," said Yahel Matalon, a student at Barnard College and a leader of a J Street-affiliated student group at Columbia University called Just Peace, of the StandWithUs document. Referring to the abuses by Arab states described in the booklet, Matalon said: "Okay, so that's horrible, but that doesn't excuse the treatment of Palestinians in Israel today. If what we're talking about is peace in Israel, it doesn't matter what Saudi Arabia is doing."

Exactly. I have no problem whatsoever with shining a light on persecution of women in Saudi Arabia, the plight of gays under the murderous regime in Iran, the Nazi ideology of Syria.... I don't think too many people argue that these are all bad things and that there are some very unpleasent regimes in the region.

But I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I can decry human rights abuses from multiple countries at the same time. I can particularly hold to account a nation that trumpets that it is a democracy, indeed insists it is the only bastion of democracy and freedom in its entire region.

That's the price of claiming something like that; Insisting that your nation is one of higher standards means you get held to higher standards.

This debate is already over. When Ehud Barak forthrightly used the word Apartheid and said firmly it was Israel's future without accommodation with the Palestinians all the fierce accusations of antisemitism against anyone else using the word just become silly. The objection against the Israel Apartheid comparison isn't about antisemitism and never actually was. Its about how effective the campus Anti-Apartheid movement of the 80's was in forcing South Africa to change.

There were lots of people calling South Africa the only democracy in Africa, a bastion of civil rights and a bulwark against Communism... and now lots of people - including some of the same people are calling Israel the only democracy in the Middle East, a bastion of civil rights and a bulwark against Islamism.

But international protests, divestment and worldwide shunning made Apartheid untenable and it ended. Despite efforts to demonize the movement, despite conservative Apartheid supporters in Canada the US and Britain, in South Africa the organized, institutionalized repression of non-whites ended and a man who had spent decades in South African prisons accused of terrorism became President.

The effort to suppress the debate, to delegitimize criticism of Israel, potentially even outlaw it is a Quixotic one, but the mere attempt shames and discredits those who try.

The man who broke into Auschwitz

It's a tale of remarkable, arguably almost insane courage. British WWII vet Dennis Avey relates the story now at age 91 of how he broke out of his POW camp and switched places with a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz, just to bear witness to the crimes of the Nazis.

Denis Avey, even at the age of 91, cuts a formidable figure. More than 6ft tall, with a severe short back and sides and a piercing glare, he combines the pan-ache of Errol Flynn with the dignity of age. This is the former Desert Rat, who, in 1944, broke into — yes, into — Auschwitz, and he looks exactly as I expected. He removes his monocle for the camera, and one of his pupils slips sideways before realigning. It is a glass eye. I ask him about it. He tells me that in 1944, he cursed an SS officer who was beating a Jew in the camp. He received a blow with a pistol butt and his eye was knocked in.
...
Avey shaved his head and blackened his face. At the allocated time, he and the Dutch Jew sneaked into a disused shed. There they swapped uniforms and exchanged places. Avey affected a slouch and a cough, so that his English accent would be disguised should he be required to speak.
“I joined the Stripeys and marched into Monowitz, a predominantly Jewish camp. As we passed beneath the Arbeit Macht Frei [work makes you free] sign, everyone stood up straight and tried to look as healthy as they could. There was an SS officer there, weeding out the weaklings for the gas. Overhead was a gallows, which had a corpse hanging from it, as a deterrent. An orchestra was playing Wagner to accompany our march. It was chilling.”
They were herded through the camp, carrying the bodies of those who had died that day. “I saw the Frauenhaus — the Germans’ brothel of Jewish girls — and the infirmary, which sent its patients to the gas after two weeks. I committed everything to memory. We were lined up in the Appellplatz for a roll call, which lasted almost two hours. Then we were given some rotten cabbage soup and went to sleep in lice-infested bunks, three to a bed.”
The night was even worse than the daytime. “As it grew dark, the place was filled with howls and shrieks. Many people had lost their minds. It was a living hell. Everyone was clutching their wooden bowls under their heads, to stop them getting stolen.” Lobethall had bribed Avey’s bedfellows with cigarettes. “They gave me all the details,” he says, “the names of the SS, the gas chambers, the crematoria, everything. After that, they fell asleep. But I lay awake all night.”
In the morning, Avey joined other prisoners for a roll call, followed by “breakfast” — a husk of black bread with a scrape of fetid margarine. “It wasn’t enough to sustain life. Everything was designed to make you waste away.” They were formed into groups and marched out of the camp, again to the accompaniment of an orchestra.
“When we passed the shed again, I slipped in to meet the Dutch Jew,” he says. “That was hair raising. Although I trusted him, I couldn’t be sure that he’d turn up. And if an SS officer had looked in the wrong direction at the wrong time, that would have been it.”
The changeover went smoothly, and Avey returned to the PoW camp. “The Dutch Jew perished, but I’m certain that this short reprieve prolonged his life by several weeks,” he says. “Whether that was a good thing, I don’t know.”

Is Ehud Barak an Antisemite?

"As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic," Barak said. "If this bloc of millions of ­Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."

Don't tell Iggy:

'Let us be clear: criticism of Israeli government policy is legitimate. Wholesale condemnation of the State of Israel and the Jewish people is not legitimate. Not now, not ever.' - Michael Ignatieff

Of course this isn't the only time Ignatieff has addressed the Apartheid comparison:

"When I looked down at the West Bank, at the settlements like Crusader forts occupying the high ground, at the Israeli security cordon along the Jordan river closing off the Palestinian lands from Jordan, I knew I was not looking down at a state or the beginnings of one, but at a Bantustan, one of those pseudo-states created in the dying years of apartheid to keep the African population under control."
- Michael Ignatieff, The Guardian, April 19, 2002.

Will Ignatieff accuse former Israeli Prime Minister and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak of antisemitism? Will Stephen Harper demand Israel lose any government funding from Canada as a result of Barak's statements?

Drink my Kool-aid or else!

Liberal blogger Eugene Forsey appears to have taken to hunching over his keyboard at two in the morning and pouring out vitriolic, border-line demented anti-NDP rants.

If you challenge his idiosyncratic interpretation of the facts or time lines, he proudly blocks your comments unless you agree with him.

His hobby horse, like most Liberals these days, is obsessing over the past. Some Lib bloggers, five years on, are still incensed with the self inflicted fall of the Paul Martin government. As Eugene still has one of those insipid 'Thanks Jack' sidebars, I guess he's one of them.

At the moment though he's fixated on three years ago and the bizarre contention that it's the NDP's fault we're still in Afghanistan. Point out that it was the Liberals who voted against an NDP motion calling for immediate beginning of the withdrawal process and subsequently voted to extend a mission they theoretically disagree with for two more years of bloodshed, and then later voted again to extend it another four years... and he will tell you that any further comments that disagree with him will be blocked.

Feel free to respond here Eugene, see I actually have confidence in the facts and my opinions so I don't need to ban people for disagreeing with me.

Prediction

My infallible psychic abilities tell me that Sidney Crosby won't be paying for his own drinks for the forseeable future. You heard it here first.

Marijuana scare of the week

The latest terrifying headlines: Marijuana use can cause psychosis! is another example of misunderstanding data - either deliberately or though ignorance.

People with incipient and ongoing mental illnesses are more likely to self medicate, with whatever comes to hand. So they drink more as a group, take more drugs in general including pot. And then they have the episodes of severe mental difficulty they were trying, however ineffectively, to control through self medication.

To draw from this that the higher usage of pot, along with the higher consumption of other intoxicants found in the histories of people with mental illness, was the cause of that illness is a logical and medical fallacy.

And probably a deliberate one.

There'd be Days...

Good old fashioned stoner rock:

Bounty

Spotted at Thwap's Schoolyard, George Monbiot suggests the only recourse we have left against elite war criminals is citizen's arrest:

This site offers a reward to people attempting a peaceful citizen’s arrest of the former British prime minister, Tony Blair, for crimes against peace. Anyone attempting an arrest which meets the rules laid down here will be entitled to one quarter of the money collected at the time of his or her application.

Money donated to this site will be used for no other purpose than to pay bounties for attempts to arrest Tony Blair. All the costs of administering this site will be paid by the site’s founder.*

The intention is to encourage repeated attempts to arrest the former prime minister. We have four purposes:

- To remind people that justice has not yet been done.

- To show Mr Blair that, despite his requests for people to “move on” from Iraq, the mass murder he committed will not be forgotten.

- To put pressure on the authorities of the United Kingdom and the countries he travels through to prosecute him for a crime against peace, or to deliver him for prosecution to the International Criminal Court.

- To discourage other people from repeating his crime.

Sunday Linkblast - Feb 28

• The Calgary School VS Public Healthcare
  Another wildly dishonest broadside against public healthcare from ideologues disguised as academics - buttressed with outright lies like Tommy Douglas "only intended to protect the most vulnerable in society from catastrophic health issues" and "We really support the public system, we just want to make it better, honest." Hey if you can't trust dishonest right wing extremists, who can you trust?
  
  
• Not a terrorist
  Sure he launched a suicide attack against the US government, but he's not brown or Muslim, so he can't actually be a terrorist.
  
  
• Never trust a smart ass
  Krugman on the Right wing's insecure anti-intellectualism. On the other hand, maybe they have a reason because...
  
  
• Super Freaks
  The smarter you are the more like you are to be a kinky, liberal atheist.
  
  
• Social Gaming
  The huge popularity of Facebook gaming like Mafia Wars and Farmville comes out of nowhere and knocks game developers for a loop.
  
  
• Multiculturalism is NOT a new idea
  The richest woman in fourth century county York in Britain was a Roman citizen of African origin
  
  
• Canadian Copyright Law: Just fine with the corporate giants
  Its the US government panicking and calling us a pirate haven, big business doesn't seem as concerned.

Yeah, why wasn't she tasered?

"She acted like a petulant child. I think she should be forced to resign because she showed such contempt for ordinary Canadians and the people of that province (Prince Edward Island) that I think she has lost the moral authority to be a minister of the Crown," said NDP MP Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre).

Martin said if anyone else displayed that kind of behaviour they would at least have been taken aside and probably not allowed to board the airplane, and, at worst, arrested and possibly Tasered.

"(Harper) needs to ask her to step down. Ms. Guergis's behaviour is completely unacceptable of any citizen, let alone a minister of the Crown," said Anita Neville, the Liberal critic for the status of women.

Ridiculous double standard!

Women's hockey team members compelled to apologize for celebrating their Olympic win with beer and cigars.

The Canadian women’s hockey team apologized Friday for their post-victory party, which featured beer and cigars, moving back onto the ice at Canada Hockey Place.

Photos of several players celebrating about an hour after their 2-0 gold-medal victory over the Americans made their way onto the internet late Thursday. That angered Gilbert Felli, the IOC’s executive director of the Olympic Games, who was quoted as saying that, “I don’t think it’s a good promotion of sport values.” He also promised an investigation.

“We realize we should have kept our celebrations in the dressing room,” national team veteran winger Jayna Hefford said Friday. “It was well after people had left the building. We had done it before and some of our favourite memories are going and sitting on the ice and getting a picture by a logo or taking in the atmosphere of the arena once everybody leaves.

How Mr Felli could manage that pompous little speech with that enormous stick rammed up his ass I'll never know.

Can we expect a huge public scandal if the men's team tip a few beers after their last game? I suspect that might be a the mild end of celebrations that may be more Fellini's Satyricon than beer and cigars on home ice.

After the absurdly lame justifications for refusing to allow women to ski jump (and reveal the embarrassing fact that there are female jumpers with better distance than the top men.) it seems more and more that the men at the top echelons of the Olympics have serious issues with women and particularly women athletes.

UPDATE: What CathiefromCanada said!

Andrew Koenig RIP

His family's worst fears were realized when he was found dead today in Stanley Park. He had been suffering from clinical depression and is believed to have taken his own life.

Koenig was a talented actor and the son of a talented actor. I'm running here the youtube of the semi-pro short film Batman: Dead End. Koenig played the Joker and knocks the performance out of the park. His is a more classic version than Heath Ledger's and in my opinion is superior.

Microsoft Crushes Cryptome

Accomplishing what many governments and their most secretive agencies have long failed to do, Microsoft used a DMCA notice to close Cryptome today.

Microsoft dropped a DMCA notice alleging copyright infringement on Cryptome’s proprietor John Young on Tuesday after he posted a Microsoft surveillance compliance document that the company gives to law enforcement agents seeking information on Microsoft users. Young filed a counterclaim on Wednesday — arguing he had a fair use to publishing the document, a full day before the Thursday deadline set by his hosting provider, Network Solutions.

Regardless, Cryptome was shut down by Network Solutions and its domain name locked on Wednesday — shuttering a site that thumbed its nose at the government since 1996 — posting thousands of documents that the feds would prefer never saw the light of day.

Here's the offending document (PDF). The public interest in revealing it is obvious and clearly brings doing so under Fair Use. Would Microsoft be allowed to shut down CNN or the New York Times if they had revealed it? Will they be able to attack Wired for doing so now? Or me for linking to it?

Cryptome revealed secrets about government torture, rendition flights, telephone company spying and all sorts of other government and corporate skulduggery. If Microsoft are now responsible for ending that tradition of casting sunlight on shadows it will be a black mark against the company.

Update: Cryptome is back up on an emergency back up server.

UPDATE 2 Feb 27: Able to recognize a force 10 PR shitstorm when it's blowing their shingles off, Microsoft relents and withdraws their DMCA shutdown request:

Subject: DN: www.cryptome.org; Registrar: Network Solutions; Host: Network Solutions - Demand for Immediate Take Down - Notice of Infringing Activity - MS Ref. 304277
Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:22:59 -0500
From: "DMCA"
To: "John Young"

We would like to notify you that Microsoft has contacted us regarding www.cryptome.org. Microsoft has withdrawn their DMCA complaint. As a result www.cryptome.org has been reactivated and this matter has been closed. Please allow time for the reactivation to propagate throughout the various servers around the world.

Linda L. Larsen, Designated Agent
Network Solutions, LLC
Telephone: 703.668.5615
Facsimile: 703.668.5959
Email: dmca[at]networksolutions.com