You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December 2011.
Sometimes Calvin says it best. For a wordier explanation see this video :)
Take care everyone.
Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus accessible and full of life and joy; accessible for all. This is a repost, but too bad, the awesome has not lost its glow.
Harper and his mercurial band of autocrats are merrily stomping on the neck of democracy. Sadly, this isn’t news, but rather par for the course as dissent, reality based or not (I’m looking at you prison bloat omni-bus bill) will be passed hell or high water. What makes the Wheat Board debacle such a gut-rolling spleen bursting festival of shitacular brazenness is that our government intends to ignore what the courts have to say on the matter as well. Canada, in theory, still regards the rule of law as important as long as it follows the will of the governing party… Rule of law be damned. A spirited opposition has risen to the task of fighting Harper’s autocrats:
“The Harper government has reneged on its promise and is now breaking the law, and we intend to hold them to it and ensure that farmers’ democratic rights are respected,” board chairman Allan Oberg said Wednesday.
The board will file an application with the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench, asking it to rule Bill C-18 invalid. The bill is currently before the Senate and could become law within weeks, so the board is also asking the court for an injunction to suspend the bill until the case is heard.
The government has already suffered one legal setback over Bill C-18. A Federal Court judge ruled last week that the bill violates the Canadian Wheat Board Act, which says the government must consult farmers via a plebiscite before making major changes.
Justice Douglas Campbell made it clear, however, that his ruling was simply a statement on the government’s actions. He did not order the government to halt the bill and said he was not interfering in the legislative process.”
However, once the wheels of injustice are greased, there is little to be done to stop the nefarious deeds –
“Five government-appointed directors now in charge of the Canadian Wheat Board decided Friday morning in Winnipeg to drop the board’s bid to block legislation ending its marketing monopoly for Prairie wheat and barley.
Legislation to end the wheat board’s single-desk became law Thursday night, when Gov. Gen. David Johnston gave royal assent to Bill C-18.
With its passage, the eight farmer-elected directors of the board are gone.”
So it is done. Of course in klassy Conservative style:
“Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz was jubilant Friday morning, telling farmers gathered in Balgonie, Sask., that it’s a great day.
“This feels damn good. It’s been a long time coming,” Ritz said. “Finally you have marketing freedom.”
Farmers in the room with Ritz cheered.”
Woo, now we can enjoy the bountiful harvest of the ‘free’ market! Soon to be followed with “all hail our new corporate agricultural overlords!!”. Now it is just a matter of time as the real work of divide and conquer can begin. Without the protection of the wheat board we can look forward to even more corporate agriculture and all of the ill effects associated with strict monoculture farming practices.
When the small farmers are all gone, we’ll look back and note the passage of the legislation that marked their end. We’ll also note the cheering, for the sake of irony and the inevitable “I told you so” that is forthcoming.
I know of a few parents who having a decidedly unmerry christmas this year, and every year after because their children were murdered by U.S drone aircraft.
After Jon Brennan, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, claimed in June that no civilians had been killed in US drone attacks in nearly a year, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that at least 45 civilians were killed in 10 US attacks during that period.
Overall, drone strikes in Pakistan have killed 780 civilians, including 175 children. The bureau documents 309 CIA drone strikes carried out since 2004 that have killed as many as 2,997 people. Over 85 percent were launched by the Obama administration, an average of one strike every four days. Yet the casualties of the US drone war rarely receive mention in the corporate media, except when described as “Islamic militants” or “suspected terrorists.” This is challenged not only by the bureau’s data, but also by gruesome photographs of drone victims taken by local journalists.
The Guardian described the images captured by Noor Behram, a journalist from the North Waziristan region of Pakistan, whose work appeared in an exhibition at London’s Beaconsfield gallery in August:
The photographs make for difficult viewing and leave no doubt about the destructive power of the Hellfire missiles unleashed: a boy with the top of his head missing, a severed hand, flattened houses, the parents of children killed in a strike. The chassis is all that remains of a car in one photo, another shows the funeral of a seven-year-old child. There are pictures, too, of the cheap rubber flip-flops worn by children and adults, which often survive: signs that life once existed there. A 10-year-old boy’s body, prepared for burial, shows lipstick on him and flowers in his hair – a mother’s last loving touch.
Here is my wish for the holiday season – I wish the American people will find a way to look outside the prison of their mainstream media and see what is being committed in their name, become righteously angry and put a stop to killing of innocent people.
People still cling to the idea that we have a liberal news bias in the media – Let’s look to the problem of global warming in an example from Media Lens.
“[…] Equally disturbing is the variation in media performance across the globe. A wide-ranging Reuters study on the prevalence of climate scepticism in the world’s media – Poles Apart – The international reporting of climate scepticism – focused on newspapers in Brazil, China, France, India, the UK and the USA. The periods studied were February to April 2007 and mid-November 2009 to mid-February 2010 (a period that included the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen and ‘Climategate’). Remarkably, the study concluded that climate scepticism is ‘predominantly an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon’, found most frequently in US and British newspapers:
‘In general the UK and the US print media quoted or mentioned significantly more sceptical voices than the other four countries. Together they represented more than 80% of the times such voices were quoted across all six countries.’
The study concluded:
‘In general, the data suggests a strong correspondence between the perspective of a newspaper and the prevalence of sceptical voices within it, particularly in the opinion pages. By most measures (but not all), the more right-leaning tend to have more such voices, the left-leaning less.’
But in all ten UK newspapers studied, there was an increase ‘both in the absolute numbers of articles with sceptical voices in them and the percentage of articles with sceptical voices in them’.
And so we find that Britain and the US – the two countries responding most aggressively to alleged ‘threats’ to human security in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – are also the two countries least interested in responding to the very real threat of climate change.”
Could it be that because we are actually securing access to fossil sources that we’re not really focusing on the downside of their use?
“As the Reuters study suggests, media reporting is heavily influenced by editorial stance which, in turn, is heavily influenced by commercial interests. In October, the former Daily Star journalist Richard Peppiatt told the Leveson inquiry into the culture and ethics of the British press the truth about about the UK’s newsroom culture:
‘In approximately 900 newspaper bylines I can probably count on fingers and toes the times I felt I was genuinely telling the truth, yet only a similar number could be classed as outright lies. This is because as much as the skill of a journalist today is about finding facts, it is also, particularly at the tabloid end of the market, about knowing what facts to ignore. The job is about making the facts fit the story, because the story is almost pre-defined.
‘Laid out before you is a canon of ideologically and commercially driven narratives that must be adhered to. The newspaper appoints itself moral arbiter, and it is your job to stamp their worldview on all the journalism you do… The ideological imperative comes before the journalistic one – drugs are always bad, British justice is always soft.’
Peppiatt noted:
‘Tabloid newsrooms are often bullying and aggressive environments, in which dissent is simply not tolerated. It is difficult to stand up and walk out the door with a mortgage to pay, knowing another opportunity is unlikely to be waiting beyond.’
The issue that is not being discussed by Leveson is the extent to which these observations generalise to the ‘quality’ corporate media, and why. By contrast, in soft-pedalling the level of interference from owners and advertisers, the Guardian’s Nick Davies wrote:
‘Journalists with whom I have discussed this agree that if you could quantify it, you could attribute only 5% or 10% of the problem to the total impact of these two forms of interference.’ (Davies, Flat Earth News, Vintage 2008, p.22)
Compare this with corporate escapee Peppiatt’s unfettered conclusion:
‘Capitalism is trampling on journalism.’
I happen to agree with this statement. The answer – I suggest more outlets like Al-Jazeera the BBC and the CBC that, although still heavily influenced by corporate and government pressure, they can occasionally still report the truth of matters.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…