Stand up stand up for Jesus..

Iain Benson is smarter, more courageous, subtler of thought, better read, wittier, more accomplished and more heartful in the world than I am. His strong sense of justice and generosity of spirit are truly inspiring and he's a lot of fun. He's also a fetus-fetishist. So when he states in his endorsement of North Van Conservative candidate Cindy Silver above that "She is concerned about the dignity of human persons-all human persons", I think we can take it as given that 1)he is including fetuses here and 2) that she wants this said on her campaign site.

Directly above Iain's endorsement is that of former Reform Party MP Sharon Hayes, who gained notoriety for issuing a press release on House of Commons letterhead accusing doctors in China of "consuming human fetuses as health food". Hayes now sits on the board of 'Focus on the Family Canada', the Canadian arm of the US 'Focus on the Family', the largest religious right group in the US. They are anti-choice, anti-gay, and against all sex education that is not abstinence-only.

North Van Conservative candidate Cindy Silver tells us on her campaign website above that she converted to Christianity as a 19-year-old single mother after she began listening to the religious radio broadcasts of James Dobson, founder of 'Focus on the Family'. James Dobson recently gained notoriety for his hysterical public assertion that any deviation from a so-called 'biblical' definition of marriage would lead to "marriage between daddies and little girls"and "a man and his donkey". Cindy Silver subsequently served as legal council for Focus on the Family, during which time she wrote position papers for them fulminating against "abortion-on-demand, artificial methods of contraception, sterilization, mandatory sex education, gender equality, and homosexual rights". When these papers were cited in a Globe and Mail news article as evidence that Focus on the Family was running "theo-con" candidates in Canadian elections, West Van/Sunshine Coast Conservative candidate John Weston wrote an angry rebuttal, quoting Cindy Silver's complaint about 'graffiti journalism'. Weston himself had also been named as one of the theo-cons for the articles he had written, since expunged, from the website of Christian Legal Fellowship.

Traditionally, discussion of the private religious beliefs of public figures has been deemed to be off-limits to public scrutiny. One hopes that anyone's actions in the world are necessarily informed by their core beliefs, but insofar as religion is a private affair between a human being and their presumed god, it's really no one else's business.
However, in allying herself with an activist Christian lobby group with a publicly stated political agenda, she has forfeited her right to rely on our manners to respect that privacy. Like it or not, she's going to have to tell us what she herself will "stand up" for.

Unrent

Maybe it's just me, but Unrent really doesn't seem to work as well as No Loop Road.

I do applaud the Undercurrent taking a stand regarding the local crisis in housing and squatters' rights, and the use of a similar woodland scene with grafitti was certainly a very clever tip-off as to how to fold the cover to find the secret message, but "Unrent" .... I just don't think it's punchy enough.

You better watch out!

SantaCon 2005
Love the Santa Do's and Don'ts :

• DO be ready for new adventure at a moment's notice. Santa is like a shark, and must keep moving in order to thrive.
• DON'T fuck with the cops. If the cops tell you to do something, DO IT. If you want to get busted, do it when you and I aren't dressed the same.

Found languishing in Comments at the bottom of the page...

What this site needs is more recipes.

My recipe for post-spawn fish:
-find one spent fish by side of Lagoon
-walk home, pick up large chunks of salt found all over the road
-grab some of the 50lb of left over waste organic vegetables dumped daily by the Bloody Turnip due to the people who can't afford the vegetables being unable to buy them and the people who do have enough money not having enough time to cook them (due to excessive commuting time and general apathy they prefer the Bloody Turnip kitchen premade YUP! Meals)...
-drop by the recycling depot, grab a large can to use as a cooking pot (they never get squished, so don't worry about that)
-fill can with creekside water
-place all the ingredients in can that will fit, leave the rest out for the rats
-ingredients may be cooked in the engines of idling cars in the Cove, (just pop the hood, they'll never notice) or cook on various landclearing bonfires... both are plentiful on the Isle of Denial!

~Muffy

Kayaking from Port Hardy

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Photo taken by my brother Howard.
If you click on it, you can fall right in.

The pink cabins in the orchard

Wonderful letter from Richard Best in the Undercurrent today about the need for affordable housing here: "I think that how we manage our social diversity is a lot more significant than how we line up to get on and off the island, important as that is." Yes!

His story about living in one of the pink cabins brought back a lot of memories. There were many more cabins then and the tenants, who included Tracey Lee Hearst, Judi Gedye, Edye Hanen, Carl O'Day, Connie Wright, Suzanne McNeil, Dawn and Nelson Riley, Carlotta Smith, and I'm forgetting lots here, formed a wonderful little village.

I badly wanted to live in one of those little pink cabins and rented elsewhere on the island while waiting for one to become vacant. By this time the cabins and their tenants were under serious seige from our GVRD rep who just wanted them bulldozed and, despite the best efforts of the tenants to save the pink cabins even if they weren't going to be allowed to live in them, the GVRD for the most part succeeded. Eventually I wound up buying a house instead by default and the surviving cabins are now mostly untenanted.

Martin Clarke, a former pink cabin tenant himself, once said you can't have a village that doesn't have any people living in it. Are we ready to rebuild those cabins yet?

CBC SchmeeBC

"CBC-TV has postponed the broadcast of Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story, a two-part miniseries about the late politician, regarded as the father of Canadian medicare, until after the election.
CBC spokesperson Ruth-Ellen Soles says the decision to postpone the show was made by the CBC to ensure balance and fairness.
"Our goal in any of our election coverage is, of course, to be able to be as fair and balanced as we possibly can, and we work very hard at that. And we were concerned that there would be a perception of partisanship if it ran during the campaign,' she said."

Ok, so then how was it "fair and balanced" to pull that program and yet broadcast the following :

MEDICARE SCHMEDICARE Thursday December 8 at 9pm on CBC-TVrepeating Monday December 12 at 10pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld

"Is one tier Medicare a myth? Have we been saluting its founder, the 'Greatest Canadian' Tommy Douglas as an emperor who really has no clothes? As the country heads toward an election in which our health care system promises to be an emotional issue, Medicare Schmedicare
takes the highly unorthodox stance that two tier health care is already here and thriving."

Both quotes above are from the naked-as-a-jaybird-and-flapping-in-the-breeze SchmeeBC website. Go kick some ass here. Or phone toll-free: 1-866-306-4636

UPDATE :John Doyle really kicks some ass in the Globe and Mail and reports that the rest of us have been too.

From The Catholic Shop :

"The enemies of Christmas have succeeded in making Christians feel as if we are bad and intolerant to wish someone a "Merry Christmas". We have reached an all time low point in our nation's history when human sensibilities are elevated above offending Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. It is long past the time for Christians to stand firm in our faith."

I really have to go along with that last line : it is indeed sooooo long past the time....

But a $2 bracelet to celebrate the marketing genius of Our Lord and Savior is pretty tame when compared to this little stocking stuffer, also from The Catholic Shop :

Jesus, what a putz.

Anarchy rules!

3:10pm at Park Royal. Four “Not in Service” buses have gone by and still no sign of the #257 Horseshoe Bay Express, which is now half an hour late. No way we’re going to make the 3:30 boat now.

An agitated group of strangers bound for Bowen and Langdale, we decide to pool our money for a cab but there’s too many of us and we can’t leave the teens behind just because they have no money.

The #257 finally arrives and we all troop rather sullenly on board. No one is in the mood to say hi to the driver, even though we are all probably aware that if he's half an hour late, his day hasn’t been exactly perfect either. But he flies down the highway, sails past the usual overpass turnoff at Horseshoe Bay with its slow winding route by the fire hall, and takes an entirely new and faster route straight through the parking lots to the ticket booth. Everyone cheers the driver and the boat’s still there! And now we’re all running with pieces of someone’s luggage and deputizing a young guy to run ahead and stall because the mum with the little kid can’t keep up.

There’s the business guy, the teens, a young guy, an old guy, the couple going to Langdale, the girl with all the luggage, the mum with the little kid, and me. We’re all strangers but we all look around and instinctively space ourselves out between the boat and the mum with the little kid because everyone has to make it.
Everyone does.

These are the rules of anarchy.
From the bus driver going way beyond his duty to his surly passengers, to the guy running with the luggage of someone who wasn't even getting on the same boat as him.
Anarchy rules.

An atheist poem for xmas

As I was going up the stair,
I met a god who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today;
I wish to god he'd go away.

Pope abolishes Limbo

"Every limbo boy and girl
All around the limbo world
First you spread your limbo feet
Then you move to the limbo beat.
How low can you go?"

So how low can you go?
The Catholic Church, defender of that all-important dead baby demographic, has noticed that Muslim children don't have to pass a test first to get into their heaven.

Still, after looking at this :

it would seem that Aquinas set the limbo bar so high that not only were people not having to bend over backwards to get under it, they didn't even have to bow their heads.

Dollars To Donuts of Mass Destruction

The private equity firm Carlyle Group, these guys, whose board has included the former prime ministers of UK, S Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand, plus some Saudi princes and Bushes Sr and Jr, and Colin Powell, is currently bidding to buy Dunkin' Donuts.

Ok, let's see, I'll have a dozen Bradley Fighting Vehicles, a half dozen mobile Howitzers, some hospitals and newspapers, and, oh yeah, throw in a few of those chocolate ones with the pink sprinkles on top to go.

The Ant and the Grasshopper

Ricky Larch tells me yet another bigoted rightwing version of Aesop's fable is making the rounds, so here's a couple of my own. As usual they are copy-left and any improvements are welcome.

The Ant and the Grasshopper - Nature version

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for winter.

The grasshopper thinks he's a fool, and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the worker ant is dead because worker members of the ant family, Formicidae, only live a maximum of a few weeks.
By contrast, members of the grasshopper order, Orthoptera, live for at least several months.

The Libertarian Ant and the Grasshopper

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for winter.

The grasshopper thinks he's a fool, and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Finally the ant asks the grasshopper why he isn't working too.

"I own all this land," answers the grasshopper, "so I just take whatever I need from the fruits of your labour."

"Sounds like a tax to me," says the ant, "and I hate taxes. Everyone has the right to the profits of his own labour."

"It is a tax," admits the grasshopper, "but when a person or a business does it instead of government, we call it 'rent' instead."

"That's not fair," protests the ant.

"Take it up with that corporate welfare bum you call your queen," advises the grasshopper. "You ants get all outraged about government taxes while that queen is sucking you dry."

"But I'm going to be a queen one day," insists the ant.

"You should live so long," retorts the grasshopper. "Try reading the Nature Version again."


More fables from Wealth Bondage, who - being a dom - topped us.
Thanks, Chris.

Moonset