Gordon Campbell was just kidding about that tax cut...

Seems we didn't show enough love for Gordon Campbell when he tried to buy our popularity. The 15 percent tax cut he promised would happen at the start of 2011 has just been cancelled.

It seems responding to a pay-off with an elevated middle finger doesn't impress the average BC right-winger.

Yet, Gordon Campbell retains his desk in the premier's office in Victoria. The most unpopular politician in BC history cannot figure out that most British Columbians absolutely despise him.

If he were a dog someone would take him to the vet for his final visit.

Go to Maui, Cambell. Get drunk. Don't ever come back.

BacillaFilla . . .

SOME VERY CLEVER YOUNG FOLKS AT NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY have developed "BacillaFilla".  It's a genetically-engineered bacteria that repairs the cracks in concrete. According to io9,

BacillaFilla is the kind of biotechnology crossed with materials science that we'll see a lot of in the future. The researchers point out that patching concrete cracks with bacteria is far less environmentally harmful than whipping up a vat of cement. Naturally green, BacillaFilla is an industrial material of the future.

A creative view . . .

TAKE A BREAK FROM THE STEVIE STUMBLE: Jim Denevan is an artist with sand. Find more of his stuff here.

Why is Harper afraid of a parliamentary debate on Afghanistan?

Because there's obviously something he's not telling you and a debate would require someone to answer some very embarrassing questions.

If Harper is so confident that he has the Liberals on side, he should have nothing to worry about. Right?

Maybe not.

A debate would shed some light on the fact that Elmer MacKay's little boy, Pete, the adrift (recently) Minister of National Defence, seems to be playing catch up on the file that should be papering his desk. MacKay seems to know nothing until that detestable little slime-ball from the PMO, Dimitri Soudas, speaks.

It would certainly appear that defence policy is coming from some desk in the Prime Minister's office - not from 101 Colonel By Drive.

There has to be more, however, because Harper's insistence that he doesn't need the approval of Parliament is not only contemptuous but obviously so. While Harper is running a wildly incompetent government this plan for a new mission in Afghanistan looks like it's been on the stovetop for a while. And that is what Harper doesn't want to have to answer.

While you misled Canadians, how long have you had this plan in place? (I'm saying last April, and I have a very good reason for that.)

Then there is the concept of "classroom" instructors being the advertised form of mission. So far, anyone I've spoken to has burst out in laughter at the idea. For one thing, the troops we send don't actually do the instruction. They monitor the Afghan instructors. (Unless we've suddenly developed a huge number of Pashtu and Dari speakers). Those who do actually lead instructional sessions are doing so through interpreters.  Ever done that? It's very difficult, even with enthusiastic, well-educated students.That means we have to send instructors and instructor supervisors who are adept and extremely well organized. What's the impact on Canadian Forces schools and the specialist training in the Canadian Forces?

Here's an obvious question that just doesn't seem to get asked: If we're going to deploy a pure training element to Afghanistan to assist in the advanced training of specialists and leaders, why don't we just bring them to Canada and train them here at our own bases, develop their instructor cadre in complete safety and save billions of dollars not having to support Canadian troops at distant overseas posts?

Ask that question in a parliamentary debate and Harper or one of his hillbilly crowd will have to explain why they don't see that as a good idea... and I can tell you it would not make them look pretty.

Why doesn't Harper want the support of parliament via debate? Because at the very least his misleading of the Canadian public will be an open sore which will get a lot of attention.

Coward.

The post that will cure the flu

This post is for our good friend JJ.



Get well very soon. We miss you.

By then, we may be swept away by the waves

That's a statement made by a resident of Alexandria, Egypt. Here's more of what he said.

I worry that the government won't do anything until a crisis hits us. By then, we may be swept away by the waves.

The fears of Alexandria taxi driver Ahmed Fatta.
Bad news, Ahmed. Not only are most readers pronouncing your name incorrectly, but a whole host of governments have done exactly what you fear - nothing.

While Steve Harper and his wife (whatever she calls herself now) are hoping to do a little Beatles medley with the Emperor of Japan, the physical world is changing. Even if Steve and his hillbillies deny it.

The problem is, in a place like Alexandria, sea level rise is no longer just a possibility. It's happening ... RIGHT ... NOW.

More than 58 metres of coastline have vanished every year since 1989 in Rasheed, also known as Rosetta, said Omran Frihy of the Coastal Research Institute.

"There are hot spots, but that doesn't mean the whole Delta is at risk. Before we start talking about doom, we need to know where those spots are and act on protecting them," Frihy said.

Increased salinity seeping into underground waters will degrade farmland and cut production, experts say, in a country where food price rises have sparked unrest in the past.

Is Alexandria doomed? Well, unless they start having a conversation with the Dutch about polders, yeah, it probably is. 

Sisters in Spirit update

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Last week APTN News reported that not only does the Cons new missing persons initiative entirely bypass Sisters In Spirit, the very group which initiated five years of research into the nearly 600 missing and murdered FN women and girls in the first place, but SIS can no longer use the SIS name or continue their research when applying for grants.

Status of Women Minister Rona Ambrose invoked support from the Sisters' parent organization, Native Women's Association of Canada, to blow off criticism in the House :

"Most important, we are working with and have the support of NWAC " ... and

"In fact, we have been working with NWAC for the last couple of years in order to implement these concrete actions."

APTN News : NWAC kept out of the loop on missing women's announcement (italics mine)

Native Women’s Association of Canada president Jeannette Corbiere Lavell said she was only informed by the government the day before Status of Women Minister Rona Ambrose stood in the Vancouver police department to say her government was following through on their $10 million commitment.

Lavell said the Conservative government did not consult with NWAC staff or those involved with the organization’s groundbreaking Sisters in Spirit project in the lead-up to the announcement.

"NWAC was originally led to believe that it would be invited to join in a discussion with the Department of Justice…about the allocation of the $10 million ," said Corbiere Lavell. "This did not occur."

Lavell further notes that the new initiative "reinvents" the work already done by SIS [at a new RCMP centre that will use up half the money], folds their research on murdered FN women into a general pot of violence against all Canadians, and excludes provinces east of Manitoba from access to funding.

She also confirmed Status of Women's embargo on the SIS name and continued research.

So why did Lavell stand with Ambrose on that podium in Vancouver last week and imply NWAC's endorsement?

Because, explains Lavell, they need the money and Aboriginal women have been waiting for it. They have to comply with the new SIS-squashing rules so they can access funds to continue related work.

Nice. Someone better call Ambrose on her bullshit in the House next week. We're watching.
As Cathie from Canada put it : "Trying to make it disappear just like all those women have disappeared."
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And as for Canada's conditional endorsement of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples this week : See Pam Palmater at Non-Status Indians.

Bob Rae... Statesman Lite

Always the ambitious serial failure, l'il Bobby Rae intends to keep his unvarnished losing streak going by climbing right up on that horse called duplicity. And who's piloting that mighty, hobbled steed, why none other than Steve Harper. The Liberal Party of Canada is wasting no time in assuring voters that they are just about as good and pretty much the same as the crooked bastards presently in charge. So he and the waffle bellied whores led by the man nobody loves or trusts are going to line up behind Harper and abandon our troops to the grinding failure of Afghanistan. The bottom line is that the mission hasn't screwed up quite enough yet. So after a decade of no particular achievement what's another couple years beyond the promised withdrawal date?

Somehow this spoiled twit has arrived at the notion that he has the makings of a statesman. So he's using the time his constituents pay for to hawk his latest book (look it up, I ain't plugging it for him). Toronto-Centre... I'd be asking for your money back. And golly gosh if his musings haven't come down to the determination that it is somehow our role to impose western democratic systems on the very foreign parts of the world with long histories and traditions that do not echo our own. Imagine if you will, Bob Rae Canada's advocate for colonialism.

In an interview with CTV he burbles a lot of undercooked tripe,

"We have to accept the fact that for us to be consistent advocates of democracy and human rights, sometimes leads to conflict," Rae said. "There are countries that will say they don't like it when you say that, and attack you personally for saying that. It can't be a reason for backing off."

Shame Rae isn't so adamant about human rights at home. As every good colonialist knows, those pissant foreign countries just don't know that they want our systems and standards. Sure, they say no, but Rae knows they really want it. The thing that appears to be lost on Bob Rae is that he no longer lives in a nation that can lay claim to the mythical moral highground. And he does not represent a political party that has any business preaching, as they are complicit in the torture of Canadians and foreign nationals, they are complicit in crimes against humanity, breaches of the Geneva conventions and our own Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Where in hell was Bob Fuckin' Rae's voice when Canadian citizens were subject to mass arrests in the streets, with police abuse in scenes worthy of Iran? The crux of his response... The police have a difficult job to do. Gosh. Don't they just and isn't it just awful about those cars and windows and stuff... care for a waffle?

It is simply ridiculous that Bob Rae can climb up on his hobby horse and pretend that he is in any way capable or qualified to tell anyone else how to order their lives. He hasn't got a sufficiently mature set of genitalia to pump enough hormonal courage into his system to take a fucking stand when his constituents are being beaten down by rioting police thugs.

"The world cannot afford to have little hidden corners that are festering with violence and conflict that go unmonitored or unassessed." says Rae

Little hidden corners like downtown Toronto, largest of Canada's cities. How about using the wannabe statesman's playset to seek justice here where we actually do have a democratic tradition. How about putting one of those expensively shod feet down and demanding the long awaited Afghanistan documents before lining up to sign our troops lives away for yet more years in a thankless job where they really are not welcome. How about that Bob? How about you wrap your pasty little noggin around doing a credible job here before you start designing your foreign affairs portfolio. And let's face it Bob, with creeps like you and Ignatieff and shysters like Dryden crawling about the Liberal caucus, you'll likely never be able to con this nation into a mandate. After all Bob, you smarmy hypocrite, it really doesn't smell right when you decide to instruct the world on democracy when you haven't the courage to make the one here work effectively.

Quantitative Easing Explained

Lies, confusion and things that don't add up

Greg Weston is quite correct. Nothing about what Harper has been saying actually adds up. And when I say "nothing" I mean it is impossible to make sense of the intentionally vague picture Harper is painting. For one thing, as Weston points out, Harper has been stringing the public along with a lie.

Less than a year ago, the prime minister was clear: "We will continue to maintain humanitarian and development missions, as well as important diplomatic activity in Afghanistan," he said in a January interview with CanWest News.

"But we will not be undertaking any activities that require any kind of military presence, other than the odd guard guarding an embassy. We will not be undertaking any kind activity that requires a significant military force protection, so it will become a strictly civilian mission."

That was never true and Harper knows it. Since the extension to 2011 was approved there has always been a caveat which Harper has neatly avoided - the withdrawal was from Kandahar, not Afghanistan, and a redeployment was always a strong likelihood. Further, Harper has known for at least a year that the demand for NATO trainers was focusing on both the Netherlands and Canada for significant contributions to the NATO Training Mission - Afghanistan (NTM-A). I will go so far as to suggest that he knew in April 2009, after the NATO summit, that he was going to commit troops beyond 2011. The question is whether he and MacKay actually shared that with the Chief of Defence Staff.

I can say with absolute certainty that, in the last two days, the only thing coming out of those who would likely be deployed is questions. Harpers yet-to-be-defined training mission has yet to make it down to CF regional headquarters with anything even close to clarity. The regular complaint was that this is another government plan cast in jelly.

The commander of NTM-A, US Lt. General Bill Caldwell, said in late September that the training mission needed a lot of additional trainers. At that time he identified the need as 900. That number has since been reduced to 750. To be clear, Caldwell was making a specific point that the goal was to professionalize the Afghan security forces and generate critical support functions within those forces. For that he was asking for skill sets from NATO armed services which extended into areas of logistics, equipment maintenance, communications, intelligence analysis, and above all, consistent and professional leadership.

That would suggest that all the positions Caldwell is looking to fill are "behind-the-wire" instructors and mentors. And that would be a mistaken assumption. The mission Caldwell commands has upwards of 10,000 NATO personnel on the books, a good majority of them operating outside the wire as mentoring teams attached to field combat units. The "classroom" billets amount to no more than 1500. Since Caldwell's address in September there has already been some realignment which has brought some of the specialist instructors in from the field to fill static trainer positions. Canada has about 125 people in those billets already and another 325 in the field with Operational Mentoring and Liaison Teams (OMLTs), Operational Mentoring and Advisory Teams (OMATs) and Police - Operational Mentoring and Liaison Teams (POMLTs). Caldwell's shortage of trainers is not so much in the classroom as it is outside the wire with the Afghan army and police mentoring teams.

Back to Weston's article for a moment. He makes this observation regarding current CF involvement in Afghan army and police training.

The department won't say exactly where all the "training and mentoring" of Afghans is happening. But it does acknowledge that fewer than 125 Canadian soldiers are assigned to various training centres, headquarters and other relatively safe areas.

The vast majority are on special teams training Afghan soldiers in the field, outside the wire, in combat zones littered with lethal roadside bombs.

In fact, aside from the less than 125 who are assigned to more static roles, the Canadian OMLTs are operating in and around the Canadian area of operations in Kandahar Province. The only way they can operate successfully is to function with the support of the Canadian combat headquarters in Kandahar. Once the Canadian combat operation in Kandahar ends then so too does the ability to maintain mentoring teams in the same AO.

Back to Caldwell and his plea for specialist trainers. He makes a critical point in his address which impacts on what Harper is peddling.

... we have identified 15 priority capabilities that we believe you [NATO] can reasonably pledge against and begin filling by this winter and next spring. These requirements represent half of the total current trainer shortfall, but most importantly represent the gendarmes, pilots, doctors, and other key enablers that will get us through a critical and exponential growth period. If these commitments are pledged and fulfilled with boots on the ground, it would cover our critical needs through the summer of 2011…and further… allows us to begin the process of transition.

Let's take those sections I highlighted one at a time:

1. Canada cannot meet the demand to start filling Caldwell's requirements by this winter and next spring. We still have a combat role and will not be able to deploy personnel to a bolstered NTM-A until well after that. We can safely assume that other NATO allies will fill that demand long before we have personnel available. This is the kind of commitment many NATO nations view as a healthy and safe way to deploy without wearing the political splatter of combat casualties. We aren't going to be there for any of it. 

2. Harper and his cheerleaders are rapping on that this will be a behind-the-wire mission, yet Caldwell makes it clear that of the 900 trainer shortfall at the time of his address, only 450 were needed in the specialist lanes. The other 450 were something else and that was mentoring teams in the field with ANA and ANP forces. Once Canada's combat mission is withdrawn, we will add a 325 person deficit to the number of mentoring team trainers. That adds up to 775 trainers needed for operations in the field with mentoring teams once we end our combat involvement in Afghanistan. This is emphasized by the call by the US to make our training role "outside the wire". 

3. The critical need described by Caldwell is through the summer of 2011. Given that JTF-Kandahar will not wind down until the end of July 2011, that puts Canada outside the bracket for deployment to a new mission which would require our presence as trainers through the summer, even if those all trainers did constitute "classroom" instructors, which they do not.

The question then becomes, what will Canadian Forces do in a training role and how do we assume safer "behind-the-wire" trainer positions which have already been claimed by other NATO allies. Telling them to fill the operational mentoring teams with their people so we can move into Kabul is simply not going to fly. We're going to be late coming to the game. We won't get to pick which line we're playing on.

If we end up sending a majority of our people to mentoring teams that puts our troops right back into the field with the same or higher levels of risk that they had prior to the end of 2011. Further, without a combat headquarters to support mentoring teams it means breaking up Canadian units into small components operating under various different allied commanders. It's no longer a Canadian mission - it's just Canadian troops tossed into a US or UK or other national mission complete with some significant warts we really don't like.

The other possibility is that Harper is simply putting lipstick on a pig. He's made the whole thing so obscure that I can't help but believe that he's making an approximate 1000 troops a matter of interpretive materiality. Certainly 750 trainers attached to combat units cannot operate with a support element of 250. So the proof will be in the actual numbers. If the number starts to inflate in any way that should start bells ringing.

As we were moving the glasses around the table yesterday one very senior individual remarked, "Watch the footprint. If the rolling stock and the armour stays in Afghanistan then Harper has simply sprayed a different colour on the same mission."

In short, none of what Harper has vaguely described adds up. The timing is off by almost a full year and unless something changes, and allies are willing to step aside, the only role actually available will be in the operational mentoring teams ... in the field ... outside the wire.

What a hack . . .

THE NYT MAGAZINE has an article by James Verini, "The Great Cyberheist", which is worthy of your attention. It's an account of the exploits of cyberhacker Albert Gonzalez. This guy was a genius for criminal organization, quietly creating "SQL injections" of major credit card processing companies — while he was part of a US government cybercrime task force busting black hats he used to work with.

According to Attorney General Eric Holder, who last month presented an award to Peretti and the prosecutors and Secret Service agents who brought Gonzalez down, Gonzalez cost TJX, Heartland and the other victimized companies more than $400 million in reimbursements and forensic and legal fees. At last count, at least 500 banks were affected by the Heartland breach. But the extent of the damage is unknown. “The majority of the stuff I hacked was never brought into public light,” Toey told me. One of the imprisoned hackers told me there “were major chains and big hacks that would dwarf TJX. I’m just waiting for them to indict us for the rest of them.” Online fraud is still rampant in the United States, but statistics show a major drop in 2009 from previous years, when Gonzalez was active.

If the Washington Post ever wanted to be known as a great newspaper...

It should have permanently silenced its presses after Nixon resigned.

No. I'm not joking.

You're starting to piss me off. Updated

You're only as good as the good you can do.

If you're an ombudsman, that means you weigh the complaint with the knowledge that you are the only door through which the complainant feels safe to pass. But if the complainant doesn't believe he/she is going to get a sympathetic ear, they'll find another way to make their case and it probably won't end well for you.

You, Guy Parent, may decide not to be vocal, but I suspect veterans won't sit by and abide a silence which results in nothing. We do, after all, come from long careers in a "results" oriented mob.

Whatever your methods, veterans expect results. And with a speed you may not yet comprehend. They... we... expect a fix to the problems in right rapid order.

You may not think the system is broken, but most of us are in a position to disagree. And not just mildly.

You will remember the occasion of the Rescue Specialist who, on a life-saving mission, received orders to standby and hook-up. Then he was told to stand down. Then hook-up. Then another stand down. Then he was ordered to jump. He did. In the confusion, he left the aircraft without his static line connected and broke most of the bones in his body.

The results of the summary investigation are now meaningless, save for the protocols which were developed to prevent such incidents in the future. But this country owes that jumper, no less than they owe any other member who suffered an injury, wound or loss of faculty due to the conditions under which they served.

And they shouldn't have to make repeated applications to have their conditions acknowledged by VAC. The department treats applicants as though they are trying to game the system. Correct me if I'm wrong, but back in new entry training we were told that if we suffered any form of permanent damage, we would be looked after. Perhaps our instructors shouldn't have used the examples of our then surviving veterans to make their point. Clearly they believed something different than the reality which faces veterans today.

Canada treated its Great War veterans like dogs. After suffering through the Somme, taking Vimy Ridge, liberating Passchendaele and becoming the acknowledged storm troopers of the armies of the British Empire, Canada kicked them into the gutter within six months of them returning home.

That was corrected after the 2nd World War. Canada was acknowledged as having one of the most generous and comprehensive veterans' rehabilitation schemes and life-long care systems in the world. Of course it probably helped that over 50 percent of post-war members of parliament were actually veterans.

Funny how that works. Especially compared to today where almost none have served, including the ministers responsible, and they're finding the Great War solution to veterans the most convenient to their political ambitions. 

To tell a profoundly wounded veteran that he/she will get a lump sum payment and then tossed onto the lines of a provincial medical system (which is not prepared to handle such wounds) is a gross betrayal of the compact with this country which has existed since the end of the 2nd World War. If that isn't a broken system, then demonstrate how it can be described as fair.

In 1938, before the 2nd World War had erupted and referring to Great War and Boer War veterans, Professor Stephen Leacock wrote in the Veteran's Annual Commentator:

When the war ends they are welcomed home under arches of flowers with all the girls leaping for their necks, and within six months they are expected to vanish into thin air, keep out of the public house and give no trouble.

Not this time, mate. You have a lot of work to do and not a lot of time.

H/T CC

Additional listening and reading:

Via Noni Mausa in comments Guy Parent responds to questions on CBC The Current. This is looking like something that is going to end very badly indeed. Listen to yourself, Guy. What do you think veterans heard?

Gerald Caplan lays it all out in front of you. (H/T Greg). Read every word, Guy, but read this over twice.

The Royal Canadian Mint pays for an entire page in The Globe advertising its new commemorative poppy coin and its Remembrance Day collector cards. The cards sell for $9.95 (not $10?), half of which will go to the Military Families Fund. I first discovered this fund a year ago, on the eve of Remembrance Day 2009. An organization I’d never heard of called the True Patriot Love Foundation held a gala in Toronto to raise $2-million for this fund, which assists military families facing urgent financial need resulting from conditions of service.

[...]

But no one at the Mint or at the gala seemed to ask the obvious question: Why should military families need private charity if they have issues arising from serving overseas? Two million dollars is chump change for any government. Stephen Harper's office alone now costs us $10-million a year. So why do our vets and their families need $2-million from private sources? What if they need more than $2-million? Why should the soldiers we honour so loudly be dependent on charity?

You have work to do. And you work for the citizens of this country - not Harper.

Gee... ya think?

The editorial writers at the newspamazine which likes to call itself Canada's national rag have this to say: (Emphasis mine)

But Parliament has already adopted a resolution that expressly supports the training mission beyond July, 2011. That resolution of March, 2008, called for an end only to Canada’s presence in Kandahar. It went to say that Canada, with its allies, including Afghanistan, “must set firm targets and timelines for the training, equipping and paying of the Afghan National Army, the Afghan National Police, the members of the judicial system and the members of the correctional system.” The Canadian government’s decision to stay in Afghanistan to train soldiers is entirely consistent with that resolution. For quite a while now, Mr. Harper has given the public the impression that Canada’s military would be leaving the country entirely. But there is nothing in the resolution’s letter or spirit to suggest that.

Wow. That is a strangely familiar line of dialog.
Oh right! From back in 2008, 26 months ago, when I wrote virtually the same thing and predicted exactly how Harper would mislead the public a la the Globe and Mail editorial writers' newly astute observations.

How... coincidental.

OK then. Having been involved with several meetings and having been out in the bazaars (the likes of which Harper, MacKay and the G&M are denied entry) I will have a post tomorrow which will shed even more light, present even tougher questions and make even more concrete predictions.

I may even suggest that certain editorial writers lay their dinks on the table and let me take a few swings with a ball peen hammer. (I don't do this for money. I just like to watch the elitists squirm, or scream, as the case may be.)

Speaking of wingnut book campaigns ...

The airhead Alaskan who was too incompetent to govern the 4th least populous state in the U.S. and thus had to quit, has had someone produce some new wingnut literature for her. (Small words, short sentences, lots of pictures and a free box of Crayola 48)

TBogg explains.

Qualifies as the "Best Line Ever"?

Rez Dog snatched a quote from the end of Jacob Weisberg's review of George W. Bush's published rush to explain himself.

Bush wants us to believe he tried his hardest and did the best he could. This thin, shallow book strongly suggests that he did.

That's got to be in line for a Best Line Ever! award. 

And.... (there's always an "and") after the campaign to re-shelve Tony Blair's book of excuses to the crime section of bookstores, a similar campaign has started to spread throughout Europe and the U.S.

In Canada people are preparing to give the book as a Christmas gift along with decorative pouches of borax and saltpeter.

On Christmas morning you simply sprinkle the powders throughout the pages of the book and then toss it on the fire. It produces an amazing array of green and purple flames which will entertain the family for at least 30 minutes.

Extending the quagmire

NDP Paul Dewar says extending the Afghan mission past 2011 to 2014 requires a vote in Parliament.

Lib Bob Rae says : "In principle I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary."

Steve says I wasn't gonna ask you anyway.

Where's Dickens when you need him most?

And you thought the crop of British upper-class schoolboys were going to be allowed to take the first prize in the Wackford Squeers clone contest.

No, it looks like that prize is going to go to those freedom loving crazy kids south of the 49th.

It's not a crime to owe money, and debtors' prisons were abolished in the United States in the 19th century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found.
Not every warrant results in an arrest, but in Minnesota many debtors spend up to 48 hours in cells with criminals. Consumer attorneys say such arrests are increasing in many states, including Arkansas, Arizona and Washington, driven by a bad economy, high consumer debt and a growing industry that buys bad debts and employs every means available to collect.

In looking around for the modern chronicler of the age to tell the story of the downtrodden and the poor I could only come up with a fairy tale written by someone who thinks Pip's older sister was just hawt.

Jill has more.

Have the House Republicans fixed the employment problems in the US yet?

Naw. I guess they're too busy trying to force their personal religion on everybody.

Off you go to PZ Myer's.

11/11/10

Remembrance

In a few days the anniversary of the cessation of conflict will be upon us. We wear our plastic poppies, fulfill the duty of gesture and go on with our lives. Some among us will clutch at their favourite lies and pretend that the day is one of honour, when they really mean glory. But there is no glory in the memorial of bloodbath. There is no honour in the mindless "support" of troops when it is a placebo for barren ideology. We hurry about our compartmentalized days while somewhere enlisted men and women do our violent bidding and place their lives at risk.

Once upon a time, sending troops into harm's way meant a grave decision and sacrifice shared. The cost in treasure was met on the home front by rationing, by diligent gardens and recycling drives. The horror of war was once something to avoid at every and all costs until there was no other possible choice for consideration. Now we squat in our obese, spoiled disconnect and bawl like fatted babes at the least inconvenience. Some of our citizenry, and the leaders they follow, bark into the night that we should be mounting the wagons of yet more conflict. Beyond a bit of tattered rhetoric, few of those cheerleaders for mayhem's cause could tell you why we should enter into fresh conflict. Let alone maintain the vanity of our current role as failing occupation force, propping up a shift change for the warlords.

We have become a people that sit back on our upholstered asses while everything that my old man fought for gets slowly worn away and covered in the filth of corruption and betrayal. The greatest generation fought to secure liberty, to defeat injustice and stand against an affront to humanity. Some among us now applaud the abridgement of those liberties so hard won, habeas rights be damned, to hell with common law and the traditions of civil justice. The rule of law is fragile when we as a nation can countenance the torture of a child soldier. We are now the terrorists, made so by our own hand and in the name of the hallowed fear we are told to cling to and by the fear we have sanctioned and sown. There is no salvation in shopping.

My old man, H.J. Stewart spent twenty years in uniform with the sappers, crawling across North Africa with Montgomery, in the belly of a liberty ship on D-Day and witnessing the liberation of the camps. He left the forces after having been held as a political prisoner during the Suez crisis, just another pawn in the cold calculus of geopolitics. All the horrors he saw and experienced, every loss and privation he endured did unspeakable harm to him. His PTSD was never diagnosed or treated and his paranoia and violent breaks with reality did lasting damage to my mother, my sisters and I. War breaks the survivors and the victors and the echoes of that damage carry force long beyond the last report of a rifle.

Today we have leaders with neither balls nor brains, whose soulless and mawkish piety informs the arrogant portrait of themselves marching across the world's stage. They can excuse their own complicity in crimes against humanity, placing our laws, treaties and charters in abeyance as they bleat smeared and tarnished claims that we are somehow still the good guys. We stand in lock step beside nations that practice murder, torture and atrocity as policy. They make excuses for cruelty, privation and collective punishment and these same lying curs will soon point their swinish eyes into cameras and disgrace the cenotaphs with wreathes of dead flowers for the fallen. And with the bloodlust of petty, little men they wield their pens and send your cousins off to fight and suffer and perhaps die. All the while those self same pens will be slashing away at the necessary services that the returning veterans will need. That their spouses, and children will need and lastly they'll use those pens to sign their crimes into secrecy. But hell, what is one more stolen youth, one more child greeting a returning stranger, one more family ground down by the echo of violence brought home.

Our leaders will don their finest and make a show of solemnity and they will do so with lies upon their lips and lies in their bellies. They will speak of honour and glory, of sacrifice and courage. And they will ask us to remember. But they want us to remember something false, something tainted by their own ambition and stupidity. What I will remember are the few conversations I ever had with my father when the walls he had built around himself came down a very little bit. I'll remember him shaking as he talked about witnessing the locks coming off doors of barracks abandoned by the retreating Nazis and the skeletal figures emerging from the stink of where they'd been left to perish. I'll remember the anguish in the face of a man I feared, who I only ever knew as cold and forbidding as he described having to hold these death camp survivors at bayonet point because the arrival of food caused them to riot.

What I will most remember is what remembrance day meant to him. Not a day of glory or celebration but a day to remember the weight of suffering by both victor and vanquished, by soldier and civilian. The lesson of remembrance day is that we must do everything in our our power and persuasion to never permit such waste and such loss to occur again. When we see Stephen Harper or Peter McKay or Brent Rathberger donning the uniform and rank that they have not earned, playing warrior like children pulling cheap tat from Mr Dressup's tickle trunk, we can see them for what they really are. They are small creatures, devoid of shame, with no qualms about defaming the uniform and in so doing demeaning the memory of the fallen.