Woman in Comfy Shoes

Literary devices in real life: Irony

2006-10-21T22:09:00.000-06:00

Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, has said some pretty offensive things about Islam.

He was in Winnipeg this weekend having a big "evangelistic festival", and while thousands of Christians are expected to attend, some are coming not to worship, but to protest. They want him to retract the hateful things he's said about Islam and apologise.

The name of the group: Operation Bless our Enemies.

Literary devices in real life: Juxtaposition

2006-10-21T21:42:00.000-06:00

1. Report finds systematic racism against aboriginals in Canada's prison system, including
- "routine overclassification" of aboriginal offenders, meaning they are disproportionately more likely to be sent to maximum security than others who have been convicted of similar offenses

- greater likelihood of having parole denied or revoked, for less cause than other prisoners

Not to mention that "Where disadvantaged socio-economic factors lead to overrepresentation of First Nations peoples in the criminal justice system, this is systemic discrimination," says Angus Toulouse, of the Ontario Regional Council of the Assembly of First Nations.

And, as Beverly Jacobs, president of the Native Women's Association of Canada, points out, "If this was the case for non-aboriginal people, I'm almost certain that Canadians would react and demand that something be done."

Stockwell Day says he'll take the report into consideration (we all know what that means) but he doesn't believe there is any evidence of systematic discrimination against aboriginal offenders in the prison system. (Besides the findings of the report? What a dumbass.)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

2. New "Dangerous Offender" legislation is tabled. Any idea who this is going to disproportionately affect?

Five things Feminism has Done for Me - but...

2006-10-12T23:43:00.000-06:00

Surprise, surprise, Mr. Harper's New Government is kicking the feet out from under the Status of Women Canada Agency, cutting the budget by $5million, despite a $13BILLION surplus, and "banned ALL domestic advocacy and lobbying of governments with any funding received from SWC". Progressive Bloggers has started a thing to support SWC by posting "Five things feminism has done for me", and even though I didn't get tagged, and I'm late to the party, I thought I'd say my piece.

So, besides the thing where legally I’m a person? I tried to limit it to five, but that was really hard, so then I just put it into five general categories.

Sexuality and Reproduction
I’m free to say yes to sex. (Note: I “borrowed” this phrase from the Happy Feminist, because it was so perfect.) Not only can I say yes, I can ask somebody else to say yes (or no) to me. I have the freedom to learn what gives me pleasure and the confidence to ask my partner for it or do it myself. And I’m legally entitled to say no to sex – to anybody, at any time.

I’ve made it to 29 without getting pregnant. If or when I decide to have a baby, it will be because my partner and I really want to and we believe we’re ready for it. And modern medicine has kicked pregnancy/childbirth out of the top spot on the list of killers of young women.

But…

There are still plenty of people around who buy into that damned if you do, damned if you don’t double standard that applies only to women, where if I say no, I’m a frigid bitch, and if I say yes, I’m a slut. And there are plenty of people out there who belive that in certain situations, a woman’s “no” isn’t valid because she’s asking for it, or that she “owes” the man sex. Not to mention the parts of the world where if it’s your spouse, it’s not legally rape, or where if a man rapes a woman and she doesn’t keep it a secret, she’s the one who gets punished (often by death) for being an adulteress.

And many, if not most, women in the world don’t have a choice about when or if they’re going to have babies. They may be denied their right to say no to intercourse. They may not be aware of their birth control options. They may not be able to access contraception (and if that fails, which it sometimes does, abortion) due to lack of availability, inability to travel to where it’s available, inability to pay for it, or even healthcare providers refusing to provide it to them. On top of that, if they get pregnant, they may not be able to get adequate pre-natal care, or even emergency help for complications that, left unattended, can be fatal.

Romantic Relationships
It’s my decision who I’ll be in a relationship with. Even if I were to get pregnant, nobody could make me marry, the father unless I wanted to. I can go into relationships expecting to be treated as an equal partner, and if I’m not, I can leave. If I do get married, it’s a legal contract between equals, not a transaction where ownership of me gets transferred from my father to my husband.

But…

Many, if not most, women aren’t this lucky. Many men still believe their wives/girlfriends are their property to do with as they like, and many women believe it too. I’m sure domestic violence is down from the bad old “rule of thumb” days*, but it still happens, to the point that resources for women trying to escape abusive husbands don’t come anywhere near the need. If a woman is murdered, there’s a good chance it was her husband, boyfriend, or ex-.

* - I’m aware that the law making it legal for a man to beat his wife was not actually called the rule of thumb at the time, nor did it reference the thumb in relation to the size of stick he could beat her with.

Education
Gender hasn’t limited me in my education. My teachers have always taken me seriously, even in traditionally male-dominated subjects like math and physics. I was able to attend university because my parents set up a RESP for me.

But…

There are still plenty of people out there - some influential - who believe that women just aren’t as smart as men, or not as good as men in certain subjects. There are people who don’t think it’s worthwhile to pay for their daughters’ higher education because women don’t need it. When families can’t afford to send all their children to school (from primary to post-secondary) it’s usually the sons who will go. And of course there’s Afghanistan, where the Taliban has burned down girls’ schools and threatened to kill anybody who tries to re-open them.

Career
I grew up believing I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up. I get taken seriously at work. I don’t get sexually harassed. I get raises on the same schedule as my male co-workers. If I decide to have a baby, my partner and I can both take leave and not be penalized. If both my partner and I decide to go back to work after having the baby, we’ll probably be able to afford quality daycare.

But…

I don’t have any illusions this is the norm. I’m living in a fairly socially liberal country, working in a white-collar job, and represented by a pretty powerful union. Most of the women in the world don’t have these things going for them. That doesn’t mean they deserve any less.

Body and Beauty
I’m not required to be ornamental. The negative repercussions of being fat, wearing comfortable shoes, avoiding pantyhose, or neglecting to shave my pits or legs, haven't really been that bad for me. I readily admit that my body confidence, and my refusal to inconvenience myself for "beauty", isn’t so much the result of feminist enlightenment as just giving up on trying to meet a standard I simply don’t fit. And wanting to sleep a few more minutes.

But…

While I don’t look sloppy – I put as much effort into grooming as the average man, I think – there are a lot of jobs where a woman dressed like me would get sent home to change. In fact, back when I worked in retail, I once got sent home to change into “more fashionable” shoes.

I get comments on my “bravery” at being seen in a bathing suit – I don’t feel brave; I’m just going about my business, which happens to be swimming. Why should it be an act of bravery for a woman to be fat in public?

I’ve had conversations with several women somewhat older than me, who were surprised that I wasn’t wearing makeup (and rarely do), and assumed that I always did, just like them. And then wished they could get away with it. And if I tell them wtf do they mean, they’re gorgeous (and I mean it) and still would be without makeup, they get all squirmy and finally admit they’re really uncomfortable about anybody seeing them without their makeup and say things about being ugly without it.

I think I'd like to tag everybody at The Galloping Beaver - and not just the women. Because let's face it, feminism is good for men too.

Afghanistan and Womens Rights - A truly Canadian Farce.

2006-10-09T18:47:00.000-06:00

One of the most risible justifications for the war in Afghanistan is the argument that we are protecting the rights of women.

First though, one must make a comparison to our other noble venture in Iraq. It is under the false aegis of bringing freedom and democracy to the people that the rights of women in Iraq are being steadily eroded.

Analyzing the two countries shows that the presence of a foreign occupying power is generally a detriment to women’s rights and freedoms. In Iraq a once strongly secular nation, frustration at the US’s farcical attempts at democracy have left the people desperate and without hope. When viable political institutions are no longer available to the populace the people tend to turn to religion to get their social needs met. A corollary of this migration to religion is the deterioration of the rights and status of women as radical religion comes to power, which is the case in occupied Iraq. Everyday there are stories of women being harassed for not wearing what the fundamentalists believe to be the proper modest clothing. Professional women in Iraq are being harassed doing their jobs, or just walking without a male relative in attendance. Yet we hear no clarion call to restore Iraqi woman’s rights, no indignation about the injustice they are facing, so why the furor in Afghanistan but not Iraq?

The reason why there is no mention of women’s rights in Iraq is painfully simple. The answer is the withdrawal of the illegal occupation forces stationed in Iraq and the restoration of authentic Iraqi sovereignty. US imperial design leaves no room for such dalliances as women’s rights when they will not serve to further justify the imperial cause. The circumstances in Afghanistan though are slightly different as we can paint ourselves as noble protectors of women and their rights, as it fits in with the current military objectives.

The ‘noble cause’ of protecting woman’s rights in Afghanistan unsurprisingly coincides with the strong hegemonic current flowing from the US; therefore defending women’s rights is acceptable (for now). If the West is so concerned about Afghani women they why did they generously fund, equip and support the Taliban in the late 1970’s and early 80’s? The Taliban’s radical interpretation of Islam was not a mystery to anyone in the West…ever. If the US and the western nations knew about the Taliban’s take on women’s rights then why did they so fully support such a repressive authoritarian regime?

Fighting the evil of Communism would be the standard answer for US apologists. A more realistic view is that the US needed a force, any force, to oppose the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ethical and moral standards notwithstanding. For empire, no decision is too despicable, too cynical as long as the needs of the empire are served. Up with the gallant Taliban heroes to fight the Red Menace and stop the spread of Communism…insert propaganda here etc. Never mind that the Taliban tore Afghani civil society to shreds and transported women’s rights back to the dark ages, that is entirely acceptable to Empire. The primacy of hegemonic power does not respect human rights. The impassioned commentators and courtiers never mention this dark chapter in the struggle for Afghani women’s rights.

It is blatantly hypocritical to clam to be fighting for women’s rights in Afghanistan. The claim rings as hollow as the promise to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq. Canadians must resist the propaganda spewing from the Harper government. What we are doing in Afghanistan in fundamentally wrong. Not only are we supporting the efforts of a unjust, immoral, imperialistic nation, we are throwing away what slight international credibility Canada has of being on the side of internationalism, diplomacy and most importantly, peace.

What is needed is a mediated peace agreement, not more violence and death meted out by our military. We must withdraw our troops from Afghanistan or at the very least cease all offensive operations immediately. We are spending the lives of our soldiers in a shortsighted, hopeless, lost cause that can only end badly for Canada as a nation.

Afghanistan has humbled far greater military powers than the meager Canadian contingent. Ask Britain and Russia about their success in Afghanistan… Why do we strive to be added the ignominious list of countries that have failed in Afghanistan?

We as Canadians are making a mockery of women’s rights by trying to use them as justification for occupying Afghanistan. We must dispense with this cynical casuistry and begin working on a mediated agreement that will work for the people of Afghanistan, rather than the needs of the imperial interests that currently dominate the debate on the legitimacy of the Canadian mission.

When all else fails, play the homo card

2006-09-29T21:43:00.000-06:00

Everywhere I click on Ted Morton's Alberta PC leadership campaign website, it just gets worse.

Among other things, he wants to:
- have a "made-in-Alberta immigration policy" (any ideas what that could mean?)
- create an Alberta Provincial Police and Alberta Pension Plan
- Allow private health insurance
- Allow private clinics to deliver some services
- "Provide marketing choice for grain farmers" [so in good years they can skip the Canadian Wheat Board]

He's a Reform Party Senator-in-Waiting

According to a collection of articles and news releases from his campaign website:

He was Stockwell Day's policy advisor.

At a bear pit session atthe Alberta Weekly Newspaper Association’s fall convention in Calgary, September 15, he is reported to have "proposed some interesting ways to attract labour to Alberta by stopping transfer payments to provinces where there are no jobs."

None of this is really exciting enough to get anybody in the Alberta PC party but policy wonks hot and bothered, but fortunately he has an ace in the hole: the homo card. He's been harping on that one since at least April, when he introduced a private member's bill to "protect freedom of speech and religion via Bill 208 for those who support traditional marriage".

He argues that "Tolerance is a two-way street. Bill 208 will ensure that the traffic keeps moving in both directions."

So gay and lesbian Albertans, in other words, can exist in public, but the people who want to push them back into the closet have every right to try.

Now that he's in the spotlight for this leadership race, he and the Edmonton Faith Coalition for Natural Marriage are getting out in the media with such brilliant, original and valid arguments as:

it is essential that the government consider the rights of children, because they're the most vulnerable in our society

same-sex marriage is not a basic human right, but rather it's a social experiment ... there is no charter of rights in the world that recognizes homosexual marriages

Not to mention the eponymous fallacy in the name of the Coalition for Natural Marriage.

Or the verging-on-theocracy statements the Edmonton Faith Coalition for Natural Marriage were making before they were part of a leadership campaign:

The scriptures of all participating faiths "indicate that marriage is a sacred thing between a man and a woman and we feel it ought to be kept that way," said coalition member Garry Rohr, representative of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada Alberta District.

Marriage is (between) one man and one woman open to procreation and that's the way the human race started.

So I have an idea what's going to be wrong with Alberta shortly... Vote for keeping the homos out of public life, Get (...)

And on top of that, the colour scheme of his website's splash screen is the same as that villain from Sin City.

Waah, no Sunshine Girl

2006-09-29T21:10:00.000-06:00

And the poor widdle mens is cwying. More than 1400 distraught readers called or emailed to complain. The Sunshine Girl was back the next day.

Never mind that the Sunshine Boy disappeared over a year ago, was way in the back (instead of opposite the opinion columns), was in black and white, and was maybe a quarter the size of the Sunshine Girl.

Reasons cited for the disappearance of the Sunshine Boy include lack of reader interest plus, according to longtime Sunshine Boy photographer Veronica Henri, "It was hard to get good-looking guys." She goes on to explain that

It wasn't considered "prestigious" to be a SSB, and most of the prospects preferred to wear suits. Women [...] are socialized to show off their bodies. "Men aren't brought up like that."

And people say we don't need feminism any more because women are already equal.

The First and Second 9/11

2006-09-10T20:48:00.000-06:00

We in the West are familiar with the second 9/11. It was a tragedy that took place in the continental United States. It is an acceptable day to remember. However, there was another 9/11 with even more grievous consequences that also “forever changed the world”.

In 1973 in Chile, Salvador Allende ended his life in the presidential palace. It was being overrun by the military in coupe led by Augusto Pinochet. As Allende fell, so did the social democratic government that had led Chile. Replacing democracy was the murderous authoritarian regime with Pinochet at its head.

Pinochet murdered some 3000 people and throughout the course of his autocratic rule his secret police tortured another 30 000. The people of Chile were being ground down with the approval and blessing of the United States and their allies. Their crime, of course, was democratically electing a government unfriendly to foreign capitol, so the government had to go. Cuba, Nicaragua and most recently Palestine are other examples of the treatment provided to ‘wayward democracies’.

The first 9/11 is not mentioned in the press, yet the second is almost endlessly eulogized and revered and kept prominently in the news. Why is there a difference? Does the bloody end of the hemispheres longest standing democracy not merit recognition in our eyes?

On the tenth of July in 1955, in the New York Times, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein issued an appeal to the people of the world asking them “to set aside” the strong feelings they have had about many issues and consider themselves “only as members of a biological species which has had a remarkable history, and whose disappearance none of us can desire.” The choice facing the world is “stark and dreadful and inescapable: shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?” Noam Chomsky wrote this in chapter one of his book Failed States. It is now, more than ever, the question of our times.

Comparing the two 9/11’s is very informative as to what our values are and who qualifies to be a worthy victim. Do the victims of Pinochet's slaughter not deserve the respect and remembrance that we lavish on the second 9/11’s dead? When (IF) the day comes when we can mourn others tragedies, and take responsibility for the ones we have caused, then perhaps we can begin edging towards the second proposition of Einstein and Russell, rather than ignorantly pursuing the first.

Just wondering

2006-09-02T20:00:00.000-06:00

No civilised person would even think of printing this:

Fit for publication in our local newspaper:

Pirates II: A review, with spoilers

2006-07-17T20:16:00.000-06:00

The first thing I need to say is that it was at least as much fun as the original, and I'd happily watch it again five or six more times. So what I'm about to say should be taken in an overall sprit of love. I wasn’t disappointed in the film; there were just things about it that disappointed me.

Dr. B already brought up the race/cannibalism/slavery issue so I’ll leave that alone. My disappointments were more in the realm of minor quibbles. Like in the beginning where the prisoner is being eaten alive by crows. Disturbing, icky, and not necessary to move the plot along. That scene alone should have pushed it out of PG and into M if you ask me.

And they missed some opportunities with the score. I mean, it’s all Flying Dutchman this and Flying Dutchman that, but you never hear Wagner’s famous leitmotif – they could have had a lot of fun with that. I mean, bits of the score where someone (not saying who) gets eaten by the Kraken sounded to me like there could be allusions to the Mozart Requiem, so it’s not like the composer was above a bit of classical borrowing.

But I think what really bugged me was Captain Jack Sparrow. I loved him in the first movie for being a charming, but totally amoral narcissist. 100% chaotic neutral. The guy is such a narcicissist, so wrapped up in himself, that he’s practically asexual. At least that’s what I got out of the scene where he and Elizabeth wind up stranded on an island with a cache of rum. He’d rather talk about himself that respond to Elizabeth’s flirtation. The thing about Jack is that you have to love him, but at the same time, he’s enough of a baddie that you can laugh at him when things go wrong. Which, of course, they continue to do in this movie.

So this thing where he seems to be developing actual romantic feelings for Elizabeth just doesn’t work for me. And unfortunately it’s a significant plot element. Not sure how else they could have worked it though.

Still, I’ll watch it several more times, cuz it’s good fun and Orlando Bloom isn’t always wearing his shirt.

2006-07-17T19:58:00.000-06:00

Seven Canadians killed in Israeli airstrike against Lebanon; Harper praises Israel's "reserved" response

It seems my plants take requests

2006-07-05T22:11:00.000-06:00

Barring any weather badness, these might be ready by Friday:

And then there was a little hidden treasure, my first fruit of the season. (Quarter included in the first pic for scale)

And the Blogger ate the tomato, and it was gooood.

So much for being one of the last people to produce a tomato.

Starting with mature plants + Global Warming ---> Ridiculously early harvest.

Temperatures here the last week have only gone below 80F at night (90s during the day). Normals for the period, low 70s.

Now if they would just turn red

2006-07-03T11:30:00.000-06:00

I slag C.D. Howe...

2006-06-20T21:58:00.000-06:00

I’m surprised the Journal does not have the Fraser Institute lined up for its next op-ed. ‘A guide for capitalizing on success’ article is fine example of the right wing cheerleading-schmaltz that regularly oozes the C.D. Howe Institute. The C.D. Howe shills recommendations can be summed up in three points; cut government spending, continue to deregulate the province and more tax breaks for business. Tempering this slavish pro-business sycophancy, is this throw away line about “Alberta should continue to insist on excellence in its educational system” in the article. Evidently artless casuistry is all Mr. Robson and Ms.Goldfarb have to offer the people of Alberta.

Alberta needs less pro-investment policy. Significantly less. We are, as countless letters to the editor have said, giving away our resources. Our paltry royalty regime brings nothing but smiles to the Big Oil corporate executives. If our government had anything resembling a backbone or cared a whit for the public-good our royalty rates would be starting around 20%. If Big Oil can continue in Venezuela under such ‘oppressive’ rates they can do it here in Alberta as well.

Currently we are told that the people of Alberta are getting such a great deal from the current resource boom. We hear that again and again in the media. Alberta is doing so well that we are actually laying off teachers, because bigger class sizes are better for kids. I’m sure it has something to do with fostering a competitive environment and of course ‘insisting on excellence’.

The popular discourse in the media is that Alberta is booming and that everyone is doing spectacularly well. Wealth will trickle down…we need less government and less regulation. These ideals are intellectually and socially bankrupt; however they do richly benefit certain sectors of society greatly. From this we get the curious dialectic of ‘What’s good for Business is good for everyone’ ideal, which is clearly a falsehood. What is good for Business is good for Business… period. These poisonous ideals are destroying the fabric of our society. What is required is a firm recommitment to the public-good and the social democratic ideals that Canada was founded on.

Belated May Two-Four Garden Blogging

2006-05-29T21:30:00.000-06:00

On the May long weekend, Sardeth's mom and I went greenhouse shopping, starting at Hole's north of St. Albert, ending up at some little family operation south of Beaumont, and stopping at (and buying from) just about every greenhouse in between. I got off easy because all I have is a small balcony, and I decided that this year I want there to be room for me on it, as well as the plants. I stuck to a bunch of herbs, some window boxes, a hot pepper (never tried growing them before), and of course tomatoes for Dr Charles' Tomato Contest.

Here are the highlights:

The herb garden

Petunias - this is my first time trying wave petunias. I got a blue vein double wave and tidal wave purple, which turned out more pink than purple, but still pretty.

And of course the tomatoes:

I got a big one that already has tomatoes and blossoms on it - I don't know if that's cheating, but I want to eat my own fresh tomatoes and the sooner the better!

I also got a much younger patio tomato - this kind I've tried before, and they're easy to take care of and have really good flavor. To keep the tomato company, I also picked up a "zesty hot" pepper.

And here's the finished balcony garden:

Happy Summer and Happy Gardening to all!

Thoughts on War is a Racket...

2006-05-25T21:33:00.000-06:00

Smedley Butler’s “War is a Racket” was published in 1935. It is a damning visceral attack on what Dwight D. Eisenhower termed the Military Industrial Complex. Mr. Butler’s observations rang frighteningly true when they were published in 1935, we would do well to heed his message as we enter our own dark imperial age.

Those who profit from war must go to war. That is, the various elites (banking, business, government) will be the first human wave in any conflict. War would quickly become an antiquated notion best left for the history books. The question of going to war when “you” have to bleed and die for your country makes the entire idea of war much less enticing.

This is not an unpatriotic proposition. If people can make obscene profits in the conduct the business of war why should they not personally feed the bloody gaping maw that war is? Why do the poor have the seemingly exclusive right to die for their country? Bankers, beggars… both qualify as “boots on the ground” and both bleed and die the same way.

War is viciously egalitarian; it takes the young, the old, the rich, the poor. It is our distorted social system of values that makes the prospect of going to war so inviting. The haughty, insular elite makes the profit while the poor are summarily consigned to their graves. Are the poor particularly in tune with defending democracy? Is the elite sector of society particularly unpatriotic because of their decidedly hands-off attitude towards participating in war?

The rhetoric of the privileged is tempered with the assurance that their blood will not be gracing the field of battle. Coupled with the profitability of war, the lack of personal responsibility allows societies such as ours to rush too quickly into misguided (often Imperial) ventures that are intrinsically immoral and unjust.

I propose as Mr. Butler did in ‘War is a Racket’ (highly recommended reading) that we allow the privileged in our society first blush at the horrors of war. Butler’s second suggestion is that the people that are directly involved in war would have the right to vote whether they shall bear arms and participate in the war in question. As Canada has a standing professional army I am hesitant to forecast how they would vote. The level of conditioning and indoctrination involved in breaking the empathic bonds we have to the rest of humanity is significant. It would be my hope that they could reconnect with their humanity and base their decision on the facts of the situation, while looking past the inevitable propaganda and the dehumanizing aspects of their training.

Between these two anti-war methodologies I would be willing to be a large sum that Canada would only engage in war in the most dire of circumstances, as it should be.

Severely Belated Blogging Against Disablism: In which I over-analyse an uncomfortable incident at the grocery store

2006-05-02T22:23:00.000-06:00

One of the reasons I'm late writing anything is that until I'd read other people blogging against disablism I didn't quite have the framework to talk about what was so uncomfortable and why that might have been. So take this as the thoughts of someone who's in the middle of a learning experience and writing about it as a way of trying to get it.

So I'm at the grocery store and as I come into the cleaning products aisle there's a guy in a wheelchair at the far end trying to reach the Comet. It's quite an effort because the Comet is up pretty high, and on top of that, the bottom shelf is quite a bit wider than the other shelves, so he has to reach not only way up, but way over. He manages to just brush it with his fingertips, knock it over, and then catch it as it falls. As I pick up my laundry detergent and head down the aisle, I see that he's still in front of the bathroom cleaners, kindof craning his head back and frowning.

Now at this point I should mention that I'm short. Not ultra-short, but short enough that the only thing in the world that seems to built with people my height in mind is economy-class seating on airlines. If you see me in front of some tall shelves in a store kindof craning my neck back and frowning, it means I want something from the top shelf, and I'm wondering (1) how long will it be before someone walks by who's taller than me so I can ask them for help, and (2) if nobody comes by in a reasonable amount of time, are these shelves sturdy enough that I can risk trying to climb them.

So I go up to the guy and say, hey can I reach something for you. He says no thanks, it was Comet he was after, but he was reading the labels to see if anything else looked better. I say no problem, Comet's pretty much the best anyway.

In a perfect world untainted by crappy -isms, he would have said have a nice day, and I would have said same to you, and we would have gone our separate ways and that would have been that.

In the real world, he launched into profuse thanks (using words like "charity") for noticing him and offering to help and I felt really uncomfortable because I thought I was just being neighborly and there was really nothing special about it - just one person who sometimes has trouble reaching things trying to help out someone else having the same problem. But I couldn't figure out how to say so without sounding really insensitive. I mean, if I can't reach, I can climb the frakking shelves.

And then he just wanted to talk (about the relative merits of different cleaning products, the weather, and other non-threatening topics), and told me his name and wanted to know mine, and so we talked about various things, and then on top of the discomfort I was already feeling, I started feeling a much more familiar discomfort that caused me to gesture a lot in ways that the ring S. gave me would look prominent, and try to find a way to end the conversation, which was harder than you might expect because he started thanking me for taking the time to talk to him.

So, lessons learned so far, if any?

1. I blame the patriarchy for being unable to enjoy a conversation with a stranger, just because he's a man. It's quite possible I just missed out on making a new friend. It's just that it's happenned too many times before, where I'm just being (I think) polite and friendly, and then I have to shake off an "I'm entitled to some pussy or at least your phone number because you talked to me" asshole, and I'm pretty much permanently suspicious.

2. I blame my own unconscious attitudes about people with disabilities for a lot f the discomfort that happened. There's got to be a way of expressing "I sometimes can't reach stuff, and you sometimes can't reach stuff, so I feel solidarity with you right now" while still being sensitive to how incredibly lucky I am, finding a way around my privileged attitude.

3. Worse than (2), it seems that I bought into the popular notion that people with disabilities are asexual. I would never have stopped to help a man who didn't have a visible disability who was frowning at the cleaning products - see (1).

4. While I've had some periods of temporary mobility limitations due to my bad knee, I didn't realize just how privileged I am to have a body that functions fairly well most of the time, until I had that conversation, and started reading through the Blogging Against Disablism posts. Not only can I climb the shelves if I have to, I am also fortunate in:
- I have never felt self-conscious about asking for help or having someone offer to help me. If I need a hand reaching something, lifting something, holding a door because my hands are full, or whatever, I ask for help, someone helps me, I say thank you, they say you're welcome, and that's that. I would never even think the word "charity", let alone say it.
- People talk directly to me, not the person I'm with. I've never even considered thanking someone for just talking to me.

Clearly I have a long way to go in learning and understanding and shedding all the subtle and not-so-subtle prejudices and mental sets related to disablism. But this blogging event is a really good first step for me and for other people like me who are so privileged they don't even know what privilege is.

At half mast and half-cocked...

2006-04-26T20:04:00.000-06:00

Our soldiers are dying for a failed imperial venture. We are a sad third rate Sparta that has been consigned the unenviable, not to mention hopeless, task of killing the enemies of ‘peace’ and ‘democracy’ in Afghanistan. As I have said in an earlier entry, some 100,000+ Russian soldiers could not ‘fix’ the Afghanistan problem, what the hell are we expecting with our piecemeal expedition. I wonder if the political currency we are gaining with the Bush Administration is worth the lives of our soldiers?

Playing nice with the proto-fascist regime to the south seems to be the order of the day for our Conservative government. Playing nice also seems to entail enacting the same mystifyingly brain-dead policies that George Bush has foisted on Americans. Censuring the media when our dead return from Afghanistan? Does Harper really think he can recreate the kind of Orwellian black hole they have going in the US? The people of Canada need to see the results of our stupid escapades in a foreign land. Contrast the actions of the Conservative government with all their pathetic rhetoric of openness and accountability and cleaning up the system. It is all such bullshittius-maximus.

Not lowering the flags when our soldiers are killed is really just another step in an amateurish attempt to control what information Canadians are exposed to. The poverty of intelligence that plagues our government is a constant wonderment to me. It is like - what new level of obliquity can we sink to this week? Adopting a ‘made in Canada’ solution instead of Kyoto? - Only from Rona Ambrose our Minister of Environment…from ALBERTA…do we hear such guileless lip smacking.

The NDP, Liberals and BQ need to get their collective houses in order and set this ungainly government on the right course…and soon.

Write yout letters but don't be surprised.

2006-04-02T19:48:00.000-06:00

A letter written to one of our local newspapers... bitter lefty rants are always a good time...

I read about half the letters section in the March 30, 2006 edition of the Journal I stopped when I read the plaintive quote across the top. It decried the lack of response to all the public concern about the Third way and if conservative MLA’s actually read the paper. I ask this question: Would it make a difference if they did?

Of course the case against privatizing healthcare is strong. The case was strong against deregulating our power, but that went ahead (at a cost of 7 billion frittered away). There was the usual host of letters brimming with commentary, relevant facts and cogent argumentation. The problem is that we’re living in essentially a one party state. Did you get your knickers tied up in knots over the sponsor ship scandal? Do you really think that the same sort of corruption and culture of entitlement does not exist after 35 years of Conservative rule in Alberta? Is the fact we cannot get a straight answer out of Iris Evans about the Third way so really surprising? No.

What is really surprising is the continued bout of naivety that seems to affect the public in Alberta (or at least the people who write letters to the editor). Not feeling like the government is listening? The Tories have been in power since 1971; they had a lot of practice ignoring the progressive voice in the province. Has there ever been a serious challenge to the Tories power? No. Full marks to Mr. Taft and Mr. Mason you would indeed make Sisyphus proud.

The first battle that needs to be fought is on the political stage. Strike some fear into the government. Elect a decent sized opposition that will not allow the Tories to rule by decree. Accountability comes when politicians are not always in their comfort zone, when they actually feel responsible to those who elect them.

It will be difficult though; Ralph’s world is not bad enough yet for the masses to be swayed easily. Get off your word processor and cause some trouble for the government. Or just continue to write impassioned pleas to the letters section, the status quo is not that bad…

Good day, Less-good day

2006-03-31T20:22:00.000-07:00

I know that if this is all I have to complain about, my life is pretty darned good.

The good day: Saturday, March 25, 2006

6:45 AM - Sun is coming in the window. Wake up, stretch, snuggle back under the blankets.

7:00 AM - Clock radio comes on to CBC. Weather forecast is good. Cat says prrrt! and comes to snuggle with me. She wants breakfast but will settle for petting.

8:00 AM - Bladder and cat have gotten insistent enough that I get up. Feed cat, eat breakfast, drink tea, listen to CBC.

8:30 - 10:30 - Drink tea. Listen to CBC. Pet Cat. Brush Cat. Play with Cat. Drink tea.

10:30 - Sofa that I ordered back in January delivered without any problems.

11:00 - Grocery shopping. The produce had been looking lacklustre the last few weeks, but this week it's good again.

1:30 - Assorted housework

6:00 - Battlestar Galactica with S.

8:00 - Put on Oilers jersey, go to pub, watch game. Eat pizza and wings. Drink beer.

11:00 - Oilers win. Stagger home singing Ole, Ole-ole-ole

Less-good day: Tuesday, March 28, 2006

2:00AM - Kitty has been galloping up and down the hall playing with her ball since midnight, but now she's pushed it under the fridge. She meows piteously until I get up and fish it out.

3:00AM - repeat

5:30AM - it's not pitch dark out any more, and Kitty decides it's time for breakfast NOW. I burrow under the covers to avoid her toe-biting persuasion, and get back to sleep by 6:30ish.

7:00AM - clock radio goes off. Something is wrong and there's a loud buzz that almost drowns out the voices. Hit snooze.

7:10AM - feed cat. Eat breakfast. Try to listen to the radio but the radio in the living room, but it's even worse than the one in my bedroom.

7:50AM - leave for work. Work isn't bad.

5:30PM - get home from work. Try to put on Disk Drive. CBC FM isn't working any better than CBC AM was in the morning. All non-CBC stations seem to be working fine.

6:20PM - I'm tired and grouchy but S. and I go to the gym anyway. When I change into my gym clothes, I discover the pants I brought aren't the pants I thought they were, and they have a huge hole in the crotch. My panties are zebra-striped so there's no way they'll blend with the black pants. S. promises to watch my six and let me know if the panties make an appearance.

8:00PM - workout salvaged, for the most part. S. assures me my panties were never visible. However I went too hard and did something to my shoulder, and it hurts enough that I have trouble shampooing my hair.

8:30PM - go for dinner, watch the game. S. informs me that while he never saw the hole in my pants, they were worn so thin that he could see the zebra pattern in places anyway. Oilers lose.

Yeah, call me a blinkin waaahmbulance.

Alberta Politics Prediction

2006-03-30T21:45:00.000-07:00

Remember how Ralphie came to power?

I was just a kid then, but as I recall, the deal was, Getty had way overspent us into debt and wrecked all sorts of things and omg omg it was like, so awful, and we kept on and on hearing how awful it was.

And then (cue the trumpets, ta-da) Klein showed up to save us all and the PC Party was reborn from its ashes and we massively voted for change by re-electing the same party all over again.

Now Klein is just embarrassing himself over and over and even conservative papers like the Sun are going on about how terrible he is.

But lo, what hope from yonder window breaks? Why, 'tis the dissident Oberg, valiantly calling out the fallen saviour.

Who wants to bet, the PCs are reborn yet again under Oberg's dissident mantle, and Albertans vote for the same party that's been in charge for the last 35 years, because it's time for a change.

World of Warcrack.

2006-03-28T21:44:00.000-07:00

Ever need to waste a week or a month...etc You get the idea.

It is easy, go down to your local computer retailer, pick up one copy of World of Warcraft and then watch the free time slip away. For those not in the gaming loop, WoW is a persistent massively multiplayer online role playing game. It is enough to know that it worse than a heroin/crack/morphine addiction. But gosh, it is fun.

It is nice to have some achievable goals once and awhile. You mean I just have to collect 10 shark-tail fin tips and I get more experience? How nice! How unlike rallying against the forces of evil in the real world it is. Although casting a fireball anywhere near GWB would be great fun, it just is not practical.

But yes, the posts have been less frequent, and now you know why… WoW-crack has me at least for a couple of more months before school starts.

sardeth

Where we've been (in case anybody is checking)

2006-03-28T21:39:00.000-07:00

Banff! Pictures once I download them from my camera.

I think it was the best little holiday I've ever had. We lived like dogs, pretty much. Ate, slept, went for walks, ate some more, napped, you get the picture. (Also sat in the hotel hot tub and the hotsprings, but that's not so dog-like)

OMG the things we ate!

There's this little vegetarian/vegan restaurant tucked way up on the top floor of the building where they make fudge in the window and deliberately blow the chocolate smell on to the street through a strategically placed vent. The restaurant is called Nourish. It's all done in red and orange and brown and feels warm and cozy. Two people work there, a thin, slightly stooped old man who speaks quietly and slowly, and a vivacious young woman.

As we sit down, the old man starts his spiel - it's the same for every customer - about special dietary needs, their to die for chocolate amaretto cheesecake, and instructions to go back down to the counter to sniff all the teas, which they blend themselves. So we sniffed all the teas, a dozen or so, from traditional things like chai and jasmine and earl grey, to blueberry rooibus and things I couldn't pronounce and therefor I don't remember.

We started with a roasted garlic and red pepper soup that I'm salivating thinking about now. If we had been the only customers, we would have licked our bowls. I was tempted anyway. S had an amazing sandwich on grilled sourdough with caramelized onions, portabello mushrooms, red peppers, and organic cheddar cheese. I had one of their signature sandwiches, avocado, pear, and brie. Also very good, although a bit bland, probably better with the swiss cheese they normally make it with because that would add a bit of zip. And that to-die-for cheesecake he was selling us on when we came in? He wasn't kidding. It was When Harry met Sally good. We finished with a pot of jasmine tea - you could see the flowers - and even though we sipped it very slowly and it steeped the whole time, it never got bitter. We went back the next day and bought some jasmine and some earl grey to take home. The earl grey was, bar none, the best earl grey I've ever had.

And then another day we ate in this faux Irish pub, which was also phenomenal. It took a whole page of their menu, in three columns, to list all the beers they had on tap. I had a Wild Rose Wraspberry Ale. I couldn't taste the raspberries, but it was refreshing and had a zippiness to it that was really pleasant. S. had a Smithwick's, which he apparently liked, but it gave me bitter beer face.

Crab, asparagus, and Guinness soup, anybody? Hell yeah. Turkey, strawberry, and brie sandwich? OMG.

Other than that, our hotel was cheap, good, located just the right distance from the busy part of Banff Avenue, had a fantastic included continental breakfast with what appeared to be homemade granola, and the staff were really helpful and genuinely cheerful.

We had meant to do all sorts of stuff, like go to concerts at the Banff Centre, go up the gondola, and maybe even go for little hikes, but in the end the only hiking we did was up and down the touristy shopping strip. Somehow that didn't matter and we came home refreshed and happy.

Lets hear it for Quebec Senators!

2006-03-17T21:59:00.000-07:00

The recent letter correspondence between Senator Céline Hervieux-Payette and the McLellan family from Minnesota was a brilliant example of what can happen when the truth is allowed to seep out through the cracks of the media establishment. Let me quote the letter excerpt from the CBC news Website.

“In her response, Senator Céline Hervieux-Payette said that what she finds horrible is "the daily massacre of innocent people in Iraq, the execution of prisoners – mainly blacks – in American prisons, the massive sale of handguns to Americans, the destabilization of the entire world by the American government's aggressive foreign policy, etc."

Iraq…check…foreign policy…check…the crushing inequality and racism inherent in the culture…check…gun mania…check… and the capper… America Destabilizing the entire world… Halleluiah!! And all of it on national TV, soon to be repeated and discussed across the world. When I heard this on the radio I actually cheered, it is nice to see the dissident point of view so clearly expressed in the mainstream media.

Apparently the Liberal Party of Canada is uncomfortably taking a step back on this one, distancing itself from what Senator Hervieux-Payette is saying and defending. I wish the LPC would shuck their timorous nature and make a stand on this important issue. It seems that when it was not politically opportune to criticize the Americans the LPC seems content to docilely nod its agreement with the Empire down south. The LPC does not have the vicissitude make an unpopular stand.

Must it take a Senator to so eloquently describe the criminally heinous nature of the “Project for a new American Century” and all of its corollary evil? The lack of anything resembling a spine in the opposition benches is a severe detriment to Canadian democracy.

Canadians should rally behind people who do not bend to the current, who have the fortitude to speak their mind even when it is not politically opportune. Fostering debate and hearing more than one point of view is good for Canada, it is good for Democracy and it is good for cynical people like me who often think the whole mendacious system has no redeeming qualities.

(See TC's article on the chillingly atrocious lack of transparency for more cheery news about the Harper Government…I swear sometimes it seems like he wants to be more and not less like the vapid wisp known as George W Bush.)

Transparency and Accountability my Ass

2006-03-17T21:05:00.000-07:00

Mr. Harper's decision that his cabinet ministers can't talk to the media about anything other than "a Federal Accountability Act, a GST cut, a child-care allowance, tougher criminal sentences, and a patient waiting-times guarantee" without clearing it with the PMO - and that even includes things like writing letters to the editor - is so far beyond ironic I don't know if I should laugh or cry.

Federal Accountability Act
Let's keep the media away from our cabinet ministers.
More free votes in the House of Commons.
Don't talk to the media without clearing it with me.

Yeah, it's the Liberals we should be mad at for their culture of entitlement. For their lack of accountability. For their lack of transparency and unwillingness to be forthright with the People of Canada, and that's why we voted for a new, ethical, responsible, responsive leader.

Pardon me while I go buy a bridge.

Public Health Care Works! ... repeat after me...

2006-03-12T17:50:00.000-07:00

That is right, folks. Take a deep breath and repeat after me. “Public Health Care Works!” I am consistently amazed by the breadth an depth of ignorance exhibited by the opponents of the public system.

Issue one: A two tier system is more responsive to the needs of the public. Competition and the free market will make things better or some other frippery to that effect.

Health care is a public good. It is in economic jargon the demand for health care is inelastic. Therefore for the sliding scale of supply and demand cannot work its “magic”. Furthermore, with the introduction of profit into the healthcare system the focus then shifts from peoples well being to a more lucrative business model. I for one do not want a system focused on profit over people.

Issue two: Wait times will be dramatically reduced with the introduction of private clinics and insurance….

This statement is dead in the water before it begins. It is essentially begging the question because the reality of the situation is that there are not enough medical professionals to meet the current demand. So how does the introduction of a private system cut wait times? Unless, of course Ralph Klein and his merry band of conservative sycophants can spontaneously generate a new batch of trained medical professionals. (they might be able to actually do so, given the crystal clear opacity of their governence)

As a corollary of this argument, what would be the incentive for the doctors to be in the public system when they can make better money in the private? The decline of the public system is inevitable when competing with a parallel private structure.

If there is one idea that is imperative to understand about the Healthcare debate it is that capitalism it not the answer to every problem. Capitalism is very good at producing (and concentrating) wealth. Capitalism is not so good at providing public goods. The profit motive destroys the idea behind public goods, corrupting and changing the fundamental nature of how Healthcare is provided to the public. We do not need corporate interests gaining more control of our public healthcare system. It has been shown repeatedly that universal pubic healthcare is viable, affordable and more efficient than private systems.

We just need to get this message out to the public as loudly as those who would sell our cherished system into the hands of the greedy capitalists.

While we're on the subject of people like Michael Coren

2006-03-12T17:21:00.000-07:00

(A continuation of my previous post)

Who the hell does this guy think he is anyway? Where does he get off thinking he can tell me what's best for the rest of my life, when he hasn't even met me? Me, and every other woman on the entire frickin' planet.

I wasn't really happy with the last post I wrote. In fact, I put it up, took it down, and put it up again. I guess I made a few decent arguments, and got in some good rhetorical jabs, but that's just not what it's all about. Logic and facts and argument have their place, but in the end, that's not what it's about. This is personal. This is about the proponents of forced childbirth thinking they can impose their will on me personally, and on every other woman who might become pregnant at a less-than-ideal time in her life. That they know me better than I do, and better than my doctor does.

So here's my story right now:

I've suffered from depression since my teen years, and been on a variety of medications. None of them has worked until this last one I've tried, and it seems to have pierced my storm clouds and let me have a bit of my real personality back. The side effects are nasty, but worth it.

I'm in a committed, monogamous relationship with the man I hope will one day become the father of my children, should we decide children are something we want. Our relationship does include sex from time to time - or at least, I hope it will again once I start feeling good enough to be up for it. We're using contraception, but it's only 99% effective, and if I should get pregnant right now, I'll have a really difficult decision to make.

The medication I'm on is known to cross the placenta in the late stages of pregnancy, and really mess up the newborn baby. It also passes into breast milk.

My choices would be:
- Carry the pregnancy to term, while still on the drug, and risk seriously messing up the baby
- Try to get off the drug before the third trimester, and have to deal with a severe discontinuation syndrome, the possible return of the depressive symptoms, and then the risk of post-partum depression
- Abort

The only person who can make that decision is me - with the input, of course, of my partner, my doctor, and anybody else close to me I want to confide in.

Every woman's decision to continue or discontinue her pregnancy is just as personal, just as intimate, as my decision would be.

Anybody who thinks s/he can make rules across the board for what every woman should do is guilty of, at best, supreme arrogance.

Please get your facts straight, Michael Coren

2006-03-12T17:12:00.000-07:00

Pro-lifers make me tired. Especially male pro-lifers, who will never be faced with the decision of what to do about an intruder inside their body. I'd have a bit more tolerance for them if they could get their facts straight, but it's really hard to argue from facts when you're wrong. Michael Coren's March 11, 2005 piece in the Toronto Sun is no exception.

Coren claims that by day 19, an embryo has "an entire nervous system established." Which is interesting to me, since at day 16, according to the Visible Embryo website, the layer of cells that will eventually give rise to not only the nervous system, but also the skin, nails, hair, lens of eye, lining of the internal and external ear, nose, sinuses, mouth, anus, tooth enamel, pituitary gland, and mammary glands, has just formed; by day 19 there is a groove that is the precursor of the nervous system. But then pro-lifers do like to confuse potential with actual.

Here are the arms and legs at 28 days that Mr. Coren waxes so poetic about:

But let's pass on the rest of Coren's overly sentimentalized vision of fetal development and talk about the rest of his argument.

We invariably hear people who favour what they describe as "choice" say they would prefer there to be fewer abortions. Yet if abortion is merely the removal of tissue without any moral or emotional consequences there is no reason for there to be fewer of them.

Besides, um... that even if they are safer and less painful than childbirth, they still hurt, and pose some risk to the woman? (Post-born women do matter, right Mr. Coren?) And I'm sure Mr. Coren has never, ever heard people who are in favor of removing tapeworms or cancerous tumors wish that there was less cancer or fewer tapeworms.

And then Coren trots out all the standard canards - that a life is a life and has the right to live, and it doesn't matter if there's overpopulation or people who want to adopt, that life has a right to live regardless. Well what about the woman?

I'd recommend Coren try the following thought experiment:

Imagine getting home from work one snowy and frigidly cold night, and discovering an intruder in your house. His clothes are thin and if you make him leave, it's almost certain he'll freeze to death. He smells really bad and it's making you nauseous. On top of that, he's already started damaging the place, throwing trash around and getting things dirty. He's going through your fridge and eating all your food. His breath smells of alcohol and he has a crazy look in his eye. You have no way of knowing whether he'll just go to sleep, or whether he'll turn on you or attack you.

Should you be compelled to allow this person to live in your house until spring?

If not, why should a woman be compelled to allow someone to live inside her body and use its resources, leaving the body irreparably changed, for nine months?

The War in Afghanistan

2006-03-09T09:40:00.000-07:00

The War in Afghanistan

Canadians should not be fighting the war on terrorism of any other abstract noun. There is no winning this war, nor will there be any clear resolution and certainly no grandiloquent “mission accomplished” waiting for us. What will is happening is a drawn out seemingly unending guerilla conflict that will continue to cost Canadian lives for no appreciable benefit.

The people in Afghanistan we are fighting know they will win. It took them ten years to beat the USSR, but they persevered. The Soviets were unhindered by lofty ideals such as peacekeeping or nation building. They brought total war to Afghanistan. It was an naked invasion and in retrospect a massive military misadventure. The Soviet-Afghan war was a meat grinder especially for the civilian population(war always is). The Taliban and other rebel forces won because it is easier to destroy than rebuild. Every power station destroyed, every school bombed, every hospital gutted was a victory for them. The people do not blame them as much as they blame the occupiers for not providing the basic security for in which society can function. The Soviets near the end of the conflict had 100,000 troops in country and could not win this war. What are 2300 Canadian troops going to do?

It is imperative that we get out Afghanistan. It is another Vietnam, another Iraq another lost cause that is being fatally mishandled. The US has done much to create this quagmire in Afghanistan, we as Canadians should not be obligated to clean up their mess. Canada’s role should be one of peacekeeping and mediation, not the bloody counter insurgency raids that will only be our undoing. The future of Afghanistan is not in our hands, this misguided military action needs to have the plug pulled now.

Memory

2006-02-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

My period was a week late or so.

I don't remember who I was fucking at the time.

I don't remember quite what bullshit excuse I used to get the afternoon off from work.

I remember that the lady at Planned Parenthood asked me, before we even got to the pregnancy test, what I would do if it came out positive.

I remember the force I had to put into my voice to hide the shake as I said, "There's no way I'm having this baby."

I remember looking at some kind of wheel to figure out how far along I would be, if I were pregnant, and her explaining that the Morgentaler clinic would do abortions starting at six weeks, and I remember the anger and the horror and horrible cold thing that gripped my stomach as I did the math and realized that this thing would be staying inside me for several weeks before anybody would be able to help me.

The test came up negative.

I remember walking home across the High Level Bridge, feeling the summer sun and breeze against my skin, against the body that was mine and mine only.

I wonder now, what that walk would have been like if there had been two lines.

I wonder about my sisters to the south.

Image via Culture Kitchen

Ordinary People's History

2006-02-15T20:35:00.000-07:00

My Grandma grew up somewhere in rural Kansas, I'm not sure of the details exactly, although I have the impression they moved to the town where my dad was born after she developed complications when pregnant with his older sister, so that she could be closer to a doctor when she had my dad.

Grandma recently moved from one seniors' residence to another, and as they were packing stuff up to move her, my aunt came upon a rare treasure. I don't think it would have ever been intended to be anything special at the time it was made. Living where she did in the 1930s, Grandma and her friends and sisters didn't have a lot of access to shopping, so if they wanted anything nice they had to order it from a catalogue. To make sure they got everything they ordered, and nothing that they didn't, Grandma would cut out the pictures from the catalogue and glue them into a notebook. She kept notes of what they paid and what they bought them for.

My aunt found the notebook, and scanned it and made copies for all the grand-daughters and great-grand-daughters. At first it was mainly a curiosity to me; I liked the styles a lot and the prices just seemed quaint. If I could walk in them, I would need these shoes desperately:

It seems the 1930s were the decade of all things my style, especially the hats. I want hats to come back.

And then I started reading through the album more closely, and there started to be stories:

H.C. would be my Grandma. Would O.C. be one of the great-aunts I never met? Besides her good taste in hats, what was she like?

And then there was a recurring theme of Ora (O.C.?) and Erna, where it looks like every time Ora gets something, Erna gets the same thing.

Were they friends who got everything the same so they could be more like sisters? Or did Erna drive Ora nuts with all her copycatting? Could Erna have been another great-aunt who got married and that's why she had a different last name?

As a co-worker commented when I showed him the notebook, the prices look low to us now, but for the time, these would have been fairly expensive items. Especially for people in rural Kansas. Here these women are, buying shoes and dresses for banquets and parties. Was this defiance of the circumstances? Maybe if you go far back enough I come from money and don't realize it, because the money blew away with the topsoil? And what of the changes sweeping the rest of the planet - is that something they thought about or was the Depression enough to worry about?

One day I'm going to run up my long-distance bill and find this stuff out.

Why doesn't this surprise me?

2006-02-14T18:27:00.000-07:00

If I were a character in The Princess Bride, I'd be...

Which Princess Bride Character are You?
this quiz was made by mysti

Canadian Women Kick Ass

2006-02-14T18:02:00.000-07:00

Canada has three medals so far. All women. Go Canadian women!

I ended up watching some Olympics on Saturday, and saw the women's moguls event. Holy crap is that a scary event. I respect anybody who would even try it. Jennifer Heil's gold-medal run was just incredible. Go-Go-Go-Go-Go-Go-...pause... hanging upside down in mid-air... Go-Go-Go-Go-Go-Go-Go-Go-pause... hanging upside down in mid-air... Go-Go-Go-Go-Go-Go-Go-Go- She so deserved to win.

Know what else was neat? At the bottom of the hill, the competitors gave eachother hugs and high fives. I don't watch enough sports to know whether that says something about the Olympics, something about women's sports, or whether that's just the way things normally are, but I was touched.

And then on to women's hockey. I saw some of the drubbing Canada gave Italy (16-0) and it was ugly. Ow.

But then you see the comments it got when they also beat the Russians 12-0. Angela Ruggiero, who plays defense for Team USA, said: "I'm upset that Canada has been running up the score, especially against the host nation. There was no need for that. They're trying to pad their stats ... Canada is running up the score for whatever reasons – personal, short-term."

My first thought was, Would they ever, ever dare to say that about men's hockey? I mean OMGWTFBBQ these uppity women are kicking too much ass what are we going to do?

But it turns out the mighty Don Cherry has previously come out against NHL teams trouncing eachother too hard, on the grounds that winning so big that you humiliate the other team is poor sportsmanship. Kick their butts but don't rub their faces in it.

So I don't get to have a feminist snit-fit afterall.

Turns out the problem is with the rules of Olympic hockey. In this tournament, tiebreakers are decided first by the deadlocked teams' record against each other and then by goal differential. That differential can determine which team has home-ice advantage.

Interesting note: Canada has outscored its competitors 28-0 so far, and USA has outscored its competitors 11-0. Kindof shines some light on why Ruggiero might not like it.

More thoughts about Dr. Charles' 1600 Calorie Diet

2006-02-14T18:00:00.000-07:00

So despite Dr. Charles explicitly saying he's a skinny guy and has no need to lose weight, what on dog's green earth is going on with the comments? I swear half the people there were trying to give the man advice on how to lose weight anyway. WTF?

Good doc, bad doc

2006-02-13T22:27:00.000-07:00

I wish my doctor had done this. Except that then this blog might not have happened, because what got me angry and ranty enough to want to blog was the way my (former) GP dealt with my weight. Except that I'm a big procrastinator and I was emabarrassed and stuff and never did write that post, although I started blogging anyway. Here's what I would have written, now that Dr. Charles' post has reminded me.
=============
My annual physical exam last year was something I had actually really been looking forward to. Not that I have some kind of weird speculum fetish or something. Just that I'd been making some really positive changes in my life and I was expecting that those changes would show up in discernably improved health and some empirical validation would be nice.

You see, all my life people (including my pediatrician at age 4, one of my earliest memories) have been telling me I'm fat. This is really stupid, because I was never more than a little overweight. In my first year of university, though, I started moving from really not fat at all, to slightly fat. When I hit 150lb, I panicked, and went to Weight Watchers, and stuck to their regimen assiduously, and got down to 120 lb (WW said my goal should have been 110). I also shot my metabolism to hell, and developed a habit of bingeing under stress, driving around town in the middle of the night to different drive throughs and having three or four super-sized combos from different McD's and throwing out the wrappers in garbages far from home so there'd be no evidence, then feeling so awful about myself that I wouldn't eat the next day, causing... more stress. I suspect that the disordered eating was the result of the group dynamic at WW, where there was a lot of good food vs bad food rhetoric going on, a sort of confessional atmosphere that seemed to rely a whole lot on food guilt and feelings of shame if the number on the scale wasn't moving inexorably downward. Plus of course not eating nearly enough to be well can wreak havoc on any body.

Not surprisingly, I didn't stay at 120lb for long. In fact, a year later, I weighed 180. A year after that, I weighed 210. I discovered that as long as I ate as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted, I could avoid the binge cycle, and for several years, as long as I was able to exercise, my weight was stable. And then there was the knee surgery and the time I couldn't exercise, and by the end of 2004 I weighed 230lb and felt really unwell. I started to get scared about what I was doing to my body and that I was going to die by the time I was 40.

So I set out to lose that weight. I made a lot of positive changes: I started exercising again - slowly at first, but then more and more, and I discovered it made me feel fantastic. At first I restricted my calories too much, but when that was unpleasant I started focussing instead on getting all my servings of fruit and veggies and lean dairy, and eating vegetarian as much as possible. Is there a word better than fantastic for how good I was feeling by the time it got to be time for my physical? I'd lost 20lb, but by then that was secondary to just plain feeling good. Also worth noting, in reference to Dr. Charles purgatorial experience, is that I was eating about 2300 calories a day, not 1600, and the pounds were melting away.

The doc was relatively new to me, since my usual doc had suddenly moved to Vancouver and left me in the lurch. I'd only seen Dr. X a few times previously, for help with my knees when I'd pushed them too hard by doing too much new exercise too fast, but I had really liked and respected him during those visits. Which is why what happened was such a shock to me.

We got off on the wrong foot right away, when he took my pulse and blood pressure (fast and high, respectively), and commented, “You obviously haven’t been getting any exercise.” I know better than to expect him to remember everything about me, because I know he has a lot of patients, but the last thing in my chart before the physical would have been that I came to see him because I was having pain and swelling in my knees that was interfering with my exercise regimen. He was holding my chart while he said it. So I’m curious why he just went straight into berating me for being out of shape. Would he have said that if I were thinner, or would he have assumed I was feeling anxious and tried to say something to put me at ease? Do people whose BMI is greater than 30 suddenly not have sympathetic nervous systems? What about feelings?

Then I told him that I had in fact been exercising, alternating swimming and weights. If he hadn’t interrupted me, I would have told him that in a good week I’ll go six times, but four or five times is pretty usual, that my swimming speed and endurance has increased dramatically, and that I still do cardio on resistance training days. But he did interrupt me, and rather than saying something positive like, “That’s great that you’re committing to getting fit,” what he said was, “Don’t do weights.” I was so flabbergasted by that, that I didn’t get a chance to ask why on earth should I not be doing weights?

I don’t remember the exact order of what happened next, but somewhere in there he launched into a stern lecture about how dangerous it is to be overweight and all the bad things that will happen to me if I don’t lose weight and so forth. I was trying to tell him(and if he'd referred to my chart he would have already known) that I don’t need to be scared or shamed into losing weight. Not only am I already scared out of my wits, I’m scared enough that I’m doing something about it, and I’ve had a modest amount of success at it. But I couldn’t get a word in edgewise and there he was going on and on like I have no idea that being 5’3” and over 200lb is bad for me, and I’m just obliviously sitting my fat ass on the couch eating deep-fried cake. I would have liked to have talked to him about the plateau I was stuck on, and the emotional ups and downs I’d been having where some of my disordered eating seems to be slipping back in, and that as far as I can tell it’s only because of the exercise that I haven’t gained everything back plus extra. I would have appreciated some encouragement, and some constructive advice for getting out of the rut. I got neither.

Then he asked me if I’m married, and whether I’m sexually active. Now, that’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask a patient, because marital status is a major determinant of social supports, and of course you need to know if I need my prescription for birth control refilled. But my level of trust at this point in the visit was so low, that my first thought was, “Oh no, he’s some kind of religious nut who’s going to refuse to provide me with contraception,” and my second thought was, “What, fat chicks can’t get laid unless they roped someone in back when they were skinny?” He also neglected to ask whether I was in a mutually monogamous relationship and whether I thought it would be a good idea to be tested for STDs.

Then he launched into a lecture about the risks of being on the pill for obese women who are getting close to 30 – which I tried to tell him I knew, but he just went on and on anyway, again as if I am oblivious and/or ignorant of the risks of my weight. I had really been hoping we could have a constructive discussion about birth control, because the risks of being on the pill really do concern me and if I have other options (besides abstinence or having a baby every year until menopause) I would be interested in pursuing them. But the way he was going on, I was afraid he wasn't going to give me any contraception at all, so I just asked him to refill my existing prescription because I didn’t feel up to fighting.

At some point we talked about diet, and I got a mini-lecture about not eating fried foods. I was able to interject there that I was in fact making a serious effort to eat a healthy and balanced diet, but I was feeling so frazzled and picked-on by this point that when he asked what I meant by eating healthier, my brain went absolutely blank.

When I couldn’t tell him specifically what I was doing with my diet, he told me to go to Weight Watchers. He refused to listen to me when I told you what an awful time I had with them. And then when he finally let me get a word in edgewise, he dismissed my concerns. "Well I've never heard of that." Like since he's never heard of it, my experience can't possibly have happened.

Here I’ve taken reasonable and effective action on my own to get healthier, and here he is insisting that I participate in a program that’s required by law to say “*results not typical” in all its advertising, and that I already had an awful experience with. I thought he was supposed to be on my team helping me get healthy.

So after my appointment I went and sat in my car and cried for a while, then I went to the pool and swam a bunch of laps and I was still angry, so I got out of the pool and rode the stationary bike and pumped some iron and I was still angry after that, so I went and wrote a strongly-worded letter, and left it with his secretary, asking if we could discuss it when the results of my bloodwork came back.

After telling me that all my bloodwork was in the ideal range, he told me he didn't want to be my doctor any more. That he remembered being in a rush, but didn't remember any of the appointment that way and clearly I need a better doctor than him. Which, evidently, I do, because I don't need a doctor who sees my size and then saves time by kicking in a stupid-fat-person heuristic.

So the question now is, how do I find a new doctor, when that letter will be with my chart if they get my old records. And then maybe that doctor won't like me either.

Who cranked the Hyperbole setting to “11”?

2006-02-07T13:02:00.000-07:00

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."

-Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays (1950), "Outline of Intellectual Rubbish"

I am thinking the blogosphere is ripe with content about the Danish editorial cartoon debacle. I am trying very hard to empathize with the people who are protesting so vigoursly against those cartoons. Are these the same cartoons that put the black man in his place when slavery was legal in North America? Is this akin to the propaganda used so effectively during the world wars to demonize enemies?

What is making this difficult to simply come out on one side or the other is the overarching systemic structure that is surrounding this issue. It is the internal superstructure of culture ideals that may be obfuscating the truth in this feverish series of events?

My first instinct is to decry the violence that is being perpetrated by the protesters. Who cranked their Hyperbole setting to “11”? Good heavens. It is just a cartoon. A cartoon in poor taste indeed, but is it worth threatening the western world with another 9/11 (even considering that the US has perpetrated multiple “9/11’s” as a vital force in its foreign policy over the years)? It just seems all so grossly overblown and out of proportion.

I think a little insight into one of the precursor issues that has not been examined is that these cartoons came out on September 30th of last year. Where was the furor then? Why the almost 4 month lag-time from printing to protest? I’m hypothesizing that when the media initially published the cartoons they were probably just taken for what they are, a visual commentary in bad taste, especially so in the Muslim community. However, once organized religion got its pernicious meat hooks into the cartoons, amazingly now we have uproar and riots in the streets. Fomenting righteous anger requires time and dedication, a system to spread the wrath. The addition of an organized religious pulpit, always an egregiously wonderful event, to whip the masses into the frothing frenzy, once again completes the dark circle of religion. (The religious right in North America does this all the time… Terri Schiavo etc.)

This was not supposed to be my next article on how religion makes the world a worse place to be, but lo and behold! Poof! It has become the much talked about part 2.

Pink - "Stupid Girl"

2006-02-06T18:18:00.000-07:00

Thank you Kameron for pointing this out.

I don't think a music video has ever made me cry like this before.

Fuck the patriarchy. Fuck it.

And why is it that what should be a consensual act of love, is the worst word I can think of for what to do to the patriarchy.

fuck

The Danish Cartoons

2006-02-05T14:33:00.000-07:00

I'll post something more thoughtful sometime later if i get around to it, but in the meantime, I just really, really want to know why people think religious belief is a good thing.

Exposed: The dark underbelly of the beast

2006-02-04T19:10:00.000-07:00

Several Days of Frozen Fog

2006-01-28T12:27:00.000-07:00

It's not fun, but at least it's pretty when it lets up.

More frosty fun if you want to see what I did this morning.

Attempted Cat Blogging

2006-01-28T12:21:00.000-07:00

Lilith is not a cooperative subject.

Canadians: Wating to Exhale...

2006-01-26T23:49:00.000-07:00

With the election of Steven Harper and his conservative ilk Canadians are now anxiously awaiting the new government. The triumphalism of the western media has died down a little, but cries of “the West is in!” are still reverberating with nauseating frequency. I hate to break the news to the West, but really, the West is not in. Nor will it be in until we too have 181 seats (Quebec and Ontario) to fill in the House. The numbers simply do not work.

Being a touch left of center I really hope the yahoos that got Harper elected force him to seriously attempt to move the locus of power westward. I would be happy to gleefully cackle and laugh as the westward shift slams headfirst into a very annoyed and vengeful lot known as the Ontario electorate. It is a different story out east, unlike here(Alberta) in which one could shave a baboons ass and paint it Conservative blue and it would win a seat. So go forth value voters and get the west in… please.

I will credit Harper for one thing. He is not a retard. I project that his policies will remain safely in the middle of the road to please the real locus of power in Canada the Toronto, Montreal, Quebec axis. The problem is that the policies he did put forth for the most part are just wrong.

100 bucks a month for Childcare? That is enough to maybe…maybe… purchase a strong enough cage to lock your child in(while snacking on beer and popcorn of course). Universal daycare that would be affordable to all? Not a whit of sense there.

Toughen up sentencing? It doesn’t work. Look southwards…it doesn’t work. It is the knee-jerk ideas that get the most play, yet are the least likely to work. It is a complex problem it will require a complex, multifaceted solution. Something that works… the gun registry but has the rednecks up in arms is going to be axed. Go figure.

One that Harper is dancing around is the same sex marriage vote. A “free” vote put to the house. That will be a hot potato for Mr. Harper as removing rights from a minority in the Canadian context is usually a big no-no. The furor it would cause might bring the conservative minority government down. I’m guessing it would put an end to the crowing coming from the socially conservative groups as of late. The prattle and utter frippery coming forth on their "re-making Canada" in their conservative image is becoming hard to stomach.

But that is another blog entry unto itself. Also, part 2 of my web investigation into the scary, seedy underside of religion is coming soon.

Adventures in a Small Town in Kansas

2006-01-18T17:57:00.000-07:00

Kansas may not be that far from Alberta, at least in absolute distance, but getting there from here on a plane takes longer, and costs more, than a flight to Paris. As a result, I don't see my dad's side of the family very often. But when my Grandma turned 90, my attendance was pretty much required.

Maybe I'm a horrible person, but I really, really didn't want to go. There were the issues of religion, politics, and sexuality, and whether I should pretend to be something I'm not to keep the peace in the house where I'd be staying. And privacy - there were going to be 20 people staying at my aunt's place, and the house is in a state of renovation where doors are a bit of a rarity. And boredom. I'd never noticed anything to do in that town except go to WalMart, or go to church, and since everybody drives everywhere, I had no idea if there was anything within walking distance that I could escape to for even a few minutes of alone time.

Instead of the horror that I was imagining, this trip turned out to be a really positive learning experience, and an overall pleasant surprise. In fact, I think I fell in love a bit with my Dad's home town.

I think the difference was being there as an adult instead of as a child, and having my brother to show me around. It turns out that practically everything is within walking distance, including a historic and picturesque main street, a beautiful park, the church (a historic site), the college's indoor pool, a fitness centre, and a fantastic coffee shop that I'm still missing. My brother has travelled to something like 13 countries and 30 states, and he says they served him the best latte he's ever had. He wasn't exaggerating. It was that good. And all fair-trade.

And although I didn't get a chance to check it out, apparently this town has an active music, theatre, and art scene too. And beautiful old houses and big trees along the streets. And nobody locks the doors to anything.

Just the town itself gave me a big reality check about America. My mind didn't change about the big political picture; I'm still as pissed off about that as ever. But I think it did me good to be around red-state Americans and interact with them as "just people" instead of some kind of amorphous Bush-voting monolith. And to walk around in a pretty American town and think about how, except for the fact that it's 68 degrees, it's not really that different from home. I think I needed that kind of a reminder.

Pharisee Takeover of My Childhood Church

2006-01-16T19:45:00.000-07:00

As Sardeth alluded, I had a fairly religious upbringing. From my atheist ranting these days, you might suspect that my experience with religion was all horrible and bad, but honestly it wasn't. I don't know whether the church I grew up in changed, and that started my loss of faith, or whether I grew up and started seeing things that were always there, and that started my loss of faith.

My earliest memories of church are tied to what I believe religion can be at its best. I went to a Mennonite Brethren church, and when I was young this was a passionate, activist, thinking kind of church. We sang songs about being called to service, and then we went out and did service. We sponsored refugees, taught English to newcomers, scrounged furniture and clothes for families in need, and made up a good half of the crews for Habitat for Humanity. There were passionate sermons about peace and nonviolence and conscientious objecting. I think someone might have gone to jail for it at one point and was a big hero.

In my childhood, I believed that Christianity was about things like "do unto others" and "whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me". That God made a point of giving everybody gifts and it was our duty to develop and exercise these gifts to the fullest possible.

The Christianity of my childhood was also a thinker's religion, as much as I was capable of thinking about it at that age. I remember our pastor as a serious and passionate intellectual, who could get a fired up over a translation from Hebrew as he could over salvation by the grace of the Lord.

So what happened?

That pastor left my church to pursue writing or studies or something - but in retrospect I wonder about that, because I remember people saying he would be writing more for our denomination's monthly magazine, and I remember every month going looking his writing, and never finding his name in the magazine.

And then, although I don't remember a turnover in my church's membership, the Pharisees started moving in. Or that was how I perceived it. It's equally possible they were always there and I hadn't been old enough to notice.

But about the time we got a new pastor, the focus seemed to change from making the world a better place for everybody, to ensuring our doctrinal purity or some such. Instead of talking about protecting oppressed indigenous peoples, we were asking whether women should be allowed to be pastors (no.). Instead of collecting serviceable used furniture for needy families, we were debating whether it was OK to have rock anthem type songs as a part of our worship service (unresolved to this day according to my dad who still goes there). Instead of ministering to the underprivileged, we were condemning the evils of homosexuality.

And I remember sitting there in my pew thinking, they're talking about me. This all happened about the time I was going through puberty, you see, and besides becoming increasingly conscious of myself as female, I was becoming increasingly conscious of myself as bisexual. And as it became increasingly clear that God didn’t love me, at least not the way he made me, I took my first steps away from faith.

But back to what the heck happened to my church, which was my original point… I have more questions than I have answers, because all this happened half my lifetime ago or more and so I don’t know which memories I can really trust and which ones I might be filling in blanks on.

My church’s change in emphasis definitely came after our old pastor left and we got a new one. But the way the church found a new pastor was, they put out an ad, and then all the potential pastors came and spent time with us, over a period of (as I recall) nearly a year, and then we (or at least, the baptized adult members) voted. It’s not like they were voting for a pig in a poke. They knew what the various candidates stood for. So the seeds of change had to have been there before the new pastor. Did those same seeds of change also actually kick the old intellectual pastor out? Why were the radical do-gooders OK with all this?

I’m wondering if there could have been any connection with the size of the church at the time this all happened. When my church was a bunch of radical do-gooders, it was a small church, possibly the only one of its denomination in the city (maybe one of two). The changes happened a few years after the church had filled up to bursting, budded off a fledgling new congregation that started a new church across town, and filled both of the two resulting churches to the brim. Church mitosis. I don’t think all the do-gooders went across town leaving the Pharisees behind at the old branch, and I don’t think it was the new members of the old branch that brought about the changes, because as I recall, a good proportion of the people who argued most passionately for the new pastor were founding members of the original church.

My suspicion, which I have no idea whether it matches the facts, is that the change was due to the size of the church. When we were small and fighting really bad things bigger than ourselves (the governments of the countries our refugees came from, our own government dragging its heels on refugee applications, etc) we were passionate and cohesive. We were on the side of righteousness, but we were the underdogs and if we didn’t give it our all, it wouldn’t get done. And we were the only ones doing it.

Give us a few years to become prosperous and happy, and we not only became complacent, we lost the romanticism of being the underdogs. It wasn’t David and Goliath any more. More like Georges Laraque and Goliath. And feeding the hungry, visiting the prisoners, and sheltering the destitute was so many people’s job, that it wasn’t really anybody’s job anymore.

What better thing to get fired up about than fighting against an evil, secular world that was out to corrupt the pure undiluted Word of God?

"I just made you up, to hurt myself..."

2006-01-16T13:35:00.000-07:00

Or how Religion makes the world a worse place to be. - Part I.

The interesting thing about religion growing up is how innocuous it seems. I, unlike the other half of woman in comfy shoes, was not raised in a particularly religious manner. For better or worse it gives me a differerent angle to tackle the question of relgion.

I judge Christianity overall as a negative influence in our modern society. I agree with Bertrand Russell and his general analysis of what Christianity has brought to the table. Russell said in his essay ‘Why I am Not a Christian’, “[The church] … is in its major part an opponent still of progress and of improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world…” I see this going on in our society, the constant fight against progress and for the maintenance of the status quo. I look at such organizations as the Promise Keepers or Vote Marriage. Briefly investigating these two organizations reaffirms to me the prescient nature of what Russell has to say about the immorality of relgion.

Taken from the helpful excerpts section on the Canadian Vote Marriage Web page:

"The deconstruction of conjugal marriage in Canada has not been driven by democratic demand. In fact, the ongoing legal “reform” of marriage has been imposed from the top down. There is a sociological divide on the marriage issue, with support for same-sex marriage coming disproportionately from elite sectors of society – the academy, the legal community, the upper echelons of business and government – and from the media."

What is seen here is the reversal of traditional roles in this statement. The religious right (a.k.a zealotry) have take the role of the oppressed minority arguing for “equality and freedom” when in fact they arguing the exact opposite. This is a very scary addition to the Canadian political scene as this brand of rhetoric can be devastating to the body politic. I wrote in my post about Kansas how polarizing and divisive this strategy is. We need to reclaim this argument from them and refute its paradoxical nature, because frighteningly enough, it works.

The Promise Keepers are a whole different brand of Mordor-esque evil scariness. They purport to follow and promote the pious ways of Christ etc. but really are have a radical reactionary agenda mostly against women and their rights. I found a thoughtful and useful anti-PK page *. Gleaned from the website was a quote from the book called The Masculine Journey written by Robert Hicks, and it was a recommended read at a PK rally in Colorado at Folsome Field. Hicks said:

“Possessing a penis places unique requirements upon men before God. . . . We are called to worship God as phallic kinds of guys, not as some sort of androgynous, neutered nonmales, or the feminized males so popular in many feminist enlightened churches. We are told by God to worship Him in accordance with what we are, phallic men.”

It is hard to find a starting place when faced with such overawing stupidity. The politics of gender are more Tricia’s forte but I’ll see what I can do to shed some light on our beloved Promise Keepers. We need to look at their CORE VALUES and then compare them to what they really do. It is illuminating to see such finely tuned propaganda in action. The amount of material here really warrants a separate post, perhaps with additional insight from T. But I’ll put the initial offering out here to wet our collective whistles as we sally onwards towards the dark belly of the beast.

*note: The anti-pk link is not a particularly reliable source. Check here and here for more information on the Masculine Journey. Both sources are also religious in nature but generally affirm that indeed, The Masculine Journey is balony(dangerous balony).

5 weird things about me

2006-01-11T18:30:00.000-07:00

It seems I've been tagged. Twice. Would have done something sooner, except that I was in Kansas (looooong post to follow) and wasn't comfortable checking sites such as HF's where I was.

So five weird things about myself - I said to Sardeth, can you help me with this, I don't think I'm very weird at all, and he's not done laughing yet.

1. I have a love-hate relationship with particular foods. In the last year, I've gone from loathing and refusing anything to do with borscht and sauerkraut, to craving them constantly.

2. I have a BA in psychology, but I work as a database developer/number cruncher for a bunch of accountants.

3. My brother and I are so different, people have trouble believing we're related. I think that when our parents' cells were doing meiosis to form gametes, he got the set of chromosomes that went to one end of the original cell, and I got the other.

Sardeth has stopped laughing and now agrees I'm actually not that weird. But he does suggest,

4. Despite having lived with the Spawn of Satan, my default setting for animals is "awwww".

People to tag:

1. Aisy of Right of Way
2. Braidwood
3. Molly who Saves the Day
4. I was going to tag the Gendergeeks, but I'm too late.

Introducing Lilith

2006-01-10T21:21:00.000-07:00

Does she actually look like she's saying eff you, or is that just my imagination because I happen to know her very, very well?

Miss Muffet's Christmas Present

2006-01-10T21:18:00.000-07:00

In which a fish notices the water

2006-01-10T20:31:00.000-07:00

I work downtown, in an office tower that's connected to half the other office towers, as well as two shopping malls, by a habitrail of pedways. This Christmas, the malls decided to have a joint promotion based on the old Santa Claus song, "He's gonna find out who's naughty or nice".

Kindof a clever theme, especially since these malls are mainly frequented by the adult office workers from the habitrails. I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more, though, if Twisty hadn't introduced me to the notion of women as the sex class, and the world of feminist bloggers hadn't sensitized me to the portrayal of women in general.

So, here's what there was: (click on the pictures to see them larger)

Right then. In case you hadn't already picked up from the displays that women are either sex objects, or cruel bonus-denying bitches, there were the fashion shows and the elves.

This is where the photo-journalism breaks off, because my old digital camera takes so long focusing and doing whatever other bzzt bzzt bzzt things it needs to do, that by the time the picture took, the models were back behind the little curtain. So you'll have to take it on my word that the show included young women parading around in, among other things, fur coats with only lingerie underneath, or a memorable combination of fishnets, heels, and gift wrap. There was a bit of beefcakeage as well, but only one male model vs three, and whereas the women models spent a whole lot of time out there in their non-outfits being hooted at by a group of male workers who had apparently been coming every week once they figured out what would be in the show, the male model just walked out really fast, and high-tailed it back off stage.

And the "elves", in case anybody had still missed out on the virgins vs whores message? Two model-types, a blonde and a brunette. The blonde in a long white (but tight, low-cut, and slit-up-to-here) dress, and the brunette in a tiny red strapless number.

And, just to reinforce the message that women are merchandise to be bought and paid for, this display in a jewelry store window has been pissing me off for months:

Update to give credit where it's due: I knew there had been something rattling around in my head about something I'd read somewhere about fish being aware of water, that both sensitized me to the mall displays and inspired the title of this post, but good luck trying to track it down if that's all you remember. But it was in fact an article by Sour Duck that referenced another article by Nina Turns 40 - thanks Sour Duck for the reminder, and to both you and Nina for the inspiration.

Test Picture Post

2006-01-10T19:47:00.000-07:00

Tree under a streetlight in the parking lot at Superstore one December morning before dawn.

The Shotgun Approach to Politics

2006-01-06T10:06:00.000-07:00

"Canadians have a reason to be nervous. The CPC is moving closer to the position in which the US Republican Party finds itself. If the Conservatives form government, the differences will be difficult to distinguish."

- A quote from The Galloping Beaver: The Albatross Around Harper's Neck

The recent spat of gun violence in Toronto as spurned the major political parties to make pronouncements about Gun control and the justice system as is. The unfortunate part of the problem is that they both miss the point. Looking the CPC record on religion and continuing to the issue of gun control one can identify a theme of shallow, unreflective political policy pandering to the populist sentiments in the West.

The CPC is a scary place to be. Living in Alberta I get to enjoy the full bore white-hot conservative rhetoric straight from its fetid wellspring. The CPC's policies as of late reflect the knee jerk reaction-action politics that often typifies the Right. I should mention here that the proposed Liberal ban of all handguns in Canada is also in the same vein, but with slightly less disastrous consequences.

Let us get this straight for the record. Tougher laws and more stringent sentences will not solve the problem of violence in Toronto. It seems like the simple straight solution but it is not. The case of punitive sentencing and its effectiveness is being played out right now south of our border. The United States incarcerates its people at a rate greater than any other Western nation. What has it achieved? The Human Rights Watch article says it best I think:

"The country[the US] that holds itself out as the "land of freedom" incarcerates a higher percentage of its people than any other country. The human costs — wasted lives, wrecked families, troubled children — are incalculable, as are the adverse social, economic and political consequences of weakened communities, diminished opportunities for economic mobility, and extensive disenfranchisement.”

This is not way we should proceed. It is an obvious failure. Will our media have the gumption to pick up on this issue? I seriously doubt it. Reflective thinking and fact have little to do with what is printed in the media today.

We need more time to think about the issues rather than the soundbytes we are being bombarded with. I think a few of us might realize that the initial starting conditions have a lot to do with the violence that is plaguing our cities. Addressing the initial conditions: poverty, inequality, drugs [etc...] are the keys to sucessfully combating the violence in our cities. Essentially, stopping crime before it starts.

The political leader that espoused this view would be attacked from all sides...being "soft" on crime and what not...but they would have the right answer and my vote.

How Nonlinearity is going to kick our ass

2006-01-02T21:42:00.000-07:00

I am a huge fan of global warming. The current winter in Alberta this year is comparable to the weather experienced out on the West Coast. The mild temperatures and almost zero snow have combined to make me one happy camper. This is all fine and dandy on my small happy scale. The bad news is that our weather is a dynamic, chaotic, intensely nonlinear system. The notorious butterfly effect discovered by Mr. Lorenz is at work here, but I am more interested in what nonlinear goodies our weather has in store for us.

The funny thing about nonlinearity is that we can continue down the same route we have been since the industrial revolution. The small incremental changes that we have brought about and continue to do so seem to have a relatively marginal effect on our weather systems (at least in relation to a ‘dynamic nonlinear episode’ which I am getting to). We scuttle about and thing seem to behave the way they should be. At some point though this can all change. A very drastic change, in the span of 50 years-ish we can see a 10 degree differential in current temperatures across the globe. As one can imagine, a fair amount of higgledy-piggledy would result. The Atlantic Conveyor shutting down, Europe freezing over etc.

Nonlinearity gives no warning, no subtle cues, no anything at all… it just happens. Patterns of weather and ocean currents exhibit extremely turbulent behaviour until a new equilibrium is formed. I’m guessing that this new equilibrium will not be particularly favourable to our current standard of living. The best and most exciting part of the whole situation is that things right now are fine. What we are doing right now is fine. The nonlinearity of our weather plays right into the hands of the capitalist ideal. Short term gain and prosperity trump all. We can safely ignore the science that foolishly preaches the interconnectivity of the systems on our planet. It is good today and it will be good tomorrow…

We’ve already grabbed our ankles, heads firmly in the sand, ass-wiggling gently to and fro. Nonlinearity has just pulled the laces extra-tight on her shiny new jackboots…the wind up and…

More on my Godless Morals

2005-12-29T21:37:00.000-07:00

This is a follow-up to my previous post on the Infinite Perspective Vortex; you should probably read that first.
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In an insightful conversation stemming from Unapologetic Atheist's damn fine post about conventional wisdom, an anonymous commenter quoted the Christian Answers website:

As with all moral issues, our beliefs about our origin determine our attitude. If we believe that we arose from slime by a combination of random chance events and the struggle for survival, it is understandable to say that there is no higher authority, and we can make our own rules.

This, in a nutshell, is the theistic "how can you possibly be a good person without god" straw man.

I mean, yes, there is no higher authority, and we do have to make our own rules, because somebody has to, but does the fact that we must make our own rules mean that we can make those rules be whatever we want? I would argue we can't, for the simple reason that our actions have consequences, and some of those consequences are pain and suffering and death, which we, for some reason that just is, tend not to want to experience.

In my previous post, I said,

My life is the only thing I have, and the only chance I have. The rest of humanity is in the same boat. Up against more than any one of us can handle alone, and without our mommies, or our deities, to get us out of our messes, we're left with the choice of hanging together, or hanging separately.

And that, in a nutshell, is where I get my morals from. I know that I'm no more or less special than anybody else. I don't want anybody to take away my one chance to exist and to flourish, because even if it means nothing in the grand scheme of things, it means everything to me. I don't want anybody else's chance taken away either.

Using that as a basis for moral reasoning, it turns out that my morals end up sometimes identical, and sometimes less, and sometimes even more, exacting, than the morals of the Abrahamic traditions.

For example, murder, stealing, lying - all wrong, because they hurt people.

When it comes to sexuality, there's no question my morals would be a bit depraved in the opinion of the Christian Right. I don't have some kind of omnipotent, omniscient being obsessing over what I do with my crotch and threatening me with eternal punishment if I violate any number of arbitrary rules and double standards. As a result, I'm free do do pretty much whatever I want, with whoever I want, as long as it's safe, sane, consensual, and fun - again, if it's not SSCF, it's hurting people, and that's wrong.

On the other hand, there are some areas where my beliefs are more stringent and more demanding than the Abrahamic religions, and that's where it comes to social and environmental responsibility.

For example, I'm not aware of any commandment not to buy clothes made in sweatshops, but I feel strongly that supporting abuse and exploitation of other human beings is seriously immoral.

Similarly, while Christians have been known to justify desecration (and I used that word on purpose) of the environment because God gave them dominion over the earth, in my opinion damaging the environment is, again, seriously immoral, because that is everybody's children's future we're wrecking. If you're a Christian, you might believe it doesn't matter because the Rapture is coming soon, but if you're a bit more reality-oriented, you realize that people have been believing the Rapture will be during their lifetimes for close to 2000 years now, and so maybe we should get our acts together in case we have to wait another 2000 years.

Here's where things get difficult: my godless morality has made my sex life morally A-OK. But in other areas I really am a terrible sinner.

There is only one store I know of that carries clothes I like, in my size. I have no idea if these clothes are made in sweatshops. It would be easy to research and find out, but I haven't done it. Why? Because I don't want to have to stop shopping there.

Also, until recently, I owned a car, and sometimes I would take the long way home for the simple reason that driving is enjoyable. I also buy the regular vegetables rather than the organic, eat meat and dairy, and don't recycle nearly as much as I could.

In conventional, western, theist moralities, maybe these things don't seem so bad. So I'm not a very good hippie. So what? But the fact of the matter is, by doing these apparently-minor things, I'm contributing to abuse, exploitation, and the depletion and destruction of our ecosystems and non-renewable resources. This is a really seriously bad thing, way worse than any of the various ridiculous sexual and gender-role taboos I may have violated. By failing to behave with proper respect for the environment and for social justice, I am adding straws to the camel's back, and I am letting down everybody on Earth, and all of our future descendents.

That's a pretty hard rap to take. What's worse, and Richard touched on this in his response to Part I, is that I really have no way out of this enormous responsibility and guilt. If I were a Christian, I could go pray for forgiveness and that would be that. I would know that even if life on Earth is kindof sucky, everything will be made fair later and the good people who are being harmed by my choices will get to go to heaven. No such luck for me. I can either live right or live knowing the harm I'm doing.

And I have a feeling I still haven't sold this to the theists.

Happy New Year?

2005-12-26T23:03:00.000-07:00

The Marines are forced to travel four hours out of their way to avoid a particularly dangerous highway between TQ [Camp Taqaddum in Iraq] and Fallujah. “The most powerful army in the history of the world,” one soldier told me, “cannot keep a two mile stretch of road open.”
From: Improvised, Explosive, & Divisive – by Tom Bissell in the January 2006 of Harper’s Magazine.

Happy holidays, I guess. Is it not just like Harper’s to drop a whopper of poignant commentary just in time for the New Year? The two articles on Iraq provide a chilling commentary on the lumbering atrocity that is the occupation of Iraq. Let us make a few resolutions this year.

First and foremost let us not trust the media. A large part of the media today has a vested interest in maintaining the current blood filled status quo. They, as any information source, must be regarded with the utmost skepticism. Pay attention to the facts the media chooses to report and ask your own questions. Your questions and insights are just as valid as the so-called experts we see every night. Question everything; a critical mind challenges all assumptions. Check their facts. Check your facts. Examine your own bias, recognize the easy ideological out, and face the assorted unpleasant truths that are out there…

I step from my soapbox… I have no patriarchal finger waggling left at the moment, but for heavens sake we have to do something about our society. We must awaken from our dogmatic slumber and struggle with our problems, fight for what is right in the world. Decide that the status quo is not enough. Vault past the ingrained indifference and decadence.

Howard Zinn said: “We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.”

For the New Year, it is time to stop the war. Stop the killing and end the slaughter. It is the children who inherit our hatreds, our war making, and our prejudices. The violence we do unto each other knows no innocents; none are spared as the bloody tocsin of war continues to beat.

Stop the war.

This is awesome

2005-12-22T12:37:00.000-07:00

An O'Reilly Factor Christmas Tale

'twas the night before holiday
and there at fox news
not a sentient was stirring
neither brain cells, nor clues

Go read the rest.

Infinite Perspective Vortex: Morals in a Materialist World View

2005-12-19T19:44:00.000-07:00

This was supposed to be a submission to the God or Not Carnival on Morality, but I'm a little late. A number of the theist articles reminded me why I wanted to write this piece, in particular Maureen at Dying in Christ, who wrote about The Utter Depravity of "Human" Morality, and the Mathetes post on Evolutionary Ethics - I think it's really important to get the atheist perspective out there, and with as much passion as theists have for their moralities. So this is my best shot.
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I remember the time I realized I was going to have to be an adult whether I liked it or not. I was in third-year university, in an honours program that I just couldn't hack, and I knew I had bitten off more than i could chew. There were several courses I was going to have to withdraw from right away, or else fail them, and if I withdrew from any courses, or failed any, I would be kicked out of the honours program.

And I remember sitting there filling out the withdrawal forms and thinking, my mom can't write me a note and make it all better with the teachers any more. I felt very alone, because at the same time as all the academic sh!t was hitting the fan, I was going through a deep depression which eventually left me without religious faith. (And yes, the depression was probably a lot of why I couldn't hack the academics) And so there I was, my parents couldn't fix things for me and God wasn't there, so I would have to deal with it and take responsibility myself.

At the time, it was a sad, scary experience, and I have the impression that theists imagine a life without faith to always be in that sad, scary, lonely place. I won't deny that it can be.

In the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, the worst way to be executed was to be thrown into the Infinite Perspective Vortex - the victim would see, for an instant, just how vanishingly insignificant they were in the face of the entire universe, and the terror of it would kill them. Zaphod Beeblebrox avoids being killed by the Vortex because (iirc) he gets transported into a parallel universe whose sole purpose is to bring him into existence. The Vortex simply confirms his belief that he is the centre of the universe.

Given the choice, I'd rather live in a universe that was created for me and my species by some benevolent entity, but I haven't found any evidence that this is the case, and I see plenty of evidence daily that it is not the case (not the purpose of this post or I'd elaborate).

So here we are, utterly insignificant in the eyes of the universe, if the universe could be personalized enough to have eyes, which it can't be. The only thing we are really sure we have is our own individual lives, and our collective lives as a society. Which have the unenviable position of counting for fuck-all in the grand scheme of things, while simultaneously being all we've got.

I imagine I still haven't sold naturalistic atheism to the theists at this point.

But here's the thing: My life is the only thing I have, and the only chance I have. The rest of humanity is in the same boat. Up against more than any one of us can handle alone, and without our mommies, or our deities, to get us out of our messes, we're left with the choice of hanging together, or hanging separately.

And that, in a nutshell, is where I get my morals from. I know that I'm no more or less special than anybody else. I don't want anybody to take away my one chance to exist and to flourish, because even if it means nothing in the grand scheme of things, it means everything to me. I don't want anybody else's chance taken away either.

My life's goal is far from heroic. I have no delusions that I will ever be a Gandhi or a Mother Theresa, I don't have what it takes to go out and try to save the world. But I do hope that my life can touch other lives in small ways and make them better, and at the same time I feel that I have an obligation to further the flourishing of humanity worldwide in other small ways - respecting the earth so we have somewhere to continue flourishing (or at least trying to); opposing tyrrany; doing what I can to help people in need.

I can't explain why I believe existence is better than non-existence, or define flourishing any better than I can define pornography (I know it when I see it), maybe those are my articles of faith, I'm not sure.

All that I am really sure about (as much as I can be sure, which isn't much) is that while the universe doesn't, and can't, care, the rest of the human race just might. If I can make life better for even one person, it may not matter to the universe, but it matters to that person, because their life is all they have.

My worldview can be bleak and cold and often lonely, I won't deny that. Scary too. But that's life as a grown-up. Freedom and the responsibility that comes with it, are scary things. But I wouldn't ever trade them in.
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Part II of this rant is available here.

Stream of consciousness post on Christmas

2005-12-19T19:00:00.000-07:00

When the only time you see the sun is if it's at the exact right angle through the skylight in the mall when you escape your windowless office for lunch, you need something to celebrate or you'll go mad. Christmas is what I grew up with, so regardless of what I believe any more, or the fact that my idea of celebrating lately is to put on a funny hat and get roaring drunk with my office mates, I call the thing I do Christmas.

I don't go for Baby Jesus and I don't go for Santa, but I've had my lights up on my balcony (and turned on) since we set our clocks back an hour, the excuse being, of course, to ward off the darkness. But once it gets "appropriate" - which is to say, the rest of my street is an epileptic's no-go zone, I start putting out more shiny stuff.

And I cook! It's nice to have an excuse, once a year, to give people stuff. I suspect people would find it weird if I started bringing them homemade candy at random times of the year.

It pains my hardnosed little rationalist heart to say it, but at least based on my own experience, there is some kind of Christmas Spirit to be gotten into. And for some reason, making (and regularly sampling!) candy whose calories could feed entire families, while listening to EuroRadio's 12-hour Christmas music marathon just puts me in a really good mood.

Even when I started questioning whether a federally-funded radio station should be broadcasting 12 hours of religiously-themed programming, I stayed in a good mood. I decided that if I can celebrate Christmas without believing in any of it except for the excuse to have a party and give people stuff, then there's no reason to ban the really beautiful art that has been created over the centuries to celebrate the made-up occasion. Bach's Christmas Oratorio can kick Rudolph's ass any day.

Even when I discover I'm out of tinfoil right when I'm supposed to be pouring hot fudge into a tinfoil-lined pan, go to the grocery store for more, discover my wallet is not in my pocket, go home, go back to the store, buy the tinfoil, come home, and realize I'm also running low on sugar, I feel all merry and bright and contemplate with amusement that I really do deserve to be boiled in my own Christmas pudding with a stake of holly through my heart. Good thing I'm not making any Christmas pudding.

Incidentally, my reason for getting my butt back to blogging: I'm avoiding this:

After listening to the EuroRadio broadcast, the main thing I'm thinking is, there are all sorts of other cultures that I don't know nearly enough about, and that must have equally beautiful artistic traditions surrounding their high holy days, and one thing i would really like to see is similar broadcasts for Hannukah and Eid and Diwali and Kwanzaa and Solstice and Chinese New Year and, and, and...

And I wouldn't mind more excuses to cook and eat yummy things either.

Jesus Christ! Under attack by gasp the Left!

2005-12-13T22:17:00.000-07:00

First of all a rousing ‘AMEN!’ for our ever so vacuous right wing media establishment; thank you for grapping hold a trivial story and blowing it completely out of proportion. The evil forces of ivory tower political correctness set want once again to snatch Christmas and Christmas Trees from our vocabulary… forever! Happy Holidays and holiday trees shall be our bane. Was Christ not nailed to the cross so we can celebrate his sacrifice by the sacred edifices of gifting and regifting? The kind of hoopla we get from Christians being ‘persecuted’ at this time of the year is predictable as it is annoying.

In a multicultural society there is nothing wrong with saying Happy Holidays or having a holiday tree. There is no shame in saying Merry Christmas or having a Christmas tree either. Acknowledging that other cultural practices exist other than our glutton based materialistic purchasing festival is a good thing. What we do not need is more agonized commentary on such non-issue (other than of course the blogosphere...we eat this kinda stuff up).

In any case, let us just try to put our fears to rest that the Christian faith (as it is) and Christmas etc… will probably survive this malevolent attack upon its very core (again). Please take your fingers off the panic button take a deep breath and…

Happy Holidays

The Unsexy Left

2005-12-09T11:13:00.000-07:00

“The grandstanding leaders never deliver, their fury mounts and mounts, and nevertheless they turn out every two years to return their right-wing heroes to office for a second, a third, a twentieth try. The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get the government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly in everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists: receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated that ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.”

A prescient quote from Thomas Frank’s book, “What’s the matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.”

I heard Thomas Frank lecture on Conservatism and the idea of the backlash that is gripping America on Alternative Radio a couple of Saturdays ago. I work in the same building which houses the main bookstore for the University. Therefore if I listen to someone really interesting on the radio, there is a pretty good chance I can find his work in said bookstore. This nefarious spatial arrangement has serious negative consequences for my finances to say the least. However, I think that it is better to be well read and poor than ignorant and rich (if I repeat that enough, I’m sure I’ll believe it sooner or later).

Back to the book now, it was a great read. By great read of course I mean it made me angry at the current state of political affairs. Chomsky is always good for that, Zinn as well. It was a righteous fiery anger that had me agitated every time I picked up Frank’s book. Frank’s work also got me thinking about the politics of the left and what we have allowed them to become.

I think, to a certain extent, that the Left just is not sexy anymore. I’m not sure what happened but when people start voting conservative to vote against the establishment something is way wrong. The idea that the right-wing of today represents the people just blows me away. Yet, as Frank observes, it is exactly what is happening.

Living in Canada I can see the same sort of polarization creeping into our debates. It threatens much of the political fabric of our society. It is an old political fact in Canada is that you campaign from center-left and then run the country center-right. It concerns me when the paradigm might change to campaigning from center-right and then running the country from further right of that.

Next after a little goodness from Chomsky's most recent interview book, I intend to read "The Ingenuity Gap"by Thomas Homer-Dixon. It should sit well with the other 'End of the world' book-binge I have been on as of late. I cite Ronald Wright's "A Short History of Progress" and Joseph Tainter's remarkable "The Collapse of Complex Societies" as fine examples of the excellent work that has been done in this field.

Waaah-mbulances not covered under universal health care

2005-12-07T21:30:00.000-07:00

Just an note in case there's anybody who checks this blog to see if there's new stuff ever (I don't know how I find that out, and if anybody is reading and knows and wants to tell me, I'd be thrilled!), I wanted to let any possible readers out there know, we'll be back soon.

Last Tuesday, Sardeth and I were simultaneously hit by some kind of nasty bug and we're just getting back to being able to sit up and take interest in things beyond the well-beaten path between the sofa and the toilet.

We hope to be posting more often (at all) soon.

Because fat people just deserve to suffer

2005-11-28T21:09:00.000-07:00

Some obese Britons now ineligible for paid hip, knee replacements

Obese people in East Suffolk, England, will be denied hip and knee replacements paid for by the government.

New rules from the National Health Service say joint replacements will not be performed unless a patient has a body mass index of less than 30 and "conservative means have failed to alleviate the patient's pain and disability."

I'm trying really hard to figure out how this can mean anything but that fat people deserve to suffer.

Here's the thing about joint replacement surgery: it only becomes an option when the joint is so severely damaged that it can't be repaired. And you know what, damaged joints, get this, hurt. A lot. I would really like the people who formulated this asinine policy to explain to the people affected how they are supposed to lose weight when they're in so much pain they can barely walk, let alone get regular exercise.

Minor administrative note

2005-11-28T20:57:00.000-07:00

Over the next few days I intend to update the links section. I'm going to take out the classifications because it just doesn't work that way. While there are some blogs that are single-issue, many cross all sorts of boundaries and defy classification. I need to get off my butt, add all the cool stuff I've been reading lately, and then get it all into alphabetical order. I hope to get it done... sometime before Christmas! Or during the time off?

Toeing the line.

2005-11-28T20:33:00.000-07:00

To toe-ring or not to toe-ring…a question of gender acceptance.

I said in my last post that I would tackle something a little less serious this time blogging around. The ugly state of the ‘socioeconomicpolitical’ landscape can fester for the time being. Back to the issue of toe-rings; really a non-issue at first glance. The problem being simply, I am male. Men do not wear toe-rings. End of sentence, full stop, termination of debate. What society says is pretty clear on the matter. I’ve been wearing my toe-rings now for 14 years and what a gauntlet I have run.

It of course starts with the stares… the incredulous looks. What is going on here? That is not the worst of it. It is my nature to be polite, *very* polite. Apparently as a man, that is another strike against me. The question that I have polled my friends about on his initial impression is quite simple. “Is he gay?” Since when has extra ornamentation coupled with a civil attitude point to sexual orientation?

Of course, gender identity, and societal norms are all called into effect in this situation. I realize that but I also see certain standards that are appropriate for women, but not for men. Women are ‘supposed’ to adorn themselves with all sorts of shiny beads and gaudy baubles. Men…well… they can wear a watch and maybe a necklace if they are lucky. Professionally for men, the open toed shoe or sandal is a no-go. If we are not sporting the jacket, tie, loafers etc combo, we are not taken seriously or respected. I’m not really much for the status quo anyways, but at times not being part of the herd is rather disquieting.

I’m thinking that a more relaxed attitude towards the fashion rules for both sexes would be a good thing. Women just seem to have a better grasp on bringing the established clothing trends together and making it work. Men I think are still gripped in the ‘manly’ image and censure those who are on the fringes of acceptable male fashion.

Thank you, HR, for wasting my time

2005-11-28T19:53:00.000-07:00

My employer is on some kind of employee wellness kick for the last year or so. For the most part, I like what they're doing. For example, they piloted flex time and compressed work weeks, and are now offering it more widely to help employees with work/life balance issues. The benefits are good; the union just negotiated a way improved medical/dental package; and every once in a while they have casual week that you don't have to pay into the social committee/united way/other charity fund for - it's supposed to encourage you to go for a brisk walk on your lunch break if you don't have to wear a suit. Pretty enlightened for the behemoth entity it is.

Unfortunately not all the initiatives pan out. Take, for example, the series of seminars they've arranged with the Doctors' Speakers Bureau - today's topic was Natural Solutions to Headache Pain. The blurb said, "Millions of Americans suffer from chronic headaches. This results in millions of doctors visits, millions of lost work days, and billions of dollars in medical bills. This presentation was designed to educate the audience about the different types of headaches, what causes them, how to prevent them, and safe, natural and effective alternatives to treating them." I was keen to go to this (and my boss was keen for me to go too) because I am a chronic headache sufferer and it definitely impacts my work.

I should admit up front I don't have a really positive view of so-called "alternative medicine". As far as I am concerned, there are treatments that scientific evidence shows they work, and then there are treatments without that kind of evidence. The former, regardless of whether it was first invented by a scientist in a lab, or a shaman in a sweat lodge, is real medicine. I don't really see why anybody would want an alternative to that, but maybe it's just me.

But I felt I went in with a fairly open mind. I was hoping for 'can't hurt, might help' type stuff I hadn't heard of (or had forgotten about) for headache self-care, things to try when you first start having a migraine aura besides taking hardcore drugs, or some relaxation exercises to try if you feel a tension headache coming on. Nice basic stuff like that, that would have a good chance of improving both my productivity at work, and my overall quality of life.

What I got was an infomercial on acupuncture, with a major de-emphasis on "info". The speaker, a local acupuncturist, was, I'm sure, a very nice and caring person, but she was completely unqualified to be giving the presentation. Her public speaking was at the level of a moderately gifted eighth grader. She finished every sentence like it was a question? You know? And she ran out of content? After ten minutes? And it was supposed to have been, you know, an hour presentation? So after she ran out of content, people just asked her non-critical questions for the rest of the hour.

A meta-analysis of trials of acupuncture for headache pain (1) found "Overall, the existing evidence suggests that acupuncture has a role in the treatment of recurrent headaches. However, the quality and amount of evidence is not fully convincing. There is urgent need for well-planned, large-scale studies to assess effectiveness and efficiency of acupuncture under real life conditions." Apparently an erratum was published in a later issue, but I haven't been able to find the text online to find out of the error caused their conclusions to be too generous or too strict, or if it was something more minor.

The bottom line for me is, at the end of it, all I had to take home was the option of a long course of therapy, twice a week over several weeks, and then regular maintenance care, at over $50/appointment, which might help a bit as long as I would make changes in the rest of my life too. And I gave up an hour of time I could have been using to get shit done to hear about it.
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1 - Melchart D,Linde K, Fischer P, White A, Allais G, Vickers A, Berman B, (1999). Acupuncture for recurrent headaches: a systematic review of randomized controlled trials. Cephalalgia. 1999 Nov;19(9):779-86; discussion 765

stupid dreams

2005-11-24T23:00:00.000-07:00

Every night this week, I've had the same dream. I dream that I'm lying in bed staring at the ceiling worrying about stuff and wishing I could get to sleep. The only way I know that I'm actually asleep is that I wake up and find myself doing guess what. It's not even one of those cool things where I could ask myself well, what if I'm going to wake up from what I'm doing right now and find out it's a dream too, because the only thing I do when I'm dreaming is lie restlessly awake and worry about things. If I expand my stupid-dream repertoire to include blogging though?

The downside is I'm about as tired as if I hadn't slept at all and it's an effort to string a sentence together and there's all this stuff I want to write about but I don't think I can until I get some sleep. waah. oh well.

Birkenstocks Cause Feminism: Causality in Odd Directions

2005-11-18T21:58:00.000-07:00

A minor example of odd causality in my life: Rather than develop a taste for beer while watching hockey games, I developed a taste for hockey as a result of the fact that it's an opportunity for beer. And now it's generalizing over to football. I swear I will purchase a sword for the sole purpose of falling on it should I discover I also enjoy drinking beer and watching baseball or golf.

And the major example: Birkenstocks cause feminism.

At one time I was one of those tough young women who didn't need feminism because I had certainly never been stepped on by the patriarchy, because I was too good to let the turkeys get me down. Feminism, to me, was just for poor women, and women in developing nations.

And at the same time I had this incredible shoe fixation. It was partially because I was into dancing, and of course if you dance you need shoes, and you're always searching for that pair that's exactly right, and all the imperfect ones just accumulate. The other part was that shoes tied really heavily into my gender identity. As a fat chick, there really wasn't (still isn't, although it's slowly getting better) much I could find to wear that would express my femininity beyond "liker of sequined appliqued sack-dresses", and the only thing I could find to wear that said vixen like I wanted it to was shoes. Sexy, high-heeled shoes. Ankle-breaking, stilletto, fuck-me shoes. I took a lot of pride that I could walk (and run backwards and spin) my fat ass around in scary heels around the wobbling skinny women.

The fall came when all the running around in nasty heels caused an old knee injury to get worse and worse, eventually requiring surgery. And after the surgery I couldn't wear heels any more, because I'd lost the muscle tone necessary to keep my balance, not to mention that I couldn't handle the strain it put on my reconstructed knee. I took it really hard, and spent a lot of time and money trying to find femmey shoes that I could also walk in. Or wearing ones I couldn't really walk in, and taking a lot of pain medicine. And I thought this was OK!

I got my Birkenstocks, if you'll believe this, to please a man. Sardeth had to wheedle at me for close to two years before I'd even consider it (he thinks Birks are hott). But I was not going to wear ugly shoes and that was final. When we finally went to the Birkenstock store (I caved in to shut him up and because he was paying) I did some hardcore distancing myself from anything hippie. I wore a frilly little sundress and sparkly heels and lots of whiny attitude, as if the sandals were going to send butch-rays up my legs and grow out my armpit hair or something.

And then the day the Birkenstocks finally broke in, I was like Saul on the road to Tarsus. What the fuck had I been doing to myself and why and for whom?

Since B-day, I've re-evaluated a lot of stuff about my self, my identity as a woman, my actual place in society as opposed to my ideal place, how much worse it is for women who didn't get the breaks I did, and come out at least an intermediate patriarchy blamer (I hope).

The Case for Torture

2005-11-18T21:34:00.000-07:00

This is an excerpt from a CBC news documentary on the torture that the United States continues to engage in. The weasel-ese this gentlemen spews speaks volumes of the moral currency of the US. How long before the rest of the United States sponsored terrorism comes to light. How long must the injustice be doubled…then redoubled a thousand times before people are moved to act? I’ve got nothing else on this one at the moment. How a purportedly ‘civilized’ nation can still unabashedly raise its head and trumpet its values?

** I've decided to edit out the rest of the post. Just the first paragraphs of the interview will be in this version. I have also edited out last sentence of my introduction because on second reflection, it was too venomous. It is just very frustrating to see the great potential of a nation used to cause so much pain and injustice. **

JOHN YOO INTERVIEW

Gillian Findlay: I WANT TO GO BACK TO THE MEMO YOU WROTE IN AUGUST 1ST, THE INFAMOUS AUGUST 1ST MEMO. CAN YOU GIVE ME THE CONTEXT FOR THAT? WHY AT THAT PARTICULAR TIME WAS THERE A DESIRE –
John Yoo: I can't talk about that.
Gillian Findlay: WHY NOT?
John Yoo: Because it's classified.
Gillian Findlay: YOU CAN'T JUST EXPLAIN, GIVE A BROAD CONTEXT AS TO –
John Yoo: About why it was asked?
Gillian Findlay: WHY, YES, EXACTLY.
John Yoo: No, I can't.
Gillian Findlay: CAN YOU TELL ME IF IT HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH Mr. AL QAHTANI, WHO WAS BEING DETAINED AT –
John Yoo: I can't, although if you look at the details of the memos, the memos that have to do with people held at Guantanamo Bay are a different question, right? Those were handled by a Defence Department working group in the spring of 2003, I believe. And this is much earlier, this is over a year earlier, almost a year earlier.
Gillian Findlay: SO CAN YOU THEN SAY IT WASN'T RELATED TO Mr. AL QUAHTANI? WE'RE TRYING TO UNDERSTAND IF THERE WAS A LINK THERE.
John Yoo: I can't.
Gillian Findlay: YOU CAN'T?
John Yoo: No.
Gillian Findlay: THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN TELL US?
John Yoo: It's all, it's classified. If the government decides to release it, then I could talk about it. But they just, they have not.
Gillian Findlay: WHEN YOU WERE ASKED TO LOOK AT THIS QUESTION, YOU ENDED UP WITH A DEFINITION OF TORTURE EQUIVALENT IN INTENSITY TO THE PAIN ACCOMPANYING SERIOUS PHYSICAL INJURY SUCH AS ORGAN FAILURE, IMPAIRMENT OF BODILY FUNCTION OR EVEN DEATH. DO YOU NOT THINK WHEN YOU SAY THINGS LIKE THAT, YOU WRITE THINGS LIKE THAT IN THE CONTEXT THAT YOU WERE WRITING, THAT THAT OPENS THE DOOR TO THE KINDS OF ABUSE THAT WE HAVE SEEN?
John Yoo: You have to figure out what the law says and again, I think there is an important difference between law and policy. And so I think there is a legal question that has to be answered and I think it's a hard question. Don't get me wrong. What the word "torture" means when it's undefined by federal statutes is a hard question. It's never, that statute had never been interpreted by the executive branch, by courts, prosecutors, by anybody.So I think it's a hard legal question. That's a different question in my mind than about whether, what kinds of policies ought to be drafted and shaped within the law. And I think factors like, will there be likely abuses to occur or not are certainly things policy makers should think about when they decide what policies to adopt. But it should not, it seems to me, change the legal analysis or the legal conclusion about what Congress has and has not prohibited.
-------

I need to find a lighter topic for next post.

TV makes me sad

2005-11-18T21:26:00.000-07:00

And this is surprising why?

First up: What Not to Wear

I know that at one time I liked this show. I seem to have retreated into some kind of dour, hairy-legged humourless feminism coupled with that stereotypical leftie hatred of the rich or something, because all I could do this time was yell at the screen and threaten to beat those bitches Stacy and Clinton up and yell at the poor victim to resist patriarchal authority by not wearing heels if she doesn't want to. I mean, pretending a bra strap is a necklace isn't cool, but neither is trying to teach for an eight-hour day in fuck-me pumps. And of course by the end of the show the poor dupe is thanking everybody and talking about how beauty is something she has to think about every day and pay attention to. Compare and contrast that to her at the beginning saying something like, "At school I have a dozen kids who are several grades behind who are counting on me, and what I look like isn't nearly as important as looking after those kids." Consider the patriarchy blamed. Suggested music selection, Nine Inch Nails, Happiness in Slavery.

Then a Fifth Estate Documentary about American war crimes in Iraq. Sardeth is writing about that.

And, during the commercials, back to TLC and the Ballroom Boot Camp, where some asshole trash talked a fat chick until she quit. Having been a passionate ballroom dancer for years, I know perfectly well that fat chicks, no matter how good they are at dancing, never win competitions*. The guy who was supposed to be the trainer knew it too, and decided he'd rather demoralize her out of the running than be associated with a fat chick. Asshole.

* - not that I was ever good enough that it mattered to me speficically!

Random DogBlogging

2005-11-17T23:33:00.000-07:00

Miss Muffet

And now for something completely different:

2005-11-17T22:38:00.000-07:00

A free lecture and string quartet performance by Dr. Clifford Will, professor of physics at Washington University, and the Borealis String Quartet. The topic was, "Was Einstein Right?".

It started out looking like it was going to be a disappointment, because, despite being a free lecture, you were supposed to pre-register. Except that only some of the advertising said anything about pre-registering, and the pre-registrations sold out, and the advertising we'd seen wasn't the advertising that said anything about pre-registering, so we almost didn't get in. Fortunately they opened up the balcony of the auditorium to make room for all us extra people.

The string quartet performance that started it out was lovely. Mozart to begin with, and then a brand new work commissioned speficically for the occasion by the Canadian Association of Physicists. The piece was called "From Water to Ice", and was written by Aaron Hryciw, a PhD student in condensed matter physics at the U of A, who also plays violin and bassoon in the University Symphony Orchestra, and studies composition with Malcolm Forsyth.

"From Water to Ice" gave me The Shivers. It's a horrible pun and I'm really sorry, but it's true.

And then the lecture was a lot of fun as well. The format was essentially, general and special relativity predict, to an insane number of decimal places, X. Due to all sorts of really cool technology, we've measured, to an insane number of decimal places, and gotten... X. Over and over again. There wasn't much that I hadn't already read in popular science stuff, but the combination of hard data, pretty pictures of gravitational lensing, and Dr. Will's enthusiasm and sense of humour, took me back to the best of my intro physics days and gave me a good case of the darn it why didn't I's.

The coolest thing Dr. Will talked about was LISA - the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna - image from NASA. LISA is three satellites that will be put into orbit around the sun, in a free-floating equilateral triangle 5 million km to a side, and, if they can get the thing to work, they'll be able to detect the distortions caused by gravity waves as they pass through. How hot is that?!

And then, if that weren't already a perfect evening, we went upstairs to RATT and caught the hockey game about halfway through the third period, during which time the Oilers came back from losing 3-1 to winning 6-5 in overtime. My poor throat - as if I hadn't done enough screaming at NIN yesterday.

I hope tonight's game will be a turning point for the Oilers season. I often feel that what happens to them is, they start to lose, and then they seem to get upset with themselves and play poorly, and keep on losing, often for several games. Playing so hard tonight and coming from behind like that proves to me that they have it in them to do it. I just hope they've proved it to themselves as well.

"You're the crazy fuckers who broke the barricade" - Trent Reznor

2005-11-17T13:28:00.000-07:00

Last night: Nine Inch Nails with Queens of the Stone Age and Death from Above 1979 at Rexall Place. Fuck yeah!

I was a bit disappointed that DFA was on first, because hearing they were going to be there is what pushed me over the edge from "tickets are too expensive" to "damn the torpedoes". So of course they had to deal with the half-empty stadium and the crowd that wasn't warmed up yet. Plus we got there a bit late, so we missed some of their set, which made me sad.

I hadn't heard of Queens of the Stone Age before, but they put on a good show and I might have to pick up their CD.

And of course NIN... They played some of their new stuff, which I wasn't expecting to like, since I hadn't liked The Fragile, but it was good stuff. Not the sound I remember from the olden days, more guitar and stuff, but probably going to have to buy With Teeth too... I'm going to be poor. And they played things from The Fragile, and maybe I was on crack for not liking it, because it rocked. And they played lots of old stuff too. Closer, of course, and I nearly shook my bootie off. And Head like a Hole. And the fuckers did their sad songs too and I lost half of my makeup during "Something I Can Never Have" and the rest of it during "Hurt." OK I didn't actually lose it, it just went from my eyes into stripes on my cheeks.

The one disappointment for me when it comes to what songs they did, is they didn't do "Heresy." Reason #1 for going was because I wanted to scream "God is dead and no one cares" with a whole stadium of people. I complained about it to our friend who we brought along, and she said, well, maybe they didn't want to offend anybody. I'm still a little blown away by that one. I mean, self-mutilation and "I want to fuck you like an animal" are OK, but a little "God is dead" is not? WTF? And I mean honestly, since when did Mr. Reznor worry about offending people? But they didn't play it. waah.

Oh, and about that barricade. I guess the people down in the pit got a little out of hand, because they did in fact manage to break the steel barricade keeping them back from the stage, and the show had to stop until they could get it fixed. Which is what prompted TR to tell us not to boo, because we were the crazy fuckers that broke the barricade in the first place. People got a little silly during the break, starting cheers like "Lets go Oilers" for the hell of it, and I'm just glad they could get it fixed and go on with the show, because it could have gotten pretty ugly if they'd had to stop.

Bottom line though: awesome show. Well worth the price of admission, even without Heresy.

Why the Left has such a rough time...(part 2)

2005-11-15T12:21:00.000-07:00

Three cheers for Canada’s Globe and Mail! One of the best subscriptions, next to Harper’s, I have the pleasure to receive. The Saturday focus section is always a favorite of mine and I am culling these facts from the article entitled Free (market) Agent. This article is about Michael Walker and his impending retirement from the Fraser Institute, a radical Right wing think tank. Some of Walker’s greatest hits include:

-Calculations of ‘tax-freedom day’.
-Privatization of nationalized industry.
-Privatization of the delivery of government services
-Reduction of the overall role of government in the economy
-Reduction of Red Tape
-Measurement of provincial education performance with ‘report cards’
-Measurement of hospital waiting lists
-Measurement of government ‘interference’ to rank ‘economic freedom’ in 127 countries.

Walker’s personal motto: “If it matters, measure it.” Now on the surface, the idea makes a great deal of sense. Econometrics can be valuable tools in gauging how our society doing in general. The downside is that studies like those in the list above readily become “factual ammunition” for the causes of the far Right here in Canada. Statistics are great, but the real magic is in how you present them to the public for their consumption. The Fraser Institute excels at taping the populist sentiments withing the Canadian populace. The econometric statistics are then used to bully, bash and coerce the public and government to a further right of center position.

Who would not like to see Tax-freedom day retreat a couple of months? Who would not like to see a more efficient Government? These contentious topics are presented on high to the public. Unfortunately, or fortunately if media distortion is your game, the topical analysis is presented with only one solution. The solution, of course, is the right-wing prescription for good governance. Backed with figures now! Charts! More importantly with no debate, no dissent and no choice on the issue at hand. Okay, the possibility for debate is there, we do live in a state with democratic tendencies. However the amount of public discussion is small, and dissent is hard to foment. Topping it all off the reports from the Fraser Institute are often mistaken for gospel here in Alberta.

On the bright side Fraser Institute literature is not mandatory reading in the schools...yet.

Why the Left has such a rough time...(part one)

2005-11-13T22:33:00.000-07:00

Why the Left has such a rough time...

If I could point to a few key ideas of what being Left wing is all about I think I could roughly (very roughly) sum it up in one sentence.

“We’re all in this together, lets help each other out and make the best of it.”

Contrast this with the Right:

“We’re all in this together, now get the hell out of my way…”

Okay, not the most balanced treatment of the Right, but they get enough positive spin from the rest of the mainstream. One of the fundamental reasons the Right is getting so much attention I believe is that they have the answers. Good answers, or at least good sounding answers.

Crime a problem? We need more police to enforce the rules. Welfare a problem? Let’s get mandatory work for welfare recipients, so they can earn their keep. Drug addiction? Let’s go after the dealers and the users with equal ferocity. Universal Healthcare cost too much? Privatize the lot of it, the private sector knows best. I could go on… and on.

The Right has short concise answers. The answers however do not plumb the depths of the real issues at hand. Why do we have more crime? What are the factors that lead to criminal activity? What can we do to decrease the prevalence of these factors? The Left’s answers are not compact; they require explanation, background, in essence, time we rarely give to a political problem.

Comparing the Right and Left viewpoints to television, the Right would be the commercials, quick and snappy, and the Left would be the actual show, that slowly builds to conclusion, but not with the laser-like concision of the right. For better or worse, the media has chosen to go with the sound byte, the clip…and that certainly makes the case for the Left difficult to cogently access the public mind. It is on the other hand an ideal situation for the political right. The rhetoric of the right is slowly becoming the gospel as our major news sources constantly repeat the same right-slanted mantra.

The problem with the Left is that our solutions often yield less than concrete results. For instance, if we give people enough money to survive modestly on Welfare then we have less desperation, less abject poverty, less hopelessness and also less crime. When we think of “those poor wretched people” they are often disproportionately responsible for much of the crime in our communities. Consider that if they could live decently would there be similar level of criminal behaviour? Would the conditions that lead to criminality be as prevalent if more people had a better standard of living? A qualified “yes” is the answer.

The problem is the qualified “yes”. Sure we can give more poor people a chance, but can we point to statistics as easily as the Right does when they put more police on the street. Arrests are up, indictments are up… these are all easily digestible facts and concrete statistics the media and the public can readily understand. Contrast this with a hot lunch program for underprivileged children. How do you quantify the results of feeding children at school? Little ‘Bobby’ now has enough calories to operate his brain properly so he can focus on school rather than on what to eat. ‘Bobby’ can now concentrate on his lessons, he does well in school, and he has a positive environment in which he can better resist the paths that lead to criminality and poor life decisions.

How do you say that in 30 seconds or less and not sound goofy (at least to the coached mainstream media public)? You would get torn to shreds. We do not have the laser of the right to make the black and white pronouncements that they often seem to do. Will allowing more people to live with dignity lower the crime rate? Of course it will. Can you get in on a chart understandable in 20 seconds or less? Doubtful. Therein lies the problem. We need to bring public debate back to reasonable intellectual standards or even have a debate in which points of view can be discussed in detail to see the good and bad with both the Right and the Left’s point of view.

Pat Robertson vs God

2005-11-13T10:02:00.001-07:00

Pat Robertson says, in his Answers to 200 of Life's Most Difficult Questions:

Is Abortion Wrong?

"[...] Abortion is terribly wrong. God condemned the Israelites who were offering their children as sacrifices to the heathen god Molech. Such children were burned up in the fires of sacrifice (see Leviticus 20:2). But we are offering our children to a god of pleasure and sensuality and convenience. By doing so we are saying that human beings are not worth anything. This is a terrible sin and a blot on our society."

On the other hand, if you believe the Bible, God:

To Abram, Genesis 22:2 - "And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of."
Exodus 12:29 - "And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle."
Numbers 16 - God causes an entire family, including their little children, to be swallowed up by the earth
Numbers 21:3 - "And the LORD hearkened to the voice of Israel, and delivered up the Canaanites; and they utterly destroyed them and their cities: and he called the name of the place Hormah." Nope, no kids there.
Numbers 21:34-35 - "And the LORD said unto Moses, Fear him not: for I have delivered him into thy hand, and all his people, and his land; and thou shalt do to him as thou didst unto Sihon king of the Amorites, which dwelt at Heshbon. 21:35 So they smote him, and his sons, and all his people, until there was none left him alive: and they possessed his land" Surely God spared the children there?
Numbers 25:7-8 - "And when Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose up from among the congregation, and took a javelin in his hand;
25:8 And he went after the man of Israel into the tent, and thrust both of them through, the man of Israel, and the woman through her belly. So the plague was stayed from the children of Israel. " Now why is it important to stab a woman through her belly if you disapprove of the union? In any case, God seems to have been fine with it, since Phinehas and all his descendents are priests for ever.
Numbers 31:17 - The Israelites rout the Midianites, kill all the adult men, and take the women and children captive. Moses, mouthpiece for God, says "Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him."
1 Samuel 15:3 - "Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. "
Joshua 6:21 - "And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword." God thought this was a Good Thing.
Joshua 8:24 - "And it came to pass, when Israel had made an end of slaying all the inhabitants of Ai in the field, in the wilderness wherein they chased them, and when they were all fallen on the edge of the sword, until they were consumed, that all the Israelites returned unto Ai, and smote it with the edge of the sword." God also approved of this one.
Joshua 10 is a whole list of entire cities where Joshua killed everybody, including babies, with God's approval
2 Kings 2:23-24 "And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. 2:24 And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them. "
2 Kings 15:16 - "Then Menahem smote Tiphsah, and all that were therein, and the coasts thereof from Tirzah: because they opened not to him, therefore he smote it; and all the women therein that were with child he ripped up." God doesn't seem to have a problem with this.
Psalms 137:9 - "Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. " (Of course, the little ones are not God's people's little ones)
Jeremiah 2:29 - God admits to having smitten little children as a way of making a point
Ezekiel 9:6 - God commands, "Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark; and begin at my sanctuary. Then they began at the ancient men which were before the house. "
Hosea 9:11-12 - "As for Ephraim, their glory shall fly away like a bird, from the birth, and from the womb, and from the conception. 9:12 Though they bring up their children, yet will I bereave them, that there shall not be a man left: yea, woe also to them when I depart from them! "
Hosea 13:16 - "Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up. "

Edited to add, November 14: After all that, I'm wondering if God's problem up in Leviticus was not so much that babies were being killed, as that babies were being killed, and offered as sacrifices to someone other than him.

Also, thanks to the Skeptic's Annotated Bible, which made it much easier to find the list, and which also made the list turn out to be much longer than I'd remembered.

Tuffy is Alive!

2005-11-08T17:39:00.000-07:00

As a little girl I was horse-crazy (I still love horses, just not in that crazy little girl way) and I was lucky enough to get horseback riding lessons. The horse I had most of my lessons on was named Tuffy. Tuffy is the best horse that ever lived. At 15 hands, he's just a little guy, but not too little for most adults to ride. At the time I was learning to ride, he was quite an old horse already, but still full of zip.

When you'd come to get him out of his stall, he'd make a happy-anticipation rumble in his chest. Oh, boy, attention!

When you brought out the saddle and bridle, he seemed to smile.

He was just about psychic when it came to connection with the rider, which is probably why I never got very good - he could tell what I wanted regardless of how badly I signalled it, as far as I can tell.

Whatever you wanted to do, he was enthusiastic. He was involved in Little Bits a therapeutic riding program for people with disabilities, and for them he was rock-solid, steady, quiet, and patient. A kid could have a siezure on his back and he wouldn't bat an eye. But when he was with an advanced rider and they brought out the jumps, he'd prick his ears and snort and prance and get excited, because he seemed to like that too.

So Tuffy always had a special place in my heart, even after I grew up and couldn't fit horse stuff in with my adult financial responsibilities.

When I learned, a few years ago, that Tuffy's stablemate Pax had died, I cried, and went through a grieving process, because I just assumed that if Pax was gone, Tuffy must be too - Tuffy was much older than Pax.

And then there was this article, and he's alive and well and being taken good care of. It's funny what strong feelings I have for an animal who I doubt ever had any feelings for me, and who I haven't seen in over a decade. But finding out that he's OK, that he's the oldest horse in Alberta, has put me through the whole ringer again. I'm happy, and I'm sad because now I'm going to have to go through it all when he actually does die.

Heaven help the children...

2005-11-08T11:28:00.000-07:00

The torture of foreign nationals must be getting close to being old hat in North America.

I am shocked that we as a civilized nation can allow this sort of thing to go on. What is more shocking is the complacent nature of our citizenry and our elected officials on the illegal and unjust nature of these detainments.

As the news article says, the boy was 15 years old when his alleged crime took place. When we make war on children how can we justify anything else that we do?

The War on Terror casts an indiscriminate net far and wide. We shatter the lives of innocent human beings. For what? Security? Defending democracy? What utter nonsense.

Another reason to love America

2005-11-05T16:45:00.000-07:00

Vice President Dick Cheney's office was responsible for directives that led to U.S. soldiers' abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a former top State Department official said Thursday.

via BitchPhD and the International Herald Tribune.

All I can say is fuck. Between that and the secret CIA prisons and the way Canadians go missing when they pass through America, is it any wonder Sweden is looking better and better?

Insightful lecture by Stephen Bezruchka

2005-11-05T16:17:00.000-07:00

On Alternative Radio today.

The United States, the richest country in the world, currently ranks 27th in the health of its citizens. Lagging behind not only most of the rich countries, but a few poor ones as well. Fifty years ago, the US was among the top five. What happened in the past five decades to cause this decline? Bezruchka explains that an increasing stratification between the rich and the poor plays a major role. Life spans and infant mortality rates depend very much on the hierarchal structure of a society. And new research shows that half of what influences our health as adults is largely determined before the age of five. What can we learn from other countries whose citizens live longer and healthier lives?

To think about from the lecture:

Stratification hurts the rich as well as the poor - even the rich in America aren't as healthy as the rich in other, less-stratified countries
Impact of poverty, maternal stress on developing fetus (and young child) has life-long consequences, that stretch to the next generation --> health of the maternal grandmother when she was pregnant with mom is major determinant of health of child
To return to the top of the world for health status, America will have to focus on becoming 'a caring and sharing nation', and 'focus on good, not greed'
In Sweden they get 1 year of mat leave at 100% and an additional year optional at 80%, and then day care is staffed by people with masters' degrees - note to self, research immigration requirements for Sweden

Fascinating stuff. Must learn more.

Just how stupid does Rahim Jaffer think we are?

2005-11-02T20:49:00.000-07:00

Stupid enough to vote Conservative I guess.

According to Rahim Jaffer's quarterly missive to his constituents, the Liberals are to blame for high energy prices, because the Liberals are deliberately using taxes to gouge consumers at the pump. The evil Liberals' motivation is that if prices are unaffordable to the average consumer, consumption will go down, and then they will be able to meet the targets of that Commie Kyoto Plan.

He further asserts that the Liberals are deliberately obfuscating the issue when they say that energy prices are set by the global market, and that the real issue is that Americans are able to pay less at the pump despite high global prices, because they pay less tax.

Fuel taxes in Canada haven't changed in quite a while. Fuel is really, really expensive now. It used to be less expensive. Is the honourable Member of Parliament seriously trying to argue that prices went up at the pumps because taxes stayed the same?

I think I know who's deliberately obfuscating, and it's not the Liberals.

Q: Why is the cost of fuel up?
A: Because we have to pay the world market price for fuel, and the price of fuel has gone up worldwide.

Q: A lot of the fuel comes out of our own ground. If we're not having to buy it from another country, why do we have to pay global market price for it?
A: Because NAFTA says so.

Q: That seems like a shitty deal. How did we get suckered into that?
A: Brian Mulroney thought it sounded like a good idea.

Q: What party was Brian Mulroney?
A: One of the ancestors of the one that now wants us to believe that increases in fuel prices are due to taxes staying the same.

I do agree with Mr. Jaffer on one point: the Liberals' plan for Kyoto so far has been piss-poor. According to Mr. Jaffer's community bulletin, the Liberal Kyoto plan

lacks initiatives to find cheaper or even cleaner forms of fuel that would replace the millions of barrels of oil that we use daily to run our cars, heat our houses, and create electricity.

Instead of developing a real plan that would map out a strategy for new hydroelectric dams, wind and solar power, clean coal technology, strengthening Canada's nuclear capacity, providing incentives to develop hybrid cars, and new ways of insulating our houses, the Liberals instead earmarked money in the last budget without any plan.

According to Mr. Jaffer, the Conservatives' plan is much, much better, because they have a concrete plan. They're going to stop charging GST on top of all the other taxes, and just charge it on the base price of the gasoline. Clearly "Axe the tax on tax", by saving everybody a couple cents per litre, will provide us all with super-efficient houses, hybrid cars, hydroelectric, wind, and solar power, and cleaner nuclear and coal technologies.

I'm sure this clever, concrete plan has nothing to do with the fact that it rhymes, and plays to populist "TAXES BAAAD" sentiments.

I guess they think nobody remembers who brought in the GST in the first place.

A smallish incident of minor hypocrisy

2005-10-31T17:54:00.000-07:00

In 1991, Delwin Vriend, a lab instructor at The King's University College , got fired for being gay. The court case that followed is old news.

A popular pub with King's College students today is the Newcastle, which is a very fine establishment if you like your beer cold and your wings hot, or are a slave to the juicy, juicy burger. Students living in rez at King's make their way to the Newcastle by walking along 90 Ave, and it seems they do it often enough and in great enough numbers that Thursdays are Student Night. If you see a group of college-age kids walking along 90 Ave after dark, chances are good that if they're headed east, they're headed to rez from the Newcastle, and if they're headed west, they're headed for the Newcastle from rez. Smart kids - I doubt the burgers they can get in rez are anything close. *drool*

So the other night the Oilers got their asses handed to them by the Coyotes. It was ugly and I wanted to cry. Shortly after the game was over, Sardeth and I were driving along 90 Ave when we saw two young men, one in a Blackhawks jersey and one in an Avalanche jersey, headed east. They were carrying an armload of skull patio lights that used to decorate the best Hallowe'en yard along that stretch of road. They were bigger than us, and something about their body language made me automatically lock the car door. Sardeth was kicking himself for not having confronted them, but my gut says it could have been ugly and I'm glad he didn't.

The compromise was that he stopped by campus security at King's and let them know what was up. The response: a sigh, a shrug, and "Yea, they were probably ours. We'll keep our eyes open."

So, if you're a Christian college:
Being gay: evil, wrong, can get you fired unless the Supreme Court intervenes
Being a vandal and a thief: a sigh and a shrug

nuff said

The US Government - Corrupt and Loving it.

2005-10-28T10:11:00.000-06:00

Turn back the clock one administration. Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, the scandal the uproar the end of the free world in other words if you followed the press in the United States. The Republicans would not, in their obstructionist ways, let the issue die. The House of Representatives voted to impeach for Clinton for his apocalyptic transgression.

Take the current yahoo in the White House. George W. Bush. After stealing the election in 2000, he went and gutted the tax system for “his base”, putting in further jeopardy the enfeebled social programs of the US. He lied about 9/11, the WMD, he lied about Iraq. The current scandal should be easy as pie to sweep under the rug. Bush took his county to war on information he knew was false. He is currently responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens…(bringing democracy) with more coming. Bush is fostering more hatred against the US for his unilateral, illegal war at the expense of the American people. He has taken the world a step closer to anarchy and lawlessness. But he hasn’t diddled a office intern, so impeachment is off the radar. A big hearty thanks to the American lapdog press for striving for journalistic integrity and keeping this government honest.

The irony of this tale of two presidents is overwhelming.

This Province Pisses me off

2005-10-26T19:00:00.000-06:00

Guest Post by tr1c14's partner Sardeth
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Alberta’s government (see Kleptocracy) has energy wealth gushing from every greedy pockmarked pore. Let us see what the grand ‘Alberta Advantage’ has done for us. Do we have superior infrastructure? Do we have five dollar a day Day-care or even viable Senior Citizen Care? Do we have any sort of plan for the future for what to do with our very temporary energy windfall?

The answer to the questions above, of course, is a big merry fucking “No”. The farce we call a government around here is pulling the plans for Alberta’s future straight out of Ralph Klein’s asshole. This shit is not good. The 400-dollar prosperity bonus is about as sensible as skates for a donkey, not to mention a waste of public dollars that might actually do some good if allocated with a whiff of sense.

Our government is naturally inclined to key policy decisions behind closed doors with little or no public debate. Government committees are almost always staffed exclusively by the government's own ministers. It is a rare and joyous occasion when an opposition member gets to sit on one of the minor boards, usually deciding such important provincial issues as what carols to sing at Christmas or the décor for the flipping staff bake-off. No debate, no oversight, no democracy in other words. The fucktards that get their shit all hot and bothered over the federal liberals had better do a 180 and look at the stinking pot of corruption here in the land of big oil, bigger cowboy hats and strangely enough a shit-for-brains electorate.

Imagine a cow. Imagine a cow stunned 20 times with a taser. Imagine the flatulence that issues from said cow during the stunning process. That flatulence is the apathetic, ignorant mass of a body politic that we have running and living in this province.

The scandal here at home is just mind-boggling. Some of the big ones first. Energy Deregulation, the miracle of the Free Market brought to us by the Alberta Conservative Retards in Power for Perpetuity party. ACRPP for short. Our formerly public energy sector was doing quite nicely, providing a Western-world necessity: power available for a reasonable rate. Our nice public utility was actually making a modest profit.

“Ohhh….but the market will make things better, competition will bring low prices for everyone” said the ACRPP. (The market FYI is craptacular at a whole bevy of products, but especially public services) The ACRPP in their unquestioned brilliance (see the vital air of democracy from above) decide to sell off our public utility to Direct Energy. Yes, that is right folks, the same bunglers that took the people of London England for a merry ride while hornswaggling them for billions of dollars. “Ohhhh..”says ACRPP, “that wouldn’t happen here…they have cleaned up their act, they are the very model of corporate goodwill… and happy smiles for all.”

7 Billion dollars later, Alberta now lives in a quasi-regulated free market abyss that is royally dry humping the citizens of the province. We have a Energy and Utilities board to watch over the corporations though, staffed by experts from the industry and, you guessed it, members of the government. These bastards are pulling our guts out through our assholes and we have the audacity to rant and rave about the Federal government of Canada losing a couple of million dollars. (120 million-ish but beside 7 billion a mere drop in the bucket.) Some of the wizards in the ministry of energy just graduated with advanced degrees in selling the people of Alberta down the river.

Let us not forget about the oil royalties that we letting slip through our grasp. The royalties we take from the oil-sands is in the area of 1%. Hugo Chavez manages 40 – 50% royalty rate for his oil. And here is the kicker, he maintains a low domestic price for his people for the refined products of oil. Thanks to Brian Mulroney and his cavalcade of conservative clownage we signed NAFTA, which prohibits us from selling oil domestically at a cheaper price than what we export it for. We are currently embroiled in a trade dispute with the US over softwood lumber, and surprise they are acting unilaterally (*gasp*) and not respecting a NAFTA panel ruling in Canada’s favour. Our Prime Minister, showing signs of a backbone, is attempting to gain a little leverage by threatening the US with countervailing energy sanctions. Hoooo..the storm that raised here in Oil-town! When Ralph Klein isn’t actively pulling fecal laced policy from his own posterior he’s on a fucking safari trying to find his missing olfactory organ in the chummy anal-cavity of Big Oil. Hence we get dire warnings about keeping our biggest trading partner happy and how we should negotiate a settlement… even with the little fact that we won the damn NAFTA case.

Our behaviour as Albertans is reprehensible. Its late and I’m all ranted out.

I’m still pissed off, but feeling much better.

Naked Grandfathers in Saskatchewan

2005-10-24T22:19:00.000-06:00

From an article by Darren Bernhardt in the Saskatoon StarPheonix October 22:

Everybody knows everyone else in small-town Saskatchewan. But the level of intimacy has a new meaning in Eston, where a number of men, many well into their harvest years, have posed in the buff for a calendar.

There's the mayor on his riding mower. And there's Keith Richardson holding his fishing rod and sitting au naturel at
the water's edge.

"By God, I'm 76, I've got nothing left to hide," Richardson replied.

The calendar is the brainchild of town councilor Al Heron, whose 97-year-old father-in-law required treatment from the local health centre's refurbished 20-year-old electrolysis machine, which often broke down. Neither the province nor the health region were willing to buy a new one, so they had to come up with something....

The picture of Richardson is charming. He's sitting there wearing nothing but his fishing hat and a smile (and some sunscreen, I would hope!). He has the kind of old-man body I see when I go swimming on Saturday morning, with some bits saggy, some bits skinny, some bits muscular, and the story of his life written in the wrinkles on his face, if I only knew how to read them. From just looking at him, I think I like him.

If there were some way of getting a calendar other than calling the Eston town office long-distance (assuming they'll take orders over the phone) I think I would probably buy one. I like the idea of not-perfect, non-airbrushed bodies portrayed positively and artistically. Even better, I like how the personality seems to just shine out. These aren't pictures of bodies to be consumed, they're pictures of people to marvel at and wonder what they're like.

Of course not everybody likes it:

"I feel it's a tacky thing and I won't look at it," said resident Tammy Gardiner, calling it a double-standard. "If my 17-year-old daughter did this, there would be a lot of angry people. So how is this okay?"

The local school principal is presently trying to establish a dress code, she added.

"It's not setting a good example for the young people when their grandpa takes off his clothes like this."

Gardiner is partially right, there is some kind of double standard going on here, but I'm not sure she is seeing the same double standard(s) I'm seeing. I personally think it's great that grandpa is taking off his clothes. Maybe if bodies were something people were used to seeing and appreciating in all their variations, and they were just another fact of life, the high school wouldn't be struggling with a dress code. Why dress to titillate when really, it's just a body and everybody has one? (Assuming from the commenter's tone that the problem has to do with kids, particularly girls, coming to school in revealing clothing.)

I think the real, nasty double standard comes in when you ask why there are only grandpas, and no grandmas, in the calendar. I see two different double standards, and while they seem to contradict one another, I think they both have some truth to them.

The lack of grandmas could be due to the differing emphasis we as a culture put on youth=beauty for women vs men, and further to that, beauty=value as a human being. Pictures of old women, genuine and vibrant and, worst of all, unashamed, could rock that boat a lot more than many people might be comfortable with.

Or it could have to do with the power dynamic involved in posing naked. The pinup "girl" (never "woman"!) is functioning more as an airbrushed commodity than a real human being. When old men, the traditional power-brokers of society, put themselves into this position, they essentially turn the power structure on its head. It's a modernized, carefully-controlled, Saturnalia for a cause, not much different from auctioning off a chance to pie a professor for the food bank*. Saturnalia doesn't work when the people submitting to the status-reversal don't have the status to be reversed in the first place.
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*I would argue that in this case, the professor being a woman was eclipsed by her being a member of the faculty, and the audience for the (consensual) pie-ing being her students.

Procrastinating in fine form!

2005-10-22T20:26:00.000-06:00

I've been wanting to have a blog for a while, but despite setting this one up over a week ago now, I have yet to write anything.

It's not for want of ideas. Here are some of the things I want to write about:

An article by Hugo Schwyzer about anti-feminist women that was actually the catalyst for me wanting to start blogging. What he was saying rang true to me on a lot of levels. But I thought if I was going to go on some kind of disjointed ramble of self-exploration, I may as well make my own space for it rather than take up his space.
A lecture I went to by Thomas Homer-Dixon - first I have to read his book, The Ingenuity Gap, but my partner is refusing to lend me any more books until I finish at least one of the ones I've already borrowed. Which means I'll have to finish either Moby Dick, A People's History, or some crazy-ass book about the neurophysiology of mathematics that gives me a headache every time I try to read the introduction, instead of pulp science-fiction.
A case of God Being a Dick that the Evangelical Atheist hasn't written about yet. I'm kindof peeved with ~I am~, because the realization that God is a dick was one of my first steps toward atheism, and here I thought I had some kind of original insight, and then I find out somebody has written a whole 16-part (and counting) series about it and I'm not original at all! I might be able to weasel out of this one by mentioning this case of dickishness to ~I am~ and then he'll write about it better than I ever could.
The teacher's strike in BC
An article I read about Eston, Saskatchewan, where a bunch of old (70ish) men posed naked for a fundraising calendar
Another article from today's paper about some dumbass doctor who thinks doctors should be recording their patients' waist measurements if their patients are overweight
Homage to the bloggers who inspired me to try my hand at this, because they're all wonderful and deserve to have wonderful things said about them

So that's plenty to write about right there. Now I just have to get off my butt and do it.