A group of baptist missionaries have been arrested in Haiti on charges of trafficking children for adoption purposes. The group of ten allegedly attempted to smuggle 33 Haitian children into the Dominican Republic to set up an orphanage. The children, aged two months to 14 years, it has been discovered, are not all orphans. According to the missionaries: The church members, most from Idaho, said their Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission was aimed at taking youngsters across the border to an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, where arrangements can be made for their adoption. A spokesman for the …
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Oh, I want to believe. I dearly want to believe. (Note the boldface added by me.) Canada will get a national child-care program under a future Liberal government, no matter how big the federal deficit has grown, leader Michael Ignatieff has vowed. “We will find the money, because it seems to me an excellent investment,” Ignatieff told reporters in Ottawa today. “I am not going to allow the deficit discussion to shut down discussion in... …
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News has been making the rounds that respected Canadian climatologist Andrew Weaver has throw his hat behind those that criticize the IPCC. And in some respects he has done just that, but importantly he has not called into question the science included in the IPCC reports, nor the conclusion that our GHG emissions are responsible for the recent warming trend. So what are his criticisms? First, it seems that Weaver doesn’t want to see the leadership of the IPCC use their position as a platform calling for specific policy actions. Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria, …
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Add this to the long list of Shit I Don’t Get:  “Bump The Show“, an online, interactive, fake reality/game show/”mockumentary” about abortion: At first glance, bump-the-show sounds like a reasonable response to “Bump,” the show — a new, faux-reality Web-based docudrama featuring actors trying to decide whether to have an abortion.  [...] Beginning Feb. 1, episodes will appear each week on Mondays and Thursdays, both on the Web site (BumptheShow.com) and on YouTube, and spectators are invited to comment. A pilot, which appeared on the eve of the …
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Okay, I am back. Things have been pretty weird and hectic in my personal life. Lots of pressure, and matters over which I have no control. Did manage to catch bits and pieces of last night's Grammys.Yes, it was about spectacle, but it was also spectacular. About halfway through it hit me hard. Women were stealing the show. Not just Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, but also the wonderfully talented Lady GaGa. And, as for Pink,... …
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*Snicker*. …
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Remember this delightful bit of misogyny? Who could possibly have written that?Who, indeed? …
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Ich unterstütze schon länger alle möglichen Aktionen von campact und kann nur allen LeserInnen empfehlen, sich regelmäßig auf der Seite campact.de zu informieren und sich in den Newsletterverteiler einzutragen, um keine relevante Aktion zu verpassen. Das Angebot von campact ist sehr niedrigschwellig angelegt, damit möglichst viele Menschen in wenigen Minuten ausreichend informiert sind und dann aus Überzeugung an den jeweiligen Aktionen teilnehmen können. Die folgende Aktion zur bereits realen "Mini-Kopfpauschale" bei einigen Kassen und der geplanten viel weitergehenden Kopfpauschale …
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So says the Guardian: Banks are pulling out of the carbon-offsetting market after Copenhagen failed to reach agreement on emissions targets… Carbon financiers have already begun leaving banks in London because of the lack of activity and the drop-off in investment demand. The Guardian has been told that backers have this month pulled out of a large planned clean-energy project in the developing world because of the expected fall in emissions credits after 2012… Paul Kelly, chief executive of Eco Securities, which develops clean energy projects, said that while markets had not expected a …
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Mark Steyn makes me nostalgic.About a century ago I worked briefly for the Canadian Government Travel Bureau, long since gone the way of all flesh. The Bureau was established to promote tourism in Canada. I was employed in a junior capacity to help answer inquiry letters from would-be visitors.It was there that I was introduced to the wonders of standard paragraphing. There is a finite number of queries that a would-be tourist can make, and potted responses were prepared for each one, and assigned a number.Although some sparse textual connective tissue was required, all we had to do at our …
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With the big sleazy event right around the corner I thought it would be nice to have another look at one of the highlights on the road to the Vancouver Olympics.________VANOC the walking filth that has mounted the corpse of what once was a noble movement and fucked that dead beauty into the mud, sinks to a new low. Being less honourable than whores and less generous than pimps, they have banned the Right To Play charity from the Olympic village and from the Olympics. Here are the folks that are being cut out of Vancouver...The Lillehammer Olympic Organizing Committee (LOOC) conceived Olympic …
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CANADIAN ANARCHIST MOVEMENT-TORONTO:TORONTO ANARCHIST ASSEMBLY COMING SOON: Following the success of last year's Toronto Anarchist Assembly it's going to be happening again this year on April 9 to 11. Here's the callout from the Ontario section of the Anarchist Black Cat discussion board.@@@@@@@@@@@@ ****Toronto Anarchist AssemblyApril 9, 10, 11****Friends, It’s time for us to gather. To assemble and talk to each other. To bring together folks who secretly or not so secretly identify with anarchism, and continue to build a larger and more vibrant community. Building on last …
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Documents show Liberals & NDP “failed to contest rights appointees.”. NDP Foreign Affairs critic Paul Dewar is said to be giving a press conference on the situation of Rights & Democracy today. I’m looking forward to that. More details here, here, here & here. [Updated February 2, 2010] …
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… published by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East …
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VANOC  officials, Games participants, sponsors, politicians and many members of the media  don’t understand the lack of enthusiasm by many Vancouverites as we prepare to “welcome the world”. I explained just last week why I believe VANOC and the municipal and provincial governments are to blame:  they have destroyed the positive feelings felt by so many when the bid was won. How?  By [...] …
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Oh. …
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Never mind a "long march through the institutions": Stephen Harper and his ideological confederates far prefer the blitzkrieg approach.Independent watchdogs have been muzzled or fired. Government ministers have meddled in the work of arms-length agencies. Respectable charities have been blacklisted with bogus charges of "anti-Semitism." And the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development has apparently been targeted for outright destruction.The ICHRDD demolition crew, composed of new Harper appointees to its Board, is pursuing its work with gusto. Later today it will …
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"Your trouser zipper is open" is of course one of two examples from the "Embarrassing Situations" section of the Olympics "Business Etiquette Protocol Manual", the other one being "A button has come undone". This does not seem to be a very complete list of what to say in 'embarrassing situations' involving foreign dignitaries, and I can't see how either one would be much help in the event that, for instance, you throw up on their shoes.At any rate, VANOC has itself wandered into open trouser zipper territory this weekend with its release of a promotional video which includes footage from Leni …
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I've a thing about the psychiatric industry's propensity to keep narrowing what it means to be normal by virtue of forever expanding the number of mental disorders any one of us might have. I've written quite a bit about that on this blog. That said, I just did this test, designed by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen et al. It appeared in their paper "The Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ): Evidence …
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Someone at the National Post gets a huge jump on a monstrous practical joke.In other news, J. D. Salinger, renowned reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, has died. As usual, he was unavailable for comment.(Cutting J. D. Salinger quip courtesy of the world-famous Dan Shields.) …
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THE NY TIMES has a disturbing article by Nicholas Kristoff, titled "Orphaned, Raped and Ignored", about the current state of things in the Congo. It's a horror-show, a 21st century Heart of Darkness, and it's ignored by just about everybody. How bad is it?A peer-reviewed study found that 5.4 million people had already died in this war as of April 2007, and hundreds of thousands more have died as the situation has deteriorated since then. A catastrophically planned military offensive last year, backed by the governments of Congo and Rwanda as well as the United Nations force here, made some …
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ANARCHIST THEORY:MOLLY’S ANARCHISM PART 4-FREEDOM TO AND FREEDOM FROM:In parts one, two and three of this series I began to define what I consider the anarchism that I have held to for many decades. To say the least my ideas have changed over that time, hopefully becoming clearer and more realistic. Some thing, however, have remained the same, but I feel at this time of my life the need to define them more exactly. This series is not meant to be any definitive statement of anarchism in all its variety. it is merely the views of one anarchist who has had a certain amount of experience in the …
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Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign, U.S.A. has filed a complaint with the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague against George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice, and Alberto Gonzales for crimes against humanity, more specifically, “their criminal policy and practice of “extraordinary rendition” perpetrated upon about 100 human beings.” Extraordinary rendition, if you didn’t know, is code for the U.S. government’s program of kidnapping, torture and …
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I should read my daily emails of care2care more often. Once in awhile, it can present something interesting. What’s next? Little by little! Our bodies are no longer private or our’s to do what we want with. First, we hear the idiotic arguing of financing abortions during the now (well pretty much, anyway) defunct health care reform debates in the U.S. We even heard of this draconian law in Oklahoma, making women have an ultrasound and viewing it before having an abortion. In the name of having all feel safe on airplanes, they  (the government’s in this case), Americans and …
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