Conservative Philanthropy

The media noticed the contradiciton this week of King Stephens wife and his Exchequer lobbying for literacy while cutting funding for literacy programs. Of course one is voluntary, the other is state sponsorship. Harper, wife reading from different pages

When asked about the cuts to adult literacy programs, Mrs. Harper refused comment. However, Treasury Board President John Baird, who announced the cuts, suggested that his government would rather spend more money teaching children how to read and write than try to help illiterate adults.

He actually said what???

"his government would rather spend more money teaching children how to read and write than try to help illiterate adults."

That means 42% of Canadians get left behind, because thats how many adults in Canada are functionally illiterate. Of course that is what the Tories are counting on to get them a majority government. They know from history that when people read they learn and when they learn they create revolutions. Books and reading are dangerous in the wrong hands.

Tch, tch the moral of this story is that Conservatives believe in volunteerism; philanthropy and charity not public social programs. Of course it is not the volunteerism of civil society they support, rather that the Church and the wealthy should take care of the poor, staying true to their Scruooge social vision

Ironically the intertwining between social welfare and the voluntary employment sector has become so integral to civil society it to got hit in the cuts. Of course the moral of this story is don't believe what neo-cons tell you but what they do.

Volunteerism takes funding hit
Surprise and disappointment. Those were the emotions expressed yesterday as people in Portage la Prairie’s volunteer community reacted to the Conservative government’s announcement it will cut $9.7 million from Canadian Volun-teerism Initiative over the next two years.
“I’m surprised. It’s probably one of the smallest parts of the budget. If the government doesn’t encourage volunteerism, it must be encouraging higher-paying jobs,” he said, adding without people donating their time, community organizations will require more staff or will be forced to increase workloads for existing employees.
He added choosing to diminish support for CVI means the government isn’t looking at the larger picture.
“What they don’t get is that the volunteer sub-sector is a vital part of the economy, not just in Canada, but across North America,” said Lapointe.
Mary Lynn Moffat works for Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada, and became aware of the cuts to CVI at the Rotary meeting.
“Obviously, it’s not what you would expect. Volunteerism is so important in our community and the country .... We can’t survive without our volunteers.”


See:

Tory Cuts For All

You Tell 'em Danny Boy

Harper



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Flaherty, Baird, Harper, Government, Conservatives, $1billionincuts, tax-cuts, program-cuts, governmentwaste, business-ttax, taxes, StatusofWomen, Museums, Newfoundland, Red-Tory, Progressive-Conservative, Premier, Danny, Williams, Province, court-challenge, minority-rights, libertarian, Burke
literacy, volunteers, MrsHarper, PM'swife, CANWEST, adult-literacy, reading, writing, ABC, literacyCanada

It's Global Warming Stupid

Damned if they do damned if they don't so the Tories do the next best thing.....nothing.....

Tories mum as environment report calls for push on global warming
The Conservative government was on the defensive yesterday and key ministers were out of town as the much-anticipated report from the Auditor-General's environment commissioner called for a "massive scale-up of efforts" to combat global warming.

The demand is out of sync with recent comments by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who questioned the accuracy of global-warming projections this week and has presented clean air as a more pressing environmental issue.

Although the report's release date has been known for weeks, Environment Minister Rona Ambrose, Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn and Northern Development Minister Jim Prentice were all in Alberta yesterday. Ms. Ambrose was unavailable for telephone interviews.

"To head out of town on the first horse back to Calgary while the commissioner’s report came down with a clear indictment of past wrongs is not encouraging," said NDP environment critic Nathan Cullen.


In denial...The Harper government is in denial about Climate Change, and in league with American global warming deniers.

In the past, Mr. Harper has questioned the science of climate change, calling it a “controversial hypothesis,” while his former environment critic Bob Mills went a few steps further calling the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement to address climate change, “a great socialist plot.”

Sowing doubt about climate change in Stephen Harper's backyard

"The Kyoto Protocol is a political solution to a non-existent problem without scientific justification," says Ball, on the Friends of Science website.

As it does in the U.S., the lobby group is trying to create the appearance of a scientific controversy where none exists. It's a political debate they attempt to pass off as science. And it is having some resonance with the Harper government.

Friends of Science puts out radio ads calling for an end to the Kyoto accord because, they say, the science of climate change isn't proven.

That's not all. In April, says the website, "Researchers at the University of Calgary, in co-operation with the Friends of Science Society, released a video entitled: Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: What you're not being told about the science of climate change.

Tim Ball gave his anti-global warming pitch in May to the Alberta government's standing policy committee on energy and sustainable resources. Ball approached the committee, committee chairman Doug Griffith's spokesman.

Stephen Harper and Environment Minister Rona Ambrose are making the issues even muddier by exploiting the public confusion sown by the anti-climate change forces. Many people mistakenly think global warming is connected to air pollution and smog, two separate issues and never intended to be linked.

So why do Harper and Ambrose talk about "pollution and greenhouse gases" in the same breath? It's politics. The Conservatives don't support Kyoto and so are trying to change the subject to air quality. To quote Ambrose: "We're looking at co-benefits -- actually taking action on things like clean air and pollutants (where) there's a co-benefit of reducing things like greenhouse gases."

Well, you can hear that exact same strategy in the Friends of Science radio ads.

"Sixty leading scientists want us to reconsider Kyoto. ... There has to be a better way to reduce pollution and clean up our air, water and soil," says the ad.

Kyoto, of course, never was about cleaner air, it's about rising temperatures. This is fudging of the first order. But it must be heartwarming to Harper's political supporters in the oilpatch. And maybe in Ontario, Harpers figures there are more votes for cleaning up smog.

ExxonMobil funds climate-change propaganda: British scientists

Britain's leading scientific academy has accused oil company ExxonMobil Corp. of misleading the public about global warming and of funding groups that undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.

The Royal Society said Wednesday it has written to the U.S. energy giant asking it to halt support for groups that have "misrepresented the science of climate change."

Yesterday while the Climate Change auditor issued her report climate scientists meeting at MIT issued their own warning, one that most business people can understand, its called Risk Assessment. And the risk is extinction if we don't do something more than less than nothing.

A Dangerous Energy Climate

"If we don't throw everything we have at energy efficiency right now, and start to do things we know how to do right now [in fossil-fuel alternatives], we don't have a chance" of halting drastic planetary changes, said Nathan Lewis, a chemist at Caltech whose research interests include new solar-power materials. Lewis spoke yesterday as part of a panel on energy at the Emerging Technologies Conference.

Caltech's Lewis said the question has become one of risk management. "If we don't cure cancer, the world will stay the same. If we don't cure AIDS, the world will stay the same. But if we don't solve this problem in the next 20 years, from a scientific viewpoint, the world is not ever going to be the same," he said. "How much are we willing to spend to avoid the risk of doing something that we don't like for the next 3,000 years or more?"The biggest policy need is for some regulation of carbon dioxide, Lewis said. Currently, there is little economic reason for companies to pursue non-carbon-emitting alternatives or to sequester the gas.


It's global warming stupid, not smog. Smog is a symptom, global warming is the problem.

Hot "Prehistoric" Conditions May Return by 2100, Study Says

Palm trees in Canada? No ice anywhere? The future could look like Earth's hottest ancient epoch, says a new study of carbon dioxide levels.

The study shows that the high carbon dioxide (CO2) levels found during the Eocene epoch match the CO2 levels predicted for the end of this century by many global warming models.

The Eocene occurred between 56 million and 49 million years ago. It featured the highest prolonged global temperatures of the past 65 million years.

See

Kyoto

Ambrose

industrial ecology

Social Ecology.

Green Capitalism

Environment

Green Plan

Oil


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Kyoto, Canada, Industrial-ecology, carbon-credits, EU, pollution
Kyoto, Canada,nuclear, climate-change, Conservatives, Liberals, government, environment, oil, electricity, capitalism, sustainablity, Rona, Ambrose, Harper, endangered-specieis, animals, environment, laws, politics, Canada, Sparrow,

Le fantôme de Bush au francophone

George Bush and the White House were not at the Francophonie summit in Romania, but their hand puppet was....PM opposes resolution at La Francophonie summit

Members of the Francophonie summit have agreed to a compromise on a contentious resolution after Prime Minister Stephen Harper blocked the original proposal.

The original wording of the resolution recognized Lebanon's suffering in this summer's 34-day conflict, but not Israel's.

Harper took a strong stance against the Egyptian-proposed resolution which most of the 72 members supported. He urged the organization to recognize the suffering of both nations.

Except that Israel is not cleaning up after the total destruction of its infrastructure and does not have cluster bombs scattered through out Tel Aviv.

UN: A million cluster bombs could be in s. Lebanon

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Harper, Bush, Israel, Lebanon, Francophne, Francophonie, French-Nations,

Fly By Night

Japan launches satellite to study the Sun I remember a joke about that...

"You know that the Americans and Russians have sent rockets to the Moon and Mars?" said Professor Muldoon. "Well, I'm designing a rocket to go all the way to the Sun."

"Surely the heat would be too strong," mused O'Connor. "And the rocket would melt?"

"No, no," assured Muldoon. "I'll be sending it at night!"

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Japan, Sun, Solar, Satellite, Space, space-exploration, rocket, EUspace, joke,

Nanny State Neo-Cons

London Review of Books has an excellent critique of Fukuyamas newest book on the Neo-Cons. Which I have commented on before. But this jumped out at me in its aptness when we consider King Stephen's New Government of Canada and its agenda.

Neo-Con Futurology: Stephen Holmes on the incoherent thinking behind US foreign policy

Fukuyama himself stresses a completely different contradiction afflicting the neo-cons. The proposal to pull Mesopotamia into the modern world, he says, is based on a facile optimism reminiscent of 1960s liberalism and publicly rebutted by the original neo-cons. Progressive dreams are bound to be dashed on the hard realities of social habit. One of the fundamental goals of neo-conservatism, in its formative period, was to show that ‘efforts to seek social justice’ invariably leave societies ‘worse off than before’. They were especially ‘focused on the corroding effects of welfare on the character of the poor’. All distribution from the rich to the poor and from whites to blacks is inevitably counterproductive. Progressive attempts to reduce poverty and inequality, although well-intentioned, have ‘disrupted organic social relations’, such as residential segregation, triggering a violent backlash and failing to lift up the downtrodden. According to the neo-cons, it is wiser to concentrate on the symptoms, using police power and incarceration to discourage violent behaviour and protect civilised values.


And in a related argument from the Monthly Review....

The Contradiction Between Theory and Practice in Neoliberalism

Let’s be clear right away that neoliberal theory is one thing and neoliberal practice is another thing entirely. Most members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) —including the U.S. federal government—have seen state intervention and state public expenditures increase during the last thirty years. My area of scholarship is public policy and I study the nature of state interventions in many parts of the world. I can testify to the expansion of state intervention in most countries in the developed capitalist world. Even in the United States, President Reagan’s neoliberalism did not translate into a decline of the federal public sector. Instead, federal public expenditures increased under his mandate, from 21.6 to 23 percent of GNP, as a consequence of a spectacular growth in military expenditures from 4.9 to 6.1 percent of GNP (Congressional Budget Office National Accounts 2003). This growth in public expenditures was financed by an increase in the federal deficit (creating a burgeoning of the federal debt) and an increase in taxes. As the supposedly anti-tax president, Reagan in fact increased taxes for a greater number of people (in peace time) than any other president in U.S. history. And he increased taxes not once, but twice (in 1982 and 1983). In a demonstration of class power, he drastically reduced taxes for the 20 percent of the population with the highest incomes, while raising taxes for the majority of the population.

It is not accurate, therefore, to say that Reagan reduced the role of the state in the United States by reducing the size of the public sector and lowering taxes. What Reagan (and Carter before him) did was dramatically change the nature of state intervention, such that it benefited even more the upper classes and the economic groups (such as military-related corporations)

See:

Harper

Nanny State


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Fukuyama, LondonReviewof, Books, Harper, neo-cons, neo-conservative, Conservaties, Government, Canada, US, parliament, politics, right-wing, welfare, military, lawandorder

Harpers Silence Over Musharraf

I had commented here about Harpers absolute silence over Musharrafs insults towards Canadians. It seems some other folks noticed he was quick off the mark to blast Paul Martin but his silence over Musharrafs remarks was deafening.

Do ya think Harper has a thing for guys in uniform?




Maybe he regrets he can't wear one...cause he ain't Commander in Chief....

She is....

Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean, Governor General and Commander-in-Chief of Canada, inspected the Ceremonial Guard on June 28, 2006 on the grounds of Parliament Hill in Ottawa. As well as being Commander-in-Chief of the Canadian Forces, Her Excellency is Colonel of both regiments that form the Ceremonial Guard (the Governor General's Foot Guards from Ottawa and the Canadian Grenadier Guards from Montreal).

It must be frustrating to someone who supports REAL Women to know who wears the military pants in the family.


well heres a fix for that....


























See

Musharraf



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Harper, Musharraf, Martin, Liberals, Conservatives, Government, Parliament, Afghanistan, wardead, war, terrorism, troops, killed,

A Failure of Imagination

Another spying scandal for Capitol Hill
Hewlett-Packard ex-chairwoman Patricia Dunn got grilled about an unfolding scandal one lawmaker called "a plumbers' operation that would make Richard Nixon blush."

Why do they always say this?

"Never in my worst nightmare did I anticipate that the circumstances currently surrounding HP could ever occur," she said.

Technology Giant Hewlett-Packard Admits to Spying on Journalists, Board Members

When they know that their worst nightmare is to live in a security state, which they are.

Right-wing targets judge who ruled vs. Bush spying

If that doesn't smack of good old fashioned McCarthyism.

Of course the cynical might be forgiven for believing this is a distraction from the real crime of spying....House passes warrantless domestic spying measure

Before it heads home to face the voters, Congress is rushing to legalize warrantless, domestic wiretaps of the sort that this summer were ruled unconstitutional in federal court, with only the barest of nods to preserving civil liberties.


Remember when the worst thing about the Soviet Union was that it was a nation of spies, it had its people spy on each other for the state.

Well all that changed after 9/11 as they say.

Unfettered government electronic and data mining surveillance of its citizens is a genii that once released from its legal bottle becomes a grave menace to democratic society. So-called terrorism is such a loose and flexible concept that it can easily be applied to just about any activity.

Soviet bloc security agencies knew that the most effective way of monitoring `anti-state’ activities was by massive random checking. Stop one thousand citizens, or monitor their calls, and a small percentage of potential malefactors, real or imagined, and enemies will be turned up.

East Germany took this sinister practice to the extreme. Its security agency, the Stasi, monitored at least half of all phone and telex calls, employed an army of informers, ran routine spot checks of pedestrians, and even retained tens of thousands of samples of the body scents of `subjects of interest.’

Give any intelligence or security agency carte blanche to spy on citizens and it will eventually take this power to extremes. It’s only a small step from monitoring real subversive activities to spying on anyone who disagrees with current government policies. Their friends and relations will also fall under suspicion.

Eric Margolis | Foreign Correspondent : December 2005

When abuses of power take away basic freedoms, something has to give. I dare say the Communists were experts at domestic spying, cultural homogenization, closed borders, and propaganda. Let's think about what that means for our own countries. Let's make sure glasnost isn't ushered in as a "new" concept to us someday.New Freedoms in the USSR

Prairie Weather: Domestic spying admitted by Pentagon

Dvorak Uncensored » Domestic Spying Story Continues to get Better ...

Congress Turning the USA Into the USSR

digg - New York Times sues Pentagon over domestic spying



See:

Spying

CIA


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Bush, Senate, HP, Hewlett-Packard, spying, security, 9/11, congress, wiretapping, warrentless, evesdropping, telephone, computer, privacy, US, America, crime

I, Robot

South Korea unveils armed guard robot for possible use along tense border with North

"I'm a lover not a fighter".

Remember the Hal 9000 rule.....never trust AI., there is always a flaw. Which Battlestar Galactica proves.

Since the robot is controled by Artificial Intelligence that will be no different than those currently in charge in the Pentagon. (drum crash)

For more on killer robots see my Gothic Capitalism, yeah I know shameless plug.

And I get to use this Robbie the Robot graphic,again, from the classic B Grade SF flick Forbidden Planet.

Robbie the Robot went on to reprise his role in the TV series; Lost in Space

Does that mean Kim Jong il , is Dr. Smith?

SEE

AI

Robots

Science Fiction

Korea


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Korea, killer-robots, army, Pentagon, robots, robotsoldiers, science, androids, Hal9000, RobbietheRobot, robotics, manmachines, automaton, cyborgs

Tags
science
history of science
science-fiction
philosophy of science
androids
robots
robotics
automotons
manmachine
computers
automation
cyborgs

666

This photo of the Magellanic Cloud is listed by NASA as 666.
And I thought we had gotten over that in June.



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
NASA, Space, Magellanic, Cloud, MilkyWay, Galaxy, Galaxies, Spacephote, astronomy, 666, Crowley, Great-Beast, Satan, Anti-Christ, 6/6/06, Omen, Evil, Live, Christian, monothesism, religion, apocalypse, armageddon, endtimes

Injustice

Welcome to the wild west. The land that Canada will turn into when the New Government brings in more minimum sentences. In this case a young woman got the maximum sentence for killing her baby. The reason she killed her baby was that she was terrified of her parents finding out she was pregnant. What was that the right wing says about leaving sex ed up to parents. Yep this is another shining example of the success of that..... Jail for mom a perversion of justice

verdict shocks experts

The jury at Effert's trial had the option of finding her guilty of second- degree murder, of infanticide or of manslaughter. Convicted of infanticide or manslaughter, Effert might have gone to jail for a short period of time or she might have received only a conditional sentence and done no time at all.

In almost every case of infanticide, a mother gets a conditional sentence, Kramar said. The longest sentence in recent Canadian history was the nine-month jail term of a New Brunswick woman in 1990.

News of Effert's life sentence with no parole eligibility for 10 years rocked local legal circles.

"This is an odd decision based on the unanimity of expert opinion that Effert had a disturbed mind," said Sanjeev Anand, a professor of criminal and constitutional law at the University of Alberta.

Still, lawyers said Effert should have been convicted of the lesser offence of infanticide, not second-degree murder. Two expert witnesses -- a forensic psychologist and a forensic psychiatrist -- testified at her trial she suffered a "disturbed mind" after secretly giving birth in the basement of her parents' home in the early hours of April 14, 2005.

Her secret pregnancy, the hormonal changes she underwent and the trauma of secretly giving birth must have proved overwhelming, they said.

Within hours of giving birth Effert strangled her baby with her thong panties and threw his body into a neighbour's yard.

If psychiatric examinations indicated Effert was insane when she committed her crime that would have rendered her not criminally responsible, expert witnesses testified during the trial. She wasn't insane but she did suffer from a disturbed mind, they told the court.

Well Duh' Oh. I liked this bit too the family is now concerned about their daughter, sister. Well kinda late for that. And they got upset at the decision well what did they expect from a bunch of hicks from the sticks who like them deny women the right to choose. Deny sex education to their kids and believe that their religious morality will save them from sin. But also beleive in punishing the sinner.

Prosecutor David Labrenze said the jury didn't appear to believe she was suffering from a "disturbed mind."

After the verdict was announced, Kim Effert asked to speak with his daughter, crying out: "I want to see my baby."

"You heartless bastards," Ryan Effert yelled at the jury after they convicted his sister of second-degree murder and concealing a dead baby. "That's what our justice system is all about."

As the guard led her out of the courtroom, Effert wept and said: "I want to see my family."

Outside the courtroom, Effert's mother, Marlene, said the family is a victim because their daughter had been charged with something she is not responsible for.

Nope the family is responsible for her predicament. If anybody deserved punishment it was them for their stupidity.

Alta.-town baby-killing verdict discussions echo national infanticide debate

"It's an anachronism that should be seriously amended, if not gotten rid of," said Sanjeev Anand, a law professor at the University of Alberta.

"This is a difficult time," said Kim Effert. "Justice was not served."

Anand said many legal experts consider the law on infanticide a holdover from paternalistic 19th-century medicine, when women were considered weaker vessels.

"Women were considered more frail than men, and the act of having a child could unhinge certain women," he said.

Anand said murder legislation allows for the consideration of mitigating circumstances and can accommodate such cases.

Infanticide legislation works against women, he said.

"You're treating women as a lesser human being."

But Kramar said that overstates the case and that social pressures such as disgrace and poverty were as much in the minds of those who wrote the act as hormones.

"The text of the law overstates the physiological motive," she said.

She called Tuesday's verdict "American-style retributive justice."

Rosemary Gartner, a criminologist at the University of Toronto, said women who commit this crime tend to be among society's most vulnerable - young, poor, isolated, often living in "strict circumstances".

And note in the cases below 9 out of 10 occur in Alberta, home of Real Women and other Christian fundamentalist political groups who make regular attacks on Planned Parenthood and Sex-Ed in public schools part of their "Father Knows Best" ideology.

A list of infanticide cases in Canada

(CP) - Katrina Effert of Wetaskiwin, Alta., has been convicted of second-degree murder for killing her newborn baby boy. Here's what has happened in some other Canadian cases of newborn killing:

Melanie Sheila Murphy, 21: left her baby daughter in garbage bag at the college she was attending in Camrose, Alta. Given suspended sentence in 1998 for infanticide and ordered to perform 75 hours of community service

Shelley Netter, 26: left her baby daughter in garbage bag on her Edmonton doorstep. Originally charged with infanticide, but received three-year suspended sentence in 1998 after pleading guilty to failing to provide the necessities of life.

Leanne Wise, 27: delivered her baby in a washroom at the Calgary bingo hall where she worked, dumped it in a trash can and then went back to her job. Received 18-month suspended sentence in 2000 for disposing of the dead body with intent to conceal its delivery.

Kelly Lynn Rector, 19: gave birth in a bingo hall washroom in Brantford, Ont., and left the infant in a toilet bowl. Granted absolute discharge after pleading guilty to concealing the body of a newborn.

Liza Santos, 31: strangled her seven-week-old baby at home in Calgary, thinking she was protecting him from demons. Charged with second-degree murder but found not criminally responsible due to mental disorder.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
cirme, infanticide, murder, manslaughter, sex-ed, Alberta, Canada, Effert, mother, child-killing, baby, baby-killer, court,