Published

It's always nice to be published, with a byline, in hardcopy. In this case my article; Harpers Faith Based Childcare, was printed in the fall issue of the B.C. Humanist Magazine. Thank's to reader; Ellen Ramsey.

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Faith Based


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Quoth

Nice to see someone read my article on the Gun Registry as a P3. And took time to quote from it.

And just a correction for Joe Calgary, I am not an executive member of CUPE. I was a member of my CUPE Local executive, and a Past President of CUPE Edmonton Council, but am not now.


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Gun Registry

P3

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shootings, Montreal, DawsonCollege, CGEP, gunregistry, gun-contol, murder, crime, Canada, Quebec, Harper, Conservatives, Government, Toews, Gill, Dawson, College, CGEP, Montreal, Massacre, shooting, crime, Columbine,Toews, farmers,duckhunters,RCMP, longguns, gun-registry, deaths, Saskatchewan, Government, Conservatives, Toews, Mounties, killed

Deer In Headlights

It seems that the current spat over Brad Lavigne has generated some 'official' response. In this case a missive from one Joanne Deer who claims to be the NDP's official' Party' Communication Director' while Brad Lavigne is the Caucus Communications Director.

Oh really then how come the NDP offical website says this;

Media Contacts

Canada’s NDP
Brad Lavigne, Director of Communications
(613) 236-3613 x2228

NDP Leader
Karl Belanger, Leader’s Media Officer
(613) 995-6767

NDP Caucus
Ian Capstick, Caucus Media Officer
(613) 995-8259

Is there another official NDP web site we don't know about? Deer caught in headlights.

Oops, he did it again

From the great work of Stephen Taylor and Greg Staples at the Liberal Leadership convention: " Hey! It's our friend Brad Lavigne from the NDP. Director of Communications and Research " I didn't hear a correction. You know - well actually Stephen, I'm Director of Communications and Research for the NDP Caucus, not the party. BTW, someone might want to point out to Brad that this excellent work was captured, edited, published and distributed by some of those bloggers that he's dismissive of.

Clearly the message got through, the response is less than inspiring.

Hello you have a communications break down. Says who, the folks in the field being your pundits in the blogosphere.

And it seems that our Deer Communications Director is selective in who she sends her emails to. Still waiting for mine.


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Precocious Two Year Old

I am, I am. This blog is now two years old. The last of the original four I launched. Perhaps not the last just the survivor which is kept active.

And if you want to see the first post go here, it also has alot of the old widgets, links and design. But it loads fast.

And this is post number 3189.

Which means that by the end of 2006 I will have blogged 4000 articles in two years.

Not only precocious but prolific, pontificating, political, punditry.

I have been a DIY web publisher/ activist for ten years now.

Just Shoppers' Guide

NO. 2 April 1996

Sports Shoes

Nike, Adidis, Puma, Hi-Tec, and Reebok all sub-contract the actual manufacturing to suppliers in China, the Phillipines, Thailand, or Indonesia, where wages are low. The following extract, from "When Corporations Rule the World" by David C. Korten, published by Earthscan, 1995, details Nike, which is one of the worst offenders.

An article from Clean Clothes Campaign, a Dutch organisation, is excellent reading on the sports shoe debate. Another article by CCC on the continuous search by transnationals for cheaper labour in theclothing industry Eugene Plawiuk writes a piece on recent action against Nike in Canada.

The politics of corruption in the 21st century

Cargill (under its subsidiary Excel) controls 22% of the market. . . . As a commodity broker, it buys and sells food and other commodities trying to get the best price for itself, regardless of the effects on the producer or consumer or their own workers’. ⁴¹

[PDF]

SPORTS METHOD PATENT

File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
Eugene Plawiuk "No World Series?! Hec there's always baseball on PBS! ... As late as 1995, Australian Courts took the view that, unless a patent involved ...
www.piper-alderman.com.au/piperald.nsf/IPTBody/9999/$file/SportsMarketing.pdf -

The Future of Labor’s Past

John Summers

This article was originally published in Labor History 40, 1 (February 1999): 69-79 and is reprinted here with permission. Another site presents an electronic version of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s "Memories of the Industrial Workers of the World",³⁹

LabourStart: Labour Web Site of the Week - Previous Weeks

8 May 1997

Eugene Plawiuk's Site (Canada)

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5202/

Eugene Plawiuk works as a janitor in a school in Edmonton, Alberta. He's a trade union and socialist activist, working on labour education at the provincial level (for the Alberta Federation of Labor), helping the Alberta New Democrats slowly get back into the provincial parliament, and serving on the executive committee of his local trade union (CUPE). In his spare time (when does he have spare time?) he has established a website that would be the envy of major international trade union organizations -- if they understood the web well enough to be envious.

Eugene has a comprehensive global strike page, a (very popular) Nike page, the best list of Spanish Civil War links on the Web, dozens (hundreds?) of articles on trade unionism, social issues, the Internet, etc. When you visit this site, set aside some quality time for your PC. Relax into a comfortable chair. There's lots of good reading here.

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My Traffic Rankings


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Man Of The Year

Hugo Chavez.

Singer, Popular TV Show host, revolutionary, socialist,Anti-Imperialist, heir of Castro, and democratically re-elected President of Venezuela, for a third time!

Hugo Chavez who was in the lead and the WINNER of Time Online Poll for Person of the Year 2006. He did not even win as their newsmaker of the year.

Even if he had the best performance at the UN.

He did make it as a runner up in the US edition though, unlike our PM Stephen Harper.

Who Should Be Person of the Year?
TIME's Person of the Year is the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied what was important about the year. Who do you think fits the bill this year?
35% Hugo Chavez	21% Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
11% Nancy Pelosi	11% The YouTube Guys
8% George W. Bush	7% Al Gore
5% Condoleezza Rice	2% Kim Jong Il
Note on Poll Results

A tip o' the blog to Canadian Observer


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Paranoia and the Security State

So why did the Arar affair happen?

Because the State is paranoid, and the most paranoid of the State's apparatchicks are the police, especially the 'secret police', or official 'state police'. Those who protect secrets and weed out secret conspiracies opposed to the the state.

IDENTIFYING THE TRAITOR AMONG US: THE RHETORIC OF ESPIONAGE

The Paranoid Style, indeed, lends itself to a worldview that has more in common with tragedy than comedy. Belief in conspiracy requires an interpretation of events as sinister and significant, and the vigilance needed to avoid being manipulated demands a constant looking beneath the surface and assumption of dishonesty on the part of others. As with Classical tragedy, in which the will of the gods was the unpredictable and inevitable mover of events, in the modern Paranoid Style the machinations of government (or the secret powers behind the state bureaucracy) are unpredictable (because individuals cannot understand that which is carefully hidden) and inevitable, with layers upon layers of secrecy and manipulation entrapping the individual (even the individual spy working in service of the government). This layering makes possible the twists and turns of plot line in a typical spy novel. This layering also creates a relationship between man and state that is alienating and disempowering. Man’s quests for freedom, rationality, and justice are hubris, doomed to disappointment and a tragic ending, according to the shared logic of the Paranoid Style and the generic spy novel.

In point of fact, however, the post-Cold War spy story seems to be more an example of comedy than of tragedy. This was perhaps predictable. Writing in 1988, Ed Black noted that “The disclosure of secret agents and agencies is not terminal; it concludes nothing beyond itself. It is ad hoc, a transient skirmish in a prolonged conflict; it functions merely to confirm the ideological position that generated it. Such a disclosure is, in sum, not purgative. It leaves the fundamental affliction in place and extirpates only one of its local manifestations.” (p. 60 in Rhetorical Questions) The crucial key to understanding tragedy is the moment of catharsis, which alone can signify the necessary closure. In espionage, there is no moment at which everything becomes clear and all the secrets are revealed. For the paranoid, there is always the suspicion that where there was one double-agent, there might be more who are better hidden.

For the individual onlookers, there is always the suspicion that what the state bureaucracy (CIA, FBI, or KGB, it doesn’t matter) is not revealing is greater than what is revealed by the limited disclosure of the spy case, and that context might very well alter our understanding of the case at hand.

Such was the case with the Liberals who after 9/11 joined other States around the world implementing anti-democratic, authoritarian, Bonapartist security legislation that stripped 'some' Canadians of their rights.

Yep we have heard this before its called the War Measures Act used to intern foreign aliens like Ukrainians in WWI and then 'foreign nationals' the Japanese Canadians in WWII. Of course then there was the 'apprehended insurrection' declared by PET over the FLQ Crisis in Quebec and that was the last time the WMA was used. However it resulted in the RCMP become an internal spy and agent provcatour against the percieved Enemies of the State; the left, unions, the anti-war movement, the PQ etc.

RCMP Spied on Tommy Douglas For Three Decades

It is the criminalization of dissent, of democracy. And the Canadian state and its private army of the right, the RCMP have along history of anti-democratic paranoid politics.

Scandal ensued which exposed the RCMP as engaging in illegal activities, burning barns, illegal wiretapping, agent provacatuers planted in movements, etc.
The result was the Macdonald Commission identified the problem with Canada's Military State Police when they were exposed for spying and dirty tricks on Canadians back through the sixties and seventies. Its recommendation was to sever espionage/spying/intelligence from the RCMP. Thus was CSIS created.
But the RCMP remained the same para-military secret police force it always had been.

Quote: The need for this civilian review is beyond debate. Endquote.

It would seem so. In 1981, the MacDonald Commission, echoing the conclusions of the earlier Marin Commission, concluded that an independent civilian review mechanism for the RCMP was necessary to ensure proper accountability.

It took a while - five separate bills were tabled in the House of Commons - but in 1986 Parliament confirmed the need for civilian review of RCMP conduct was beyond debate.

It's now 17 years later and, quite frankly, I shouldn't have to be addressing the need for effective civilian review of RCMP conduct and, more particularly, civilian review of the national security activities of the RCMP.

However come 9/11 and the Democratic Governments of the World use it as an excuse to bring in draconian anti-libertarian laws against their citizens. All were potential enemies of the State but none more so than those who are Muslim or from the Middle East, who have swarthy looks, funny last names. It's called profiling and it was done on Arar and others by the RCMP.

The Liberals again unleashed their personal police force, to do their dirty work. Given carte blanche the RCMP did the internal spy search while CSIS coordinated international connections. And in between these two came a dangerous disconnect, one that ended up with Maher Arar being sent to Syria to be torutured by the Syrians on behalf of Homeland Security and CSIS.

Given their past practice I believeCSIS was looking for usable double agents, agent provacatuers, its usual modus operandi. When embarassed through internal misinformation and not being able to turn Arar or use him they abandoned him to be dealt with by the US Homeland Security and the CIA.

Once again the RCMP have engaged in domestic spying and espionage in the name of the Liberal Government of the day.

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Karl Marx

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Man O Steel

Time's Newsmaker of the Year RH Stephen Harper, man of steel;

has set himself the messianic tasks of remaking Canadian federalism by curbing Ottawa’s spending powers and overhauling Canada’s healthcare and social welfare system…

The Blogging Tories are gleeful, like children at Christmas. Overlooking on the fact he was only news in the 'Canadian' Edition of Time.

Stephen Harper is Time Canada Newsmaker of the Year

Thanks to them Canadian content rules of the CRTC, them rules the Conservatives love to hate.

Because in the US edition of Time a different autocrat was featured; People Who Mattered: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad An Interview with Iran's Agitator

And Harper did not even make it across the border as a newsmaker. He was left out of the U.S. Edition of People Who Matter 2006


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Harper

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Election 2007

How do I know? There was an ad in the Edmonton Sun Jobs section for Chief Returning Officer and returning officers

A sure sign of Election Prepardness.

I say it will be in the fall, if at all in 2007, and apparently the journalist panel on CTV's QP agree with me.





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Tories Fail Arar

Arar still a threat, US envoy says

Globe and Mail, Canada - 16 Dec 2006
The US ambassador to Canada yesterday dismissed the $16-million Canadian judicial probe into the Maher Arar torture case, saying Mr. Arar remains listed as a possible terrorist threat.
Americans take a turn smearing Arar Toronto Star
Arar remains on US security list National Post
Arar considered threat to US, Wilkins says CTV.ca

So much for Conservative White House buddy buddy diplomacy. Neither formal letters from Public Security Minister Stockwell Day to the US government, nor tuff talk, in the house, from PM Stephen Harper have availed Marher Arar of his right to enter the United States. He remains a security threat despite the Harpocrites claims to have done all they can to rectify this injustice.

There has been no formal apology to arar from the Conservatives, whom as a party and as the official opposition chose to call Arar a terroist and impugn his reputation. No apology from the Harper government, to date hiding behind legal refuge, the last bastion of a scoundrel. And a limp attempt by the government to ask the Americans to remove Arar from their security lists.

You don't ask YOU TELL 'em, tough guy.

But the apologetic approach of the Harpercrites on this issue once again exoses our New Government of Canada as made up of compradors and quislings.


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Lincoln Obama

Newt Gingrich on Meet the Press today was asked by host Tim Russert if Barak Obama had the experience to be President, having only two terms in the house.
.
Newt repled; "Lincoln only served two terms in the house." Bam.

Lincoln the first Labour Republican, not a Newt Republican, rather a modern liberal.

On the Clintons, asked if Hillary could win, he replied "Of course". And admitted that they were formidable political foes.

In fact he praised Bill Clinton as one of the best polticians in the United States!!!

"They are like watching your favortie opposition football team. You know Tim like Buffalo"

Is this the same Newt we have loved to hate. Yep. He is defintely NOT in the running for Rebulican nomination for President.


And he is.....

Barack Obama on ESPN MNF




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