Seventy - Three

PrimeNumberVille
vanDongenWorldGoneWild

The number of fantastic catches a way done gone Willie Mays made patrolling Shea Stadium's center field during the last year of his career which, not coincidentally, was 1973?
......Not a chance......

The number of times gopher-boy Gordon Campbell went googlie over young W5 reporter Carole Taylor when she came to town to interview the big boss man, Art Phillips, in 1974?
......Not even close.....

The number of times Vancouver Alderperson Carole Taylor, and now spouse of former big boss man Art Phillips, made goo-goo eyes at a prematurely greying, but still slim and trim, Mayor Gordon 'Marathon Man' Campbell during City Council meetings in 1988.
....Not even once, she was admonishing him to ignore the antics of that infamous lefty power trio from days gone by - Davies, Ericksen and Rankin....

The number of times not-so-golden-boy Gordon Campbell had mean thoughts about Vaughn Palmer after the latter called him the BC Liberal Party's 'worst handicap' in 1997.
....Mean thoughts? Gordo? Are you kidding?.....

The number of times that born-again neandercon Premier Gordon Campbell and his Minister of Fish Fries, John van Dongen, said that independent scientists in general, and Alexandra Morton in particular, don't matter since they came to power in 2001?
.....Maybe, if you multiply by, say, a thousand......

The number of times Rafe Mair called Messrs. Campbell and van Dongen on the carpet for their ridiculous fish fry statements since 2001?
....Perhaps, if you multiply by, say, a million....

The fold increase in sea lice found on wild salmon that pass within 30 km of open-pen fish farms that are clogging British Columbia's coastline in 2005?
.....Bingo!.......



____
Stranger than fiction part of the story......this is a big deal on the mainstream media map the world over, but still not a peep out of the CanWest (not)Global Monolith as we get ready to push the 'publish post' button.

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Anatomy of a Meme, Part I

BeingWilliamGibson'sAmygdala
BetweenARockAndAHarderPlace

My brother and his family came over for dinner last night

I'll call him Don here, which is his real name, but we'll pretend it's not.

If you think I am a waygone Lefty, well, you should hear Don talk.

I may support the labour movement and almost all it stands for, but my brother lives it and breathes it around the clock - literally.

Anyway, as the evening wound down (after the kids had done their performance of 'Cats' in the basement - one more good reason not to have Cable!) the talk turned, as was inevitable, to the upcoming Provincial Election.

The upshot of it was that Don bemoans the fact that our side seems unwilling to take it to the other side and 'give 'em a taste or their own medicine' on the Prop/Spin front.

You see, in a way, my brother got to the same place that Billmon just arrived at, only in Don's case his train pulled into the Smackdown Station a long time ago.

Four years ago to be exact, back during the 2001 election campaign, where Don spent endless hours sitting in stuffy Union halls listening to people like former Premier, and no longer Dipper, Ujjal Dosanjh wimp out and admit that we'd made mistakes without offering up anything in the way of significant Firewalls and/or Counterinsurgency Strategies to try and reduce the number of inciendiary spincycle devices and rhetorical bunker-busters that were raining down on us from all quarters of the corporate media monolith that has (or perhaps I should say "had") a stranglehold on information dissemination in this Province. And after the extreme drubbing we took in that election (77 to 2 for those who are not in the immediate vicinity) my brother decided that the only way to beat these people is to get down in the muck with them and start throwing the haymakers, non-stop.

Now, as you can see from my previous posts here I feel somewhat differently. While opininated, I try my best to be less strident, something that I hope is reinforced by my comments at other places in the bloggodome - a few of which you may have inadvertently run in to yourself in your cyber-travels*.

Essentially, for me at least, it comes down to this: I don't want us to win by building a more viscious Obfuscation Machine, even if it does serve to smackdown the Neandercons for good (or at least for another hundred years or so before they take another shot ressurecting the Gilded Age in all it's glory).

Why?

Because, I figure that if that were to happen the truth really would be on the ropes. What's more the ideological poles would start to bend towards each other which, ultimately, would be good for no one.....

And that is the position I took with my brother last night even though I know it exasperates the hell out of him, and even though I know that another redmeat Lieberal majority will not have nearly the direct negative impact on me and mine as it will on him and his.

But then later, after everyone had left, and I was doing the last of the dishes in a dark, quiet and comfortable house in a formerly working-class East Vancouver neighborhood where the mean house price is fast approaching $500,000 I got to thinking....is there a third way in the AgitProp game that allows you to 'Stick it To the Man' while simultaneously 'Sticking to the Truth', as it were?

And that's when the lightbulb went off (think I was scrubbing the potato pot at the time) and I came to the conclusion that it might be worth seriously analyzing my extremely minor role in 'T-Shirt Gate' which all started when an unexpected E-mail floated lazily out of the ether from Citizen K...........

......stay tuned for Part II, coming soon to a bloggodome near you......

___
* Exception to the rule Update: 'discussions' about any aspect, either real or imagined, of Intelligent Design, which drive me so far around the bend that I stop making any sense whatsoever; happened recently over at pogge's place where I came out sounding like an advocate, I think....still apologizing for that one.

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The Price

Balad AirBase, Iraq

From Johny Dwyer of the NY Times Magazine:

As of March 18, 11,344 American soldiers had been injured in the war in Iraq......

"These young kids are heroes," says Col. Joseph Brennan, a head and neck surgeon. "Somebody's got to pay the price. And these kids are paying the price."

To which one can only ask - why?

Why does any kid, no matter where they are from, have to pay that price, or worse, for no good reason at all?

___
Can also be reached via the always fine TruthOut.Org

Coming Soon to a Congress Near You...

HypothesisTestimonials
SaveTheFossilsVille

The House Unamerican Scientists Committee

There's no easy way to admit this......

In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies.....

Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details.

Good journalism values balance above all else..... In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.

Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICBM defense system that can't work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars and imperil national security, you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that's not our concern.... This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science.....

And it will start on April Fools' Day.

MATT COLLINS
THE EDITORS editors@sciam.com
COPYRIGHT 2005 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC.


Once you've stopped laughing, go read it all, then take a deep breath and realize the guts this thing took.

Oh sure, it's cloaked in humor but what it really does is put truth up on the table with all the lies and the half truths for all to see (and smell).

And in these times this kind of effort is the only thing that can save us.

But it will only work if a significant proportion of mainstream media outlets get up the gumption to do the same - in all fields.

Why?

Because there is safety against the targetted smear in numbers.

And even more importantly, once a few get going others in the media that want to do the right thing (and their editors) will be emboldened to do so.

And if that happens the Obfuscators (love that word, sounds as sordid as what it actually describes) will be forced out into the open to defend their lies and half-truths day after day after day after day until they either give up the ghost or dry up and tumble down the idiot wind with last remaining shreds of yesterday's fish wrap.

So, how are we going to help make that happen?

___
Huge Thanks: to Liz at Blondesense for posting the letter in its entirety, especially for those that can't get past the subscription wailing wall, and for helping us see obfuscation for what it really is.
DoubleSecretProbationUpdate: especially for our South of 49th Readers....if the hearings are held, who gets to reprise the role of Sen. McCarthy?

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In The End...

Anschluss Rising
Canuckistained (blood red)


......We Will All Love Guns.

By way of Rick Barnes, Aislin nails it.


-30-

Res Ipsa Loquitur.....

The High-WaterMark
SingleMaltVille


.....which means "The Thing That Speaks For Itself".

That, along with "Let The Good Times Roll", was one of the favorite mottos of Hunter S. Thompson, and when he died I suggested that it was no more.

Now, I'm not so sure.

****

Even if you are not a Thompson freak you are probably acquainted with his infamous line about the vision of the highwater mark that he saw in the Mojave Deseert, circa 1971.

But just as a reminder of the work of a man at the top of his game, as it were, here it is word for word:

"We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark— the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

So forget all that 'He Who Makes a Beast of Himself to Get Rid of the Pain of Being a Man' stuff for a minute, because there is something else to consider here.

Something bigger.

Because if you go back to Thompson's mid-60's writing it is a beautiful, savage thing. And from it you can catch glimpses of life, the real thing, both in its darkness and its light.

And so, while I'm convinced that his high-water vision had the ring of truth to him at the time, I don't think that Mr. Thompson ever really believed it.

And while he always said that his job was to chronicle the 'Death of the American Dream' I don't think he really believed that either.

Because if you've really read Thompson you also know that, despite the great gathering of the darkness that came with Nixon's stomping of McGovern, Ford's pardoning of Nixon, the Hawks' false-deification of Reagan, the emergence of the New Dumb, the squashing of his own private Idaho from the Mankiewicz days - Gary Hart, the Atwater-aided Willie Horton-abetted one term aberration of George HW 'Sushi Barfing' Bush, and, finally, the lynching of Clinton by the unholy Scaife/Coors/Mellon Trinity, he never lost sight of the light.

I felt the same way when I stumbled upon Billmon's Whiskey Bar awhile back.

Back in the days when he still ran comments.

This time last year both Thompson and Billmon were still stomping on the terra, the former only occasionally, the latter every single bloody day (sometimes twice, or even three times per).

But both collided hard against something that could not be avoided in the run-up to the next big swindle - the re-unification of the Church of the Sacred Bleeding Aileswater/Rovian Heartless Ones during the re-election campaign of George W. 'Sushi Cortex' Bush.

Which, of course, was the stomping of the truth.

For Thompson, it was too much and in the end I think maybe the light at the end of the Dream tunnel really did go out, because, as quoted by Billmon:

Starting around the time George W. Bush got re-elected, Hunter descended into a deep funk. Traditionally, when the blues appeared it would last for a day or two and then his arch humor would creep back in full force . . . But not in November 2004. The jokes disappeared and never came back, replaced by incessant talk of his having fulfilled his life mission. Death was now always on the table.

Rolling Stone
Contentment Was Not Enough
March 24, 2005

Billmon too gave up the ghost, ostensibly because:

"What I finally had to confront was the fact that truth alone is impotent in the face of modern propaganda techniques – as developed, field tested, refined and deployed by Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, the think tanks, the marketing departments of major corporations, the communications departments of major research universities, etc. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the peculiar vulnerability of historical truth (which means political truth) is that it isn’t inherently more plausible than outright lies, since the facts could always have been otherwise."

Which scared the hell out of me, because, despite his ability to chronicle all that was going wrong with America, like Thompson, I always felt that, deep down, Billmon also believed in all that America could, and should, be.

But all is not lost.

Because now, suddenly, Billmon is back.

And sure, he can pretend it's because of that monkey he just can't quite get off is back:

"But as I’ve noted before, blogging is a strange drug. When you’re clean, it’s not too hard to stay clean. But once you start using the stuff again . . . man, the monkey can get his claws in your back pretty damn fast. So one post led to another, and then another. And, well, pretty soon I was back freebasing."


Or, he can pretend that he's learned to live with futility:

"American democracy will continue to vegetate in the chronic ward, occasionally moaning or drooling or wetting itself, until someone in authority finally orders the feeding tube pulled out....The Republican Party no doubt will continue to metastasize into an unholy alliance of Christian authoritarians and nationalist xenophobes. Little Green Footballs uber alles. The world, in other words, no doubt will continue heading for hell in a hand basket. But I guess I’ve learned to accept futility. Or at least, I’ve decided it isn’t good or sufficient reason to lock up the liquor cabinet and shut down the bar."

But we know it's something more than that.

Because we now know that, through it all, Billmon has kept a candle in the window.

And we know that that candle, and a thousand others like it, are throwing a small but growing light on the initials of a crazy hillbilly from Louisville that are etched in the stone above that old high-water mark far, far out in the darkness.

And that is a beautiful and sometimes savage thing.

Let the Good Times Roll.

____
Update: Credit where credit is due. The 'Sushi Barfing' thing is from another writer with a very different, yet strangely congruent, vision, Annie Lamott.

-34-

Identity Crisis?

CanuckiStanMikitaVille
NoMore?

Today's the day we start to find out if we're still the Country we think we are, or if the Anschluss has truly begun.

And no, we're not talking about that made-for-TV 'Three Amigos' thing down in Texas.

Instead, it's the day American Anti-Iraq-War Warrior Jeremy Hinzman finds out about his refugee claim.

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He Who Must Be Punishered

MarvelLand
StanLeeVille

Whew.

Second source, courtesy of Thursday, is in the bag.

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Cluffie Must Go! Vol V

SpicedUpRadioOneWorld
MotherCorpVille

OK, OK.

We're willing to admit that it's not all CBC Vancouver morning man Rick Cluff's fault this time around.

But we do believe that Cluffie's continued puffery in all matters serious is symptomatic of the continued disintegration of the Nation's Broadcaster.

****

What really got a bug in our ear this morning was the now ubiquitous 'TalkBack' crutch.

Essentially, this is a device where people are invited to phone in and 'give their views' after an interview or talking-head piece on an important subject.

All fine and good in concept, but only if the producers, fact checkers, and hosts are willing to do their jobs assiduously.

But it is essentially crap that gets in the way of rational discourse by obfuscating evidence, reason, and fact when it is used as "he said/she said, two-sides-of-the-same-coin" filler that gutless Mothercorp administrators love because it is cheap and it offends no one.

Case in point: this morning a very well-meaning lady called the TalkBack line to bemoan the fact that Terri Schiavo is being starved and forcibly euthanized because of her husband's decision to have her feeding tube removed.

Now, this lady should in no way be chastized for making these statements.

It's just that the CBC should either not run such comments or, if they do, they should make a moderating statement to clarify the facts.

For example, here are two facts that were not made clear by P. Cluffie, either before or after he played the Talkback Clip in question:

#1) Ms Schiavo is not being 'starved' to death because she is no longer capable of perceiving hunger. Her cerebral cortex with it's billions of neurons and trillions of synaptic connections is gone; it has been replaced by cerebral spinal fluid.

#2) The withdrawl of a manufactured medical device that is keeping someone alive is not euthanasia. This is the same thing as choosing to remove a respirator when someone is braindead after a massive stroke. Despite what the Rovians and their Corporate Media Shills would like their Base (and the lady who innocently called the 'TalkBack' line) to think, Ms. Schiavo is not being murdered.

Given these facts, we would like to suggest that the critical point to be discussed here is not whether Ms. Schaivo's husband should be allowed to pull the plug (ie. this is not arguable in the law, either here or in the States, which is why successive judges have refused to grant injunctions), but instead whether more humane ways of dealing with a certain, yet slow death, should be seriously considered.

As the fact-challenged 'Senator from Shrubland', Tom DeLay, said last weekend:

"If you did this to an animal you would be thrown in jail."

Indeed.

And if Mr. DeLay and his kind would stop grandstanding and instead facilitate the passage of humane death and dying laws there would be no need to inflict this kind of thing on anyone or their families.

Unfortunately, you won't hear P. Cluffie talk about really hard stuff like this as long as he can duck the toughest job of a real jounalist, which is to separate the wheat from the chaff. Instead, he falls back on his unmoderated 'Talk Back' breaks, his hourly duels with Kevin Sylvester, and now, worst of all, his constant stream of inane chatter with the newly installed Traffic Girl.

Which is a real shame, because as CBC Radio apes the corporate Morning Zoo shows in an effort to become more 'relevant' for a younger demographic it is becoming less and less relevant as a disseminator of insightful news, analysis and comment.

________
Update: In case you were wondering, cerebral spinal fluid, or C.S.F., is a clear, plasma-like fluid. It contains no cells - stem, nervous, or otherwise. Essentially, it is saline with a bit of protein in it; kind of like the stuff you wash your contact lenses in. That is what Ms. Schaivo's brain has become over the last 15 years, and no amount of wishful thinking, or parsing of the prognosis by the anti-Hippocrates incarnate, Bill Frist, or now the Jebbinator is going to change that.
DoubleSecretProbationUpdate: Looks like 'renowned' and Nobel Prize 'nominated' Fristian prognosis parser, neurologist William Hammesfahr may not be all he has been hyped to be .

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Does Sam Walton Have Something Against....

Wal-Mart-O-Rama
RaceToTheBottomVille


El Gordo?

____
Thanks to KayberToss for the link.

Big Frank and the Shillophant

Potterville
CapraCornifornia

Listen.

I know a lot of things are better now than when I was a kid.

Especially our inclusiveness towards each other - in almost all of our forms.

But sometimes I wonder why we have decided to give so much of it up.

Why we have convinced ourselves that hopping into the excrement at the bottom of the Neandercon's Newly Gilded Cage is a good place to be.

In fact, it's gotten to the point where I sometimes figure we've crossed over to the darkside of a Frank Capra story.

You know, like that part in 'It's a Wonderful Life' where Bedford Falls turns into Potterville.

Case in point: Casinos everywhere.

Don't get me wrong. I like Casinos and I like Vegas.

It's just that I also like to drive through the bats near Barstow to get there, get stupid for a few days, stop to hit fungos in the desert on the way home, and then get on with my life.

What I don't like is going for a bike ride with my kids along Vancouver's Seawall and then, suddenly, out of nowhere having to run a gauntlet of Security, Stepford Molls, and Pseudo-Sopranos as we pass the old Expo '86 site.

And if it was only the Mob running a shady show I might be able to live with it.

But what I can't handle is the likes of Big Frank Stronach slathering it up as good 'ol fashioned fun and wholesome entertainment for the Entire Noocuelar Family.

Belinda's included.

And never forget that Potter.....errrrr....Stronach always has his legitimizing ducks in a row.

Why else would he have recently hired former US Ambassador, and Rovian Shillophant, Paul 'Gucci' Celluci, to help smooth things over both North and South of the border.

Influence doesn't come any better than that.

But then again, hey!

Maybe if Big Frank really steps up to the plate and becomes a Super Ranger, "Craps at the Casino" and "Trifectas at the Track" will become a Keystone Investment Golden Arm of that Social Security Privatization Plan that has not quite yet emerged from Mr. Bush's Brain.

____
Update: Patricia over at Blondesense has the South of 49th view on SS 'Gambling Account's in a fabulous bit of snarkolepsy she calls 'Viva Lost Wages'
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The New Pornlaunderers

Prince Rupert, British Columbia
CoalVille

Looks like Heavy Kevvie has gotten the green light from the Bridge to use a little Slushie to buy Prince Rupert's Ridley Coal Terminal from the Feds:

By WENDY STUECK
Saturday, March 19, 2005 Globe and Mail, Page B6

"The British Columbia government is negotiating with Ottawa to buy Ridley Terminals Inc., a coal shipping terminal in Prince Rupert, B.C. Provincial Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon yesterday said the province approached Ottawa after learning that the federal government was talking to prospective buyers about the facility, which opened in 1984. B.C. wanted to ensure open access to the facility, something that might have been threatened had the terminal been sold to a private company, Mr. Falcon said...

So, apparently, the Falcon wants to ensure open access.

For Whom?

The Snowman?

Balderdash, we say.

Here's our prediction: The SS Gordo makes a small investment now ($10 million tops)....takes it out for a short term, pre-election savior spin....then a year from now, two tops, the terminal is quietly sold to the bidder of the Government's choosing for a sweetheart deal and an even sweeter closed-shop contract.

We're not sure what their double secret probation name for this scam is but we call it "Privatization Laundering".

It's new, it's sexy, and it will have the Multinats drooling all over themselves in anticipation.

And like all perversions it will gain strength with repetition.

Just imagine the circle of frenzied Corporate Onaism that will ensue when it comes time to sell off, oh say, Manning Park?

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And Justice For All?

ParadiseByTheLake
RainForrestVille

Thursday has an excellent post up on the Air India verdict that ultimately brings us around to the eminently sensible conclusion that the justice system may have actually performed a required correction that was necessitated by a very flawed National Policing system that must be fixed.

Thus, opportunistic politically expedient bleatings to the contrary, if there is to be a public inquiry it should focus on the latter, not the former.

___
Update: Interesting that Thursday and Michael Enright (see this am's Sunday Morning editorial) are pretty much on the same page - except the former beat the latter to the punch and offers up much better evidence to support their conclusion.

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Where Have all the Numbers Gone?

Anti-WarProtesting
DoingTheRightThingVille

Regular contributor eteba from Quebec is quite rightly despondent:

"A little over 2 years ago we were 135,000,last year 25,000 and today 8,000.
It was quite dissappointing because we had a beautiful, sunny and warm day."

It was a similar situation here as well, for total numbers at least.

But I did notice a subtle shift in the crowd because mixed in with the usual suspects there seemed to be a higher percentage of families at Sunset Beach in Vancouver's West End today.

And the unembedded Dahr Jamail, whose speech was short and to the point, was magnificent.

Something I didn't know is that his has been a DIY operation from the beginning. Essentially, Jamail is a guy from Anchorage Alaska who got so upset with the (non)reporting of the Naked Aggression/Occupation that he decided to go to Iraq himself.

He also pointed out that the Main Stream Media in North America has done its job to keep it all off the front pages, and then described the current situation in Fallujah in detail. What is abundantly clear is that the city is a concentration camp, complete with retinal scans for all residents.

And what percentage of North Americans knows this, or that it is being done in their name?

Jamail also pointed out that the Bush Empire has demonstrated that it does not care one iota about 'protest as usual' . Thus, he believes that we must undertake a concerted, 3-pronged peaceful effort to topple the Empire by:

1) Unmasking the entire MSMedia (ie. not just Miller and Gannon) as shills
2) Actively supporting military resisters in the US and other 'coalition' countries
3) Making corporations that support and/or profit from the occupation pay.


Most importantly, he said, these are things that we, the commoners, can make happen on a DIY level.

I agree with him.

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Get The Real Story on Iraq - Today!

LotusLandia
Vancouver, British Columbia

Big anti-war rally in Vancouver today.

March starts @ 11:30 south side of Burrard Bridge.

Rally starts @ 1:00pm Sunset Beach.

Real life, on the ground Iraqi correspondent/blogger Dahr Jamail is speaking!