Thursday 31 May 2012

Shrieeek! Union destroys hospital! And Timmies!

This is what passes for news reporting, in the Sun tabloids.
A hospital Tim Hortons in St. John's that was supposed to make hundreds of thousands of dollars to offset the cost of delivering health care is going fully private after years of losing taxpayer money.

Eastern Health, Newfoundland and Labrador's largest health authority, announced this week that it will hand over all its non-patient cafeteria services — including the red-ink-stained Timmies — to private companies.
How many prevarications did you spot in those opening paragraphs? Tim Hortons are franchised; whoever has a contract with the head company is required to hand over a large chunk, if not ALL the profits to the corporate owners. Hospitals are not-for-profit but you'd think that somebody in Accounting might have been able to crunch those numbers for Eastern Health before agreeing to a venture that lost money to private industry.
"We cannot continue to subsidize those non-direct care services when we know they can be provided more effectively and efficiently," Eastern Health CEO Vickie Kaminski said.
Words taken directly from the CONservatives' standard talking-points manual. Will Eastern Health soon be asking patients to launder their own bedsheets and clean the bathrooms? That's *non-direct care services*, right?
When the Tim Hortons opened in 1995 in the Health Sciences Centre, Newfoundland and Labrador's biggest hospital, authorities promised it would net a profit of up to $300,000 a year, enough to "pay the salaries of seven nurses," then-hospital administrator Gladys Peachy told CBC News at the time.

Instead, Kaminski revealed this week the chain lost $260,000 last year alone, despite the fact it's a very popular spot, with huge lines every day.
Hmm how interesting. Could it possibly be that the budget advanded in the Tim Hortons' franchise template was based on part-time, minimum wage, no benefits staff salaries? And Eastern Health probably has regulations that require workers within its complex belong to a union.
But while the coffee shop itself is privately managed, its workers are unionized hospital employees, earning about $20 an hour, plus benefits.
What the Sun's union-bashing propaganda piece neglects to mention is that any revenue "lost" by Eastern Health went to Tim Hortons' investors and shareholders. And earning $20 an hour plus benefits, working in a busy high-stress environment seems appropriate to me.

Interestingly enough, it appears that none of the infotainment flaks who work for the Sun chain have expressed outrage about this
.
The bill [C-38] increases Gov. Gen. David Johnston's salary from $137,500 to $270,602 starting on Jan.1, 2013 — but he's no longer exempt from paying income tax. His salary was hiked to offset the taxman's bite.
His salary was doubled. Some *taxman's bite*. Remember, the governor general lives for free in luxurious housing including housekeeping staff and travels first-class to exotic locations - all paid by our taxes. Where's the shriEEEK, Sun Media?


Meanwhile in BC - as illustrated by the photo above - the customers' seating area outside the Tim Hortons' located in a hospital was temporarily used for patients arriving at Emergency during an unusually demanding health care critical period.

Just say 'no', Canada

So, last night on Twitter, SUZYALLCAPSLOCK, as @roseblue, was squatting on the #M312 (Woodworth's Wank) hashtag in a prolonged fit of echolalia, obsessively repeating her mantra: 'It is *so* human. It's a fact.' Over and over and over again.

I got a little annoyed and decided to post links to Canadian Cynic's scathing take-down of her endorsement this past January of a USian hit list for abortion providers. SHE thinks we should have one here too. I thought that maybe people on the fence on M312 ('what's the harm in discussing when life begins?') might be interested in the sort of person who is fanatically in favour of it. And, in particular, what a lying, eliminationist nutbar SHE is.

By the way, I think desperation is setting in to the pro-M312 camp as they realize the truth of what Chantal Hébert said on May 11. They are going to lose. Big. Time.
A defeat this time — at the hands of the most socially-conservative friendly majority government in decades — would be a crushing blow to the anti-abortion cause.

It could be construed as its biggest setback since the Supreme Court ruling.

Given the active opposition of the prime minister to the motion, it would likely put the issue to rest at least in Parliament and, if not for all time, at least for the rest of his term in office.
This morning it dawned on me that today is the *third* anniversary of the assassination of Dr George Tiller. A man who had been targetted and hit-listed by the very group behind the new hit list SHE endorses. His murderer was, in fact, aided by a member of Operation ReScum.

What do we call that again? Oh yeah. Terrorism enabling.

While we in Canada have our insane fetus fetishists, overall we are not nearly as nutz as the US.

And we are not nutz because, well, we're Canadian, but also because abortion is a settled matter here.

Settled. As in, been there, done that.

No abortion doctors or clinics have been attacked here for years and years.

Let's keep it that way. Don't let the terrorism enablers have a platform for their hate and insanity.

Fuck the debate.

Tuesday 29 May 2012

Doin' the Twitter Block!

It happened to JJ. It has happened to fern hill.

And now, I'm proud to report that many right-wing, religious zealots that people Twitter have also made me the target of their hissy-fit blocking.

It happens of course when prochoice activists ask too many inCONvenient questions and point out CONtemptuous fallacies in the tweets of abortion-criminalizing fetushists.

So, I've been blocked by cpc MP Stephen Woodworth.




In his *parting* tweet, Woodworth even had the chutzpah to throw back at me the words of the brilliant Molly Ivins
that I quote on my Twitter profile page.
There are two kinds of humor. One kind that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity. The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule -- that's what I do. Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful.
I responded to his tweet by pointing out he had no idea who Molly Ivins was. He also appears aggrieved and to consider himself victimized by prochoice activists who can think faster and better on Twitter than he does.

Sunday 27 May 2012

Note to NatPo Visitors

A couple of days ago I left two comments on Mike Schouten's (the guy behind We Need a Law (Like a Hole in the Head) brain-twister in the National Post, in which he threatens PMSHithead that for abandoning the abortion issue the Mighty Evangelical Bloc will punish him by voting NDP.

One identified Schouten as a Dominionist; the other was in reply to someone asserting that fetus fetishists had nowhere else but the Contempt Party to park their votes.
Um, Mike ran as a Christian Heritage candidate.
In each, I left a link to the May 1 DJ! post about Schouten and his connections.

Since then, I've been deleting a bunch of barely coherent splutterings from various Anonymice.

This one just came through and I thought I'd share. Look for the tells.
I was speeding through a playground zone and told the cops that they had no right to impose their values on me. Strangely though, they didn't buy it. I told them that nobody had the right to tell me what to do with my body, and if I wanted to press hard with foot on they gas pedal, who were they to constrain my freedoms? They still gave me a ticket. And I am a lesbian womyn. Therefore, all police are mysoginistic homophobes, clearly, as are the bigots who make traffic laws. Stupid ignorant people. All law is imposition of values. Stupid silly morons. Every time I hear or read one of your inane slogans I cringe a little bit. I die inside just a little bit more whenever I try to fathom how irrational some presumably mature humans can be. What a sad, sad world, so filled with idiots.
Now I wouldn't wish ill on anyone, but I sure hope this Anon bookmarks DJ! and keeps on reading. ;-)

NOTE to NatPo readers and would-be commenters: DJ! will not provide a venue for your vitriol. DJ! is reserved for our vitriol.

Saturday 26 May 2012

Finally. Fetushist Speaks the Truth

After ignoring my straightforward question on Twitter on why we need Woodworth's Wank, then side-stepping with non sequiturs about the 'law reflecting truth', SUZYALLCAPSLOCK comes clean.



The sole purpose of M312 is to recriminalize abortion.

OK? We're clear on that?

(SUZY has me blocked which, I've just found out, disallows me from linking to her statuses and embedding her tweets. Yay! Full and fair exchange of ideas! Thus, screenshot. [I have more.])

BONUS: The galloping idiocy this whole schmozzle is generating is too much for smartypantses to resist. Yay! JJ, the unrepentant is back on the beat.

Would You Debate Nelson Muntz?

On Twittter, JJ, The Unrepentant Hippie and I are discussing @BerthaWilsonMtn.



He (? let's assume it's a he) mimics what Sane People tweet about Woodworth's Wank (M312) and changes the link.

Hahahaha. Knee-slapping funny, if you are an eight-year-old boy.

We shouldn't be surprised. The whole 'Bertha Wilson Motion' thing is a typical repurposing of clever pro-choice messages by imagination-challenged fetus fetishists.

He's got a particular fascination with deBeauxOs and moi. Here he claims the entire anti-M312 argument is based on one scathingly tongue-in-cheek tweet by dBO, which he had already taken issue with.

There's a screenshot of her tweet which I grabbed.


This week’s LOL Award (Lack of Logic or Laugh out Loud…your choice) goes to this nice little anonymous lady(deBeauxOs) that speaks tough, well, because she is anonymous…and because, you know, when you are trying to influence government and you don’t have a shred of logic…you post “intelligent” comments that really advance your argument…and demonstrate your ability to debate issues and influence public opinion.

For those who are unaware, necrophilia is sexual attraction to corpses.

It takes an amazing sick mind, and probably a supporter of the NDP, to even suggest that there is any similarity between necrophilia and this.

In the meantime, this is what is actually lobbying government.

Oh, sorry…deBeauxOs doesn’t actually lobby government..you have to be a REAL person to do that.

The account is just an anonymous RoboDrone.

No wonder they are afraid to debate.  We would be too if this is the best we could muster.

LOL.
All that's missing is an armpit fart and a Ha! Ha!.

Go leave him some love. Since April 11 the blog has garnered only eleven comments total.





Just eat your rotting vegetables, there are children in Africa

Planetary financial overlord Christine Lagarde helpfully informs us that she is more sympathetic to eager schoolchildren in Africa then she has for people suffering from reduced health care coverage in Athens. She is saying this because she wants to avoid the likely electoral success of an anti-austerity party in next month's elections. It's a well-known fact about human psychology that a sound, unsympathetic moral scolding from an alien overlord from a parallel imaginary universe produces willing acceptance of increased suffering and a greater desire to comply. (Hmm, I suppose that explains the USA...)

I now eagerly await Mme. Lagarde's impending inauguration of the boat that will carry the resources that are being taken away from undeserving Hellenic sick people to those very eager children in Africa. Will it be rowed by sweating speculation-company executives, who, after all, live to do God's work? While we wait for her to organize this flotilla, maybe she could explain to us, over a bag of live garthax beetles, what the heck her predecessors on the IMF mothership had been doing for African schoolchildren in the 90s.

(Another take from Common Dreams. I have really no idea how exactly the election will pan out in Greece next month. Perhaps the fear-mongering will work, sadly. But everytime it does, it does at an increasing cost to the legitimacy of global institutions. I do not necessarily believe that this is inherently a good thing...but it is on the head of people like Lagarde.)

Successful Lawless Abortion

Amdist all the yammering about Woodworth's Wank (aka M312, or #M312 on Twitter), the question that still hasn't been answered is 'WHY?'

Why do we need to reexamine this issue?

As JJ points out, things ain't broke.


(Doncha just love #LawlessAbortion? Make it trend!)

The only non-glurgey hemi-demi-semi-quasi reason the Wankers can come up with is that the law is based on an old definition of 'human being', which in this context -- the Criminal Code, mind -- equals 'person'.

Old. That's all they got.

Let's help them here. Some old laws are bad. But they're bad not because they're old but because there have been scientific or social developments. Or they're bad because they are inefficient, slow, cumbersome, expensive, etc.

Have there been scientific developments in 400 years? Of course.

Do they affect human reproduction? Yep. It's much safer. A little understanding of germ theory goes a long way in reducing maternal and neonatal mortality.

But apart from some technological tinkering, reproduction is still pretty much egg meets sperm and we're off! Until it stops or is stopped.

Biology, aka sex and reproduction, pace Dean Del Mastrobato, hasn't changed in 400 years.

Have there been social developments? Yep. But none -- such as women's rights, LGBT rights -- that works to the Wankers' advantage here.

So, is this 'old' law bad because it's slow or expensive or wasteful or just plain stoopid?

I haven't seen any arguments along those lines.

Nope. That's it. That's all they got.

Old.

And maybe it hasn't been changed in 400 years because it's straightforward and practical. You know -- successful.



New! Improved Whingening Power! Same Great Taste!

Since being disappointed that the 'trailer' being touted wasn't for another cheesy conservative Christian horror film, I became curious as to whether the perpetrators of the 'new' Abortion Caravan, "Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform" (Refoooooormmmm!) had any connections to Margaret Somerville. Bio-ethicist Dr. Somerville is the go-to source for Christian religious anti-choicers propping up the wrongitywrongwrongwrongness of abortion.

Poking at their site, it became apparent that while Dr. Somerville is not obviously linked to this 'bioethical' group, this fresh faced organization is staffed as a lesser satellite of the American (and original) Centre for Bio-ethical Reform (Reeeefoooooormmmm!) The penny bios of the Canadian satellite staff are weighted heavily with young campus veterans from the University of Calgary anti-abortion crusades and other Canadian university venues.  There is a strong inference of Catholic as well as evangelical Protestant support. The bios of the staffers emphasize how they "became convicted", always a dogwhistle for the conservative religious.  The site bluntly equates abortion with SIN and is trolling for religious converts in its encouragements.

I recommend giving the site a good read just to know where a lot of the tactics orginate, although possibly with an alcoholic beverage or five.  I'm preeettty sure there's a drinking game to be had on their 'publications' link page and their 'projects' page maps out what tactics they're using, which are wholecloth franchised from an American mothership.  I had an 'aha' moment when I discovered that I personally ran afoul of their martyred 'Choice Chain' protocol cluttering the sidewalks of all corners of a busy intersection in downtown Calgary during Stampede. These are also the same folks behind the carnage postcards gleefully stuffed into Canadian mailboxes.

I'd like to be a fly on the wall when the mothership project for picketing churches judged lacking 'true Christianity' shows up at a target. Especially if it pits Catholics against Protestants and vice versa.  What about synagogues and mosques as targets? Wiccans?  It's so very Westboro Baptist continium.

Their endorsement links page is also educational, in showing who really really really likes them and why. All Catholic and evangelical anti-abortionist testimonials to the saintliness of the CCBR staff; go figure. My favorite is Jeff Scott: 'Pastor of Young Adults, Singles and Sports, Metropolitan Bible Church'.  Sadly, I don't think he means sports the way I initially read his title.

Their videos page strikes me as the 'new' media generation approach they seem to be hinging the latest campaign on.  A mini-Youtube centre with a slant of martyrdom and fervent effort to wrap themselves in the human rights cloak.  They're all over dramatic music (which part of me finds annoying because I am a fan of the 'incidental music' genre), surgical close-ups out of context, etc. bring slightly better production quality to the Fallacy of Appeal to Emotion.

The darkly ironic thing is, their mothership has an abortion facts page that informs us how minimal abortions are after 9-12 weeks gestation, but that (somewhat outdated) reality impinges not on their stance.  They're aiming for conception as the start and end point.  You have to give them points for honest agenda.

The vids also clearly show the American mothership's presence and origination of the 'edgy young' tactics, going back years, so they're pretty much admitting this isn't new, it's re-packaging by a new marketing firm in an effort to up dismal sales, facts be damned.

Speaking of the mothership, you can tell I toddled over to their site.  I advise you right now, many of the tabs open into a 'horrific' abortion video autostarting...and then looping.  It's pretty much Christian Hellhouse meets out of context medical footage. When and if you wade through that, you find them mostly excusing using bloody pictures because 'Hey, it works for those tragedies we're equating ourselves with so ergo sum, it'll work for us because we've told you we're the same as those'. ...and other apologetics. It was founded by former GOP politician from the Reagan era, Gregg Cunningham, and now hosts the free speech of he and his like minded colleagues. Note the Canadian crossover in staff.

There is another gossipy irony in that, despite their aims, CBR are derided on the 'net by the Army of God's Dan Holman as being too pacifistic in their unwillingness to commit violence and too willing to sue others who don't want to pay copyright on Cunningham's galleries of photos used on all the trucks etc. (the claim is, as unlegimitately sourced as it is, that he paid an abortionist to photograph surgical remains).  I suppose there's a morbid comfort that CBR settles for psychological shock and awe.

PS: Did anyone else know there is an analogue of Facebook called Prolifebook?

Wednesday 23 May 2012

CONservative family values: the Republican *Christian* way.

The MASSIVE cognitive dissonance in US right-wing neo-CON politics lumbers on, like a huge prehistoric creature whose dysfunctional actions signal the ongoing extinction of its species.

First, this:
The son of Arizona's Senate president confessed that he and another counselor shoved broomsticks and flashlights into the rectums of 18 boys in at least 40 incidents at a youth camp in June.

Now Yavapai County prosecutors say they will drop all but one assault charge and likely recommend little or no jail time if 18-year-old Clifton Bennett agrees to plead guilty.

A similar agreement has been offered to co-defendant Kyle Wheeler, 19, who faces an additional assault charge for choking three of the boys until they passed out.

The plea agreements were first presented in court last week and could be completed at a hearing Monday.

Prosecuting attorney James Landis explained the plea agreement in court, saying the "broomsticking" was a hazing ritual and a punishment, not sexual assault.

But legal experts, sex-crimes prosecutors and victims'-rights lawyers say the acts clearly fit the definition of sexual assault.

The pleas, which describe the assault charge as "a non-dangerous, non-repetitive offense," have outraged parents who say their sons were victims of violent sexual attacks. The boys, who were 11 to 14 years old at the time, have had trouble going to the bathroom, sleep with clothes on, are afraid at night, and have undergone sexual-assault counseling.
[...]

Lawyers for
[Clifton] Bennett [...] described Bennett as an honor student and active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, planning to go on a mission in September. "A felony conviction for assault will make his desire to complete his mission impossible," they wrote.
The outcome:
A judge on Friday sentenced the son of Arizona Senate President Ken Bennett to 30 days in jail and his fellow counselor to 45 days for a series of hazings at a youth camp near Prescott last June.

Clifton Bennett, 18, and fellow counselor Kyle Wheeler, 19, admitted to abusing 18 boys ages 11 to 14 — who had been hand-picked for a weeklong leadership camp — by poking them in the rear end with broomsticks, a flashlight and a cane as a punishment or just because they were in a bad mood. [...]

More than a dozen victims' parents spoke, calling the hazing sexual assault and molestation despite findings by state experts that there was no sexual intent behind the "broomings."

Both sides of the case expressed disappointment with the sentence. Family members and victims called it too lenient and said Bennett got a deal because of his father's position, while Bennett's family said he was treated with more scrutiny because of his father.

Bennett and Wheeler had each been charged with 18 counts of kidnapping and 18 counts of aggravated assault. Bennett was allowed to plead guilty to one assault charge while Wheeler pleaded guilty to two charges. Prosecutors dropped the other charges.
Notice the change in language from one media report to the other. Actions that were violent, forced upon children, invasive of their bodies and caused them damage and harm, are now described as "a poke in the rear end".

Did Jerry Sandusky use similar innocuous words to defend his behaviour when (or more likely if) Penn State football coach Paterno questioned him?
Afterward, Bennett and his father left the courthouse from the back to avoid media attention.

When reporters caught up with them, the elder Bennett said his son had made an unfortunate decision.

When asked how he felt about the sentence, Bennett said: "How would you feel if your son were going to jail?"
The families will probably launch civil suits. Clearly none of them gravitate in the exalted, privileged circles of political and oligarchal power that the Bennetts do.


The above is a photograph of serial sexual abuser Clifton Bennett.

I fear this man will re-offend, and he'll use the considerable resources at his disposal to avoid any form of accountability. This experience has probably also taught him how not to get caught, next time. Leave no witnesses.

ADDED: The Daily KOS nails it.
[...] when your son brutally traumatizes a bunch of 11 to 14 year-olds, you don’t whine about the sentence. You are down on your hands and knees begging forgiveness from the victims, for maybe having failed to meet your obligations as a parent.

But the overlords of Happy Valley – whether it’s a college campus or the state of Arizona - never teach this kind of accountability to their children because they don’t face it themselves. Their money, their connections, their fame, their manipulation of the system mean never, ever having to say they’re sorry and actually mean it, let alone pay an appropriate price for what they do.

I don’t want these people anywhere in or near the White House. Because they are the kind of people who will steal your children’s clean water for their fracking profits. They will let your children go to bed hungry and come to school hungry, so they can get another $150,000 off their taxes. And they will send your children to die in Iraq, or Iran, or wherever the next trumped-up conflict is, so they can continue to profit from war.

Amen.

Tuesday 22 May 2012

FetusBully.com Is Here!


More at FetusBully.com.

DJ! is pleased to be listed under 'Fellow Bullies'. SUZIEALLCAPSLOCK has a link under 'Friends of the Fetus' with her usual juvenile redirect to fetal pro0n.

BREAKING! Fetus Lobby Enters Way-Back Machine

As we asked back here, what the hell are the Fetushists® up to with their cheesy teaser?

Today's the Big Day. Finally we can answer the burning question.

Not much.
Anti-Abortion Activists Highjack Abortion Rights’ Pet Project

Young adults with the anti-abortion group, Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform have released details today about their plan to take a project once used to advance abortion rights, the 1970 Abortion Caravan, and to instead abolish abortion with their own spin-off: The New Abortion Caravan.

In one week’s time, 20-plus young people ranging in ages from 19-36 will be driving box-bodied trucks with 7-foot tall and 22-foot wide posters of aborted children, demonstrating on street corners with similar graphics, and circulating postcards at peoples’ homes. They are starting their campaign in Vancouver on May 29, travelling across the country and ending in Ottawa on Canada Day.

CCBR’s executive director Stephanie Gray explained the historical significance of her group’s tour: “We have taken the sacred cow of Canada’s abortion rights movement and are using it to advance the cause for pre-born children.”
Pet project? Sacred cow?

From forty-plus fucking years ago?

Zowee. They've gassed up a few more FetusMobiles®.

JJ dubbed their perambulating fetal porn trucks FetusMobiles® at least five years ago.

And they've been pissing people off ever since.

Sunday 20 May 2012

About that so-called *public* outcry against SEXhibit ...


Bébés

Radio-Canada's Brigitte Bureau, who has done excellent work for Enquête regarding the influence that rightwing fundamentalist evangelical lobby groups exert on the Harper government, spoke to staff at the Museum of Science and Technology.

They stopped counting the emails that savaged "Sex: a Tell-All Exhibition" when they noted the overwhelming majority were template messages provided by religious institutions and many were duplicates from similar email addresses. This tactic is not all that different from the habitual RWNJ freeping campaigns and astroturfing.

Fundamentalist religious groups lobbying against the Sexhibit have been identified: Christian Gouvernance led by Timothy Bloedow (assistant to CON MP Maurice Vellacott), the Catholic Civil Rights League, Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, Canada Family Action and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.

In addition the vice-president and legal counsel for that last group claims the photographs of naked minors (as above) is child pornography and has filed a complaint with the RCMP. I imagine that Don Hutchinson's next target will be all those "pornographic" text books used by pediatricians and medical students.

These groups are demanding that the federal government stop funding the Museum.

And yet, we learned from a few tweets that Summum, a privately published soft-porn magazine receives subsidies from Heritage and Culture. One wonders if CON MP Dean Del Mastro served on the committee that awarded this periodical federal monies.

Original Radio-Canada exposé about Summum, en français ici.

There are been positive reactions to the exhibit, from taxpayers affronted by the sexphobic outcry from the religious reactionaries.

Here are excerpts from letters to the Ottawa Citizen: here, here, here, here and here.

"A tell-all exhibit may be controversial, but it is certainly no insult to taxpayers.

What is insulting is how little teenagers know about sex and the responsibility that comes with it.

Being a teenager myself, I can see how easily we can fall through the cracks of the current sex-ed curriculum. Just among my peer group, very few know what IUDs are or what they do, nor do they know the facts about STIs: basic information that is supposed to be available to all teenagers, but is obviously lacking. [...]

For the more conservative Canadian, this exhibit may seem pornographic, but kids are exposed to sex everywhere, and we face a lot of pressure to engage in it. The aforementioned exhibit touches on such subjects as consent and when one is "ready" - subjects that seem to get missed in many a classroom."

"I am not sure whether to be surprised that the sex exhibit at the Science and Technology Museum raised the concerns of Minister James Moore. My lack of surprise notwithstanding, I would hope that he would have more pressing concerns than this.

Local, somewhat reactionary talk radio has lambasted the museum and those responsible for this exhibit. Do they not realize that this is not the 1950s, the time of mom and dad and 2.4 children and of no sex outside of marriage, as if that really ever existed. Sex is everywhere.

Check the Internet lately? And teens think about sex. A lot. And they think about it at 12 and 13 years of age."


"As any parent of teenagers will tell you, the amount of sex hormones raging through teen minds and bodies is inversely proportional to how much they want to talk to their parents about it.

As a parent of two teens, I welcome the opportunity for them to get factual information about human sexuality in an impersonal environment. I'd rather they get their facts from the Canada Science and Technology Museum, instead of the locker room or the Internet. And I'll go with them because you never know when opportunities for dialogue may arise."
For a more balanced response to the Museum's exhibit which is RWNJ-free, check out these tweets.


By the way, the Museum of Science and Technology was in the news recently for this exhibit. Interestingly enough, the *radical* groups that raised questions about this one-sided promotion of the Tar Sands were critical of the use of taxpayer-funded facilities to promote a corporate marketing strategy.

Your Daily Dose of Weird

As JJ reported here, the Fetus Lobby is going batshit over this story.
A British citizen in Bangkok has been arrested after Thai police found six roasted human foetuses packed in his luggage.

Chow Hok Kuen, who is 28 and of Taiwanese origin, was held by police after the grisly discovery was made in Bangkok's Chinatown district yesterday.

Reports says the six foetuses had been covered in gold leaf after being roasted as part of a black magic ritual.
Gold leaf, eh?

Hmm.

Remember this?




BONUS: Is roast fetus tasty? Check it out.

Friday 18 May 2012

Attention, those who choose to leave *anonymous* comments.

Recently at DAMMIT JANET! we've been receiving *anonymous* comments from people who choose not to create an account in their real or internet identity.

This means we can't contact you via email if we have a question about the observations you would like to share with us or other readers, in response to our blogposts.

Since we have the power to moderate our comments - which we choose to do as it's our blog & our rules - we like to know who and what we're dealing with.

Some of our regulars - k'in for example, who we've met in real life, and can contact through an email address - have experienced difficulties registering with Blogger and thus leave a signature when they comment.

In recent weeks we've received multiple comments from several "Anonymous" folks who regurgitate fetus lobby glurge or anti-choice propaganda, and then make a big show about dissassociating themselves from the puke they've written.

Thank you for your *concern* but enough is enough. Our regular readers leave comments that engage the mind and advance the discussion. We're familiar with the standard antichoice bullshit; you don't need to drag it here as though you're a 3 month old puppy bringing us the carcass of a dead rat.

We're not in the business of providing biscuits.

Debate These Liars?

Not only is Maurice Vellacott -- like all fetus fetishists -- an opportunistic creep, he is also a lying liar.

From his press release:
Scientific research is revealing an ever-younger age at which children in the womb feel pain. Dr. Steven Zielinski, an internal medicine physician from Oregon, is one of the leading researchers into fetal pain. He has testified that a child in the womb could feel pain at “eight-and-a-half weeks and possibly earlier.” (“Pro-Lifers Welcome First Fetal Pain Abortion Ban Lawsuit,” LifeNews.com, Sept. 1, 2011)
Note tenses: present, present, past.

I'd never heard of the fellow despite having been on the Bad Science of Fetal Pain beat for quite a while.

So I googled 'Steven Zielinski fetal pain' and got this featuring a flock of fetus fetishist sites with nary a credible source in sight.

Next, Google Scholar.

On the first page, I see only three citations -- all from the mid 1980s.

And that 'has testified'? Look. 1986.




Next, google for 'Steven Zielinksi'. Lots of them. Only one I could find is a doctor from Oregon.
Dr. Steven Zielinski specializes in internal medicine and legal medicine in Umatilla, Oregon.
'Legal medicine'? New jargon for 'whoring for the Fetus Lobby'?

That look like a 'leading researcher into fetal pain' to you? Making important discoveries in the present tense? Or the present century?

Now, consult a real scientist. P.Z. Myers explains fetal brain development.

Past sins by MV on that sciency-facty stuff here.

Pity the poor Reverend Vellacott ...













Poor Maurice was blindsided by a MASSIVE fundamentalist christian furor against the SEX exhibit that exploded in dozens of phone and email messages (templates provided by churches, the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, and possibly by the Heritage and Culture Minister himself).

And yet, his plan was simple: steal "borrow" the language of the anti-bullying campaign designed to protect GLBQT kids in schools and "re-purpose" it to suit his fetus lobby.

His thunder was stolen: Waaaah!

The Radical Handmaids did take note, however and posted this.

And JJ delivers le coup de grâce to the 'nads. This is the winning comment, surely.



More blog posts inspired by Maurice Vellacott, CON idjit.

Illustration source, here.

Thursday 17 May 2012

Actual G20 Police Accountability?



When the Office of the Independent Police Review Director (OIPRD) released its scathing G20 policing report yesterday, the Twitter machine lit up.

The HiveMind® got to work trying to remember if there had been any charges laid against cops and we could come up with just two: Glenn Weddell and Babak Andalib-Goortani.

At the same time, one of the people I follow, Paisley Rae, was having an interesting exchange with the person or persons behind the Toronto Police handle. For a bot, Toronto Police seemed fairly intelligent and responsive.

I followed @TorontoPolice and asked for information on the status of the two charged cops, because even with one very distinctive name, they seemed to have dropped off the news radar. He or she promised to find out.

And now because I'm following, I get all kinds of missing persons reports, PSAs, press releases etc., like this one.

It amused me. I mean, they must have known for weeks when the OIPRD report was coming out, right?

And today, we finally get the news we've been waiting nearly two fucking years for -- there might be some accountability after all.
A handful of senior Toronto police commanders are expected to be charged in coming weeks for a variety of misconduct offences over their leadership at the G20 summit in June 2010, CBC News has learned.

The charges are in addition to 28 frontline officers slated to have disciplinary hearings for a range of misconduct offences, including unlawful arrests and use of excessive or unnecessary force against prisoners.
. . .
Until now, no details of specific charges against the officers have been released, however court documents reveal specific allegations against eight officers who have already been served with "notices of hearing."
While that says 'court documents', it isn't clear to me whether these are internal hearings or Real World (as in, Having Serious Consequences) hearings.

We'll see, I guess.

BONUS: A CBC round-up of G20 reports to date.

Once more, Mrozek misses the point.

It should come as no surprise that anti-choice scold Andrea Mrozek is also anti-science and anti-communication about human sexuality.

In her opinion piece, she inveighs against SEX: a Tell-All exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Science and Technology. She parrots the talking points stated by communications staff for Heritage and Culture Minister Moore and shrieeeks that the exhibit leaves out "true connection, intimacy and community".

Um, Andrea? The Museum's mandate "is to foster scientific and technological literacy throughout Canada," according to a statement from Moore's office.

In spite of all the metaphorical pearl-clutching expressed in Mrozek's piece, it appears that the scientific and technological aspects of human sexuality are very well displayed in the exhibit.

Given the very *special* fundamentalist religious *interests* she represents, one might assume that Mrozek would ferociously defend the gawd-given right of parents and communities to educate children with regard to sexual connection and intimacy. Why would she want the government to do that?

Oh. Wait.

Comically, Mrozek openly reveals her revulsions:
White plastic naked models of a life-size man and a woman recline, facing each other. Black light causes the models — and the white page I took notes on — to really pop. The instructions are to “locate 10 male and female erogenous zones by delicately touching each mannequin.” In case youth need help, the nipples of the woman are lit up with a purple hue.

Delicately touch each mannequin? Really? I call over a member of our research team, a medical doctor, to see if I’d understood correctly. Then we call over the public relations director of the museum. “Touching the mannequin” seems like a perverse dare for all of us. I furtively reach out to do what I’ve been told. Nothing happens. Perhaps my caress of the plastic model wasn’t delicate enough.


Right. Or perhaps anxiety-clenched fingers, sweaty with fear, aren't a "turn-on" for plastic mannequins. One wonders if Mrozek caressed the male or the female model. That's one "Tell-all" detail she clearly left out.

Added: What great inadvertent publicity for this exhibit! I expect there will be MASSIVE crowds that will turn out to see it, including adolescents under the age of 16 trying to sneak into the museum.

UPDATE: The local Radio-Canada investigation at the Museum on the provenance of the attacks against the exhibition confirms that 1) most are form letters and email messages and 2) most, if not all of them were sent by members of fundamentalist christian groups.

Wednesday 16 May 2012

Canada's Got Young Radicals!

This twelve year old girl has more savvy and brains in her little finger than all the CON MPs, including Cabinet Ministers like idiot Peter Kent.



It's unlikely that you'll see Victoria being exploited by Harper's Politburo for a photo op with PMSHithead - unless they hold her parents and the family pet hostage.

No sex please, we're Ottawans.

In the news today:
A museum sex exhibit designed to educate teenagers was just fine in Regina, but it's too hot for Ottawa.

The Canada Science and Technology Museum has raised the unaccompanied age of admission for Sex: A Tell-All Exhibition to 16 from 12. [...]

This change means the show will miss much of its target audience. Designed by the Montreal Science Centre, it is intended to introduce adolescents to the confusing world of sex.

That was supposed to include young adolescents who are just starting to experience physical and emotional changes of puberty. They will still be admitted, but only with an adult.

A museum spokesman said Wednesday there were "about 50" complaints about the show since publicity began last week. Some were phone calls, some were emails, and many of the emails had the same text copied and pasted.

The spokesman said no identifiable group was associated with the complaints.
I think members of Blob Blogging Wingnut and Tubesock Holocaust's special *Vatican Taliban* interest group - aka fundamentalist, anti-choice catholics - are responsible for the e-swarming.

Anything that might educate their children, encourage them to ask questions about sexuality and allow them to think for themselves is Verboten!

More on the War on Women and on sex that's not for breeding purposes.

I wonder if SUZYALLCAPS' zealot peer group will picket this film, à la Westboro Baptist Church, when it's screened at the ByTowne.




UPDATE by fh: Culture Min James Moore confirms his office bitched.

Added by dBO: shriEEEk!
"The purpose of the museum “is to foster scientific and technological literacy throughout Canada,” Moore’s office said in a statement.

“It is clear this exhibit does not fit within that mandate. This content cannot be defended, and is insulting to taxpayers."
From here.

Well I'm a taxpayer and I'm insulted that the Ministry for Heritage and Culture is controlled by sexphobic, religious fundamentalists and christofascists like Charles McVety.

Counter the RWNJ complaint letters with your own, and keep track.

Tuesday 15 May 2012

The Devil Has All the Good Slide Shows Too

SUZYALLCAPSLOCK (aka, SHE Who Wants the Abortion Debate but Blocks Tweeps Who Ask Inconvenient Questions or Cite That Damned Facty Stuff) is whinging again that 'prolifism' is handicapped by the unfair fight against Main Stream Culture because the devil has all the good tunes.

And movies. And literature. And television. And documentaries. And dancing. And fun.

Prolifism needs its own culture!!11!!!

(Plain text to save unwary clickers from fetal pr0n/gore redirect.)

http://www.bigbluewave.ca/2012/05/mark-steyn-quote-explains-problem-for.html

Well, I was going to mock that with 'It does have its own culture and it sucks', providing handy links to fetus fetishist movies and music.

But then I saw that SUZE isn't alone in trying to counter the sane people's idea of a good life. The nutbars at the Family Research Council are working on it too.

They've come up with a doozy.

Apparently, the Democrats have come out swinging for the non-male vote with this cutesy slide show of how much better 'Julia' would fare under Obama rather than Mittens Romney. It's called Life of Julia.

FRC hits back with Life of Maggie.

I found it via JoeMyGod who can be something of a kidder. He tweeted:
Maggie's first date is with her father.
And I thought 'funny'.

Well, it's still funny. Because it's true. See 'Age 14' in the slide show.

Most of the citations go to a new-to-me Bad Science outfit called marri research, which has been torqued from 'Marriage and Religion Research Institute'.

So, FRC has suggested #IAmMaggie as the hashtag for this hard-hitting campaign and BOOM! the Smartypantses are having a ball with it.

About Racism, Anti-Choice and Enslavement ...

Religious and fundamentalist gynophobes attempting to roll back women's sexual and reproductive rights typically use the struggles of oppressed groups. Abortion criminalizers try desperately to hitch their obfuscation propaganda & glurge wagons to accepted analysis and reflections.

Anti-choice zealots have exploited the historical realities of the Shoah and of the US Civil Rights movement, and they've cherry-picked bits of feminist theory to patch up their shoddy arguments.

Pro-choice advocates have considered connections between racist appropriation and reproductive rights, such as the original and trenchant one developed here:
Pamela Bridgewater’s argument, expressed over the past several years in articles and forums, and at the heart of a book in final revision called "Breeding a Nation: Reproductive Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom", presents the most compelling conceptual and constitutional frame I know for considering women’s bodily integrity and defending it from the right.

In brief, her argument rolls out like this. The broad culture tells a standard story of the struggle for reproductive rights, beginning with the flapper, climaxing with the pill, Griswold v. Connecticut and an assumption of privacy rights under the Fourteenth Amendment and concluding with Roe v. Wade. The same culture tells a traditional story of black emancipation, beginning with the Middle Passage, climaxing with Dred Scott, Harpers Ferry and Civil War and concluding with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Both stories have a postscript—a battle royal between liberation and reaction—but, as Bridgewater asserts, “Taken together, these stories have no comprehensive meaning. They tell no collective tale. They create no expectation of sexual freedom and no protection against, or remedy for, reproductive slavery. They exist in separate spheres; that is a mistake.” What unites them but what both leave out, except incidentally, is the experience of black women. Most significantly, they leave out “the lost chapter of slave breeding.”

I need to hit the pause button on the argument for a moment, because the considerable scholarship that revisionist historians have done for the past few decades has not filtered into mass consciousness. The mass-culture story of slavery is usually told in terms of economics, labor, color, men. Women outnumbered men in the enslaved population two to one by slavery’s end, but they enter the conventional story mainly under the rubric “family,” or in the cartoon triptych Mammy-Jezebel-Sapphire, or in the figure of Sally Hemmings. Yes, we have come to acknowledge, women were sexually exploited. Yes, many of the founders of this great nation prowled the slave quarters and fathered a nation in the literal as well as figurative sense. Yes, maybe rape was even rampant. That the slave system in the US depended on human beings not just as labor but as reproducible raw material is not part of the story America typically tells itself. That women had a particular currency in this system, prized for their sex or their wombs and often both, and that this uniquely female experience of slavery resonates through history to the present is not generally acknowledged. Even the left, in uncritically reiterating Malcolm X’s distinction between “the house Negro” and “the field Negro,” erases the female experience, the harrowing reality of the “favorite” that Harriet Jacobs describes in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

We don’t commonly recognize that American slaveholders supported closing the trans-Atlantic slave trade; that they did so to protect the domestic market, boosting their own nascent breeding operation. Women were the primary focus: their bodies, their “stock,” their reproductive capacity, their issue. Planters advertised for them in the same way as they did for breeding cows or mares, in farm magazines and catalogs. They shared tips with one another on how to get maximum value out of their breeders. They sold or lent enslaved men as studs and were known to lock teenage boys and girls together to mate in a kind of bullpen. They propagated new slaves themselves, and allowed their sons to, and had their physicians exploit female anatomy while working to suppress African midwives’ practice in areas of fertility, contraception and abortion. Reproduction and its control became the planters’ prerogative and profit source. Women could try to escape, ingest toxins or jump out a window—abortion by suicide, except it was hardly a sure thing.

This business was not hidden at the time, as Pamela details expansively. And, indeed, there it was, this open secret, embedded in a line from Uncle Tom’s Cabin [...] “'If we could get a breed of gals that didn't care, now, for their young uns…would be ’bout the greatest mod’rn improvement I knows on,” says one slave hunter to another after Eliza makes her dramatic escape, carrying her child over the ice floes.

The foregoing is the merest scaffolding of one of the building blocks of Bridgewater’s argument, which continues thus. “If we integrate the lost chapter of slave breeding into those two traditional but separate stories, if we reconcile female slave resistance to coerced breeding as, in part, a struggle for emancipation and, in part, a struggle for reproductive freedom, the two tales become one: a comprehensive narrative that fuses the pursuit of reproductive freedom into the pursuit of civil freedom.”
Urban US African-Americans are constantly besieged by disingenous campaigns.

Biologist and story-teller Boucar Diouf produced a witty opinion piece in response to CON MP Woodworth's odious M312, which was ridiculed by racist, CONdescending, and literal-minded anti-choice fetus lobbyists.
As a biologist, I always find it rude to hear men of a certain age openly advocate for the control of what happens inside women's bodies. It must be said that such male imperative is not new. After the discovery of sperm by the Dutchman Antoni van Leeuwenhoek in 1677, even the most respected thinkers of the time believed that women did not bring any contribution to the formation of the fetus. The sperm was presented as holding a tiny human being poised in its head. The woman's body, viewed as a flower pot, only served to grow this little male seed. It wasn"t until 1887 that scientists Oscar Hertwig and Herman Fol, challenged the supremacy of men by demonstrating the fetus was the result of a merger between a sperm and the ovum.

More than two centuries after this discovery, women's struggle for full human rights still meets resistance in Ottawa. And yet, isn't a man who opposes abortion, somewhat like a Black man who rails against tanning booths? In both cases, credibility is absent.
The whole Google-translated text is available here; the original - here. I suggested the white guy (@jasminll) working for the Catholic Church might be racist.



Blob Blogging Wingnut questioned my tweet. Confusing analogy with metaphor, SHE claimed that I was responding to his comment - "Vraiment?" - incorrectly.

My reply tweet challenged the notion that Black dermatologists would support tanning booths & reminded HER of a previous analogy FAIL on HER part, with regard to Bill C-484 (SHE'd compared a physical assault against a pregnant woman which resulted in miscarriage to a break-and-enter during which a parrot in a cage is stolen, as two separate criminal offenses).

SHE then declared that in actuality, Black people were against tanning and thus Diouf was wrong. I responded that SHE appeared ignorant of the pressures in the Black community to be "light-skinned".


Clearly out of touch with the specific ways racism manifests itself within the Black communities, with respect to degrees of skin colour, SHE blunders on, claiming that I didn't understand what SHE calls Diouf's "fallacious analogy".

Well, duh. It's not an analogy.


And get a clue, SUZANNE. Diouf is not only a biologist, he's also a story-teller who cleverly plays with notions of essentialism: male vs female, black vs white.

I'm now waiting for Blob Blogging Wingnut to state that Black people have the right to own parrots, just like men have the right to prevent pregnant women from obtaining abortions.

;^)

Saturday 12 May 2012

Fun with Fetus Fetishist Numbers. Partie II


On Thursday fern hill, and also JJ, reported on the annual March of the Feti and its habitual stoopidity with regard to its so-called MASSIVE turn-out.

Yesterday fern hill, and again JJ, brought sanity and a serious reality check to what has become a long running joke: the usual obfuscations and spinning about the number of antichoicers that showed up on Parliament Hill.

In the tweet above, I responded to Blob Blogging Wingnut's claim that 19,500 - exactly! - people showed up for M4L2012.

The Radio-Canada journalist mentioned, Brigitte Bureau, has produced some impressive investigative reporting about fundamentalist christian groups who lobby MPs and Cabinet Ministers.

Just like Faytene did at the Forgiven event, SUZYALLCAPS has determined that only those who "count" - meaning they have the right religious ideological and political creds - are to be believed.

Aaaand, no March of the Feti would be complete without these credible stand-up guys, Stephen Woodworth's homies, the Knights of Columbus!



Added: A rough translation of my exchange with Blob Blogging Wingnut:

Me: Only 10K according to Brigitte Bureau, not 19,500.

HER: How can she be more credible than someone "who laboured to count" the numbers?

Me: So this person "who laboured to count" is more credible than the reporter who did investigative journalism on christian fundamentalism?

HER: Your delusions make you say that christians are idiots. You are clearly prejudiced against catholics. You're not credible.

HER: Yes, he is more credible because he bothered to count and the police and the reporters didn't.

Friday 11 May 2012

Pius Xtremists and Title IX

It's good to know stopping abortion is important enough that the Catholic schools of Ontario, subsidized as they are by taxpayer monies, allow boys and girls to mingle while on their mandatory outings to politically protest at the command of their authority figures.

Of course even forced political protest isn't as important as say, sports.  Real Catholics TM know sports are too important to leave to the reality of merit and good conduct.

This is going on as an accepted religious educational format in the heartland of  off-season training camp pro-baseball, Arizona.  Where it's increasingly ok for everyone above the age of 10 to carry concealed sidearms and Stand Their Ground.  If the sexes cross each other's path for the matters of defense against the premarital coitus, are the boys supposed to respect the girls and let them shoot first or should the girls defer to the boys as their superiors and let them shoot as many rounds as they want without interruption?

It's not about the babies 'saved' from abortion for the 'religious', it's about control of women and the psychological manipulation of men to ensure it.

h/t Butterflies and Wheels