PItchforks

When a lousy event like a child being murdered happens, well the villagers get out their torches and pitch forks. I was asked to join a facebook group called: Mandatory Life Sentences for Pedophiles & Child Molesters, Death for Child Killers. I declined. First, "Mandatory", "Zero Tolerance" these are dangerous concepts. Lest face it, if someone is so far off that he kills children, is he going to stop and say "you know, if i would get 10 years that would be ok...but Life, well then I am going to stop killing children". Nope. The second half, well I am opposed to the death penalty. And the angered, well are they going to stop and make sure the right person is even accused/tried/convicted, etc....we live in a "trial by media" world - I have even heard people say "well, the police would not have arrested him if he wasn't guilty". Ask Guy Paul Morin or Susan Nelles. A friend of mine once put it best: "I hope I never resemble the local rapist".

One friend made a great point during the Bernado trials. His co-worker suggested Bernado be publicy ripped to death in Maple Leaf Gardens. So my friend asked: "So you would enjoy his suffering". "yes". "Well, isn't that what Bernado did? enjoy the suffering of others?".

"There's no Logic, Captain"

I got this from The Doonesbury website:

"I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter. And I'm not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it's an interesting coincidence."
-- Rep. Michelle Bachmann. In fact, Gerald Ford was president during the last outbreak of the virus.


First, what she says isn't true. Second, even if it was WHAT THE HELL WOULD THAT MEAN????

Again....

The Harper regime will not bailout the CBC in fact theyd kill it outright if they could, what with all nonsense that "real" canadians don't want or need (you know "arts" "science"...)

But they will contemplate bailing out private networks such as CBC or Canwest.....

From Today's Toronto Star:

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/620477

RIght Thing for the Wrong Reason

Seems killing people just isn't cheap. Not in Iraq or in America.

Many states, including Bush's beloved "Dead or Alive" state of Texas are contemplating cutbacks or the outright suspension of death sentences after July 1st.

The old argument from the opposite view (from people who I would say have their poles reveresed), was that executions were good things because otherwise you have to house and feed inmates for the rest of their life. But, for decades, with the cost of a capital trial and the right to extensive appeals, has meant that a capital case was far more expensive than life imprisonment.


Even if the "it costs less" assertation were true, it would still not justify capital punishment...so the opposite argument is just as flimsy.....

..however...as my title suggests, right for the wrong reason...but let's take it.


TF

Odd

Headline today for CNN;

-- Ashton Kutcher is first to reach 1 million followers in Twitter contest with CNN.

Why is any part of that worth doing let alone "reporting"????????????

Let us eat cake

Wonderful attitude from our glorious leaders, from Today's Toronto Star.

The Prime Minister has obstinately refused to relax the requirements for EI. Indeed, his human resources minister, Diane Finley, has declared of the unemployed: "We do not want to make it lucrative for them to stay home and get paid for it."

Why this is not making sense

If you were putting together a tribe, would it not make sense that the leaders are the ones that are the wisest and have passed on the greatest skills to the strongest new generation of hunters and gatherers? Would you not want the leaders to be capable of learning new things?

Well, if you have lived in North America for the past decade, what has happened is exactly the opposite. In The US, they have begun to straighten things out. They hit a rock bottom I hope we never get near. We are going to move up soon, as well, I hope.

Neo-Cons, Right wingnuts (Bush-Harper) have been running the place in exactly the worst way. They are close minded people who ignore the great learning of the tribe. Religion is fine as long as it does not cut off your Brain from learning new things. Where it thinks the enlightenment and the scientific revolution are things that need to be ignored...well you get the mess we have today and you get the kind of Relgion that blows other people up.

I still cannot fathom the neo-con version of Christianity which ignores the vast bulk of what Jesus is saying in scripture - um, it's been a few years but I think Jesus is an important part of Christianity? There is no kindness and humilty to these bible thumpers.

In other words, they don't even follow their own teachers.

Bush was dumb - smart people tell me Harper is smart, but it is so tough to believe that when everything he says and does is so mean and narrow-minded. I guess he is a pigeon - his brain can fly thousands of miles, but try and catch him and he flies exactly 4 feet - just the minimum effort to solve the most immediate problem.

Harper sees his party as the one of practicality, and the "right wing" liberals as one of rigid ideas. First - they are further to the right than ever. I guess Harper does not believe in the existence of the NDP. This reminded me of The Russian Revloution. Lenin named his side and named his opponents. He called his folks "Bolsheviks" which means moderate, and Kerensky's people "Mensheviks" which means "radical". (my apologies to the Russian Language). Lenin, was of course, the real radical. Just as Harper pins definitions on two parties, in exactly the reverse of what they are making himelf seem like "one of us" while liberals live in ivory towers. ( I think Paul Martin sold off the Ivory Towers LOL).

TF

P.S. I missed this during the campaign, but Alec Baldwin called Sarah Palin "Bible Spice" Love it!

Faux News and The American Coverage

As far as I can tell, MSNBC (the best one down there) had it's own article about Fox News' call to invade Canada while we were all at yoga class. CNN had a link to youtube. Fox, of course, NOTHING on this. ABC had nothing but did cover the fallen Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. CBS had nothing. I did not have a chance to check The Daily Planet....

Twitter

I have yet to catch the twitter big. I am a Luddite, and so, email, facebook, my blog, MSN Live, Yahoo Messenger, Skype, my Cell Phone and smoke signals are my only ways of contacting the outside world.

I certainly have nothing against it, but I would never do this:

A recent tweet by one would-be Cisco employee proves that when it comes to placing a permanent black mark on your resume via the Internet, Twitter is now the tool of choice. To illustrate, here’s the tweet the now Web-infamous "theconnor" shared with the world:

"Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.”

TF

My letter sent to The Red Eye show on Fox News

The American right wing elite media has no sense of humour about itself. So, do not expect Canadians to be amused that you spat on the graves on 116 Canadian soldiers who gave their lives in this war of terror, as your ally. I assume that your show is not in any way meant to be "news" as the rest of planet understands the word. It is not punditry. It was not satire, as satire is meant to be funny, not to denigrate to an ally.

Where did the re-directed airlines land on Sept 11, 2001? We were your ally since before the war began. It is a shame that as little as you know your enemy, you know your friends even less.

Thomas Forten
Mississauga, Ontario

Then again...

...if, as Fox News suggests, they invade Canada, that would get rid of Harper and have Obama in charge of us.....hmmmm

Fox News

I simply do not understand the right wing American media. I have commented before how a nutcase can get on CNN and his view that Katrina was sent by God because they had a gay pride parade. If you have not seen this, you will be surprised...or it will be surprising to you that you are not surprised:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcJn5XlbSFk

An affront to soldiers who risk their lives is deplorable.

As I said somewhere else, Fox News is to the world as fart jokes are to literature.

BUT it you use the word "cunt", THAT can get you in trouble in The United States. I know maybe I should take a "who cares" approach to this, and treat it with all time and effort that is given to "The National Enquirer".

As a nation, we can take a joke - Jon Stewart referred to us as "gay us" and makes fun of us all the time. But it is meant in jest. I saw no humour in the Fox segment.

Besides, as we all know, God sent Katrina because he hates French people....

Obama

Watching Obama run the U.S., while Harper runs our country, is much like having the Dad from "My Three Sons" raising your neighbor's kids, while you and you siblings are being raised by the schoolteacher from "The Wall".

Obama, unlike Bush, thinks science is a good to, you know, "have". Canada's science minister does not even answer a blunt, direct question whether he believes in evolution. Oh boy, what a great guy to have as minister of science!

TF

Greed

Greed has been in the news a lot lately, and for good reason. Profiting by the extremely wealthy, at others' expense, even to the point of ruining the weakest of us, has been a favoured blood sport on acid lately.

Let's go back to the Irish famine of the 1840s. Abandoned by their own colonial overlords, the British, millions of Irish set sail in the “coffin ships”, so named because many of the passengers died en route to North America.

But luckily some got to Canada, and Canada has never done nasty things to profit on the misery of others. Well, guess what – many of the Irish refugees lived long enough to make it all the way to the infant city of Toronto. But in 1847 it was only a town, with a population just over 20,000. Over 40,000 Irish ended up here – twice the native population. After some time there was put in place a process of funds to save those who could be saved, and treating the sick in the way thought best at the time, quarantine. So many who have survived the coffin ships, and the screening process in Quebec, died in Toronto. Some of the funds were used to purchase coffins – even back then disposal of the dead was known to be a good idea.

Some of the fine people involved in organizing the burials, pocketed half the money and buried two people to a coffin .

People have always sucked: AIG and folks are not doing anything new, they just had the means to do it on a massive scale.


Tom

Remember When You Were Young….

I appreciate all kinds of good music. "Good "is defined as what I like, and what I don't like is stamped as "Bad".

My band is Pink Floyd. I liked the revival Gilmour lead 80s-90s stuff, certainly a good show, but the real Floyd ends with "The Wall" in 1979. The final cut..well….

I worked with a young musician in 2005 when the Geldolf live aid concerts were done, and he was even blown away by the one-off throw together concert the Floyds did with the more accessible songs like "Money" and "Wish you were Here". I laughed, and said yeah, I did not expect them to play "Careful with that Axe Eugene", in which Waters whispers then screams at the top of his lungs for the several minutes.

One's appreciation of art and music is entwined with one's emotions and state of mind at the time you read/listen. I re-read Tolstoy and loved every bit of it. I tried to re-read Dostoyevsky, and couldn't do it. Mr D could write, I just wasn't into it when I tried to re-read it.

Waters took over the band – you can hear the exact point – on Animals during "Dogs" when he takes over lead from Dave in the line "gotta admit…..". Now I know "Dogs" is 17 plus minutes long, but he kept the stick for the rest of the relay. I was very mad at Roger for a very, very long time. In 2005 I figured if Dave, Rick and Nick could forgive Roger, maybe I could too. In the winter of 2006, I re-considered it all from The First album on…and I was back!!

Now leave it to me to chose, as his favourite band, one where the founder went totally off, having fried his brain on LSD, and where the eventual new leader went almost as badly off into a bathos that was simply not listenable.

My dearly departed best friend of 25 years who left us in august 2007 attended the 1977 Montreal Olympic stadium concert where the band pretty much imploded as a live act, collapsing under their own weight of self-absurdity. She had a bootleg of that concert and the tender, loving anthem of "Echoes" was differently presented as, since it was at the end of the tour, Dave and Rick's voices were shot to hell and instead of a few mellow hippies singing about labyrinths and coral caves, it sounded like Johnny Rotten and Iggy Pop in a duet. It was also where Roger spat at the audience, something that Mr. Rotten did, and was a Rotten thing not a Roger thing. Of that friend, my tribute to her is, and shall always be, from "Shine on you crazy Diamond", Roger's tribute to Sid:

Pile on many more layers, and I'll be joining you there.

Next Week: How Jethro Tull helped me lose my religion.

Tom

A Process

This did not have a happy ending. But the ending is another thing all together.

I do have a fair bit of experience with the Ontario health care system as I had a close family member who was ill off and on for over 35 years (the one I am talking about here). She was in very poor health the last few years of her life. Also, I worked in a non-medical role in 2 different, large hospitals – one in 1999, and another in 2001-2.

In July 2008, I was thrust, along with other family members, into the position of being in a hospital to provide support for major surgery to a close family member. On the day of the surgery we first sat in a pre-check in waiting area still with the patient herself. After check-in, we went to wait for her in the "waiting to be prepped, but has already been admitted" waiting room. Again the patient was still sitting with us. Then, she was called to be prepped. When she had been prepped for surgery, we remained in waiting room #2. Then, we were told she was prepped and we went to waiting room #3, in the "prepped, but not yet in surgery" waiting room. Here you could go two loved-ones at a time to see her in the prep room while she was waiting to be wheeled into the OR. Then, when she was off to the OR we were sent to another floor completely. We remained there in the "while the operation is in progress" waiting room.

One miss-step had occurred – she had gone for full blood work at a clinic the day before. Those results had been sent like lost luggage into limbo. It's as if the tests had never taken place. So, if the stress of surgery wasn't enough, they did an entire new set of blood tests on the cusp of he surgery. That could have gone better.

Waiting in the surgical room: Well, this was like enduring a missed or delayed flight connection at an airport, but with the added bonus of having a close family member having a serious operation! We had to push to get the first update. Finally a nurse or surgeon came to tell us there had been a delay as they had to fine tune the machines that collectively go "ping" to be in working order for the surgery. We were treated very well as this person left the OR to talk to us and that was helpful. When it was completed the head surgeon talked to us and filled us in, and stayed until all of our questions were answered. We were very, very well treated and informed.

It was a very structured process – not simply for the patient, but also for the loved-ones. I did simply not expect that kind of rigid structure. It seemed to be well thought out and probably well evolved since the bleeding with leeches era.

If you watch Grey's or House, let's say that what goes on as portrayed on television is done so for dramatic purposes. Reality is very different from drama. Since I have a B.A. in English, hopefully this is not something I only recently discovered. I also side with Alfred Hitchcock that drama is real life with all the boring parts cut out. On TV, the waiting room seems to be near the emergency entrance, right out in the open. I suspect this helps segue to plot B where the car crash or shooting accident victims come blasting through the doors and words like "Stat" and "GSW" are yelled out. We were far from any madding crowds on the 3^rd floor, nowhere near any main door. If I may use the term, we were in a place that seemed sterile.

I watched Michael Michael Moore's "Sicko" and while one must obviously take into consideration "Moore's Law", that he is going to wildly twist his thesis to suit his conclusion, I get the impression that in The United States, underwriters determine the course of a patient's treatment in many, many cases. I did not get that impression from my experience – that the hospital administration was on the phone to OHIP to approve treatment. I got the impression that the medical people made the medical decisions. Billing comes later. Our way is better. Period.

George Carlin

"The Greatest thing since sliced bread". So this is it, huh folks? The Pyramids; The Great Wall of China; Even a lava lamp, to me is greater than sliced bread. You got a knife, you got a loaf SLICE THE FUCKIN' THING!!

I think he was a great social commentator in the vein of Mark Twain (not the novelist but his public persona) and Will Rogers. In my case as a North American, Irish, Catholic, Atheist, I understood his perspective.

Most people get lower key when they get older. George got angrier. He was willing to take on religion in a country where you are pretty much not allowed to do that. Where the most idiotic idea, if it's author calls it "religion", gets you on CNN during prime time. There is no other 1^st world nation where that happens.

As Jon Stewart said, the good thing about George is that he left us thousands of hours of video.

In all that video and audio, one really always makes me chuckle. The famous 7 words lunched a law suit. One minister objected to them being aired. At some point during the process, George said:

Hey Reverend, the radio has two knobs, although I am pretty sure he is uncomfortable with anything that has two knobs. But, the first knob changes the station. The second one TURNS IT OFF.

What was also amazing is that I even missed the first decade and a half of his career, due to my age, yet he was a comic presence from my teens until my mid-forties. He never caught on as an actor, like other comedians, but he did do a children's show!

Along with Richard Pryor, and even before them Lenny Bruce, he expanded the boundaries of what was acceptable in stand-up comedy. But like a Picasso of gags, George knew the rules he was breaking. A lot of today's comics are obscene and vulgar, but far from Picasso-like, they are monkeys flinging paint at canvas.

George, as much as any single performer, actor or individual artist, seemed to take my brain where it was going to go anyway – but he paved the way.

Unfortunately, unlike Twain, rumours of his death were not at all exaggerated.

RIP You irreverent old Hippie!

Tom

Hardship

“Rich people are different”
“Yes, they have more money"
- The Great Gatsby

An article in today’s paper, begins:

A number of charity and awareness walks may cause some serious traffic congestion in the city today.

Um, ok, factual and practical – but it kind of shows what priorities people have these days, or perhaps, have always had. It must be hell for a hung-over rock star puking in his limo to be held up by people out walking to raise money for children with autism.

After my “80” in grade 13 economics, my knowledge of the subject has been on a downward bust cycle, no booms. But I once heard that when the employment rate goes up, stocks go down. Isn’t that awful? Mr. and Ms. Suburbia have to wait another month to re-model the breakfast nook because some low-life jerk gets herself a minimum wage job serving coffee.

It must have been a strange world to live in – czarist Russia, where 97% of the people were serfs living at bare subsistence level, and 3% of the people owned everything. At least in our world I think that 1% own 90% of things at least there is 10% left for the rest of us to fight over.

Intersting Observation

I was waiting for a subway train at union and I had some gum I wanted to get rid of. Then I remembered hearing that I would not find a garbage can (and I DIDN'T) as they are really neat places to hide bombs and IED's. I forget if that was a post 9/11 change or a 7/7 one. I do recall some Jewish fellows all named "IRA" placing bombs in garbage cans in the 70s in London. So I spat the gum on the tracks which i assumed would not result in a derailment.

TF

Eight Belles

A horse finishing second then breaking both ankles and having to be euthanized right on the track is a nasty thing. Barbaro died of injuries sustained in 2006. I first remember this happening in 1975. Another Filly, in fact the most successful Filly of all time, Ruffian, broke a leg and later had to be put down. I had followed this horse’s career for some time. I never really followed racing again because this broke my heart. I had to be taken aside and told she had been put down like an aunt had died. I am actually unofficially named after an ancestor who was a harness racer.

Garth Woolsey in today’s Toronto Star asked the same question I had asked myself: Is this a cruel sport that should be banned? Well, certainly as in any sport, such as getting rid of rug turf in football that injuries (which with horses usually means fatalities) must lead to changes in safety.

Joe Theisman broke his leg on national TV, but he ended up in the broadcast booth, not in the ground.

Ray Chapman was killed by a pitch in a 1920 game between Cleveland and New York. This lead to major changes in baseball.

An outcry has likened racing to cock or dog fighting. We find these "sports" to be repugnant. We don’t mind it when people fight. But then again, people choose to do it.

No, it is not the same as dog fighting, as horses naturally run.

As sad as I am at another beautiful animal dying for money and entertainment I am going to go with the theory that what happened Saturday is rare. We don’t hear about the thousands of daily races where nothing happens. We don’t hear about planes that don’t crash, bridges that don’t collapse or people who did not get murdered.

Being a race horse is much, much safer than being president of The United States. There have only been 43 of those and 3 of them were murdered. Reagan came close, and shots have been taken at many more. But we don’t ban this job.

Tragedy yes and, I hope very much, rare.

Tom.