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Tuesday July 22, 2008
Life's a TV special
1) Dalt loves Julian ... 2) Beer, yuppies and occult symbols ... 3) Guantanamo's kids ... 4) Military tribunal: a reely, reely "big shew" ... 5) What killed Jeffrey Ray Mallet? ... 6) Media prophecy - what Brown will say in Israel ... 7) Rockets from settlers, not at them
1) Dalt loves Julian
NDP calls for Fantino 'to resign or be fired' over Brant wiretaps
It seems there are Ontarians who don't think the OPP Commissioner
should be able to wiretap without going through proper legal channels and/or threaten to cause trouble within a community.
Premier Dalton McGuinty, however, takes a different view:
Commissioner
Fantino continues to have my full confidence. He has worked long and
hard under very trying circumstances for a very long time now and he
has my support.
I suppose
that's because it's not McGuinty's phone being tapped and not his party
being deliberately infiltrated and set against one another. But
he is setting a precedent for that, isn't he.
And
he's proving what I always say - that the police work for the system
- whether it's a bad system or a good one - their mission is not "to
serve and protect" the people. McGuinty's coming across as another Mike
Harris on this one. Fantino didn't do the wiretap without permission
from somebody.
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2) Beer, yuppies and occult symbols
Beer, long the drug of choice for the so-called lower classes, is
moving into yuppie world, thanks to such TV ads as this one:
Dos Equis and Most Interesting Man in the World Tell Drinkers to “Stay Thirsty My Friends”
People,
especially males, are so enamored of the seedy old letch being passed
off as an "interesting man", they aren't aware that "stay thirsty"
means "don't drink this stuff".
I was more intrigued by the Dos Equis logo. There's
a lot of talk on the net about Illuminati symbolism being repeated over
and over in corporate logos and ad images, and if this isn't one of
them, I'll eat my purple hat.
I don't expect you to believe the theory, but you probably should know about it. Michael Tsarion (an Irish Arab) walks viewers through the maze of symbols
that we see every day but of which we aren't consciously
aware. The video is quite long, but it's broken up into about a
dozen parts, so you can take it in small doses.
====================
3) Guantanamo's kids
The forgotten kid of Guantánamo
A
teenager captured in Afghanistan and shipped to the U.S. prison
remained unknown to the world for five years. Now he's being tried as
an adult.
The
United States has acknowledged holding eight teenagers at Guantánamo,
but although some of them were given special housing and educational
opportunities and were eventually released, the U.S. has ignored
Jawad's status as a juvenile.
The
teenager isn't Omar Khadr, but with all the sudden focus on Khadr,
perhaps when it's too late to save his mental health, I thought you
should know about this kid too.
I can't go out with the others
and shout at empty buildings "Bring Khadr home". I mean, where
were all these caring folk when he was crying "Help me, help me" at the
age of 15-16, if indeed that was him in the YouTube video? Why
did they wait until it has become an issue popularized by the media,
for who knows what reason? We've known from the CBC for quite some time about the Khadr family and that Omar was at Guantanamo.
All this says to me is that if the media start yelling, then so do the
activists. If the media aren't saying much, activists go
on vacation. Do they also "stay thirsty" only when they're
told to?
Guantanamo should be shut down, period. And Canada needs to develop
some policies based on general principles of human decency instead of
picking and choosing which individuals it's going to support who have
gotten into difficulty in foreign countries.
For instance, the only time I ever hear of the plight of someone like Bashir Makhtal is
when his friends and relatives try for the umpteenth time to get the
Harper government to take an interest. I'm pleased to find out that he was recently written up in the Star. But I haven't heard a murmur about him in the social activist network.
====================
4) Military tribunal: a reely, reely "big shew" (apologies to Ed Sullivan)
Haven't I said over and over that these military trials are just for
show, just something to keep fresh in the minds of taxpaying public the
need for the fake "war on terror"? Well, now the prosecutors
themselves have said as much.
Osama bin Laden driver Salim Hamdan stands trial at Guantanamo Bay
Military prosecutors are keen to use the case of Mr Hamdan to showcase a tribunal system that has seen several legal obstacles.
There's an interesting comment at the foot of the above article:
I
see that people are complaining about keeping people in prison without
trial......well this is what happens in France.....up to 3 years is no
problem in French law. And often the 'prisoners' are then acquitted.
They get about £100 000 damages ! at least 3 years later !
Don't Americans think France is "old Europe" - outdated and actually pretty stupid? Isn't that why the US now eats "freedom fries"? But the chips don't fall far from the cherry tree. (How's that for a new idiom?)
Bush and Co. insist Bin Laden is alive and in the movies, and was the "mastermind" behind 9/11 but is nevertheless “not a top priority use of American resources”,
yet they've got all the time, energy and American resources to make
OBL's driver's life into a living hell. And they still expect us
not to think they're insane.
====================
5) What killed Jeffrey Ray Mallet?
Manitoba man dies in police custody
RCMP in northern Manitoba are investigating after
a 37-year-old man they'd picked up for public intoxication was found
dead in a holding cell. ... Jeffrey Ray Mallet was from the Cross Lake
First Nation. Autopsy slated to solve cause of death
You probably know what I'm thinking. And if it was from Tasering, the autopsy will probably not show it.
====================
6) Media prophecy - what Brown will say in Israel
It seems the media have an easy time of it these days. When a
Prime Minister makes a speech, he gives advance copies of it to the media so
that they can later "report" on what he said. The Yorkshire Post
decided to use their copy of Gordon Brown's speech in the Knesset
as a prophecy tool. They reported in advance what the PM would say.
I found it while trying to verify whether or not Brown really did say
that Ahmadinejad wants Israel "wiped from the map of the world".
Turns out he did - in spite of how often that rumour has been
debunked.
"And to those who believe that threatening statements fall upon deaf
ears, we say in one voice - that it is totally abhorrent for the
President of Iran to call for Israel to be wiped from the map of the
world."
Wikipedia: Though the IRNA wording was inaccurate and misleading, the media assumed it was true, and besides, it made great copy.
And the power of the media is such that it
influences even Prime Ministers, who in spite of being responsible for
decisions that affect humanity, can be quite ill-informed.
Aljazeera
wanted so badly to believe that Brown is a good guy, they waxed all
dewy eyed over his statement that Israel should remove its settlements
from the territories and share Jerusalem with a Palestinian state.
It came from the heart, they said.
The nice thing about reading
a report written by someone (from the UK Press) who actually heard the speech is that
you get to find out that Brown was heckled by the audience when he said that.
Nobody seems to have clued in that this was intended to make Brown look
tough on Israel before making statements that would help them build a
vicious case against Iran.
Olmert had preceded Brown to the podium and delivered this diatribe:
Iran a menace for Israel - Olmert
"From our point of view, we are talking about an intolerable situation,
one with which we cannot reconcile ourselves," Olmert told the Israeli
parliament, ahead a of an historic address by British Prime Minister
Gordon Brown. He added however that Iran was not just a menace for Israel, but a "global threat."
"The state of Israel is not asking for anything else but peace," he
said, adding that although Israel's conflict with the Palestinians was
"bitter," it was "not unsolvable" and that although there were "still
profound disagreements" in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations,
these were "bridgeable."
Olmert also praised Britain's "tough stance" in the global struggle against terrorism
And Brown lounged on his perch muttering, "Squawk, squawk, I'm a pretty boy."
(To give credit where it's due, I got that parrot image from reading David Icke's "Infinite love is the only truth - Everything else is illusion".)
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7) Rockets from settlers, not at them
"Like a fever in my mind, i just can't let go"
El Presidente: Rocket lyrics
Here's a decidely under-reported item in the western mainstream:
Israeli settlers fire homemade rocket at West Bank villages
Hani Abdelatif, member of the municipal council of the village of
Awarta told reporters that a 40-centimeter homemade rocket landed on
Monday afternoon on a valley between the villages of Awarta and Odla
south of Nablus, causing no damages or injuries.
Palestinian security sources said it is the first
time that Jewish settlers fire homemade rockets at Palestinian villages
near Nablus.
The sources said a group of settlers, belonging to
one of the Jewish schools in the settlement of Yitzhar south of Nablus,
are responsible for making the rockets and fire it at Palestinian
villages.
And this wasn't the first time. The last thing fanatical settlers want is a truce, or any kind of peace settlement.
yayacanada
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