WOW! second place in the Lefty’s 
Thanks to everyone who mentioned/voted for me.
Congrats to all the winners and nominees.
December 6th
Every year it breaks my heart to watch as 14 roses pile up in remembrance of the horror of December 6, 1989.
In the face of such an atrocity one can only hope that lessons will be learned. Unfortunately, it seems that few have paid attention.
Women are still being killed simply for being women, for asserting their rights, or simply for being there. Women’s shelters are still full and daily women face abuses and the possibility of death.
It is often difficult, especially in light of such tragedies, to make those privileged enough not to have to deal with the daily issues see how ‘small’ things contribute to the larger picture.
When you allow words as weapons (calling women cunts, throw like a girl, etc), when you excuse sexist behaviour, when you smear an MP because she calls someone on an act that would not be allowed in any other workplace, when commercials that talk about how “boys are just built different” no icky girls allowed, when these things passed unremarked the message that girls are somehow ‘less than’ is ingrained.
The women cut down in the act of terror committed that day deserve better.
Lest we forget
Our Glorious Dead
In times of war we are called upon to honour our glorious dead. 
Indeed the memory of the fallen is used to raise our collective patriotic ire at anyone who does not support any military action. This has become known colloquially as “not supporting the troops.”
It does not matter if the cause they were fighting is just. If the people they killed were innocent. If the war they fought a sham. Honour must be paid.
Compare this to the all too common occurrence of women being killed by partners or strangers. Too often in both courts of justice and courts of opinion these women’s memories are not honoured but desecrated.
Excuses are made, she provoked him, she was dressed or acted provocatively or was a sex worker, she was out alone at night, she was the violent one. [Read more…] about Our Glorious Dead
Yet another death at the hands of police
Robert Knipstrom, 36, died early Saturday in hospital, four days after two officers used pepper spray, a taser and their batons on the Chilliwack, B.C., resident, who reportedly was acting erratically in a Chilliwack rental store.
{the Globe}
My family and I along with other activists from Bread and Roses attended the rally to remember Robert Dziekanski and to demand an investigation into his death.
As was stated at the rally this is no longer just about 4 officers, or TASER™’s this is about a culture and climate of political change which has allowed and encouraged the police to see the general public as an enemy to be subdued.
This fits very well with the right wing cultish approach to politics. Creating a society of sheeple ready to agree without question to the demands of their leader. {as an aside I wonder how right wing foetus fetishers will react to the first case of a pregnant woman who gets TASERED™?)
Those in attendance at todays rally were for the most part ‘older’, ‘well-dressed’, and well-heeled. The sort of Canadian that cons might see as the average “don’t have time for protesting” sort.
Perhaps Harper et al will find it surprising that Rush Limbaugh politics don’t play well in Canada (Free Dominion a distasteful exception.) most of us though are not surprised that the average Canadian does not want to fear the police. Many Canadians, in fact, came to this country to escape that very type of culture.
So yes we demand an immediate halt to any further use of TASER™, but we also demand an end to the use of our police forces as execution squads.
The Smoking Gun
Taser™ is using any and all despicable tactics to threaten, intimidate and otherwise try to warn off those who would bring the potentially deadly outcomes of their product to light.
Into the fray walks Pam Schreiner,
… who worked for the Arizona-based maker of the electric-shock weapons in 2004, says she was threatened and intimidated, including her home being shot at, after she saw company officials intentionally shredding Taser injury reports during a legal proceeding, according to court documents.
“Since leaving Taser International, I have lived in fear of what Taser International will do to me. The company has enormous resources and connections through law enforcement,” Ms. Schreiner says in an affidavit sworn this summer and filed in a court in Georgia.
Taser International says it “aggressively defends our products in all litigation brought against the company.”“I have been verbally threatened by people hired by Taser to harass and intimidate me. I was told by the two Chandler [Arizona] police officers that they had conducted surveillance of my residence, followed me around and gone through my garbage,” her affidavit says.
“I was confronted at the grocery store by someone I had never met and told that it would not be a good idea for me to be testifying against Taser. In the summer of 2005, shortly before giving my deposition in [a previous case against Taser], a window was shot out of my residence.” {read the rest of this article}
Hmm.. lawsuits, threatening, intimidation, suppression of facts….. Where have we seen this before?
No to tasers in Canada
Please take a moment to sign the Petition
Your names on this petition will be included with a letter to the Prime Minsiter along to his hundreds of MP’s demanding an end to the use of tasers and demand answers to our questions.
It is our duty as citizens of this nation to ask Canadian Government to act now with an immediate moratorium on taser use by enforcement agencies in Canada.
Here is the petition:
http://newsnet.ca/phpPETITION/
Thanks to Beijing York for posting this link
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