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Democracy? Fuck that shit
Title shamelessly stolen from Mike in a comment at Unrepentant Old Hippie
Anyone who still believes Canada’s New Government™ has any concept of democracy, decency or shame, must surely be disabused of that notion by this from Blogging a Dead Horse;
“Three days ago, Dick Harris, the Conservative MP for Cariboo-Prince George announced that the Conservatives have named their local candidate Sharon Smith the “Skeena-Bulkley Valley liason to the federal government.
That’s right, seems that after only 20 months of trying it, the Conservatives have decided that listening to MPs – particularly those from other parties – is way too onerous and distracting. The solution is obvious really: replace them with compliant and agreeable people who look like MPs, pretend to be MPs, but have absolutely no legitimacy.”
Many parties with a minority government have thought of ways to have more members elected next time round. None have dared to dispense with the electoral process and simply install members as they see fit.
This is not simple partisan politics. This is a reshaping of the very foundations on which our government, our country is built.
Harper’s Government™ must hear loudly and clearly that this heinous assault on our democratic process will not be tolerated.
Motherhood–hold the apple pie
A society will sentimenalize and moralize about the things it wishes it cared about. Pregnancy and motherhood being no exception.
Plenty of moralizing, lots of cooing over womb contents like children oohing over puppies in the pet shop window, but little actually being done to support pregnant women and mothers.
We begin with the moralizing over what you may or may not eat/drink while pregnant.
You say you just can’t help super sizing. You look at the that hamburger and all you can think is more bacon!!!!!!!!!! You have started getting slushies by the garbage pail.
No need to take responsibility folks. Good news it’s your mom’s fault!!
Our study has shown that eating large quantities of junk food when pregnant and breastfeeding could impair the normal control of appetite and promote an exacerbated taste for junk food in offspring,’ she said Dr Stephanie Bayol.
‘This could send offspring on the road to obesity and make the task of teaching healthy eating habits in children even more challenging.’
link
Now don’t you feel better? Have a cookie.
In an effort to prove two can live as cheaply as one pregnant women are now being told they must keep weight gain to 10lbs less than the current guidelines.
According to current guidelines, which IOM announced in 1990, women with low body mass indexes should gain up to 40 pounds during pregnancy, women with normal BMIs should gain 25 to 35 pounds, and most obese women should gain about 15 pounds. In 2003, about 25% of pregnant women in the U.S. gained more than 40 pounds during pregnancy, compared with 20% in 1990, according to the AP/Standard-Times.
Link
Now some of that weight is increased uterine size, breast size, placenta and amniotic fluid. All of which on their own can add up to 15lbs. Considering that ‘obese’ women are now to only gain 5lbs, one can only assume that doctors are recommending calorie restriction (ie dieting) during pregnancy. Seems like a bad idea. In fact the current guidelines were set because doctors were recommending restricted weight gain before and it wasn’t shown to have good results for the babies.
I suppose the retro fad has hit the medical community now.
Not only that but you’ll grow hair on your chest and talk funny.
Lobby groups in Ireland are calling for regulations on anti abortion ‘counselling services’.
Niav Keating of Choice Ireland said: ‘When our activists attended one agency, they were told that having an abortion would increase their risk of developing breast cancer, becoming an alcoholic and abusing children. These are blatant lies designed to scare vulnerable women in a crisis pregnancy situation.’
Choice Ireland said it was calling on the government to bring forward statutory regulation for all pregnancy counselling services. Minimum codes of practices and standards should be imposed to ensure that misleading and incorrect information is not given to
vulnerable women.
link
You would think that groups that invoke the gord as their witness wouldn’t be playing so fast and loose with the truth….something about bearing false witness.
Adoptive parents showing appreciation for the trials gone through to create the children they want are in court complaining about birth mothers getting benefits they don’t.
adoption advocates contend that 15 weeks is far more time than the average mother needs to recover from the physical stresses of childbirth and that much of it is actually spent bonding with a new child.
But some maternity experts disagree, saying that the birthing process puts physiological stresses on a woman’s body that adoptive parents may not recognize.
‘Maternity benefits exist to recognize the unique experience of pregnancy,’ says Amy Mullin, a University of Toronto sociologist and author of Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare: Ethics, Experience and Reproductive Labor. ‘During pregnancy, a woman can undergo hypertension, nausea, heartburn and a number of other things. It’s not the norm for pregnancy to be completely easy. The government has recognized that embodied experience and I hope they continue to do so.’
Ms. Mullin stressed that the 15-week leave can start up to eight weeks before pregnancy, addressing any pre-birth health concerns.
‘That gives a mother six weeks to recover after her pregnancy,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t say that’s out of line.’
Link
Bleeding hearts. Why in my day women dropped ’em while doing the laundry and went right back at it.
Here are some of the realities of pregnancy
A dairy farmer is accused of giving a cattle hormone to a woman he got pregnant in hopes of inducing a miscarriage.
Police said 25-year-old William Stanley Sutton III added ProstaMate last week to a soda he gave to Lauren Ashley Tucker, 21.
Tucker felt sick to her stomach and vomited after drinking a 20-ounce soda Sutton gave her that ‘tasted nasty and burnt her throat,’ according to court records. She went to the hospital Aug. 9, and the hospital reported a possible poisoning to police.
The unborn child survived. Tucker, who was treated and released, is now 15 weeks pregnant.ProstaMate is a hormone given to cows in the breeding process to bring all cows in heat at the same time. It can also be used to stimulate an early-term abortion in a heifer that gets pregnant too young or a cow that mates with an undesired bull.
Link
A Perth man who bashed, kicked and stabbed his pregnant, wheelchair-bound de facto wife has been remanded in custody.
Graham Leslie Garraway, 24, appeared in the Fremantle Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday charged over the alleged attack on Wednesday on his 21-year-old partner at their Langford home.
Link
DARTMOUTH, N.S. – A pregnant woman is in hospital with life-threatening injuries after being stabbed repeatedly with a sword in a domestic dispute.
A 43-year-old man who lives with the woman has been charged with attempted murder. Police wanted to charge him with trying to kill her unborn child, as well, but that was overruled by the Public Prosecution Service.
The stabbing happened in a ground floor apartment in Dartmouth just after midnight Tuesday. The woman was discovered by a passerby who heard her call for help from an open window. When she looked inside she saw the injured woman and ran for help.
Link
A pregnant woman with a chronic heart condition pleaded for doctors to abort her baby so she could live – but both she and her newborn son died.
Her ‘tragic’ story resulted in a year-long investigation by Health and Disability Commissioner Ron Paterson after her family complained about how she was treated. His report, released yesterday, criticizes poor communication between clinicians during the woman’s pregnancy and a 15-week delay in assessment for a heart condition – 15 times longer than recommended.
The family of the woman and her son did not want them named.
Paterson refused to say which hospital provided ‘suboptimal’ care but the Sunday Star-Times understands Wellington Hospital, one of two hospitals involved, was found to have twice breached the patient code of conduct.
Link
Censorship or Propaganda?
Eddie Vedder, lead singer of the rock band Pearl Jam, is using his powerful pipes to call out corporate censorship after an AT&T webcast of the band’s Lollapalooza performance that edited out Vedder’s anti-George Bush musings.
The improvised lyrics in question were sung to the tune of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”: “George Bush leave this world alone. George Bush find yourself another home.”
AT&T claims this was an error though the circumstances seem suspicious at best.
The first time Vedder sang “George Bush leave this world alone,” the lyrics were transmitted to users on AT&T’s Blue Room Web site. The second two anti-Bush verses were cut.
AT&T is currently using the ‘big boys did it and ran away’ defence. Putting the blame squarely on the firm they hired out editing (aka censoring) responsibilities to.
AT&T employs the firm Davie-Brown Entertainment (DBE) to edit their webcasts for profanity that is not a part of a song’s lyrics, and also for nudity, company spokesman Michael Coe said.
Coe also offered; “We have said repeatedly over and over that we will not block customers’ access to legal content. We’ve said that in front of Congress. We’ve stated it as conditions of our merger with Bell South.”
Who defines legal? This is the same argument that could be used in discussions of other censored internet situations such as that in China and Saudi Arabia. Hardly a ringing endorsement of freedom of speech or access to information.
Tim Carr, a neutrality advocate at the Save the Internet coalition, said AT&T’s censorship is an excellent example of what could go wrong when ISPs control what their users see and hear.
“The censorship of Pearl Jam gives us a clear view of what the problem is: When you allow large Internet providers to also become gatekeepers to content there’s too often a temptation to limit what people get to see,” Carr said.
Interestly, though Save the Internet feels this is an example of what could happen if net neutrality is not respected the rightwing libertarian Media Freedom Project spokesman, Derek Hunter said;
“To say that they’re censoring is ridiculous? It’s propaganda and it seems to be working.”
Pearl Jam has posted the two different versions of the webcast here
In a statement on the site Mike McCready writes;
I can only look to historical figures who are above reproach in my mind, such as Thomas Jefferson “I hope we shall crush…in it’s birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” I feel that corporations can still exist without worry of a few words at a rock concert and need not trample upon our constitution for the sake of profit.
I think that horse has already bolted, and not just in America.
Contribute to electoral reform
Fair Vote Canada, Equal Voice and others have been working toward educating and advertising about the MMP system.
Few people in Ontario seem to realize there is a referendum on electoral reform this fall.
Ontarians will vote on Oct. 10th 2007, at the same time as they vote in the provincial election.
The Referendum question, posed by the Ontario Government, will be whether they want to continue with our present riding-based electoral system or want to change to a “mixed” system (called Mixed Member Proportional).
The Ontario referendum is a wonderful opportunity–and perhaps the last for many decades–to achieve reforms to our outmoded electoral system that would help more women get elected.
Canada is one of the few modern democracies still clinging to our old Westminster model of electing Members from local ridings (others are the UK and US, which have ever worse records in electing women). We stand 48th in the world in terms of the number of women in our House of Commons (just under 21 per cent), and in recent years the numbers of women, standing and being elected has started to decline.
This is why Doris Anderson, and others of us in the long fight for fair representation in politics, have concluded that we cannot hope to succeed without changing our electoral system. Out there in the ridings, local riding associations still conclude that white male professionals are the
best candidates, so we end up with party slates that are 80 per cent male even when party leaders are publicly calling for more women.
The Oct. 10 referendum could throw open the doors of the male political club. A victory in Canada’s most populous province would likely set off a domino effect. It is a last chance because efforts at electoral reform have failed or floundered recently in PEI, New Brunswick, Quebec and B.C. Not all women realize that political decision-making–particularly on issues
such as child care, home care, and choice–lies so largely in the hands of men. It is time more women were in office helping men make decisions which often effect women more.
The Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform (103 Ontarians randomly chosen by Elections Ontario) is recommending moderate change–keeping a majority of seats (90) still elected in the ridings in the old way, but a minority (39) elected by Proportional Representations. They are
calling it a Mixed Member Proportional system. Voters would get two votes–one for a local riding representative and another for their favourite party’s “list” of candidates for the PR seats.
As we know any type of campaigning or public education requires money. Mark Greenan of, Blogging for democracy and also of Fair Vote Canada has blogged a proposal to encourage those that can to help financially with the campaign for MMP.
$10.10 for more democracy on 10/10
If we are going to win the campaign for better democracy in Ontario, we’re going to need the resources to counter the spin and misinformation and reach out to the 70% of Ontarians who don’t know about the referendum.
That’s why I’m calling on all my readers who are fed up with politics-as-usual to dig into their pockets and make a small donation to the Vote for MMP campaign. Like I just did, you can take a minute and donate online to the campaign right here.
You can make donations here
This campaign is near and dear to my heart not only because my former riding president believed in it so strongly and not only because Doris Anderson did, but because I believe a government should be of, by and for the people and I believe this is a good step to a stronger democracy.
cross posted at Bread and Roses
“Caffeine isn’t a drug, it’s a vitamin!”
According to a new study, women over 65 who drink 3 cups of coffee or more “showed less decline over time on tests of memory than women who drank one cup or less of coffee or tea per day.
The results held up even after researchers adjusted for other factors that could affect memory abilities, such as age, disability, depression, education, high blood pressure, medications, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic illnesses.” ((http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070807/coffee_women_070807/20070807?hub=Health))
The study refers to “older” women, but hey why not get an early start on results!
A fig for partridges and quails,
ye dainties I know nothing of ye;
But on the highest mount in Wales
Would choose in peace to drink my coffee.
~Jonathon Swift
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