nibbler

Tried to enter, the survey froze my browser on the 1st page 1st time around, then made it to the last page of the survey 2nd time around but was unable to click the submit button. Using Safari.

Of course it doesn't, but obsession over the Middle East, wether on behalf of the Main Stream Media, internet bloggers, or your average Joe, Ari, or Moe on the street does not lessen the brutality of the conflict on either side. M.S.M. covers the story as an ongoing fascination rather than as a vulgarity. This type of coverage does not seem to help kickstart the world into taking some kind of action aimed at helping bring about a peaceful resolution for the people living there; when in reality most of them would eagerly trade their left nut for the chance to live peacefully in co-existence. This type of coverage does make it easy for both Israel and Hamas to recruit money and personnel to throw at the fire. I'm going to assume Rex has done a lot more 'looking at whats really going on' in the Middle East than you and I combined, both in the individual context and as a journalist. Consider: When the media provides 24/7 coverage of the already 2600+ year old Mid-East Conflict, new troubles elsewhere in the world are given the time and space needed to germinate, take root, grow, and to explode into ethnic violence before the media is on hand to keep things in check. They could show up early and assist by building international support when it matters most, but all too often the media show up long past the point of diffusing these conflicts. They show up late only to photograph body bags while wondering how nobody paid attention to all the signs of the impending ethnocentric violence until it was too late to stop? In saying this you reveal much more about your own personal prejudice in this discussion than you reveal about Rex's possible motive. He speaks for himself, you speak for yourself. Which sort of brings me back to my original points: the Main Stream Media does its best at: keeping us distracted with the fascination of violencefocused on playing the blame gamechoosing sides on the bi-polar see-saweffectively ignoring ethnocentrism and human rights abuses in our own backyards or wherever its due to pop its ugly head up next Which is not to say I blame all thats wrong in the world on the M.S.M. We are complicit too- simply by eating up the crap they're dishing out.

my bad

You hillbilly hogtowners always deliver a good twang session. Great songwriting, creative arrangements of old time classics, stunning harmonies- Wish I were in the city!

That festival = good campground picking sessions, bad lynch mob factor.

Last Updated: Thursday, June 17, 2010 | 2:50 PM ET By Peter Nowak, CBC News Hot on the heels of Apple announcing it will sell unlocked iPhones in Canada, an NDP MP has introduced a resolution that would force cellphone carriers to do the same with all the devices they sell. Bruce Hyer, the MP for Thunder Bay-Superior North, on Thursday tabled Bill C-560, the cellphone freedom act. The bill proposes three rules: cellphone carriers would be required to notify customers at the point of purchase whether a phone is locked to work only on their network; they would have to remove such a lock free of charge at any point after the conclusion of the customer's service contract; and they would have to remove it if the customer does not enter into a contract within six months of buying the device up front. "Mobile phone customers should have the freedom to choose whether they want to be locked into a company's cell network or not," Hyer said in a statement. "Right now, most consumers don't even know they [can] switch to another network without throwing out their phone and buying a new one, or trying to unlock their handset at some expensive aftermarket shop. Many resort to trying to download complicated instructions off the internet, but these can result in dead phones if used improperly." Hyer also launched a "Don't Lock My Freedom" website in conjunction with the bill. Canada's major wireless carriers typically sell mobile devices locked to their network on top of multi-year contracts. Some carriers have said this is to ensure that the devices work properly on their network, so they can support them if problems occur. Some compatibility issues remain Switching carriers and using the same phone was generally not an issue until recently since Canada's big three providers used different technologies. However, Bell and Telus launched a new network last year that is largely similar to the Rogers network, so most newer phones will work on all three. Some compatibility obstacles still remain as Canada's new wireless companies — Wind, Moblicity and Public Mobile — have networks that run on different frequencies from Bell, Rogers and Telus. The new companies, however, don't offer phones with contracts tied to them and require customers to pay the full cost up front. Some phone manufacturers are beginning to push against locks imposed by carriers. In January, internet giant Google began selling its Nexus One phone directly to consumers online, unlocked and without a carrier contract. Apple is now doing the same in Canada with its wildly successful iPhone, which is also available locked and with a contract through Bell, Rogers, Telus and their subsidiaries. The federal government's recently introduced copyright reform legislation, Bill C-32, seeks to enshrine consumers' rights to unlock their mobile devices, an act that is already perfectly legal. Consumer advocates have said Canada needs to go further with laws such as those prescribed in Bill C-560. A number of countries have instituted such legal obligations, ranging from requiring the carrier to unlock phones immediately when asked by a customer to doing so at the conclusion of term contracts. Some countries, such as Singapore, outlaw locking phones entirely. Link to source

Johann Hari: How can America's 'War on Drugs' succeed if their Prohibition laws failed? America's Prohibition laws were meant to cut crime and boost morality – they failed on both fronts. So how can the 'War on Drugs' ever succeed? It can't. Friday, 11 June 2010 Since we first prowled the savannahs of Africa, human beings have displayed a few overpowering and ineradicable impulses—for food, for sex, and for drugs. Every human society has hunted for its short cuts to an altered state: The hunger for a chemical high, low, or pleasingly new shuffle sideways is universal. Peer back through history, and it's everywhere. Ovid said drug-induced ecstasy was a divine gift. The Chinese were brewing alcohol in prehistory and cultivating opium by 700 A.D. Cocaine was found in clay-pipe fragments from William Shakespeare's house. George Washington insisted American soldiers be given whiskey every day as part of their rations. Human history is filled with chemicals, come-downs, and hangovers. Yet in every generation, there are moralists why try to douse this natural impulse in moral condemnation and burn it away. They believe that humans, stripped of their intoxicants, will become more rational or ethical or good. They point to the addicts and the overdoses and believe they reveal the true face - and the logical endpoint - of your order at the bar or your roll-up. And they believe it can be ended, if only we choose to do it. Their vision holds an intoxicating promise of its own. Their most famous achievement - the criminalisation of alcohol in the United States between 1921 and 1933 - is one of the great parables of modern history. Daniel Okrent's superb new history, 'Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition', shows how a coalition of mostly well-meaning, big-hearted people came together and changed the Constitution to ban booze. On the day it began, one of the movement's leaders, the former baseball hero turned evangelical preacher Billy Sunday, told his ecstatic congregation what the Dry New World would look like: "The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever rent." The story of the War on Alcohol has never needed to be told more urgently - because its grandchild, the War on Drugs, shares the same DNA. Okrent only alludes to the parallel briefly, on his final page, but it hangs over the book like old booze-fumes - and proves yet again Mark Twain's dictum: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." There was never an America without chemical highs. The Native Americans used hallucinogens, and the ship that brought John Winthrop and the first Puritans to the continent carried three times more beer than water, along with ten thousand gallons of wine. It was immediately a society so soaked in alcohol that it makes your liver ache to read the raw statistics: by 1830, the average citizen drank seven gallons of pure alcohol a year. In 1839, an English traveller called Frederick Marryat wrote: "I am sure that Americans can fix nothing without a drink. If you meet, you drink; if you make acquaintance, you drink; they quarrel in their drink, and they make up with a drink. They drink because it is hot; they drink because it is cold... They commence it early in life, and the continue it until they soon drop into the grave." America was so hungry for highs that when there was a backlash against all this boozing, the temperance movement's initial proposal was that people should water down their alcohol with opium. It's not hard to see how this fug of liquor caused problems, as well as pleasure - and the backlash was launched by a furious housewife with eight children from a small town in Cincinnati. One Sunday in 1874, Eliza Thompson - a woman who had never spoken out on any public issue before - stood before the crowds at her church and announced that America would never be free or godly until the last whisky bottle was emptied onto the dry earth. A huge crowd of women cheered: they believed their husbands were squandering their wages at the saloon. They marched as one to the nearest bar, where they all sank to their knees and prayed for the soul of its owner. They refused to leave until he repented. They worked in six hour prayer shifts on the streets, until the saloonkeeper finally appeared, head bowed, and agreed to shut it down. This prayerathon then moved around every alcohol-seller in the town. Within ten days, only four of the original thirteen remained, and the rebellion was spreading across the country. It was women who led the first cry for Temperance, and it was women who made Prohibition happen. A woman called Carry Nation became a symbol of the movement when she travelled from bar to bar with an oversized hatchet and smashed them to pieces. Indeed, Prohibition was one of the first and most direct effects of expanding the vote. This is one of the first strange flecks of gray in this story: the proponents of prohibition were primarily progressives - and some of the most admirable people in American history. The pioneering suffragist Susan B Anthony gave her first public speech demanding a booze ban. The ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglas said: "If we could make the world sober, we would have no slavery." America's greatest Socialist, Eugene V. Debs, said liquor was a capitalist tool to render the workers supine. The pioneers of American feminism believed alcohol was at the root of men's brutality towards women. The anti-slavery movement saw alcohol addiction as a new form of slavery, replacing leg irons with whisky bottles. You can see the same left-wing prohibitionism today, when people like Al Sharpton says drugs must be criminalized because addiction does real harm in ghettoes. Of course, there were more obviously sinister proponents of Prohibition too, pressing progressives into weird alliances. The Ku Klux Klan said that "nigger gin" was the main reason why oppressed black people were prone to rebellion, and if you banned alcohol, they would become quiescent. The dry newspaper the Nashville Tenessean wrote: "The Negro, fairly docile and industrious, becomes, when filled with liquor, turbulent and dangerous and a menace to life, proporty, and the repose of the community." And of course there were hints that white women were in greater danger: one Congressman said alcohol "increases the menace of the black man's presence." This, too, is still there in America's current strain of prohibition. Powder cocaine and crack cocaine are equally harmful, but crack - which is disproportionately used by black people - carries much heavier jail sentences than powder cocaine, which is disproportionately used by white people. It was in this context that the Anti-Saloon League rose to become the most powerful pressure group in American history, and the only one to ever change the constitution through peaceful political campaigning. They announced their movement "was begun by Almighty God." In fact, it was begun by a little man called Wayne Wheeler, who was as dry as the Sahara and twice as overheated. One of Wheeler's friends said of him: "Like most humourless men, he had to make life into a crusade to make sense of it." Okrent compares him to Ned Flanders, but he was a political genius, maneuvering politicians of all parties into backing a ban. He made them change the school curriculum so children were taught that "the majority of beer drinkers die of dropsy" because it is "a narcotic poison [that will] deaden or paralyze the brain." Wheeler and the Prohibitionists had a structural advantage over his enemies. As the writer George Ade pointed out: "The Non-Drinkers were organising for fifty years but the Drinkers had no organization whatsoever. They had been too busy drinking." The League succeeded in 1921, when the Eighteenth Amendment came into effect, and it became a crime to drink alcohol anywhere in the United States. They celebrated the arrival of Utopia - and the inevitable dysfunctions of prohibition began. When you ban a popular drug that millions of people want, it doesn't disappear. Instead, it is transferred from the legal economy into the hand of armed criminal gangs. Across America, gangsters rejoiced that they had just been handed one of the biggest markets in the country, and unleashed an Armada of freighters, steamers, and even submarines to bring booze back. Nobody who wanted a drink went without. As the journalist Malcolm Bingay wrote: "It was absolutely impossible to get a drink, unless you walked at least ten feet and told the busy bartender in a voice loud enough for him to hear you above the uproar." So if it didn't stop alcoholism, what did it achieve? The same as prohibition does today - a massive unleashing of criminality and violence. Before prohibition, the saloon-keepers could defend their property and their markets by going to the police if they were threatened. After prohibition, the bootleggers could only defend theirs with guns - and they did. As the legendary lawyer Clarence Darrow explained: "The business pays very well, but it is outside the law and they can't go to court, like shoe dealers or real estate men or grocers when they think an injustice has been done them, or unfair competition has arisen in their territory. So, they naturally shoot." Massive gang wars broke out, with the members torturing and murdering each other first to gain control of and then to retain their patches. Thousands of ordinary citizens were caught in the crossfire. The icon of the new criminal class was Al Capone, a figure so fixed in our minds as the scar-faced King of Charismatic Crime, pursued by the rugged federal agent Eliot Ness, that Okrent's biographical details seem oddly puncturing. Capone was only 25 when he tortured his way to running Chicago's underworld. He was gone from the city by the age of 30, and a syphillitic corpse by 40. But he was an eloquent exponent of his own case, saying simply: "I give to the public what the public wants. I never had to send out high pressure salesmen. Why, I could never meet the demand." By 1926, he and his fellow gangsters were making $3.6bn (in 1926 money!). To give some perspective, that was more than the entire expenditure of the US government. The criminals could outbid and outgun the state. So they crippled the institutions of a democratic state and ruled, just as drug gangs do today in Mexico, Afghanistan, and ghettoes from South Central Los Angeles to the banlieues of Paris. They have been handed a market so massive that they can tool up to intimidate everyone in their area, bribe many police and judges into submission, and achieve such a vast size the honest police couldn't even begin to get them all. The late Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman said: "Al Capone epitomizes our earlier attempts at Prohibition; the Crips and Bloods epitomize this one." Occasionally, the alcohol gangs would have "Peace Conferences" in Atlantic City where they would divide up the country, fix prices, and agree to stay out of the other's territory - and violence would go down. But then the police would try to take out one of the many gangs, and war would break out again to seize control of the newly-available territory. This dynamic explains something that might appear, at first, to be a paradox: the more the police try to enforce prohibition, the worse the drug violence becomes. Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon tried to knock out the heads of the drug gangs, 40,000 people have been killed. Each killing triggers a new war for the dead dealer's patch. Of course excessive alcohol and drug use can cause terrible harm: I have friends whose lives have been ruined by it. But the harm caused by prohibition soon outweighs the harm caused by the drug itself - whether it's alcohol or cannabis or cocaine. An appalled President Hoover soon said in private that prohibition had caused "a complete breakdown in Government" in Detroit with "indiscrimiate shooting on the river." Sound familiar? One insight, more than any other, ripples down from Okrent's history to our own bout of prohibition. Armed criminal gangs don't fear prohibition: they love it. He has uncovered fascinating evidence that the criminal gangs sometimes financially supported dry politicians, precisely to keep it in place. They knew if it ended, most of organised crime in America would be bankrupted. When Michael Levine, one of America's top narcotics agents, went undercover in the 1980s and 1990s with la Mafia Cruenza, the Bolivian cocaine cartel, he discovered that, as he puts it, "not only did they not fear our war on drugs, they actually counted on it." The cartel's boss, Jorge Roman, told him the drug war was "a sham on the American tax payer" and bragged it was "actually good for business." When Levine told his boss, the officer in charge of the US drug war in South America, about this, he replied: "Yeah, we know it doesn't work, but we sold [the War on Drugs] up and down the Potomac." So it's a nasty irony that Prohibitionists try to present legalizers - then, and now - as "the bootlegger's friend" or "the drug-dealer's ally." Precisely the opposite is the truth. Legalizers are the only people who can bankrupt and destroy the drug-gangs, just as they destroyed Capone. Only the prohibitionists can keep them alive. Once a product is controlled only by criminals, all safety controls vanish - and the drug becomes far more deadly. After 1921, it became common to dilute and relabel poisonous industrial alcohol, which could still legally be bought, and sell it by the pint-glass. This "rotgut" caused epidemics of paralysis and poisoning. For example, one single batch of bad booze permenantly crippled 500 people in Wichita in early 1927 - a usual event. That year, 760 people were poisoned to death by bad booze in New York City alone. So many people became partially paralysed by an industrial alcohol known as 'Jake' that a shuffling, stumbling inability to walk was known 'Jake leg.' Wayne Wheeler persuaded the government not to remove fatal toxins from industrial alcohol, saying it was good to keep this 'disincentive' in place. Prohibition's flaws were so obvious that the politicians in charge privately admitted the law was self-defeating. Warren Harding brought $1800 of booze with him to the White House, while Andrew Mellon - in charge of enforcing the law - called it "unworkable." Similarly, the last three Presidents of the US have been recreational drug users in their youth. If the law was enforced in full, they would all have been ineligible to vote, never mind enter the Oval Office. Once he ceased to be President, Bill Clinton called for the decriminalisation of cannabis, and Obama probably will too. Yet in office, they continue to mouth prohibitionist platitudes about "eradicating drugs", and insist the rest of the world's leaders resist the calls for greater liberalisation from their populations and instead "crack down" on the drug gangs - no matter how much violence it unleashes. The need to mouth this script can lead even the sharpest brains into unwitting absurdities. Obama recently praised Calderon for his "crackdown" on drugs by - with no apparent irony - calling him "Mexico's Eliot Ness." Yes: he praised an enforcer of drug prohibition by comparing him to an enforcer of alcohol prohibition. Obama should know that Ness came to regard his War on Alcohol as a disastrous failure, and he died a drunk himself - but drug prohibition addles politicians' brains just as drugs addle a chronic addict's. By 1928, the failure of alcohol prohibition was plain - yet its opponents were demoralised and despairing. It looked like a fixed and immovable part of the American political landscape, since it would require big majorities in every state to amend the Constitution again. Clarence Darrow wrote that "thirteen dry states with a population of less than New York State alone can prevent repeal until Haley's Comet returns," so "one might as well talk about taking a summer vacation of Mars." Yet it happened. It happened suddenly and completely. Why? The prohibitionists made a serious miscalculations: they reacted to their failure by demanding the laws be tightened even more. Misdemeanours were turned into felonies - and it threw up a series of judgements shocked America. For example, one 48 year old mother called Etta Mae Miller with ten children was given a life sentence - for selling two pints of liquor to an undercover cop. But the biggest answer is found in your wallet, with the hard cash. After the Great Crash, the government's revenues from income taxes collapsed by 60 percent in just three years, while the need for spending to stimulate the economy was sky-rocketing. The US government needed a new source of income, fast. The giant untaxed, unchecked alcohol industry suddenly looked like a giant pot of cash at the end of the prohibitionist rainbow. They needed it. Could the same thing happen today, after our own Great Crash? The bankrupt state of California is about to hold a referendum to legalize and tax cannabis, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has pointed out that it could raise massive sums. Yes, history does rhyme. Many people understandably worry that legalization would cause a huge rise in drug use - but the facts suggest this isn't the case. Portugal decriminalized the personal possession of all drugs in 2001, and - as a study by Glenn Greenwald for the American Enterprise Institute found - it had almost no effect at all. Indeed, drug use fell a little among the young. Similarly, Okrent says the end of alcohol prohibition "made it harder, not easier, to get a drink... Now there were closing hours and age limits and Sunday blue laws, as well as a collection of geographic prosecriptions that kept bars or package stories distant from schools, churches and hospitals." People didn't drink much more. The only change was that they didn't have to turn to armed criminal gangs for it, and they didn't end up swigging poison. Who now defends alcohol prohibition? Is there a single person left? This echoing silence is suggestive. Ending drug prohibition seems like a huge heave, just as ending alcohol prohibition did. But when it is gone, when the drug gangs are a bankrupted memory, when drug addicts are treated not as immoral criminals but as ill people needing healthcare, who will grieve? American history is pocked by utopian movements that prefer glib wish-thinking over a hard scrutiny of reality, but they always crest and crash in the end. There will always be millions of people who want to get drunk or stoned or high. The only question is whether their needs are met to by mafias and militias, or by legal and regulated businesses. Okrent's dazzling history leaves us with one whisky-sharp insight above all others. The War on Alcohol and the War on Drugs failed because they were, beneath all the blather, a war on human nature. link to source

Rather than whining about it, it would be more productive for the UN to send an international peacekeeping force in. Seems like a no-brainer but then again, so does banning GMO's- see my next point. It appears to me that Rex is pointing out how easy it is for the media to avoid covering other important stories; so long as the public continues to eagerly lap up anything with the 'middle east' label.

Rex Murphy: UN condemns Israel first, investigates later Rex Murphy June 5, 2010 – 9:00 am I don’t suppose the world needs to remember Rwanda to note how sluggish in the face of imminent horror the United Nations is and can be. If that is not a sufficient cue, we could bring in other examples of areas of great threat or immiseration or both: Darfur, Tibet, Chechnya, North Korea, Zimbabwe, the Congo or Iran. On these the UN has the patience of a stone but only some of its energy. But torpid as is its nature, and comatose as are its eternal deliberations, on one subject, and toward one state, the United Nations acquires a strange and uniquely transformative power. Bring Israel under its gaze and the diplomatic sloths at UN headquarters morph into the swiftest of gazelles. From lotus-eaters to adrenalin junkies in the twinkling of an eye. Quite amazing, really. So naturally when the debacle over the so-called “freedom flotilla†— news media should be wary of letting activists choose the names of things — roared into the headlines, the UN reacted at the diplomatic equivalent of the speed of light. The Security Council issued its “condemnation,†and in a wonderful reversal of cause and effect also called for an investigation into what it had “condemned.†And the cruellest joke on the planet, what the UN with unbounded irony refers to as its Human Rights Council, issued, as unfailingly in every previous international incident involving Israel it has, a condemnation as well. If the flotilla’s real purpose was to bring aid, then merely by complying with Israel’s request to dock at Ashdod — as five of the ships did, with no blood shed and no international headlines — the supplies on the sixth ship would now be in Gaza. In reality, it was exercise in early 21st century propaganda on the battlefield of world opinion. Its only purpose was to challenge and delegitimize Israel’s blockade of ships travelling to Gaza — a blockade, as too many news reports fail to emphasize, which up until this “incident†was also being maintained by Egypt. That the Egyptian government, until a few days ago, mirrored in its actions Israel’s concerns about what might get shipped into Hamas is the only real obstruction in the otherwise perfectly concentrated anti-Israel narrative. As to the “peace activists†on that sixth ship, the ones who received the Israeli soldiers boarding the ship with bats, pipes, knives and chains — well, the video footage of the moments preceding the boarding and the boarding itself will make most rational people review their understanding of peace and activism and some of the organizations that fly the flags of these conveniently fungible designations. Any real investigation of the flotilla will not confine itself to the boarding, but include an equally scrupulous inquiry into the origins of some of its actors, its unstated as well as it stated aims, and the facility and speed with which it revved up the engine of international protest against Israel. It seemed like half the world took to the streets in less than half a day. This was but one installment in the long and continuous campaign to isolate Israel, and to turn that state in the eyes of international opinion into a pariah, to erode its legitimacy and to break its will. You’ve seen the branding. Apartheid Israel. Israel is the worst thing to happens to Jews since the Holocaust. Racist Israel. Imperialist Israel. The campaign has been remarkably successful, which is much to Israel’s woe and may be to the world’s woe as well. There are far larger, more egregious causes for the world’s attention than the episode off Gaza last Sunday, greater threats and deeper anxieties. But it is truly worth remarking that when Israel is in the dock, protest rage goes epidemic. To use that vile term so often recently turned upon Israel when it acts in its self-defence, the response is extravagantly “disproportionate.†I truly do not know why this is so. Israel is a sanctuary state established after one almost successful attempt just two generations ago to rid all the world of Jews. And Israel is now in the shadow of a fundamentalist, ferociously anti-Israel theocracy which is about to equip itself with nuclear weapons. Perhaps, alas, under the threat of a second attempt. Yet somehow Israel is the rogue, the barbarian nation, the only state on earth that can energize the professionally lethargic diplomats in the great tower of hypocrisy on the East River. Strange and dangerous times. National Post Rex Murphy offers commentary weekly on CBC TV’s The National, and is host of CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup. link to National Post for original

well happy frikkin birthday to c-towns the banjo hater then

Yeah Hugh's Room is the shit for acoustic music! Not sure if the dinner show deals are in effect for her show but its safe to say that Allison Brown never disappoints... and she tours with a killer band. Prior commitments prevent me from attending both this show and the free Bela show on Saturday- ACK! I'm surprised to see there isnt more interest in this show/banjo weekend extravaganza- I thought newgrass/bluegrass was in vogue these days?

Now that they've used the dispersants, we can forget about the hay idea and how to implement it:

Indeed. Though for the record, nobody said it was. :relax:

Indeed. See the Ten Jammandments

Canadas government blatantly disregarded the law in run-up to the 2010 G8/G20 summits Canada's federal government blatantly disregarded Ontario's provincial law requiring private security firms and their guards to be licensed, in the run-up to the 2010 G8/G20 summits. As the Toronto Star reported on June 8, 2010: 'The security firm awarded a government contract to provide private guards for the G8 and G20 summits is not licensed link to Globe and Mail for original

Thats a great tune brad!

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) – Sensing a public relations opportunity, golf legend Tiger Woods spoke out today on the BP oil spill, telling reporters, “At least I didn’t fuck the entire Gulf of Mexico.†Initially stunned by his comment, reporters asked Mr. Woods to elaborate on his response to the oil spill crisis. “I’m just saying, sometimes you can cause a lot more damage by drilling one hole as opposed to a thousand holes,†he said. “I’m just saying.†link to original

notice how the people in the 'drill' all have hands raised...

If CSIS comes knocking... A community advisory from the People's Commission Network People's Commission Network http://www.peoplescommission.org/en/csis/whattodo-csis.php May 2010 Since the fall of 2009 there have been ongoing visits by members of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) to various local social justice organizers and activists. These visits are in addition to CSIS’ ongoing harassment of targeted communities. This community advisory is in response to those visits. Visits by CSIS and the RCMP to activists are nothing new; they have taken place before around specific events or projects. In general, these visits can have different purposes: they are not only about information-gathering but can also be attempts to create or exploit divisions between activists, plant misinformation, intimidate, develop psychological profiles, and recruit informers. If CSIS comes knocking, we strongly encourage total and complete non-cooperation. A CSIS visit to your home or workplace will be a surprise, but we encourage you to be ready to not cooperate with them in any way, which means not speaking with them or listening to them. If you are in a precarious position -- due to your immigration status, pending criminal charges, probation, parole, or any other reason – we strongly encourage you to NEVER EVER talk to CSIS alone. Instead, tell them to contact a trusted lawyer that you have chosen, and then refuse to say anything else. You can contact the People's Commission Network for references to lawyers who can act diligently against CSIS intimidation tactics. If you are comfortable doing so, ask for the names, telephone numbers and cards of the CSIS agents who want to talk to you. Insist they provide their names, and don't say, or listen to, anything else. You are under no legal obligation, ever, to confirm your identity with CSIS. Sometimes CSIS agents might begin speaking to you and only later identify themselves. In that case, if you are taken by surprise, we encourage you to refuse to continue speaking with CSIS. You can always default back to being silent. In dealing with security services, silence is the golden rule. In all cases, you are encouraged to tell CSIS to leave your home or workplace or cease following you. Tell CSIS clearly to leave, in whatever fashion you feel is appropriate. You can insist they leave, to the point of closing doors in their face. Remember, although CSIS can act in very ugly ways, it has no arrest or policing powers. We encourage you to get in touch with the People's Commission Network to report any CSIS visits or related incidents. These visits can be de-stabilizing and stressful. That’s why it is important to not remain isolated in this situation; and the People’s Commission Network wants to offer concrete support to overcome the feeling of isolation these visits can create. Your correspondence with the People's Commission Network will be considered confidential. Consider any unannounced CSIS visit to be harassment against you. If possible, we encourage you to write down your experience so that you have the facts clearly noted. The People’s Commission Network can support you in documenting this harassment with the aid of a lawyer. CSIS' job is to gather information for the state and to disrupt movements of social justice. Their broad mandate includes monitoring any activities they deem to threaten the current political and economic order. Their intimidation focuses on indigenous peoples, immigrants, racialized communities, radical political organizations, labour unions, as well as the allies of these groups. CSIS' actions, which show clear evidence of gross incompetence, racism, as well as complicity in torture, are all the more reason why they deserve no cooperation whatsoever by anyone involved in movements for social justice. Total non-cooperation with CSIS and other security agencies by the entire social justice community - broadly and inclusively defined - is our best way of maintaining unity and solidarity, as well as keeping our focus on our important day-to-day organizing and activism. To recap: Do not talk to CSIS or share any information with them, no matter how harmless you think it is. Do not listen to CSIS agents. Do consider reporting the visit to the People's Commission Network. Please share this community advisory within your networks, and with members of your organizations and groups, so we can encourage collective non-cooperation with CSIS. We encourage community groups to ENDORSE this advisory, as a way of building collective solidarity against CSIS harassment. An endorsement means your group agrees with the following statement: “We support and endorse the People Commission Network’s Community Advisory concerning the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS).†We encourage everyone to share this advisory widely, in your networks and within your community. You can download a pamphlet version of this advisory, in pdf format, at http://www.peoplescommission.org/files/csis/PamphletEn.pdf.

Already started a G8/G20 'welcoming committee' thread thread in the Sanctuary:

~Happy Birthday~

Happy Birthday!