nibbler

Bernard Prigent, Pfizer’s inside man PM Harper's appointment of drug company's VP to Canadian Institutes of Health Research is also a registered lobbyist… to CIHR. by Tim Bousquet February 4, 2010 Last October, the Harper government appointed Bernard Prigent to the governing council of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the federal agency that distributes about a billion dollars annually for health research. That appointment was met with near-universal condemnation from medical ethicists, because Prigent is a vice-president of Pfizer Canada, a firm that stands to profit from the decisions made at CIHR. "There's a structural conflict of interest," explains Jocelyn Downie, the Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy at Dalhousie University. "On the one hand, it's [Prigent's] statutory duty to represent the best health interests of Canadians, and on the other hand, as an executive with Pfizer, he's legally bound to promote the profit interests of his company. Those competing interests will not always align, and will sometimes be in conflict." Prigent's appointment was all the more remarkable because just a month before, Pfizer was fined $2.3 billion in the United States, the largest criminal fine ever assessed in that country, for fraudulently marketing the arthritis drug Bextra for unapproved uses. Prigent's appointment resulted in an extraordinary review by the parliamentary standing committee on health, but it was not reversed. But the parliamentary committee did not have a crucial piece of evidence: not only is Prigent a vice president of Pfizer, but he is also a registered lobbyist for Pfizer. That information is only now coming to light, and has never been previously reported. According to the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying of Canada, the government agency that regulates lobbyists, Prigent's position as Pfizer lobbyist is to sway policy at the "Canadian Institute of Health Researchers (CIHR) and other Research Oriented Spending Programs as it relates to private/public research and development partnerships," and Prigent is to achieve these aims through both oral and written techniques. In other words, Prigent the Pfizer lobbyist is paid to lobby Prigent the CIHR official. Federal rules require that lobbyists file monthly reports about "oral and arranged communications relating to a contract regardless of who initiated the communication," but Prigent has not filed such a report. Prigent did not respond to a request for comment. http://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/bernard-prijent-pfizers-inside-man/Content?oid=1503474

Modern Olympic torch relay first organised by Nazis in 1936 games From The Times August 6, 2008 Patrick Foster In doing away with the torch relay, the organisers of the London 2012 Olympics will bring to an end a tradition that has been passed down not from the athletes of the ancient world, but rather from the Nazis. In the sanctuary of Olympia, where the ancient Games took place, a flame burnt permanently on the altar of the goddess Hestia, but transportation of the flame to the site of the modern Olympics did not happen until the 1936 Games in Berlin. Today, the International Olympic Committee says that the torch “transmits a message of peace and friendship amongst peoplesâ€. It was Carl Diem, Hitler's Games organiser, who proposed a torch relay from the site of the ancient flame. Without the modern gas-fuelled torches we have today, it proved a logistical nightmare. Roads had to be laid at Olympia, which was barely accessible, transporting the flame across sea posed problems and extensive research went into developing specialist technology. Nevertheless, the relay was a success, and the Winter Games followed its summer counterpart by introducing the ritual at the 1952 games, in Oslo - with a torch carried from the valley of Morgedal, in Norway. Since the inception of the relay, the flame has travelled to the Games by skidoo, canoe, Concorde, horseback, steamboat, wagon, parachute and even by camel. When airborne, the flame is kept burning in a security lamp, similar to a miner's lamp of old. At night, it is kept alight in a special cauldron. In case it goes out, several fires are kept burning to ensure that every torch can trace its provenance back to the original fire at Olympia. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/olympics/london_2012/article4466834.ece

We Should Not Give Up the Game Before All the Cards Have Been Played By Howard Zinn ZNet via Information Clearing House http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24568.htm February 02, 2010 American historian, playwright and social activist Howard Zinn died January 27, 2010, aged 87. His light will shine bright into the far off future. A new socially just world will owe a great debt to Howard and others like him who gave so much of themselves for us. Below is an excerpt from his recent book A Power Governments Cannot Suppress published by City Lights Books, www.citylights.com. -- ZNet Staff In this world of war and injustice, how does a person manage to stay socially engaged, committed to the struggle, and remain healthy without burning out or becoming resigned or cynical? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. A revolution to overthrow the czar of Russia in that most sluggish of semi feudal empires not only startled the most advanced imperial powers but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II-the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die? And then the postwar world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, the tumultuous and violent Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone. No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created in the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of Nyerere's Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin's adjacent Uganda. Spain became an astonishment. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy came into being, open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone. The end of World War II left two superpowers with their respective spheres of influence and control, vying for military and political power. Yet they were unable to control events, even in those parts of the world considered to be their respective spheres of influence. The failure of the Soviet Union to have its way in Afghanistan, its decision to withdraw after almost a decade of ugly intervention, was the most striking evidence that even the possession of thermonuclear weapons does not guarantee domination over a determined population. The United States has faced the same reality. It waged a full-scale war in Indochina, conducting the most brutal bombardment of a tiny peninsula in world history, and yet was forced to withdraw. In the headlines every day we see other instances of the failure of the presumably powerful over the presumably powerless, as in Bolivia and Brazil, where grassroots movements of workers and the poor have elected new presidents pledged to fight destructive corporate power. Looking at this catalogue of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience-whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just. I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Wherever I go, I find such people, especially young people, in whom the future rests. And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands, more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of one another's existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing the boulder up the mountain. I try to tell each group that they are not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement. Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power that can transform the world. Even when we don't "win," there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope. An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not being foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of competition and cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places-and there are so many-where people have behaved magnificently, it energizes us to act, and raises at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Bear's in hibernation mode. I'll be there and I may stay for Dub Trinity on Saturday night too! Hope you make it out, its been ages and will be awesome to see you again!

Strange, I didn't see profound sense of insecurity listed as an adverse reaction anywhere on the H1N1 infosheet

This thread gets funnier by the post... witch reminds me...

ROLL CALL: who's in for this show? (besides meself)

Thanks Brad! Good job on the Lanois Dave! Awesome!

Rename thread: Two Minutes Hate

Good observation. Depending on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go, consider that until the 9/11 plane grounding "experiment", scientists were stumped as to how they could test the global sunscreen hypothesis...

You're right about that. Its a long public transit hike from downtown, amongst the many sights smells and sounds there, Pacific Mall has a huge arcade on the top floor. (Steeles and Markham road) Everybody should visit Pacific Mall at least once in a lifetime!

Corporations do have the rights of individuals, and if diagnosed, they exhibit the psychological profile of psychopaths. Strange how we lock up human psychopaths, yet we allow the corporate psychopaths free reign of our world. Corporations make decisions unclouded by emotion or ethics, on a regular basis marginalizing points of view which challenge their supremacy, silencing prophets, and when deemed necessary, hiring hit men, armies and death squads to murder individuals, and groups of people resisting the corporation's freedom to profit. The slave trade is larger and stronger than ever in 2010 on a planet ruled by boards of directors. Environmental destruction has reached tipping points,the arctic ice cap has melted, and cancer has become so rampant that it is commonplace to hear of young children afflicted with and dying from it. Some scholars have suggested that our increasing disconnection from nature is what has ushered in this era of destructive corporatocracy. Its inspiring to see so many people engaged in this David and Goliath struggle. I recognize the good fight is not for everyone, and I sympathize with those souls who have had the fight sucked out of them. Go hug a tree, or if you're as creatively intelligent as Terry Gilliam, make a movie about it:

'bout time they stopped carving the powder and got back to jammin!

Just got the latest update about this Friday's MUTABARUKA show in Peterborough: Subject: Happy Black History Month?! Hi Everybody, That's right, BHM is here, and you know know what they say, "A man who has no vision for the future always goes back to his past". The third annual Black History Month event at the Market Hall is this Friday night and I can think of no better way to honour black history than by experiencing visionary poet Mutabaruka perform to a Peterborough audience. It has been my vision for these events to contextualize the present instead of conforming to what is really a token "celebration" that attempts to satisfy the quota... I don't like Black History Month because it has become an end instead of a means, and it is too easy to package Black culture in easily consumable forms instead of totalizing our vision of the past, present and future in an event that isn't so confinable. Come celebrate the legacy of visionaries, past AND present, because we are still here, 'belly full but we hungry'!

I'm glad to hear that some of us are previously acquainted with Zinn's work. Not that I am trying to downplay the importance of the passing away of another great writer, yet JD Salinger's death effectively eclipsed Zinn's in mainstream media coverage. In this respect, the timing of Salinger's death must have come as a breath of fresh air for modern day slavers, imperialists and greedy capitalists everywhere. (i.e. Salinger being read by high school kids everywhere versus Zinn's account of the true history being banned from high school curricula everywhere) In contrast to a weak response here at jambands dot ca; the punknews dot org blog generated a huge response to Zinn's death.

Buck Fush - Pacify By Numbers

DemocracyNow heard daily on Pacifica Radio, payed tribute to Howard Zinn on Thursday's show, with guests Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein and Anthony Arnove:

cool idea!

So true... This thread was already a mile long and a couple days old by the time Apple sent an official email to me about the new iPad. Brilliant fucking buzz marketing! Speaking of which, I hear there's a new Apple product on the horizon made for the PC crowd that has inadvertently helped market, yet resisted buying any iOfferings thus far: its called the the iDouche

Zinn fans will appreciate this interview. Part 1 of 6.

Glad to hear you're the adventurous eater Ms.Huxtable! I find the sustainable protein argument compelling, as well as the "pesticide free" argument hehe. The way toxic chemicals bio-accumulate in the fat and meat of birds, fish, pigs, cattle etc is far less appetizing to me than the thought of worm pizza cooked by a gourmet chef. (who teaches culinary arts at Niagara College) Theres a creepy-crawly tasting featuring at least one of the master culinary chefs mentioned in the Charlie's Burgers article coming up in a couple weeks time. Apparently its a much more reasonably priced affair: Start Time:Saturday, February 13, 2010 at 11:00am End Time: Monday, February 15, 2010 at 4:00pm Location: Niagara Parks Butterfly Conservatory Street: 2405 Niagara Parkway City/Town: Niagara Falls, ON Here's a link to the facebook Bug-a-Licious Insect Food Festival event page

I've already begun saving. Do you guys own a newer model or an older one? If newer, where was it made? Thanks!

I'm there in spirit, and I'll be looking forward to the tapes Brad!

Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87 January 27, 2010 07:12 PM By Mark Feeney and Bryan Marquard, Globe Staff Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and whose books, such as "A People's History of the United States," inspired young and old to rethink the way textbooks present the American experience, died today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling. He was 87. His daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington, said he suffered a heart attack. "He's made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture," Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, said tonight. "He's changed the conscience of America in a highly constructive way. I really can't think of anyone I can compare him to in this respect." Chomsky added that Dr. Zinn's writings "simply changed perspective and understanding for a whole generation. He opened up approaches to history that were novel and highly significant. Both by his actions, and his writings for 50 years, he played a powerful role in helping and in many ways inspiring the Civil rights movement and the anti-war movement." For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. "A People’s History of the United States" (1980), his best-known book, had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers -- many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out -- but rather the farmers of Shays' Rebellion and union organizers of the 1930s. As he wrote in his autobiography, "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train" (1994), "From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than 'objectivity'; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble."... Read the entire article on the Boston Globe website