Forward Together #UofR: Buffy St. Marie – Live Blog

Buffy St. Marie tackled the subject of Aboriginal peoples’ self image. What has been the basis for it? In many cases in popular culture, it’s from philosophers in Europe who never met the First Peoples in their life!

#Buffy event at #FNUniv is almost full 10 min to start. http://t.co/TNO8jZ4K0a—
John Klein (@JohnKleinRegina) March 27, 2013

#Buffy lecture opened with an elder ceremony and #FNUniv president. http://t.co/JXQy3d3jYL—
John Klein (@JohnKleinRegina) March 27, 2013

The reality is that First Nations civilizations were much more complex, scientific, and peaceful than depicted by European and settler academics and politicians.

Team sports were an invention of Native Americans. Helmets with animal logos. Basically the NHL. #Buffy #APTN—
John Klein (@JohnKleinRegina) March 27, 2013

The bully who is running the politicians will keep at it unless you are setting a stronger example. #Buffy We are creative. Grow.—
John Klein (@JohnKleinRegina) March 27, 2013

War is caused by greedy people. It is a choice. The wealthiest nations still go to war. #Buffy #APTN #UofR #IdleNoMore—
John Klein (@JohnKleinRegina) March 27, 2013

Killer Robots From Earth

I grew up thinking that Killer Robots From Venus was a pretty amusing song. Now that we’re living in 2013, the ‘future’, we have to seriously contemplate the implications of building robots that can kill as their intended purpose. Our next-future expectations depend upon what we choose now. I’m not okay with building Terminators, just because we have the technical capability. We should be seriously concerned, even if we don’t think a Skynet scenario will play out as it did in the movies.

The consequences are dire and deadly even if the machines don’t ‘decide’ to turn against their human programmers.

“Giving machines the power to decide who lives and dies on the battlefield would take technology too far,” said Steve Goose, arms division director at Human Rights Watch. “Human control of robotic warfare is essential to minimising civilian deaths and injuries.”

US political activist Jody Williams, who won a Nobel peace prize for her work at the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, is expected to join Sharkey at the launch at the House of Commons. Williams said she was confident that a pre-emptive ban on autonomous weapons could be achieved in the same way as the international embargo on anti-personnel landmines. “I know we can do the same thing with killer robots. I know we can stop them before they hit the battlefield,” said Williams, who chairs the Nobel Women’s Initiative.

“Killer robots loom over our future if we do not take action to ban them now,” she said. “The six Nobel peace laureates involved in the Nobel Women’s Initiative fully support the call for an international treaty to ban fully autonomous weaponised robots.”

“They may be metallic, but they’re just like me and you.” – Arrogant Worms.
No, they are not just like me and you; they’re killing-machines. Don’t let computer scientists program killer robots.

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We can’t even seem to convince some people that it’s a good idea to harness wind energy, yet those same people might defend the creation of deadly robots that could quite literally be turned against them and their family giving a worst case scenario.

Bones of Kings

The discovery of Richard III’s grave is pretty awesome. Bonus, he was still inside it! It’s really hard to get the motivation to leave a grave though, it doesn’t happen very often anyway, and is entirely with assistance.

And here’s another thing entirely:

Good Ol’ American Sex Scandal

The American media is very primitive, which is why it avoids complex and important issues, and instead resorts to tabloid topics like sex scandals. While their country is embroiled in an unprovoked war in Iraq, occupies Afghanistan (along with Canada), and itches to bomb Iran for oil, they’re worried more about where the wiener Petraeus has been.

It pretty much doesn’t matter, and it’s par for the course, yet it’s popular to talk about because it involves powerful people being shamed. It’s not exactly Wikileaks’ level of interesting, yet it will lead to many old stories being looked at in a slightly new, sexy light.

So far it only offers scant hope to Republicans that they can somehow embarrass Obama or impeach him over an unrelated event in Benghazi, Libya, and a shirtless FBI male agent whose photo was published today with shot-up dummies. No photo bombing, or anything remotely interesting. Expect this scandal to blow over in a month if no new tie-ins are made.
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It’s not directly related, but Greenwald had an interesting email exchange with a US Army Colonel years ago.

Commodity In the Real World

Now @JephMaystruck is reppin' the book Brandwashed by Martin Lindstrom – solid read #SYPElunch—
Jackson Middleton (@KiltedBroker) September 19, 2012

Everything in our world is a commodity – everything is either bought or sold and will be recommended or not. #SYPElunch—
Jackson Middleton (@KiltedBroker) September 19, 2012

I read Jackson’s comment about Maystruck’s presentation and “Brandwashed”, and it stuck out in my mind. It came back to me when Hedges talked about it last night, and I found the comment in a speech he gave at UofT almost two years ago, before Egypt’s uprising took place.

“Everything in our world is a commodity – everything is either bought or sold and will be recommended or not.”

Hedges:
“When your community physically breaks down”, people retreat into fantasy and magical thinking. “Miracles and magic” are desired. “Absurdist policies” rule the day. Military spending is rising, but people want government spending to be cut. Attempting to push people back into reality, brings a rage from those attempting to avoid the world that almost destroyed them. “The end of the world is no longer an abstraction” in Detroit as Hedges points out.

37:30 in the video:

“The rise of the commodity culture, where everything from human beings to the natural world have no intrinsic value, but are judged only on their monetary value.”

Hedges studied religion, and is of the opinion that the loss of sacredness, where people don’t hold certain things like the natural world and life at a higher value than money, is a crushing weight on preserving civilization.

England Threatens to Risk War With Latin America to Please United States!

I wish my title was embellished, but it’s been a crazy 24 hours. The background to this story is that Wikileaks‘ editor Julian Assange is holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, waiting for the Ecuadorian President Correa to rule on his asylum bid. It’s expected that asylum will be granted on Thursday. One way or another, the UK has threatened to storm the Ecuadorian embassy and take Assange into their custody for rendition, err… extradition to Sweden for “questioning”. From there, it’s widely expected Assange will be extradited to the USA for torture and eventually death in retribution for unleashing Cablegate.

If #Assange is not the lead story on ALL "news' and 'current affairs' shows tonight, true journalism and truth does not exist here.—
Lisa Watson (@Lisa_Watto) August 16, 2012

The whole “Assange is a rapist, and people who support him and Wikileaks supports rape” comments found on Twitter and elsewhere, is propaganda of the worst kind. It’s convincing otherwise intelligent people to put prosecution of sexual misconduct at a higher priority than preserving free speech and democracy! Look at unfree countries and tell me women are treated equal to men or better there.

If political prisoners, like Assange, are not universally defended, then the state will simply accuse anyone it finds a threat as being a sexual deviant. Since propagandized individuals don’t see through that old ploy, they’ll cheer as our top journalists are imprisoned, and weaker journalists shut up to avoid going to jail. Bye bye democracy. Then bye bye feminism.

I’m getting seriously pissed off explaining to people privileged who live in free democratic countries like England, Canada, and New Zealand, that we PROTECT political prisoners, not cheer for their prosecution. We are becoming the bad guys, as western nations. Our moral high ground over China, South Africa, and elsewhere with poor reputations, is rapidly being ceded to pursue a bogus rape charge for the most innovative journalist to make waves in decades.

TonoFonseca 2012/08/15 at 5:51 PM ET:
I never, ever, thought, in a million years, I would be siding with Ecuador against Britain. It is sad how countries like Britain, Canada, and the USA are becoming just like the police states we fought against in WWII and the Cold War.

While You Were Sleeping

Have you committed a crime? No? You’re still in a police database somewhere. It’s not supposed to happen according to our laws, and according to American law, but it’s happening and it’s called TRAPWIRE. 9/11 is often the excuse used, but it’s actually simply the state using its latest tech toys in the most obvious way possible, which is why Orwell wrote fiction about it. It didn’t take a whole lot of imagination to dream up a world where our every move is government monitored. Yet you can expect that crime will not be eliminated in such a world.

When democracy is lost, and the power of the ballot box to bring change is gone, what’s left for oppressed people? Crime gets worse. People get desperate. It’s not an untested societal model, even if the technological pervasiveness of the state has not bee quite as acute. It’s not a country I want to see, let alone live in.

I can’t stop the slide into fascism that Canada is facing, not by myself. It took the Greatest Generation to defeat it previously, and it will take another generation to overcome again. Yet our tools of truth are under attack by governments, by our representatives. Well, they claim to represent the people, anyway.

If you care about your civil liberties: write a complaint about #TrapWire to your elected representatives!—
Asher Wolf (@Asher_Wolf) August 13, 2012

It’s 2012. We don’t have flying cars, but we do all carry tracking devices (cell phones), and the state watches where we go in multiple ways. I think I’d rather have the flying cars, even given the naive pre-9/11 view that they’d not be used as missiles.

RCMP – Really Carefully Monitoring People

Originally appeared on BackoftheBook.ca

How can I write this without sounding, well, paranoid? I believe the RCMP is watching too many people, and abusing its resources. There are plenty of signs this is taking place, and it worries me. The police should not be monitoring Canadians without having a reasonable suspicion that criminal acts are imminent or are taking place. It is not a valid reason to pay police to watch all activists, especially ones who peacefully oppose prevailing political governance. Are we not a society free to disagree with our government?

Here’s an incomplete, but startling, list of reports that suggest the Mounties are getting their man by putting everyone, innocent people too, under a microscope.

• Yinka Dene Alliance is not a terrorist organization. If the report had said RCMP were monitoring “Polish Canadians” (as a random example), do you think there would be more outrage?
• RCMP interrogate former Conservative candidate for passing documents from anonymous source to Ethics Commissioner in Parliament (after Parliament mail room lost first submission).
• A BC man got a visit from the RCMP after contacting the Prime Minister.
• Until the 1980s, the RCMP kept a secret list of people they considered to be Communists, and were prepared to round these people up in the unlikely event of the Cold War heating up. PROFUNC was ended by accident.
• The G8/G20 brought Canada’s so-called “largest ever” police spy operation down on activists whose worst members did damage comparable to unruly drunk hockey fans in Vancouver. Meanwhile, the police assigned to watch the protests ended up being charged with crimes. RCMP “abandoned policy”, and kettled protesters, which resulted in the arrests of hundreds, to possibly over a thousand, innocent people.

Since there are no laws clearly governing the use of your personal information collected by the ruling political party into their CIMS database, they could be sharing this intelligence with the Mounties. Would it change your answer to any survey or political phone call if you knew your response could end up on an RCMP surveillance watchlist?

As a political blogger, I’m pretty much screwed if the government takes an active interest in me. Even though I’ve previously worked in a job for the government where people, with less oversight and more authority than the RCMP, confirmed I’m loyal to Canada (and the Queen even) and am the opposite of a threat to national security, I have little doubt that now I’m an unhappy smiley face in CIMS, and who knows what other police-state Stasi-style databases. With social networking, it’s easy to track most of my contacts. When Toews’ Bill C-30 passes, the police will be able to do legally what they’ve probably been doing since September 11th, 2001. I also carry a cell phone, so my movements could be mapped, or conversations bugged using the phone mic. Ubiquitous technology is stacked against a free, democratic Canada.

Will the RCMP maintain the peace in Canada, or bring an end to it? Will they resist the pull of pervasive electronic monitoring of every person? I know what I hope for, but the signs are pointing in the wrong direction.

Progress

In Grade 10 I read The Chrysalids, a John Wyndham science fiction that starts out describing an agrarian culture where they talk of God-like old people who could move the Earth into walls and hills. There were enough clues in the first chapter that I soon figured out that the book was describing the future, but many kids in my class didn’t comprehend the fiction. It was too far fetched for them to even consider in fiction that humans could regress in our technological abilities and knowledge. What could cause that sort of disaster, they hopefully wondered.

In my day, we read books, they couldn’t be bought on the Internet for a tablet, and young people knew that things only got better and more possibilities were going to present themselves. Cars would fly, computers would make holodecks, cameras would take holographic pictures, and holograms would carry messages to Jedi. Now we’re lucky if cars will move after peak oil (or ever drive themselves), if computers will have electricity with doubling power bills, if cameras aren’t telling the government exactly what we are doing at all times (assuming we switch off our tracking device by Apple or Samsung or RIM), and if 3D TVs don’t give us a headache and brain damage, let alone save our planet from the Death Star.

MOS’s blog post made me think of The Chrysalids. It’s a good book, and completely relevant to today, even with the threat of MAD war somewhat off the table. I happened to see this graphic on FAILblog too, which fits with this post. It’s the age old question, “Is the current batch of kids stupider than average, or is this the old crumudgeon effect taking shape?” The paradox in perception is dangerous, as it can lead to acceptance of sub-par child rearing and behaviour, or on the other end of the spectrum, an over-controlling adult class that is unwilling to listen to the untainted perceptions of the less-indoctrinated.

F-35: Don’t Need No Stinking Accountability

I am genuinely concerned that there is no viable alternative party for conservatives in Canada who have, to this point, put all of their eggs into the Harper basket(case) Conservative Party of Canada. It’s staggering, the amount of intellectual fortitude (dishonesty) it takes to justify the crimes, the lying, the harassment, and general bad-neighbourly things the Harper Conservatives have done to Canadians.

@saskboy Exactly. The Progressive Conservatives would still be a good party today (more or less) had they not imploded post-Mulroney.—
unfuckwithable (@unfuckwithabIe) May 12, 2012

It must taste awful to have to claim that Stephen Harper is a sound fiscal manager, while there are indisputable lists everywhere showing how he’s not even close to such a title.

The Harper Cabinet is filled with liars, habitual ethics violators, and hypocrites. Cynics will say it’s always been this way, but it doesn’t have to be, with this group of distasteful, mean people ruling by fear, while simultaneously ^NOT fearing an early end to their own cushy jobs. “If you vote NDP, they’ll destroy the economy and you’ll lose your job,” can’t you hear the Info Alert emails spreading that line? “Strong, Stable, National Conservative Majority Government”? How many strong and stable people do you know who describe themselves that way? Isn’t it a bit like someone driving a Hummer or Corvette to compensate for, uh, intrinsic shortcomings?

There are so many millions of Canadians willing to put up with the abuse, but it really should stop. There are people without proper shelter, or enough food or hope, but the rail line is luxury travel these days, so good luck seeing a fruitful On To Ottawa march in the world’s second largest country. What will be the flashpoint of democratic change, if RoboCon and the F-35 $10B+ lie haven’t been it?

It’s been more than a month that many ministers of the government should have resigned or been fired in disgrace for openly lying to the House of Commons. What happens when mere commoners like you and I lie in court? For Conservative MPs, there is special treatment from the Speaker. If you find yourself on the stand entering your words into the public record, and are caught in a lie, see how far you get claiming it’s your constitutional right.

Has the media been pushed too far to accept the Harper government as acceptable, and even endorsement worthy? Still, it’s been months since RoboCon became widely known among well informed Canadians (like journalists), and still there is great hesitation in their papers and shows to identify Poutine, or mention that his scheme took place in only half a percent of the ridings affected by similar democracy-stealing crimes. That kind of forgiveness is really Christ-like. Maybe they’re all Christians before Canadians, or before journalists, or before people who want to live in a free country with a functioning democracy. Who among them are not cowards, or are edited by cowards?

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