Happy Festivus

Cold hands, warm hearts

The Idle No More protest today in Saskatoon:

Flash mob for protest

Thousands take over Saskatoon mall for Idle No More protest:



This was last night, at Midtown Plaza -- 2,000 people took over the mall in a flash mob for Idle No More.

There were periodic eruptions of cheers and yelps as a massive group of protesters shutdown parts of the Midtown Plaza. People held hands as they danced in an enormous circle to the beat of drums and a chorus of traditional First Nations' signing. There were no political speeches or organized chants, but the estimated 2,000 people who attended this flash mob on Thursday are all part of a national movement that is sweeping the country.
“People are walking up,” said Jenn Altenberg, who came downtown for Thursday’s Idle No More protest. “People showing up here is a powerful statement. Our young people are finding their voices.”...
“It’s not just First Nations or aboriginal people. I think it’s a culmination of a lot things,” said John Noon, one of the drummers who led the flash mob. “It’s like Occupy. It’s building on that. It’s going worldwide.”

One of those things you wonder about

I always thought Bing Crosby's last Christmas Special was the oddest one ever made, and the Bing/Bowie song was the oddest pairing, in spite of how their voices actually blend well. So its great to finally find out how this happened.
h/t

They're not going to take it anymore

The Idle No More movement is being noticed across Canada.
The Star Phoenix had a major story this morning about its founders Sylvia McAdams and Sheelah McLean (pictured above) who, with Jessica Gordon and Nina Wilson, started the whole movement.
Through social media, rallies were organized last week in Canadian cities, and more are coming on Friday including at Canadian consultates in London, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
In the Toronto Star, Tim Harper sums up all of the reasons why First Nations leaders are really angry at Stephen Harper and his government:

[the government's] determination to economically exploit resources over the objections of environmentalists and aboriginals who believe this regime is running roughshod over its ancestral lands. . . .
movement leaders count 14 pieces of legislation — dealing with everything from education to water quality to financial accountability — that they believe are the laws of an adversary.. . .
Consultations with native representatives over education have broken down. The initiative is now largely a unilateral Ottawa move.
First Nations believe a bill forcing chiefs and bands to publicly release salaries and financial reports is a move meant to pit leaders against residents.
The omnibus bill amends the Navigable Waters Protection Act, a law dating to the days of Sir John A. Macdonald, meant to ensure development would not impede Canadians’ rights to freely pass through public waterways.
The government now has the right to approve projects on more than 160 lakes without consulting First Nations.
The Conservatives also amended the Indian Act, making it easier for aboriginal leaders to lease out land for economic development without consulting band residents and have proposed a bill that would give Ottawa more control over band elections.
There is ongoing frustration over the lack of an inquiry into the more than 600 aboriginal women who have been murdered or gone missing in this country over the past two decades and why 50 per cent of violent crimes against aboriginals go unprosecuted, twice the rate of the general population.
Even the program used to compile the data, Sister in Spirit, lost its funding under the Conservatives.

There is a spiritual aspect to this movement.

Friday's noon event in Saskatoon at the Vimy Memorial is billed as a day of "spiritual awakening" and will feature a community round dance, a water ceremony and several speakers. Organizers are expecting hundreds of people to participate.
The spiritual aspect of the movement is just as important as the political message, Gordon said.
"We can't just focus on one thing," she said. "Friday is based at the spiritual level to assert our indigenous nationhood with everybody beating their drums as one."

Central to the movement is the two-week hunger strike by Chief Theresa Spence of the Attawapiskat First Nation -- yes, the same reserve where awful housing conditions shocked all of Canada last year and which has proven to be a bellweather for the incompetent management and finger-pointing of the Harper Cons.
Chief Spence wants something very simple -- a meeting with Stephen Harper.
Will the kitten whisperer step up and show some leadership here?  Will the Governor-General?
Or are Harper and his PMO brain trust so small-minded that they will see this as just another political pissing contest which they can blithely ignore?   Personally, I'm not optimistic.

WTF was that?

Holy shit News, Video and Gossip - Gawker
UPDATE: Darn it, it was a hoax. But the students got an A.

Unbearably stupid

Neil Macdonald has a slightly different take on the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre:

Yet another "national discussion" about guns is under way here, and it's so anti-rational, so politically cowardly, so …unbearably stupid that you have to wonder how a nation that has enlightened the world in so many other ways could wallow in this kind of delusion.
Twenty children are dead, and journalists and politicians have assumed those breathy, semi-hushed tones that have become so much the norm in covering tragedies.
Everywhere, there is talk about "the grieving process," with pious asides thrown in about the need to "go home and hug your children," or pray.
As if that is going to accomplish anything.
The American audience is a giant emotional sponge looking for distraction from its collective gun craziness, and the media obliges, broadcasting endless montages of victims, with sombre, hymnal piano music playing underneath.
After the state medical examiner had finished talking about multiple bullet wounds in each young victim, all inflicted by the same Bushmaster rifle, one reporter asked the man to talk about how much he'd cried — "personally" — while performing the autopsies.
To repeat: the 20-year-old shooter used a Bushmaster .223 assault rifle, a commercial model of the military M-16, and the reporter wanted to talk about crying.

He's fed up with the stupid, and the rest of the world agrees.

This one's the best

Shootout?

I'm no lawyer but it strikes me as somewhat stupid to start some complicated legal maneuvers so that maybe some judge will issue an order that will somehow force the NHL to abandon the lock-out. I expect the judges will say fuhgeddaboutdit, you're not going to emboil us in your power play here.
Why don't Bettman and Fehr just have a shootout, first one to make five goals wins?

Will anything be done?

I doubt it.
As the The Hartford Courant says:

The National Rifle Association and other gun lobbyists can take great pride; they've brought gun ownership within reach of every psycho and wing nut with a crazed rage to kill.

But when the head of an organization called Gun Owners of America can tweet "Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands" and mean it, then we are all living in Bizarro World.

This is all I ever wanted for Christmas

A Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine
Here's my favorite "research" strip:

2012 google searches

Google's Moving Tribute Video to the Past Year, as Told by Our Searches

Spam

I just deleted more than 3,900 spam comments from the last several months -- I didn't realize I should have been doing this all along.
Anyway, I know its a pain, but I am going to try to use the word verification tool to prevent spammers from posting as much. Hope it will work.

Idle no more

200 in Calgary

500 in Saskatoon  Video here.

Hundreds of First Nations people across the country protested the latest omnibus bill yesterday. Yes, they knew it likely wasn't going to change the minds of any of the Harper Cons, but they did it anyway:

"There’s not a lot we can do about it other than raise our voices, raise our drums"

Yesterday was billed as a National Day of Action and Solidarity, the first of the Idle No More protests.

They died because they were women.

Jonathan Kay, and dozens of his yahoo commenters, can whine to their heart's content about the unfairness of the Montreal Massacre, and they can complain about how Judy Rebick hurts their delicate fee-fees, and they can talk like men are the real victims here.
And they can compare us uppity, angry, ball-busting Canadian feminists to those quiet, well-behaved, non-confrontational, forgiving Amish who would never dream of upsetting nice Canadian men by demanding they do some soul-searching about sexism and misogyny and gun control.
But all their strum und dang will never change this one simple basic fact -- one cold December evening 23 years ago, madman Mark Lepine got himself some guns and killed 14 engineering students because they were women.
(h/t)