This little piggy stayed home

Cam Cardow



I don't think WHO is going to be able to convince the world's media to call this the "H1N1 influenza A" -- doesn't exactly roll tripingly off the tongue.
Some of the commenters on Effect Measure have other suggestions:

"I saw a funny article from Finland that the English translation call it the TexMex Flu."
"I call the virus the "USA Capitalist Pig Virus". The stories I have read have all linked the inception to a USA Corporate owned hyper-intensive pig farm in Mexico."
"My friends and I are calling it the "Flying Piggy Flu". It's "flying" because it has avian genes. (I suppose we should have worked humans into the name somehow, but this has a nice ring to it.) Also "piggy" seems more friendly/less scary than "swine". The fact that "flying" is sometimes used in place of a more common f-word in polite company had nothing to do with it, but is a nice added bonus."

Game On!

I hadn't really been following the BC election, but today's polling news is startling. The NDP have just about caught up with the Liberals. As RossK now says,
Game On!
Here are some of the poll tidbits:

Even though their reputations seem equally sullied, people chose Campbell almost twice as often (40 per cent) as James (23 per cent) when asked who would make the best premier. . .
The poll shows a growing gender gap in the B.C. election. While nearly half of women (48 per cent) are planning on voting NDP, only 35 per cent are planning to go with the BC Liberals.
The leading party seems to sit better with male voters. Forty-eight per cent polled said they'd stay under Campbell's leadership, as opposed to the 31 per cent who said they'd go NDP.
Age is also a large factor in the party people choose to vote for. Young voters aged 18 to 34 are more likely to vote NDP (41 per cent) and Green (19 per cent). Only 32 per cent of young voters indicated they would re-elect BC Liberals.

Here is one tidbit I thought was particularly interesting. The CTV story says:

Campbell also won the contest for best dinner date. Fifty-one percent of people said they'd rather have dinner with the Liberal, beating out James by two per cent.

It would be more accurate to describe this result as a "virtual tie" and it shows that James isn't as poorly thought of as the rest of the article implies.
And sorry, but I've just got to say it -- it would probably help her public image if she would update her hairstyle -- longer, looser, and get rid of those heavy bangs!

Twisted

It sorta painful, in a metaphysical sense, watching people twist themselves into pretzels as they try to justify torturing people. TBogg quotes Andy McCarthy writing at The Corner:

The pertinent question is whether the interrogations gave us valuable information about al Qaeda that we wouldn't have gotten, in a timely manner, without it. Information about a specific imminent terrorist attack would have been nice too. In my mind, we should never resort to enhanced measures unless we believe in good faith that attacks are being planned and possibly imminent. But obtaining intelligence about a specific imminent attack would not have been necessary to validate the use of the enhanced measures. . . .
Whether the enhanced measures are validly used, moreover, has to be determined by the threat situation before the enhanced measures are employed. Sure, it's crucial to study the quality of the information the tactics yielded in making the policy decision of whether they should ever be used. Once you decide to have them in your arsenal, however, the determination of whether they were properly employed on any one occasion has to hinge on the situation that existed before you decided to use them, . . .

TBogg adds:

Did you get all that? He's against torture except not.
...and that "Information about a specific imminent terrorist attack would have been nice too" is a lovely touch. It's like a grace note for sociopaths.

Oh, and by the way, using a term "enhanced measures" instead of "torture" is like a drug addict calling heroin "my medication". George Orwell would laugh.

I love the internets

Amazing

Politics has consequences

A public health blog, Effect Measure, reports on what is going to hamper the US response to the swine flu pandemic:

There is another relevant fact that should be mentioned here. CDC [Centre for Disease Control]is an agency on organizational hold, with an Acting Director. As public health professionals they are doing a heroic job, but they depend on DHHS [Department of Health and Human Services] , of which they are a part, for building government-to-government relationships. Those relationships suffered badly during the Bush years, with the result that Mexico had a better and more comfortable connection with Canada than the US. So why hasn't the Obama administration righted the problem? Because, among other things, there is still no Secretary of DHHS. Obama's nominee, the highly capable administrator Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, has had her confirmation held up by Republican ideologues playing abortion politics.
If ever there was a time when we needed strong leadership at DHHS, this is it. Playing politics has consequences.

Stage 3

This swine flu spread is pretty scary, isn't it. I've been reading up on the WHO website and we are now considered to be at Stage 3.
Stage 4 is the kaboom stage.
Sounds like all we can really do is wash our hands lots and stay away from large public gatherings.
Some people are buying surgical masks, I guess, but unless the person wearing the mask is the infected person, I'm not sure of their utility -- with SARS, it was determined that heatlh care workers were being infected by breathing the air that was getting around the side of their surgical masks, so they might as well not have worn them.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who voted in the Canadian F-word Blog Awards at Creative Revolution. The winner in my category was Womanist Musings -- congratulations, Renee!
And thanks, again, Alison at Creekside, for nominating me.

Memories

Considering how poor the memories of RCMP officers apparently are, its amazing they can still testify in court cases, isn't it?

October 15?

It is, I think, a terrible mistake for Obama to give the Republicans six months, until October 15, to torpedo his health care bill — they may be dumb, but they’re not stupid.
If the Democrats actually succeed in giving Americans some kind of guaranteed health care, the voters will be grateful forever. So Republicans will move heaven and earth to prevent Democrats from doing this.
Now, a sensible Republican party would join with the Democrats in passing this bill, so they could take credit for it, too. Maybe this is what Obama thinks they will do if they have six months to think about it. But these guys are too dumb, and too entangled with their own anti-government ideology. Besides, Rush Limbaugh wants Obama to fail, and making sure health care reform fails will be his highest priority.
It’s going to be a long summer.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

Cordell Barker, the creator of The Cat Came Back, is showing his newest at Cannes
Here's the classic:



Here's the NFB website.

Have you no shame?

Oh for pity's sake, Mr. Prime Minister.
Stop whining and pontificating and ducking and weaving and just do the right thing.
I don't like Omar Khadr either, but he is a Canadian citizen.
Bring him home.

Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in

You know how during the Bush administration whenever there was something going on that didn't make sense, it always turned out to be worse than you could ever have imagined?
Its a nightmare that just won't end, because it's happening AGAIN.
One thing that didn't make sense about the Bush administration using communist and vietnamese torture techniques was that these weren't actually aimed at gathering information but rather at provoking false confessions.
But now we find out that the Bush administration actually wanted false confessions all along::

Having realized that there really was no evidence of a Saddam/Al Qaeda connection (and later that there were no WMD in Iraq) they had to come up with some false information that they could spin. The best way to come up with false information ... is to torture it out of people.

Monsters.

Playing with dolls

I hadn't heard about this ridiculous Michael Coren column about how unwomanly female soldiers are until I read about it over at Galloping Beaver. Dave and the Rev say just about everything that needs to be said about this sexist drivel.
The only additional point I want to make is this:
I've been dealing with this kind of dinosaur attitude all my life, where some men, and some women too, think it is chilvalrous and they are doing women a favour by preventing us from going into dangerous or lonely or physically demanding careers like construction workers, police officers, firemen, forestry workers, ambulance drivers, doctors, veterinarians, long-haul truckers -- or soldiers.
Consciously or unconsciously, they see women as Barbie dolls -- women aren't real people, we are just gender objects. People who think this way use words like "pretty" and "sexy" to describe young women, and words like "frumpy" and "bitchy" to describe older women -- the words don't actually describe us as individuals but only as how we look or how we relate to the men in our lives. We are really nothing but bit-players in the real world, the world where men do the real work.
The tip-off that we are dealing with another dinosaur is this: inevitably, somewhere we always find a mealy-mouthed, head-patting line about how very very special it is to be a woman because we bear the children and isn't this just the most important "job" of all!
The coda is, so just shut up about all this stupid equality stuff, and go cook something delicious like only you ladies can! And since you're in the kitchen anyway, can you iron me a shirt for tomorrow?
This attitude toward women was so ingrained in our society that many people didn't even realize they had it until they first heard the doctor riddle.
I wonder if Coren would get it even now?

Grear line of the day

Digby on the torture memos

It was bloodlust, plain and simple. They gave themselves permission to become barbarians.

And everyone from Bush and Rumsfeld and Condi and Colin Powell on down started lying about Abu Ghraib in April 2004 and have never stopped:

That we now have even more proof they consciously sent these SERE techniques to Iraq to "Gitmoize" it --- a country which we invaded under false pretenses and which had not attacked us first --- takes these crimes to yet another level. If nothing else, allowing a bunch of low level grunts to pay the price while the men and women who gave the orders publicly pretended they were appalled at the behavior they themselves had sanctioned, makes all arguments that these leaders shouldn't be held accountable completely untenable.

S & M Republicans

There's something very S & M about Republicans these days.
They spent the last eight years knuckling under to George Bush whenever Karl Rove cracked the whip. And now that Bush and Rove are gone, they're submitting to Rush Limbaugh. It's like they just can't be happy unless they're made somebody into the party dominatrix.
And come to think of it, the Conservatives under Harper aren't much better, are they? Its odd to see so many grown people enjoying being ordered around.