Have heard this song before. It's from an old familiar score.

I’m really really trying to get upset that the BC’s chief electoral officer is refusing to take the 700,000-signature HST petition to the BC Legislature in accordance with the law.


Pundit Bill Tieleman who has been helping the former BC premier Bill Vander Zalm (talk about strange bedfellows…) with a little PR on his blog and on his Facebook page, has a blog heading from Aug 10 that says: Total Recall!  Elections BC verifies success of Fight HST citizens Initiative petition - but won't act because of big business court action!

Oh-kay.  But where do the !!!!!s come in to this?  People are surprised?

Bill Tieleman says the reason the electoral officer won’t submit petition is “because a big business coalition is attempting to take legal action to block the entire [Fight HST] Initiative process - a bogus excuse for refusing to do their duty as required.”

I can see where Bill Vander Zalm might be a teeny bit surprised -- it is a bit flagrant -- but I thought Tieleman would know this type of thing is S.O.P.  (standard operating procedure) when the establishment wants to block those who disagree with them.

Ask any political activist from the Left.  It’s why they all burn out. They slog away year after year, decade after decade, following “the law” -- going through the process of legal dissent -- while governments or their agents, slalom around them and block them at every turn.

A recent example would be David Orchard, who tried valiantly to stop the takeover by the Canadian Alliance Party of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada - the “merger” that produced that rough beast called The Conservative Party of Canada which slouched towards Ottawa and became our federal government soon after.


The Electoral Chief of Canada actually opened his office on a Sunday -- yes a Sunday in Ottawa -- to accept the paperwork for the merger.  And you know all about the signatorial derrings-do that Peter MacKay pulled when he made the deal with David Orchard promising on paper, in writing, no merger in order to become leader of the PC Party then later enabled that merger. 


But the Right, in the person of people like The Zalm and his followers -- because they tend to be the Establishment in everything -- are not accustomed to having their legal initiatives blocked and stymied like people on the Left are.


Speaking of Vander Zalm’s followers, don’t be surprised to find out that that his intention around the Fight HST Campaign was to call forth the undead of the old Socred party and do grassroots (a favourite word of his) organization around the HST issue, with a view to supplanting Right Wing Party #1 (the Liberals) with Right Wing Party #2 in the next provincial election -- a Socred rehash.  Not that the Liberals aren’t that, but this would be a re-branded Socred rehash.


And isn’t the Left playing into the former premier’s hands around the notion of supporting his anti-HST thing because Vander Zalm cares “the people?” Remember when he was Human Resources Minister of this province and told people on welfare to “pick up a shovel?” That’s Mr.  Peeps for you.


Listen to Bill T., bless his heart:

The Recall and Initiative Act is extremely clear - if the petition is verified as having met the threshold, then ‘...  the chief electoral officer must send a copy of the petition and draft Bill to the select standing committee.’ 

Not ‘may’.  Not ‘whenever he or she feels like it’.  Not ‘after business groups take a legal run at the petition’ - the Act says the chief electoral officer "must" - no ifs ands or buts.

This is the same government that tore up legal union contracts in BC, the government that has shown again and again it will do whatever it bloody well pleases.  Law-schmaw.


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Media Release, Friday, March 5, 2004

Why did the Chief Electoral Officer create the Conservative Party of Canada on a Sunday?


There will be a motion in Federal Court in Toronto on Monday, March 8th asking the court to order the Chief Electoral Officer to provide more information from his files concerning the creation of the Conservative Party of Canada.

The Chief Electoral Officer registered the Conservative Party of Canada as a result of a purported merger between the Progressive Conservative Party and the Canadian Alliance on Sunday, December 7th, 2003.  One consequence of the registration was to eliminate the Progressive Conservative Party.

The Honourable Sinclair Stevens, on behalf of a number of "PC Party loyalists," has launched an application to judicially review the Chief Electoral Officer's decision to register the new Conservative Party.

The Notice of Application alleges that there was no proper "merger resolution" as required by the Canada Elections Act.  It further alleges that registering the merger on the day after the vote by the Progressive Conservative Party denied natural justice to those who wished to make representations to the Chief Electoral Officer that he should not accept the purported merger.  

The Notice of Application also alleges that PC Party leader Peter MacKay usurped the role of the Management Committee of the PC Party in selecting the PC Party members to sit on the interim joint council of the new Conservative Party.  The Notice of Application further alleges that the Conservative Party of Canada did not have any structure whatsoever at the time that the Chief Electoral Officer registered it as a political party.

As part of the application for Judicial Review, the applicant requested that the Chief Electoral Officer provide all notes, memoranda, correspondence, emails, voice mails and any other documents concerning the Conservative Party of Canada that he had in his possession.

The Chief Electoral Officer provided some such documents but withheld others on the ground that they were irrelevant to the Chief Electoral Officer's decision.

The documents that were provided show that the initial presentation to the Chief Electoral Officer concerned the creation of a new party, not a merger.  To date no explanation has been given for the changed wording or of how it was arranged that the Chief Electoral Officer received the merger application on a Sunday.  There remain many other mysteries concerning the discussions between the Chief Electoral Officer and those who were pushing the merger.  The applicant submits that further information from the Chief Electoral Officer's files is required in order to properly adjudicate the application for Judicial Review.

The motion for an order that the Chief Electoral Officer be required to produce all the documents will be argued in the Federal Court in Toronto on Monday, March 8th, 2004 beginning at 9:30 a.m.


Court Hearing: 9:30 a.m., March 8, 2004
Federal Court, 8th Floor - Canada Life Building
330 University Avenue, Toronto

-30-

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The Greening of America - still a ways to go

I received my Staples order at work in a plastic bag that was 20 times larger than necessary to hold the two mini-BIC Wite-Out® correction tape holders it contained. (People wanting to talk to me about the ecology of correction tape, please take a number and line up to the left there).

The 20-times-too-big plastic bag had a big green sticker (!!GREEN!!) on it that said:

Make a difference.

Recycle your ink and toner today.

Staples claims on the green label that they have recycled more than 50 million cartridges!  Wow! Go Staples.....  Sounds admirable doesn't it?  And 50 million sounds like a lot, doesn't it?  But, hmn… is it really?

If you figure one printer per 10 people in the U.S. - that's at least 30 million home printers, not counting business printers.  So the 50M they boast about is 1½ cartridges per personal printer recycled in----how many years was that?

Hmn….

I opened the 20-times-too-big bag and took out the 2 little packages of mini-Wite-Outs®.  They are the size of thumb-drives, but themselves are blister-packed onto a cardboard backing.  And I had ordered the "ECOsolutions" version of the BIC Wite-Out®.

Any notion that this was "green" was in shreds because the two little containers had been sent out to me in a separate order.

So first, there was the over-packaging and the huge plastic bag (petroleum products in the manufacture and now landfill issues) … then the petroleum used to drive the thing to my work site … then the staff person used to deliver it from our Receiving area to me … and soon there'd be the cleaning person required to deal with the disposal of the 20x-too-big plastic bag and the cardboard (since we don't recycle cardboard or paper at my big worksite).  BIC says "we can be part of the solution."

What a waste of energy, time, resources this one little order was. 

I'm thinking maybe I should go back to the traditional "correction tape"-just crossing stuff out with my pen.  That seems about the greenest I could go on this one.

All those print cartridges, recycled or not - another reason not to print out so much stuff in our "paperless" work environments.

Read more about BIC's "eco solutions" - http://www.bicecolutions.com - I'm dying to see how they are "greening" the ubiquitous BIC disposable shavers and lighters....

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Chainsaws and spelling

I hate people who are picky about spelling (unless it's in a copy-editing situation).  But recently I was trying to search out a blues musician called "Chainsaw Davidson" on Facebook.

If you really want to know how bad the literacy level is in North America, maybe in the world -- search the word "chainsaw" in Facebook and start reading at about result #100.  Not that people don't know how to spell chainsaw.  It's--well, it's ...  well, here are some of the spellings I saw:

• The Texas Chainsaw Masica
• Texas Chainsaw Massacher
• Chainsaw Mascer
• Chainsaw Texas Masacre
• Texas Chainsaw Masakr
• The Chainsaw Masacure
• Texas Chainsaw Masecar
• Texas Chainsaw Massaccare
• The Chainsaw Massicure
• Texas Chainsaw Masaquer
• Texas Chainsaw Massaker
• Texas Chainsaw Masscre
• Chainsaw Massacra

The I-don't-know-how-to-spell-Texas-either list:

• Texaz Chainsaw Massacare
• Texes Chainsaw Massicar
• Texes Chainsaw Massacare
• Texes Chainsaw Masacer
• Texsas Chainsaw Massacare 

The NASCAR spellings:

• Texus Chainsaw Masicar
• Texas Chainsaw Massicar
• Texas Chainsaw Masacr 

• Texas Chainsaw Mascara  (my personal favourite)
• Chainsaw Masicka  (the gangsta rap spelling?)
• Texas Chainsaw Masscre
• Chainsaw Masscre the Beginning
• Texas Chainsaw Masequer  (Eh, garçon, it must be French!)
• Texas Chainsaw Massacrecre
• Texas Chainsaw Masakre
• Texas Chainsaw Msacre
• Chainsaw Massa  (This guy wasn't going to take any chances on 'massacre')
• Texas Chainsaw Beggining (This guy must have decided to sidestep 'massacre' altogether and just go with beginning as a keyword.  Oops.)
• Texas Chainsaw Masika  (3rd reich spelling)
• Texas Chainsaw Masakar
• Texas Chainsaw Masicer
• Chainsaw Masicare
• Texas Chainsaw Massequere
• Texas Chainsaw Masachar
• Texas Chainsaw Maccacre Texas Chainsaw Mascure

I mean there is Google for checking the spelling of things and since you're already on the internet creating your page on Fasebook, er, Facebuke, er Phacebook...

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Sad, sad, sad...Tibetan culture struggling to survive

I went to the Tibetan Cultural Festival this afternoon. It was put on to raise money for the earthquake victims (many of them ethnic Tibetans) in Jyekundo, also known as Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, China where a devastating magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck April 14th, 2010. 


The theme of the festival was "Celebrating Survival."

It was sad, though, to watch minuscule numbers of young Tibetans performing -- part of an increasingly desperate attempt by Tibetans to preserve their culture in the face of what often seems like insurmountable odds - and the very negative energy of the might and not entirely good will of China.

Today I saw a handful of Tibetan performers where you would much prefer there would be hundreds.

As a Canadian, I feel a poignant kinship with Tibetans. We Canadians, too, live adjacent to a huge superpower -- one that at any time could decide it wants our resources, as China did with Tibet, and could just roll over the border and help themselves.

As much as we have trouble defining just what Canadian culture is, I know that we would suffer and mourn it just as much as the Tibetans do if it was taken away from us.  (I'm not quite sure where we could possibly go to in exile to preserve it though - at least the Tibetans had India).

It is awful to watch the remnants of a once-magnificent culture being bullied out of existence.

Namaste.

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What to do with all those old runners

Wu, a review

WU: The Chinese Empress Who Schemed, Seduced and Murdered Her Way to Become Living God by Jonathan Clements (Gloustershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 2007)

Here is another able woman empress, administrator, commander-in-chief (China 625-705 AD) who, because she was a woman and her history was written by her enemies, has been excoriated as a terrible terrible figure largely because a woman should not do the things she did.  Only thing is, pretty much every emperor or conqueror worth their salt in history had to do the things she did.  At least Clements does acknowledge that fairly frequently in this fascinating biography.

She rose from very humble beginnings (daughter of a lumber merchant); at 14 she became the Taizong Emperor's companion/concubine, then managed to become a concubine then wife of the Taizong's son & heir, the Gaozong Emperor - and then she went on to become the only woman who ever became a reigning empress of China.

Of course she made a few enemies along the way.

And it's like Cleopatra: you never get the real story of Cleopatra because the Romans, who hated her, wrote her history  (I can't wait until they discover the hidden scrolls on her  written by Egyptian biographers and we get the real Cleopatra).

Those fearful historians (sorry, they were all men) went to Imagination Town with the stories of her witchcraft and enchantment of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony and her legendary beauty.  The fact is, there are very few likenesses of Cleopatra, and those that exist show a plug plain woman. 

This:

 

Not this:

So the fact that  a plain-jane Cleopatra was so captivating to two of the world's most powerful men makes her ever more interesting than the whole "siren" thing. 

Wu, on the other hand, was said to have been absolutely drop-dead gorgeous.  The only thing people didn't seem to realize (except for her two emperor patrons/hubbies) was that she was also extraordinarily intellectually gifted, quite a brilliant strategist and yes, if you want to use pejorative terms, a master 'schemer.' But what great ruler is not a master schemer?  These adjectives all hit 10 on the nasty-o-metre when they are applied to women.

Yes, she also had a 'harem' of strapping young lads when she was in her 70s and single, having buried her husband.  Cudos to Clements because he writes:

"But, even if the Zhang brothers were servicing Empress Wu on a nightly basis, the censorious attitude of the courtiers betrays a remarkable double standard.  Nobody would have thought twice about a similar set-up for a male emperor in his seventies.  In fact, old emperors were encouraged to spend their time with a variety of fresh young concubines, spiritually feeding on their yin essence in order to prolong their lives."

Wu, too, was accused of using witchcraft.  Sigh, yawn, ho hum: what is with the witchcraft thing?  Is that the best shot historians throughout recorded history can come up with? Every able woman in history is accused of using witchcraft, for Goddess's sake.  Hilary Clinton's enemies probably accuse her of using witchcraft (but if anyone has need of certain elixirs in the Clinton family, it's probably not Hilary).

The only thing I didn't notice in this biography was Wu taking making any effort to support fellow women in moving the up & out of the concubines' courtyards,  no surprise in an age when women were pitted against women, deadly rivals for the favour of the men, especially emperors.  Nope, they continued to be firmly anchored below the bamboo ceiling.  But I've seen America's Top Model and The Bachelor and we've come a long way, right?

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Communi-whahh?

If we really are all born equal into this world, wouldn’t that mean we all 'own' one-seven-billionth of its resources?  Yet we don’t all seem to be getting our share of the bounty.  I just read that the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales

“soon after taking office in 2006, moved against the foreign- owned natural gas and petroleum companies to take 50% of the revenues, and to make the state-owned petroleum company the administrator and, in some cases, a co-investor. Similar deals have been made with transnational capital in the iron-mining sector, and the government is in the process of negotiating state-dominated agreements for the exploitation of Bolivia´s huge lithium deposits.

“While it is true that Morales has not launched a full assault on capital, his government along with the other New Left governments in Latin America have ended the neo-liberal era in which the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank imposed free market policies, severely curtailing social spending, and enabling transnational corporations to gain unprecedented control of the region’s nonrenewable resources. 

"Now many of these governments are using the state to exert greater control of the economy and are renegotiating the terms of investment in order to capture a greater portion of the revenue for social programs and to facilitate internal development and industrialization.”

Morales calls this 'communitarian socialism.'  A convoluted-sounding name,  but this idea of having 50% of the revenues from schemes that use or consume resources that we all own, come back to the people for social programmes sounds good to me. What about our oil and gas industry--are you getting any?

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