The longest day of the year!
And, still I’m not getting enough time to write up all the things I have ‘drafted’…. Shame on me. But, it’s just so fun to do some ‘stuff’ with the family – homework is over, exams are done, and we can all just get together and start pushin each other’s buttons!
In a fun way, of course!
However you mark it – or not – Happy Solstice!
And – Happy Father’s Day!
Yes – it’s true!
I JUST MIGHT!!!
OK – I am suspending my rant against institutionalizing young children, in order to comment on something WAY OVER THE TOP!!!
Yesterday, our Conservative Ministers of Justice (!) and Public Safety (Rob Nicholson and Peter Van Loan, respectively) have announced sweeping new legislation which would give police the power to snoop on all internet traffic – and the identity of people on the net – WITHOUT A WARRANT!!!
From The Canadian Press:
The proposed legislation would:
-enable police to access information on an Internet subscriber, such as name, street address and email address, without having to get a search warrant.
-force Internet service providers to freeze data on their hard drives to prevent subscribers under investigation from deleting potentially important evidence.
-require telecommunications companies to invest in technology that allows for the interception of Internet communications.
-allow police to remotely activate tracking devices already embedded in cellphones and certain cars, to help with investigations.
-allow police to obtain data about where Internet communications are coming from and going to.
-make it a crime to arrange with a second person over the Internet the sexual exploitation of a child.
Did you notice that???
They ‘tack on’ the last one – protecting children from sexual exploitation – on to a whole set of really, really oppressive things. This way, if anyone speaks up against it – they can SMEAR him/her by saying he/she does not want to ‘protect our children’!
I don’t even know where to begin my rant!!!
Do I start with the oppressive police-powers, or do I start with how the issue was intentionally manipulated, using our children’s well-being as a guise to strip us of our rights!!!
OK, I am a ‘little’ angry.
And I think I am right to be angry! And every Canadian ought to be bloody angry about this, too!!!
The Harper government has repeatedly failed to reign in the Stalinist HRCs – which have now been shown to be staffed with political activists, religious extremists and corrupt ex-police officers, and which are trampling on REAL human rights in this country!
It is frightening that the federal Conservative Finance Minister’s wife, Christine Elliot, is running for the leadership of the Ontario Provincial Conservative Party leadership: this kind of ‘political dynasties’ are bad for everyone….and I cannot believe that Conservatives (I am a ‘little ‘c’ conservative – so it is not my place to do so), in Ontario AND federally, have not caused major fuss about this. But, her stand on the HRCs is truly frightening: it is not’ politically expedient’ to reign them in – and the people be damned…this is about ME getting elected!!!
Now, it appears that her shalowness and political opportunism are a reflection of her husband’s federal Conservative policy… and THAT explains why the HRCs are allowed to rattle their sabres and continue to persecute anyone who dares to speak up against them!!!
SHAME, SHAME, SHAME, SHAME!!!
But, even worse, now federal CONSERVATIVES(!) are planning to pass LAWS which would make it easier for the HRCs to abuse people who have committed thought crime – and will give such corrupting power to the police forces, too!
I don’t even know what is happening any more…
How could they?!?!?
Has Ezra’s lesson not sunk in?!?!?
How DARE they?!?!?
This is one lesson that if we wait until after we have learned what it means, it will be too late to ‘undo’ it!!!
What the (insert expletive of your choice) is going on?!?!?
Will I be forced to vote Liberal?
Damn them all!
Friday, 19th of June, 2009 – at 8 pm Eastern Daylight Savings Time (i.e. GMT-4), my friend, Juggernaut, will be hosting a live BlogTV session: learning about and discussing the differences between Canadian and American (as in, USAmerican) systems on such various issues as healthcare, education and other ‘public’ policies.
Juggernaut will be hosting: everyone can join, either by signing up or by participating as a guest.
The link: http://www.blogtv.com/People/TheJuggernauts
I’ll be there – if you would like to add to the discussion, please, join us!
My dog loves the sofa. He also loves blankets.
He absolutely relishes sleeping on the sofa – and this is one dog that has elevated ‘sleeping’ into an art form. Really – I have known many dogs, and owned a few, but I have never met a dog who relishes sleep like this crazy canine does!
Also, he does not like strangers to sit on his the sofa. He’ll watch to see if the person gets up for some reason – even for a moment, sneak in behind them, steal the spot and immediately start pretending that he’s asleep, has been asleep in that spot for a very long time, and why is everyone getting all worked up about this?
He also loves to steal blankets: and has been known to quietly grab a corner and, slowly but steadily, sneak off with the blanket of an unwary person lying down on the sofa, watching TV late at night.
When my son and I came home Monday, he greeted us with great enthusiasm. He slithered off the sofa, stretched slowly and thoroughly, and wandered over to the front hallway to greet us. Honestly – this passes as ‘enthusiastic’ from him: sometimes, he just lifts his head off the sofa’s arm-rest and wags his tail a tiny bit to show he’s noticed you came in.
So, today’s was an enthusiastic greeting! Then, after he followed me to the kitchen and stopped in front of the fridge, hoping that his beautiful brown eyes would hypnotize me to give him a pepperette, when – suddenly and visibly – a though struck him.
Quite suddenly, he abandoned begging communicating and, with unusual swiftness, he ran to the living room. OK, we knew when we adopted him that he was ‘special’ and, though incredibly good natured, he was no border collie in the brain department – so I thought nothing of it.
Later, when I came into the living room, I noticed that he was not lying down on the sofa, but on a chair. And he was not really lying down in his usual way… instead, he was more ‘splayed’: all four paws spread as far apart as possible, his centre of gravity as low as he could get it. His head was not resting, but just slightly elevated in a high-strung sort of way. And his eyes…
His eyes were priceless! They were ‘big’ – his ‘vigilant look’ (well, as vigilant as he gets) – with lots of ‘white’ showing. And they were flashing, side to side – in a particularly self-pleased way!
Had his behaviour not been so ‘obvious’, I would not have looked around too closely to see what he was doing. But, his very demeanour gave away that he was ‘being tricky’: that he had ‘done’ something naughty and thought he was getting away with it!
It turns out that my son – in a fit of insomnia – brought his blanket down, watched some TV, then forgot his blanket on the chair. The dog knows ‘bed blankets’ are off limits to him: but this blanket was not on a bed, was it? So he lay down on it, spread his body as wide as possible to hide the fact that he was indeed occuppying a ‘bed blenket’ which was currently ‘not a bed blanket’… The dog was very, very pleased with himself!
So, what does this story have to do with my post today?
Yes, it was a bit of a long segway, and this story took me a few days to write up, but…
Monday, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty made an announcement. Some person whose makes his living ‘educating children’ released a report today, saying that ‘children need more educating’!
Why, that is almost as convincing as a ‘Cure-all’ salesman saying this potion in this here bottle will ‘cure all’!!! Better buy a few!!!
And, Mr. McGuinty, he is so concerned about the welfare of children, he’ll have to do what is best for all of the children! (Will somebody please shut up the parents of those pesky Autistic kids? They’re not even photogenic: no photo-ops from that lot!)
As I was saying: Mr. McGuinty, he is so caring, he only wants what is best for the children! And since that report by a guy who gets rich by sticking EVERY child into a ‘one-size-fits-all’ ‘institutions of teaching’, that is exactly what this kind and caring man announced he would do!!!
Aside: make no mistake! Our public schools are ‘institutions of teaching’, NOT ‘institutions of learning’!!! They are centered around the needs and desires of teachers, whose powerful union regularly holds the whole population hostage by refusing to ‘teach’ unless it is ‘on their terms’ – ONLY! Therefore, schedules, methodology, material and just about every aspect of ‘teaching’ you can name is tailored to suit the comfort of teachers. Students, who have no union to represent them, are just pawns to be cycled through the system – a pesky annoyance to be minimized and with which the teachers have to put up with as a minor part of this ‘education system’…
So, what is it that this caring, loving man (who is reportedly married to a teachers’ union activist) proposing to do???
He wants to institutionalize our children for 10.5 hours a day, 5-days per week, 50 weeks per year, from toddlerhood on!!!
Of course, the words he used to make his announcement were not as direct as my statement of it is – but the meaning is identical. His version is all about ‘what is best for the children’! And he has that ‘study’ (by a guy who, among others, will have an increased revenue stream if McGuinty institutes) this to back him up!
Here is the video – I invite you to watch the body language:
Did you notice it?
The way he shifts his eyes, the way he enunciates certain words, the way he uses his whole body to help him spit out some ‘concepts’?
It’s that SAME body language my not-so-bright (but way more lovable than McGuinty) dog used when he was trying to ‘pull one over’!
This sent me ‘looking for’ what it is that is ‘the loophole’ here: what is this man ‘pulling over’ on us?
I’ll rant more on this tomorrow….
Imagine living in a world where the nearest library or bookstore is a plane-ride away!
It gives me nightmares, just thinking about it… (I love books, I collect books, I like to touch books – I like just about everything about them…including acquiring them!)
If you live in or near Ontario, here is a chance to have some books delivered to kids who live in Northern communities so distant, the only way to reach them is to fly!
Between now and Sunday, 21st of June 2009 (this is an annual thing – check his website for the drive’s date in future years if this post has become stale), drop new books for readers 14 and under at any OPP (Ontario Provincial Police) station. If you are in the GTA area, you can also drop them off at the Toronto Police Stations.
They’ll take the books and fly them to Northern communities: heavy things like books are very expensive to ship there, so most kids cannot afford to get many. Also I am rather glad that this politician is using his budget towards something useful!
OK – I am sucker for these ‘feel good’ things, people helping people. (Even if some are politicians!) And I am a reader – life without books, to me, would be torture!
So, I am already plotting (pun intended) the books I’ll get: personally, I’ll skip the baby ones and aim towards the higher end of the 14-year-old age bracket….get the mind working, imagination soaring, ideas brewing… FUN!
Little Miss. Ms. Lynch says those nasty bloggers have unmasked discredited her nice little minions…
One of my young American friends has asked me an honest question: “What is wrong with the Ontario Human Rights Commission?”
Where do I begin?!?!?
But, it is my bane that I always seem to think that if I know something, then it must be clear and obvious to everyone else! Of course, this is not so – and I KNOW that… I just forget it sometimes and do not explain things as thoroughly or clearly as I ought to. My apologies!
The topic of our Human Rights Commissions is less clear to people who do not live in Canada and have not been following what has been happening to our rights and freedoms…. but it is NO LESS important to them, because these things are spreading in Medusa-like fashion and subverting the very foundations on which our ‘Western’ civilization is built.
So, here is a little explanation (sorry if it is a bit of a rant – I get very emotional about this!)
OHRC is called ‘Ontario Human Rights Commission‘. It is a fancy name which suggests that its aims are to protect human rights: and, it – along with it mother-organization, the Canadian Human Rights Agency and sister ones, one for each Province and Territory in Canada – was created with that in mind. It was meant to be a non-threatening place that people who were denied housing or jobs because of the colour of their skin could go and record their grievance.
This was especially aimed at the less-privileged members of society who would not be able to afford an attorney and try to get justice in court.
So, the theory goes, the agency accepts the grievance/complaint, investigates it on its own and, if it finds it meritorious, it is then supposed to (somehow – without ever going to court) figure out a way to fix the problem. The solution it decides on then becomes legally binding, as if it were a declaration of a real court.
In effect, the ‘Human Rights Commissions’ – and/or their tribunals – become the complainant, the investigator, prosecutor and judge… It answers to nobody!
Can you spot the problem?
What has happened with Canadian HRCs – federal and provincial/territorial – is that they have been staffed with people who ‘have causes’. And these people are promoting their ’causes’ at the expense of REAL human rights.
Their main line is that ‘human rights’ have to be ‘balanced’ against the need of the society to ‘promote tolerance’. In other words, anything which these people find ‘rude’ or ‘intolerant’, they have the power to censor, ban and so on.
Here is a recent example from the Ontario HRC. A guy was smoking pot in the doorway of a restaurant. Pot is, of course, illegal – but this guy had a ‘medical exemption’. Smoking, however – inside and within 2 m (I think – this does vary from place to place) of a restaurant (or any other place where people work) is forbidden. The law does NOT specify cigarette smoke or pot or whatever else.
The ‘no smoking’ laws came about because people insisted that EVERYONE has the RIGHT to work in a smoke-free environment. And, nobody has the right to CHOOSE to work where people smoke, because ‘poor people’ might be coerced…. OK, so we all banned smoking in or near workplaces.
Now, this restaurant owner finds himself in front of the OHRC, because he asked a guy NOT to smoke within the legal ‘no-smoking’ boundary. He ended up – when it was all over – with tens of thousands of dollars in legal costs….
And, he lost: the OHRC said that because the guy has a ‘medical exemption’, he can smoke his pot anywhere he wants to – including INSIDE this guy’s restaurant.’
A couple of weeks later, the ‘no-smoking enforcement’ people show up at the restaurant for inspection, and see this guy smoking pot. They cite the restaurant owner for violation of the rights of his workers to work in a smoke-free environment – and the restaurant owner looses his liquor license….
The OHRC people are enforcing THEIR ruling and care nothing about the smoking bannies laws. The smoking bannies are enforcing THEIR laws, and don’t care about the OHRCs ruling – not their jurisdiction!
The poor sap gets caught in the middle – and pays, pays pays legal fees, fines and eventually looses his right to run his business (his type of restaurant cannot survive without a liquor license!).
But THAT is just ONE of MANY such cases.
And these HRCs have the right to issue a lifetime gag-order on people: forbidding them from speaking, writing, or communicating in any way, shape or form, publicly or privately, on specific topics. These lifetime gag-orders, once issued, are legally binding!
If you thought things could not get worse….
The ‘double jeopardy’ – where you can only be tried for a crime in one jurisdiction – does NOT APPLY with HRCs in Canada. For example, MacLeans magazine was charged – for the same complaint – in three different jurisdictions: Ontario, BC AND federally! And, they HAD TO prepare a defense – and pay lawyers – for each one of the three trials!
Recently, the OHRC’s head, Barbara Hall, has been making noises about expanding the scope of the ‘transgressions’ they will assume jurisdiction over.
Oh – by the way – TRUTH is NO DEFENSE against the HRCs!
The complainant does NOT have to prove anything. And, even if the defendant proves that what they said/did was TRUE, it does not matter – IF it has a POTENTIAL to harm someone by making them FEEL discriminated against!
So, no CRIME, no HARM is needed: only the POTENTIAL for ANYONE to PERCEIVE something MIGHT be hurtful or seen as discriminatory is sufficient to find one guilty…
Another thing I revile these organizations for is that they are often used at the tool to enforce linguistic apartheid which is like a cancer on our Canadian society.
The people running this – the investigators AND the ‘judges’ – do NOT have to have ANY training in law whatsoever. Many don’t! Evidence has shown that a cop dismissed for some serious corruption is now a mover and a shaker at the Ontario HRC… As well, some evidence seems to be coming that several of these HRCs have been infiltrated by radical Islamists who find anything short of instituting Sharia to be ‘offensive’!
Just think about it: extrajudicial process – with none of the restraints cops and real trials have (the HRCs can enter your premises and seize things without a warrant or notification to you – and you are NOT presumed innocent until proven guilty – and truth is no defense…), in the hands of people who think that individual rights are things that must systematically bow and be supplanted by ‘community needs’.
THAT – ALL of the things I listed above…and much more – is why so many of us want to get rid of these corrupt, un-accountable, oppressive organizations who now have the power to limit our human rights at their whim to serve their own special interests!
Last night, the Ontario Conservative Party leadership hopefuls debated at Ottawa University.
OK – I have to declare my personal bias: while I am not a member of any political party, I like Randy Hillier – and have liked him long before this leadership race started. I like what he stands for and I like the way he stands for it. Also, I am not a fan of the only leadership-hopeful who is a fan of the OHRC (whose federal counterpart has, BTW, just rejected their own reviewer’s call to clean up their act), Ms. Elliot.
This morning, I had the pleasure of being invited to the ‘post-debate’ breakfast with Tim Hudak.
Very interesting.
Of the conservative leadership candidates, Mr. Hudak is philosophically the closest to Mr. Hillier. Here’s a quick summary (from my point of view):
Can’t really argue against that!
And, I do like the nifty little quote on his website:
“For too long, individual rights have been trampled by a dysfunctional human rights bureaucracy… and the democracy of our unionized workplaces has been eroded.”
– Tim Hudak
I must admit, in person, Mr. Hudak made a very good impression on me.
Despite the early hour – following a long and exhausting evening, he was bright and fresh and smiling and pleasant. Abandoning the microphone, he preferred to use his voice directly. Always a good move – if the venue allows it.
And he spoke well. He said all the ‘right’ pre-canned things, as is to be expected, touching on the his main campaign platforms. I was pleasantly surprised to find he sounded more conservative – and less ‘watered down’ – than I had expected. He even mentioned Ronals Regan! That is always a hit conservatives – and it certainly scored him points with this breakfast crowd.
This is important: if the people I talked to were representative of the whole group, many of them have not yet decided whom they will vote for when the time to elect a new leader comes. Many were weighing the Mike Harris endorsment of Tim (good) against the rumours that he has inherited a lot of the ‘John Tory people’ (bad). Many liked Randy Hillier, but worried about his electability in the Greater Toronto Area.
The main issues on people’s minds? Scrap the HRCs, lower taxes, fire the nanny and replace it with a state which respects people’s individual rights…. There might have been more, but these were what I heard most often and most loudly.
Still, I find it hard to gage people at these types of things. Things are all prepared, rehearsed, people know they are ‘on the record’ and so it’s hard to separate the ‘personna’ from the ‘person’ – if you know what I mean. So, despite the fact I quite liked Tim Hudak, I was not sure of my judgment.
Kids, on the other hand, are very good at judging a person!
Luckily, there was a lone kid at this breakfast. Lisa MacLeod had dragged along her young daughter, Victoria (then promptly left her to find entertainment on her own, while she herself went to schmooze talk to important people). Looking for someone to help her from her boredom, little Victoria turned to – you guessed it – Tim Hudak!
It was easy to see that Victoria knew him – and liked him. And, she obviously trusted him – and knew he would talk to her. Which he did. He got down to her level, so she could talk to him eye-to-eye, and instead of brushing her off, he actually talked to her. Until, that is, her mom ushered her away…
And, while I think (and I am not alone) that the endorsment by Lisa MacLeod is more likely going to hurt Tim Hudak in this leadership race than help him, the genuine endorsement by Ms. MacLeod Jr. is a strong plus for Mr. Hudak.
At least – in my never-humble-opinion, that is!
This blog does not have a very tight focus…to say the least!
I bounce around, from current political stuff – global, Canadian and local to me, to a bit of political theory/history (with help from others!), to philosophical/religious stuff…and just about everything in between.
Oh, and I also have a few post about Asperger Syndrome: my experiences in living with it and some of the perspective from an Aspie point of view, as well as some things that worked when I helped my – and other – kids master their Aspieness and turn it from ‘a curse’ into ‘a gift’.
Well, it seems that some of the things which I tried and which worked for me and mine have also worked for some other Aspies! And, it has also attracted the attention of some educators of Aspies – and, perhaps, over time, it could become an unlikely resource.
From what I hear, many professionals who work with Aspie kids have great amount of theoretical information available to them, but very little practical ‘stuff’ to go on. So, reading the experiences of an adult Aspie – even one who is not a specialist in their field. Perhaps they can read my experiences and see what worked for me, and interpret it at a higher level than I could hope to.
While I think that my ‘Aspie posts’ fit quite well in with my other rants, I cannot but help thinking that my other rants do not exactly fit in seamlessly with my ‘Aspie posts’, so to speak.
Therefore, I have decided to start a blog to house just my Aspie things. It is called ‘Xanthippa on Aspergers‘. OK – so it sounds a little pretentious: but, I wanted the title to retain some of the keywords which get rated high on Google and help people looking for my take on Aspergers…
One advantage of this place will be that the tags/categories will be more specific, so it will be more easily searchable. And, since none of the political or philosophical or religious rants (yes, I am a tiny bit opinionated) will be there, it will be a little more acceptable to ‘educational professionals’.
Over the next little while, I will re-post all my Aspie things on the new site – starting with the most read ones first. (Of course, I will not take them away from here!)
In the future, I will post my thoughts on Aspergers on ‘Xanthippa on Aspergers’ – but I will still cross-post them here.
Thank you all for all the feedback and support!
All right – a warning: this is a rant!
A bit of an angry rant!
Why?
Because our most esteemed City Council gave my 10-year-old a nosebleed! LITERALLY! (And I use that term accurately.)
How?
Well, just read on…
The Ottawa City Council has so lost sight of what their role is – quite a while ago. I do not know if there is any hope of shaking them out of their fuzzy dreamworld and back into reality. You know, where we, the taxpayers without expense accounts have to live!
The only member of this Council who actually wanted to focus the City on its core tasks was the Mayor – and he has been effectively neutralized through lawfare. In the meantime, the rest of our elected officials are planning to spend hundreds of millions of our taxpayer dollars on a new Central Library – which will be a legacy to their brilliance and importance… a tourist attraction, they tell us… while they are also building another new library building on Woodroffe avenue – less than a 10-minute walk from an existing huge library in the former Nepean City Hall!
They are busy banning kids from playing street hockey, banning people from having nice gardens – or, at least gardens that look like the people want them to, banning people from selling their property – because they went there for a movie once, banning people from just about anything they can think of that is none of their (insert expletive of your own choice here) business, while wasting time doing anything they can think of – except their real jobs!
In the meantime, our most esteemed councilors do nothing to stop
YES!
The school-bus ride on Ottawa City roads was SO ROUGH, my son was jostled so hard inside his school-bus, he started to bleed from his nose!
No, his head did not hit the window, or another seat, or anything like that. It was simply the force of the jostle – from the neglected, decaying and increasingly un-navigable Ottawa City streets – that triggered his nosebleed!
And, no – he does not get nosebleeds easily.
Yes, he has had some in the past – but they tended to result from expected causes: a sudden impact into a wall he did not see in time while running, or a ball whose trajectory he did not triangulate properly, and so on… all ‘normal’ and understandable reasons for an active kid to get a nosebleed from. And, no, he has not had any such ‘close encounters’ with walls or balls or related things – or any nosebleeds – in the last few days or weeks…so this is not a case of a ‘scab coming off’ or any such thing.
He said he was lucky that a lot of the kids sitting near him had kleenexes, so he did not get his blood all over the bus or any of the other kids. Still, his own shirt bore the marks of it…
In other words, through their failure to maintain the roads – one of their primary roles as our elected officials – the Ottawa City Council, in no uncertain terms, gave my son a bloody nose!
I could not make this stuff up if I tried… and I am so angry now, that if a Councillor showed his or her face to me now, I would give them such a tongue-lashing, their EARS would hurt! May be not bleed, but – man – when kids end up bleeding, because our politicians are not doing their jobs…
Oh, I had better end this and go calm down a bit… I wonder if our politicians will fix the roads leading up to their Taj Mahal of a new library….you know, so the ‘tourists’ don’t get blood on the books!
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 