disobedience

Anti-war protestors in New York City were denied a permit to march anywhere the United Nations while the Resident is in town on Tuesday, September 19. But they are marching anyway.

We Are Marching -- Permit or No Permit

On Tuesday, Sept. 19, President Bush will be speaking at the United Nations as part of an election-year public-relations push on his disastrous Iraq War.

The New York City Police Department has refused to grant a permit to United for Peace and Justice to march anywhere near the United Nations. Based on feedback from our member groups and supporters, we have come to a decision: We are marching anyway. Permit or no permit, we will stand up against this immoral war and for our right to dissent.

While the Bush Administration has pursued its belligerent policy of preemptive war abroad, attacking a country that posed no danger to us, our Constitutional rights have been steadily eroded here at home, with peaceful protesters treated as security threats. In New York City, the NYPD and other agencies have systematically declared one location after another off-limits to protest -- no rallies in most of Central Park, no marches on Fifth Avenue, no pickets in Times Square, and so on endlessly.

We know there are serious security issues to consider when the president and other heads of state are in town. But those needs must be balanced against protecting the right to assemble, the right to protest, and the right to dissent. The NYPD said no to every alternative we put on the table and simply refused to give us a permit for a reasonable location for our march next Tuesday.

Enough is enough. We are marching -- marching to demand that the troops come home now, and to assert our right to peaceful protest. Marching without a permit amounts to nonviolent civil disobedience, and those of us who participate in the march on Tuesday will place ourselves at risk of arrest.

We also know and respect the fact that many people cannot participate in an activity that does not have a permit. And so we are seeking a permit for a rally starting at 8:30 a.m. in Herald Square, one of the busiest locations in Manhattan. This will enable anyone who wishes to protest the war and the restriction of our civil liberties to join us without risking arrest.

There are important details to work out, but this we know for certain: we will not be silenced, we will call for an immediate end to the war in Iraq, and we will be on the streets of New York City on Tuesday, September 19th!

WE NEED YOUR HELP:
1) Please share this email message as widely as possible. Help make sure that everyone knows about the rally and march on Sept. 19th and the denial of our request for a march permit.

2) Especially if you are in the NYC area, make plans now to join us next Tuesday morning. If you would like to participate in the march, please take a moment to call our office at 212-868-5545 so we can give you information about nonviolence trainings. We would rather take this risk than allow our rights to be undermined.

3) Check the UFPJ website for updates on the details for Sept. 19th, including the exact time and location of the rally and the plans for the march. If you are looking for or would like to offer a ride to NYC, please visit our ride board.

4) And, of course, all of this work takes money. Whether or not you are able to participate in person on Tuesday, you can show your support by making a financial donation today! Make an online contribution, call our office at 212-868-5545 to make a credit card donation over the phone, or send a check or money order to UFPJ, P.O. Box 607, Times Square Station, NY NY 10108.

contrasts

U.S. readers, your tax dollars at work:

Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.

The object is basically public relations. Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible safety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne.

"If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," said Wynne. "(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press."

The Air Force has paid for research into nonlethal weapons, but he said the service is unlikely to spend more money on development until injury problems are reviewed by medical experts and resolved.

A public relations problem. Yes. (Thanks to Redsock for the story.)

Elsewhere, tax dollars actually put to good use.

The Chilean government recently decided that contraception will be publicly available for all women over the age of 14. According to IPS, all public health centers must dispense birth control, including emergency contraception (EC), free of charge. The decree also ensures that younger women can without authorization from their parents obtain a prescription for birth control pills.

The Catholic Church and conservative politicians are already criticizing the decision that aims to give women of all ages and incomes control over their sexual and reproductive lives. Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, a pediatrician, responded, saying to the Santiago Times, "The obligation of the state is to provide alternatives, and the obligation of families, of each one of us, is to communicate with our children, explain things to them, and to teach them."

Emergency contraception, or the morning-after pill, was finally approved for over-the-counter use in the United States, in response to a massive feminist and public health campaign. In the US, however, EC will only be available through a pharmacist, and only to women over 18 years of age.

The morning-after pill is a safe, highly effective method of preventing pregnancies, and is not an abortofacient. The use of the morning-after pill, however, does mean that sex has taken place. And sex, as we know, is evil. If society doesn't provide the means for pregnancy-free sex, teenagers will simply stop having sex. Right?

charlatan

This really disturbed me.

Pack of Lies
by Mark Derr

With a compelling personal story as the illegal immigrant made good because of his uncanny ability to understand dogs, Cesar Millan has taken the world of canine behavior -- or rather misbehavior -- by storm. He has the top-rated program, "Dog Whisperer," on the National Geographic Channel, a best-selling book and a devoted following, and he has been the subject of several glowing magazine articles.

He is even preparing to release his own "Illusion" collar and leash set, named for his wife and designed to better allow people to walk their dogs the "Cesar way" -- at close heel, under strict control.

Essentially, National Geographic and Cesar Millan have cleverly repackaged and promoted a simplistic view of the dog's social structure and constructed around it a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach to dog training. In Mr. Millan's world, dog behavioral problems result from a failure of the human to be the "pack leader," to dominate the dog (a wolf by any other name) completely.

While Mr. Millan rejects hitting and yelling at dogs during training, his confrontational methods include physical and psychological intimidation, like finger jabs, choke collars, extended sessions on a treadmill and what is called flooding, or overwhelming the animal with the thing it fears. Compared with some training devices still in use -- whips and cattle prods, for example -- these are mild, but combined with a lack of positive reinforcement or rewards, they place Mr. Millan firmly in a long tradition of punitive dog trainers.

Mr. Millan brings his pastiche of animal behaviorism and pop psychology into millions of homes a week. He's a charming, one-man wrecking ball directed at 40 years of progress in understanding and shaping dog behavior and in developing nonpunitive, reward-based training programs, which have led to seeing each dog as an individual, to understand what motivates it, what frightens it and what its talents and limitations are. Building on strengths and working around and through weaknesses, these trainers and specialists in animal behavior often work wonders with their dogs, but it takes time.

Mr. Millan supposedly delivers fast results. His mantra is "exercise, discipline, affection," where discipline means "rules, boundaries, limitations." Rewards are absent and praise scarce, presumably because they will upset the state of calm submission Mr. Millan wants in his dogs. Corrections abound as animals are forced to submit or face their fear, even if doing so panics them.

Mr. Millan builds his philosophy from a simplistic conception of the dog's "natural" pack, controlled by a dominant alpha animal (usually male). In his scheme, that leader is the human, which leads to the conclusion that all behavior problems in dogs derive from the failure of the owner or owners to dominate. (Conveniently, by this logic, if Mr. Millan's intervention doesn't produce lasting results, it is the owner's fault.)

Women are the worst offenders in his world. In one of the outtakes included in the four-DVD set of the first season of "Dog Whisperer," Mr. Millan explains that a woman is "the only species that is wired different from the rest." And a "woman always applies affection before discipline," he says. "Man applies discipline then affection, so we're more psychological than emotional. All animals follow dominant leaders; they don't follow lovable leaders."

Mr. Millan's sexism is laughable; his ethology is outdated.

The notion of the "alpha pack leader" dominating all other pack members is derived from studies of captive packs of unrelated wolves and thus bears no relationship to the social structure of natural packs, according to L. David Mech, one of the world's leading wolf experts. In the wild, the alpha wolves are merely the breeding pair, and the pack is generally comprised of their juvenile offspring and pups.

"The typical wolf pack," Dr. Mech wrote in The Canadian Journal of Zoology in 1999, "is a family, with the adult parents guiding the activities of a group in a division-of-labor system." In a natural wolf pack, "dominance contests with other wolves are rare, if they exist at all," he writes.

That's a far cry from the dominance model that Mr. Millan attributes to the innate need of dogs by way of wolves.

Unlike their wolf forebears, dogs exist in human society. They have been selectively bred for 15,000 or more years to live with people. Studies have shown that almost from birth they are attentive to people, and that most are eager to please, given proper instruction and encouragement.

But sometimes the relationship goes very wrong, and it is time to call on a professional.

Aggression is perhaps the most significant of the behavioral problems that may afflict more than 20 percent of the nation's 65 million dogs, because it can lead to injury and death. Mr. Millan often treats aggression by forcing the dog to exercise extensively on a treadmill, by asserting his authority over the dog by rolling it on its back in the "alpha rollover," and through other forms of intimidation, including exposure to his pack of dogs.

Forcefully rolling a big dog on its back was once recommended as a way to establish dominance, but it is now recognized as a good way to get bitten. People are advised not to try it. In fact, many animal behaviorists believe that in the long run meeting aggression with aggression breeds more aggression.

More important, aggression often has underlying medical causes that might not be readily apparent -- hip dysplasia or some other hidden physical ailment that causes the dog to bite out of pain; hereditary forms of sudden rage that require a medical history and genealogy to diagnose; inadequate blood flow to the brain or a congenital brain malformation that produces aggression and can only be uncovered through a medical examination. Veterinary behaviorists, having found that many aggressive dogs suffer from low levels of serotonin, have had success in treating such dogs with fluoxetine (the drug better known as Prozac).

Properly treating aggression, phobias, anxiety and fears from the start can literally save time and money. Mr. Millan's quick fix might make for good television and might even produce lasting results in some cases. But it flies in the face of what professional animal behaviorists -- either trained and certified veterinarians or ethologists -- have learned about normal and abnormal behavior in dogs.

Mark Derr is the author of "A Dog's History of America: How Our Best Friend Explored, Conquered and Settled a Continent."

We shared our lives with an anxious, fearful animal, and Millan's methods would have provoked Buster's aggression, and led to his death. Establishing the pecking order of the pack is important, but for most dogs, it occurs naturally. Dogs who are anxious and afraid, like humans, need gentle, gradual training in a secure environment. You don't force a person who's afraid of heights to jump out of an airplane and call it a cure.

There are so many bad dog trainers and methods out there, and they can literally ruin a dog's - and a family's - life. The only time Buster ever attacked another dog - the one time he got away from us and was able to - was a direct result of an incompetent trainer.* I've also read several books by David Mech, the wolf expert cited in this piece, and his view of canine behaviour is enlightened, advanced, and based on years of careful observation, not an easily-packaged pop psychology.

The sexism, well, that's just bullshit. Some of the world's best dog trainers and behaviourists are women. I'm not going to say women make better trainers because they're more gentle (that's sexism, too), but they certainly aren't incapable because they "apply affection" first.

There are thousands, millions, of homeless and abandoned dogs, in part because people don't know what to expect, don't understand the dog's needs, get bad advice, and give up on the "bad dog". People like Cesar Millan only make it worse.

Thanks again to AW1L for pointing me to this story.


-------
* The other dog was OK; he needed stitches in his ear. Allan was rushed to the hospital with a bone protruding from his ripped-open finger, and spent five days in the hospital, often in tremendous pain. The incident released massive aggression in Buster, was highly traumatic for me, and began us on a long, painful, expensive odyssey to try to work with Buster's problems. If the trainer had listened to us, or if I had over-ruled her (not easy to do when you're paying a so-called expert), none of it would have happened.

quieter

The government of Peru recently granted licenses for helicopter tours over Machu Picchu - then almost immediately rescinded them.

The Peruvian government has reversed a decision to allow flights over the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu after an outcry from environmental groups.

Peru's Transport and Communications ministry has declared the area around the site a no-fly zone.

Environmentalists said a number of rare animals and plants would have been severely affected by the low-flying helicopter tours.

Machu Picchu, a world heritage site, is Peru's biggest tourist attraction.

Little more than a week after a licence was granted for helicopter tours over South America's most famous ruin, it was taken away again.

The Transport and Communications Ministry was forced to reverse its decision after complaints from environmentalists and archaeologists.

After a short meeting with Peru's departments of Culture and Natural Resources, the ministry declared a flight restriction in the whole area surrounding Machu Picchu.

Several leading environmentalists said the flights would have caused irreparable damage to the ruins and rare wildlife, such as spectacled bears and vicunas, would have been scared away.

Such flights had been allowed during the 1990s but were banned shortly afterwards.

World wonder

Peru's Institute of Natural Resources said those flights led to the disappearance of a rare species of orchid and the Andean Condor from the area.

Machu Picchu is one of the best-preserved pre-Columbian ruins on the continent.

But experts say the Unesco World Heritage Site is being slowly damaged by the hordes of tourists which visit it every year.

Meanwhile, the Peruvian government says its investing in a campaign to make Machu Picchu one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

I'm very relieved about this, even for purely selfish, touristy reasons. I can't imagine visiting the quiet splendor of Machu Picchu with the sounds of rotor blades overhead. And of course, there are more important issues at stake, as well.

When UNESCO placed Machu Picchu on its list of World Heritage Sites, it estimated that the Incan ruins could support about 500 visitors per day without irreparable damage. In the height of the tourist season, more than 2500 visitors currently tramp through Machu Picchu.

UNESCO's Machu Picchu info here, and a small sample of our photos of it here. A friend of wmtc just booked his trip to Peru, perhaps partially inspired by our journey. (And when I went to his site to get the link, what do I see? Machu Picchu!)

Thanks to Alan With One L for the story.

photo dump

I'm just cleaning out the contents of my digital camera, and thought you might like to take a look. Nothing spectacular, but some things that make me smile.

I took these in our backyard in the spring. Each month, different colors surprise us. Next spring I'll try to cut back the overgrowth, to give the blooms more prominence.

I have to measure our backyard one day. It's huge. Quite ridiculous.




Here's Cody.

She's been so sweet and affectionate lately. And here I am thinking about messing up the equilibrium. Have I mentioned I'm thinking seriously about getting another dog? I'm thinking maybe a retired Greyhound, or else an abandoned "bully boy". More on these thoughts as they develop.

Here are some pics we took in New York last week.

This is The Strand, a New York institution. I learned here on this blog that some people feel it's been sanitized and ruined, but Allan and I didn't find it such.

New York used to be full of great bookstores, including a street lined with used-book stores nicknamed Book Row. There are only a handful of independents left now, thanks to the absence of commercial rent control and the advent of Barnes & Noble Superstores. Most New Yorkers I know blame themselves as much as B&N, knowing that their attraction to the great prices and comfortable decor, not to mention the huge author reading series, helped shutter many of the old stalwarts.

This is McSorley's Old Ale House, one of the oldest continually operating bar in New York City. It was made famous by the great Joseph Mitchell, chronicler of New York City street life and eccentrics, who named one of my favourite books after it.

McSorley's is mainly the haunt of tourists and suburban daytrippers now, but there are still neighbourhood folks who call it home. Among McSorley's claims to fame, it was the one of the last of the "men only" bars. It opened in 1854, and allowed women inside its doors for the first time in 1970, and only after a court ruled it must.

update

My recent post about Blogger beta has been updated.

appeals

The Resident is invading New York City on September 19, and the NYPD won't allow protestors anywhere near the United Nations. From United for Peace and Justice:

Next Tuesday, September 19, President George Bush will be addressing the United Nations in defense of the disastrous Iraq War. United for Peace and Justice has planned a peaceful march and rally to voice our opposition and call for the troops to come home.

Yesterday we met with the New York Police Department, who informed us they will not allow any marches near the United Nations that day. In fact, they said they would not allow any marches east of Park Avenue, south of 52nd Street, or north of the mid 30s.

The police are invoking "security concerns" to justify shunting us so far away from the site of Bush's speech that we might as well be in another borough. We wouldn't just be out of earshot and out of visual range -- we'd be many long blocks away. Is this what democracy looks like?

We were completely willing to discuss a range of reasonable march routes, but the NYPD refused. Their only proposals were for marches far from the UN or a slot for a short rally at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, among at least eight other organizations working on an array of issues.

This is another in a long line of actions by the New York City Police Department -- and the federal government -- that undermine our right to dissent. Time and time again, United for Peace and Justice has had to fight to exercise our basic right to peaceful protest. They tried to stop us from rallying in the lead-up to the Iraq War. They tried to sideline our protest against the Republican National Convention to the sun-baked West Side Highway.

We didn't back down then, and we're not backing down now. United for Peace and Justice is determined to have the strongest possible antiwar presence on the streets of New York City on September 19 while Bush speaks at the UN. We know this is a workday, but we urge you if you possibly can to make plans to join us in the streets.

As we review options and decide how to proceed, we want your input and need your support.

There is a survey where members can vote on what course of action UfPJ should take, and many other ideas on how you can get involved.

* * * *

World Can't Wait is seeking donations to run an ad in USA Today on September 19. Give if you can. If you're in the US, mark your calendar and plan on protesting that day.

* * * *

OK, now I'm going to get some work done, and this time I mean it.

meta

Several readers have emailed me comments on some recent posts. They can't post comments; they've upgraded to the new Blogger beta, and now they can't leave comments on any non-beta blogs. Apparently you're not informed of this before making the switch, which seems like a serious glitch.

This gives me pause about making the upgrade. I'd hate to be cut off from older blogs.

I suppose beta users could open a new, separate, non-beta account, just for commenting. If anyone wants to do that, and report on the advantages of Blogger beta, that would be cool. I have an email about it from a reader, which I'll post if I get permission.

I'm not sure if this person implied that on Blogger beta, comments will now use Haloscan? I certainly hope not. I really dislike Haloscan comments. The way Blogger handles comments is one of the reasons I want to stay with it in the first place.

* * * *

It's been very quiet here. Statcounter says you are all still there, but since my 9/11-related posts, discussion has died down. I imagine (hope) we're just in a lull and will return to our normal comment-discussions soon.

Meanwhile, Allan's blog has become a community hang-out, much as wmtc has been. Just as well, since our baseball season disintegrated. His link to his 9/11 post at wmtc got a lot of good support.

I'm going to get some work done, and post more later today. Bye for now.

* * * *

Update. Friend of wmtc Amateur says:

The main "under-the-hood" thing that comes with the upgrade is that all your pages are no longer static HTML. I don't get all the technical details but from a practical perspective it means that when you publish a post (or change your template) you don't have to wait for that little timer to run up to 100% while your whole blog is "republished." Things happen more or less instantaneously.

The Blogger dashboard interface is slightly improved, which is nice.

There is a graphical control facility for your template, changing colors and fonts, and adding stuff. In particular there's a widget for managing link lists -- makes things easier to manage, but if you switch you need to reconstruct your lists, and that might take some time.

Then there are also a bunch of pretty neat widgets that they've added. The new post archive is pretty neat -- it's effectively a full index to all of your posts. Actually there are several different versions available, but you can see one of them on my sidebar.

You can label your posts, and then add the list of labels to your template so that people can sort them by category. My labels are still a bit messed up and I haven't done all of the historical posts, but you can see the tool on my sidebar.

You can add the RSS feed from anything into your blog. I'm not sure how useful that would be, but for example you could load RedSock's RSS into your sidebar to provide people a quick summary of what he's been writing about, automatically updated whenever he publishes. Again, I've taken advantage of this -- I actually created a new blog just to use its RSS feed.

And there is an "older/newer/home" pager that makes it easier to browse through historical posts.

Also the new Blogger takes advantage of the Google "pages that link here" function to provide backlinks for your posts. These appear on the post pages if you enable them -- sometimes you have to wait a little while for them to appear, but it's neat for a couple of reasons. It shows who else has been linking to your posts, and also shows a sort of cross-reference list for your blog. Pretty neat.

Oh yeah -- people can subscribe to an RSS feed for your blogger comments as well as your posts. I'm not using that because I don't use Blogger comments, but it could be really great for your blog! [True!]

I'm pretty keen on what they've done, although I will say that I struggled quite a bit with adding the HaloScan Comments. It's still possible to do tricky stuff by editing the template HTML, but I'd say that the learning curve is pretty steep.

Amateur also clarifies that you can use Blogger beta and still use Blogger comments.

You can stick with Blogger's comments, and in fact that will make your life much easier during the transition -- being one of the first Haloscan users to switch made it pretty challenging. (I switched to Haloscan because my posts are cross-posted on cansport.com and I wanted readers at both sites to be able to comment. I later realized that I probably could have stayed with Blogger anyway, but I don't think I'll switch back now.)

Many, many thanks to Amateur for this very useful info. Opinions and suggestions about my upgrade and redesign are most welcome.

yuck

Make that yuck a double-double.

What a disgusting duo.

When Rice assures victory, you know you're in deep trouble. The Star has a little slideshow that seems a bit sarcastic. Click on "Condi's Canadian Adventure".

cinq à sept

Walrus again. Just a Canadian story I liked a lot.

Touchez-pas That Dial
An anglophone DJ charms Montreal listeners, one bungled word at a time

by Martin Patriquin

Tim Morgan doesn't remember exactly what French phrase he first botched on-air, but he's pretty sure it was Jeanne Mance. Morgan, a DJ on the Montreal classic-rock radio station chom-fm, pronounced the storied Montreal street as most Vancouver natives would: instead of sounding like "Zhan Mahnse," it rhymed with "green pants." The phone lines lit up, the assistant station manager came in to correct him, and Morgan sheepishly apologized for his faux pas during his next segment.

A few days later, he mentioned on the air that he was taking French lessons and had learned key phrases such as Je m'excuse, mais mon français n'est pas très bon (I'm sorry, but my French isn't very good) and, more importantly, Je vais jouer du Floyd entre cinq et six heures (I will play Pink Floyd between five and six o'clock). Morgan's earnest attempts, combined with chom's steady dose of classic rock—for which French Canadians have an enduring affinity—have made him a minor celebrity in francophone Montreal. For the first time anyone can remember, the 3-to-7-p.m. show, which Morgan has hosted since December 2004, recently beat out French-language ckoi-fm's drive-home show in the ratings, no small feat considering that ckoi is a Montreal institution.

Over the past year, Morgan has received praise, encouragement, party invitations, Christmas cards, a verb-conjugation wheel, and offers of free French lessons—only some of which weren't thinly veiled overtures from smitten French-Canadian women. "I got into an exchange with this girl who said she wanted me to come out with her and her friends to practise French," Morgan says. "I said that might be fun. She wrote back, saying that actually it would just be me and her over dinner. I had to tell her thanks, but my girlfriend speaks pretty good French."

chom's playlist hearkens back to the days of seventies and eighties stadium rock, and the station's DJs, Morgan included, regularly usher in "Thirty-Minute Non-stop Rock Rides" with utmost zeal. The real Morgan, though, is the antithesis of Tim Morgan, rock DJ. Tall and unassuming, the thirty-year-old doesn't look like someone who peppers a significant part of his day with boilerplate chatter about potholes, rickety Metro cars, lazy blue-collar workers, and overpriced beer at the Bell Centre. His face would look good on a chom billboard, no doubt, but his tastes run to Wilco and Ben Harper—acts that would make the average chom listener dial in to demand something Led Zeppelin-related.

In person, Morgan turns off the slick, exaggerated inflection he uses on the air and is prone to introspection about his profession. "What is a Rock Ride, really" he asks out loud to no one in particular. "Tell me what it is. It doesn't make any sense." He also has a habit of aborting thoughts mid-sentence if he thinks he's being immodest. Of his show's success, he says, "I guess it's good, but for me it's— ckoi might kick my ass next time, you know."

By speaking hesitant French to an audience of roughly 312,000 people, Morgan has become French Canada's favourite type of anglophone: one who makes an effort to learn the country's "other" official language. "English people don't force themselves enough, and someone who comes here from Vancouver and really tries to learn is fun en tabarouette [as all hell]," says Johanne Nepton, forty, who has tuned in to chom since 1979. ("I listen because I know I will never wake up to Céline Dion," she says.)

Although statistically, more Quebec anglophones than francophones are bilingual, the idea that les anglos can't be bothered to learn French persists. So when someone like Tim Morgan butchers his verb conjugation in public, the reaction is grateful, not derisive. For her part, Nepton sent Morgan a friendly note. "I think it's really good that you are learning French," she wrote in her native tongue, adding, "I hope you can read what I write."

None of the 925 songs that make up chom's weekly playlist are likely to invoke the ghosts of Quebec nationalism. And DJs rarely, if ever, bring up language politics, for reasons both practical (how do you segue from "Whole Lotta Love" to Bill 101) and institutional ( chom is a rock station, nothing more, nothing less, a swell fit for famously apolitical Montreal).

Morgan has resisted calls from several listeners and at least one member of the chom sales team to speak more French on his show. Classic rock takes up a lot of airtime and he doesn't want his French to become a gimmick shoehorned into the limited space he has between songs and commercials. His biggest on-air preoccupation is nailing down words that are themselves staples of every self-respecting Montrealer, English or French. It's a dépanneur, not a corner store; a terrace, not a patio; cinq à sept, not happy hour; Zhahk Car-tyay, not Jack Cart-yer.

A year and a half on the air hasn't cured the curse of Jeanne Mance though. Every time the street name pops up in a script, Morgan envisions the hordes of callers who will make fun of him, send a card, or ask him out on a date. "It's scary. I see the words in my brain coming up, and I think, "Say it really quickly. Maybe they won't notice.' Thing is, they always do."

We love Montreal - we've been visiting there long before we ever dreamed we'd live in Canada - and I'd love to know the city better. We're also spending our 20th anniversary of domestic partnership (January 3, 2007) in Quebec, but that's another story.

This reminds me we should check in on Uncle David in in Montreal. You have to be reading wmtc a long time to know who that is!

follow-up

I have a subscription to The Walrus, a welcome-to-Canada gift from a (former?) besotted reader. It's kind of a Canadian Harper's, which puts it in very high standing.

Months ago, I blogged about a Walrus article: "A House Half Built", by Roy Romanow. Here's an excerpt:

An agenda for a renewed national purpose requires a return to co-operative federalism as the vehicle to solve Canada's major problems. Our leaders - governmental, corporate, and community - must be guided by the overarching principle of what the national good demands, and solutions to challenging issues must be openly debated.

This agenda could also encompass a made-in-Canada economic strategy that provides short-term financial opportunity and longer-term prosperity, and that lessens our dependence on the US by boldly developing new markets. At the same time, we must dramatically increase the size and vigour of Canadian businesses and, partly to protect the country from global recessions, expand Canada's internal markets. And this must be done in the context of advancing workers' rights,ensuring that a forty-hour workweek provides a decent wage, improving our natural environment, and demanding that the political rights of those who live in the lands of our trading partners are respected.

The income-security system, one of Canada's social-justice hallmarks, is in trouble. We must modernize it and reinvest in it. Similarly, the country can afford a national affordable-housing program and universal child care, and to at last honour the rights of aboriginal peoples to healthy lives, equal opportunity, and a share in the country's bounty. A renaissance in education and research and increasing access to university and college by lessening the financial burden would spur economic development and innovation.

In health care, the provinces need to do the heavy lifting involved in properly re-engineering the universal system: using new money to buy real change, developing effective programs on disease prevention and well-being, providing for independent auditing, and telling their electorates that it will take seven years to achieve these goals, not seven months. Playing around with private-delivery health-care options is the default position of those governments that have not had the courage to innovate within the public model.

Similarly, supporting Canada's unique cultural identity through what we see on television, hear on radio, and read in newspapers, magazines, and books, will produce genuine dividends. It's time to restore our cultural sovereignty over the airwaves through generous investments in the arts and in broadcasting; and it is time to affirm the democratic commons and bring legislative remedy to the unacceptable concentration of media in the hands of a few.

International prominence comes not just from enterprising businesses. Canada should recapture its reputation as a world leader in building peace and sharing prosperity through our international objectives. It is unimaginable how far we have slipped. Canada's foreign-aid spending, for example, is a national embarrassment. And imagine a bold and dramatic national environmental initiative to restore our damaged biosphere. Imagine corporate- and government-sponsored research dedicated to making Canada a world leader in environmentally sensitive new technologies.

I can hear the protests and rebuttals to this modest down payment on a better Canada: "Cost. What would all this cost?" It is a reasonable, albeit predictable, question, but the fiscal capacity necessary to achieve our shared destiny is well within our reach. Just look at accumulated federal surpluses; just look at the rising trend in corporate tax benefits. We must demand investment. After all, isn't it a fact that a progressive society is shouldered on the foundations of a progressive tax system and progressive social policies?

The current issue of The Walrus contains mostly appreciative letters in response to Romanow's piece, and his reply to those letters. He writes:

"A House Half Built" was written as encouragement to a public that wants and needs more. The response to date has been inspiring. The notion of difference is certainly not a new phenomenon in Canada—diverse peoples progressively building a nation together is one of Canada’s most recognizable features. The concept of shared destiny describes our historical commitment to digging deeper for meaning in our place and to being something bigger than the sum of our differences.

New challenges over time raise new questions. How can we maintain a commitment to a fair and balanced Canada in the context of growing complexities and a smaller world We grapple with big questions through casual chats with neighbours, by attending a budget meeting at city hall, or by following mass media. Our political leaders and their policies play a central role in fomenting this debate. In many ways, it is how governments orient themselves in the public arena that ultimately shapes the character of our conversations, and too often we are led down the path of "divide and conquer" instead of being engaged in ways that would teach us more about what Canadians have in common.

This truncated discourse is increasingly pervasive. Ministers haggle over fiscal imbalances instead of engaging Canadians about the purpose of federal transfers. Discussions over health reforms begin with the promise of transparency and consultation but wind up being conducted behind closed doors. The promise of a carefully negotiated child-care agreement is abandoned under the guise of increasing individual choices.

It should come as no surprise that as policy-making becomes detached from our history and the very public it is supposed to reflect, Canadians lose faith in the possibility of a shared destiny. But Canadians still dream of public institutions that can reflect our shared values of fairness, opportunity, and respect, and that also strike a balance between the individual and society.

Perhaps a little less dreaming and a bit more demanding is in order. To invoke the words of Alfred Lord Tennyson, "come, my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world."

Romanow was a long-time premier (US readers: governor) of Saskatchewan, and the head of the Royal Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada, which released the Romanow Report in 2002. Here's his Wikipedia entry. A good bit:

Romanow was well-acquainted with Pierre Trudeau, Prime Minister from 1968–1979 and 1980–1984. He remains a close friend of Jean Chrétien, who was prime minister from 1993 to 2003.

During the 1981 discussions over the repatriation of the Canadian constitution, these three men worked out most of Canada's new constitution at the famous late night "kitchen table discussion". Romanow objected strongly to any protections on private property in the new Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and none were included.

A little less dreaming and a bit more demanding - I like that. Maybe, first dream it, then demand it.

news

Amazingly wonderful fantastic news! Gito and Juan are coming to Canada!!!

You can't imagine what these guys have been through, how long they've waited, how many disappointments they've had along the way. I really admire their perseverance and their commitment.

9/11: the political

By now you all know about "The Path to 9/11," the propaganda movie being disseminated by the Disney and Scholastic corporations. The people behind the movie are an evangelical group called Youth With A Mission.

Now, ABC claims to be editing those false sequences to satisfy critics so the show can go on -- even if it still remains a gross distortion of history. And as it does so, ABC advances the illusion that the deceptive nature of "The Path to 9/11" is an honest mistake committed by a hardworking but admittedly fumbling team of well-intentioned Hollywood professionals who wanted nothing less than to entertain America. But this is another Big Lie.

In fact, "The Path to 9/11" is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11's director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to "transform Hollywood" in line with its messianic vision.

Media Matters has a good summary of the issue, plus links and phone numbers through which you can voice your disapproval.

We know that September 11th has been used to justify, well, nearly anything. War without end, torture, concentration camps, spying on civilians, imprisonment with charges or trial, unchecked governmental powers, censorship... it's a long list. People who control vast resources have a lot invested in perpetuating the lies and the propaganda. A lot depends on it.

But what is the truth?

We don't know.

Most of what passes for common knowledge about 9/11 is fiction. The official story -- or, as Allan often corrects me, the official stories, there have been so many -- is also fiction. Those people trying to uncover and expose the truth are routinely smeared as wackos, given the derisive label "conspiracy theorists," as if the very idea of conspiracy is in itself ridiculous. (Yet isn't even the Official Story one of conspiracy? Didn't someone conspire to perpetrate 9/11?)

The US Government went to a lot of trouble to try to prevent an investigation into the events of September 11th. Only the activism of 9/11 widows prevented them from getting away with it. Now, when I think of the time, money and effort that is spent trying to disgrace the 9/11 Truth Movement, I can only conclude that there are many things to hide.

It's easy to deride. It's harder to keep an open mind. Let's all work on keeping our minds open.

Today we have a guest post from my esteemed partner, Allan, a/k/a Redsock. Allan is part of the 9/11 Truth Movement. Here's what he has to say.

As the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks arrives, the 9/11 Truth Movement has made incredible strides. Numerous videos and scores of articles from dozens of researchers circulate on the internet. Without the web, what has been accomplished in the last five years might have taken more than two decades.

For the mainstream media, ignoring the Movement is no longer an option. Over the last six months, magazines and newspapers have been forced to say something about the many groups that are asking questions about what we've been told happened that day. The media's usual reaction? Ridicule -- often by highlighting a silly obscure theory and using that to smear the entire Movement.

Yet there are clear signs that many Americans have serious doubts about the official story. ... When I say "official story", I'm referring to the broad outline of what supposedly happened on 9/11. There is no "official story". Nearly every aspect of the actual attacks, the warnings and government response, the hijackers and their backgrounds can be seriously questioned, either because no evidence has been presented or because there are two, three, sometimes four different versions of what happened.

Some poll results:

August 2006: 36% of respondents say it's "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials either participated in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop them.

May 2006: A Zogby poll finds 42% of Americans believe there is a 9/11 coverup.

August 2004: This Zogby poll found that 49.3% of New York City residents believe some US leaders "knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act". And of those people, nearly 30% are registered Republicans and over 38% described themselves as "very conservative".

(On the flip side, according to an August 2006 Washington Post poll, 30% of Americans did not know in what year the 9/11 attacks took place. And 5% of respondents could not remember the month and date of the attacks.)

The 9/11 Commission has been exposed as a sham and there is next-to-nothing in its much-hyped Final Report that hasn't been discredited or had serious questions raised about its authenticity. (The Report has recently been released, appropriately, as a comic book.)

The Commission failed to address hundreds of serious questions, glossing over the many warnings from nearly a dozen foreign governments during the summer of 2001 -- the Bush administration insisted for nine months after 9/11 that there had been no warnings whatsoever -- and ignoring most of the 300+ questions submitted by the members of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee. Those questions and the Committee's rating of each "answer" can be found here.

In addition, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chairmen of the Commission, admitted in recent weeks that officials from the Pentagon, NORAD and the FAA all lied to the Commission in their testimony. The Commission considered referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, but in the end, they did nothing.

Kean and Hamilton also admitted that they consciously avoided asking tough questions of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani: "It proved difficult, if not impossible, to raise hard questions about 9/11 in New York without it being perceived as criticism of the individual police and firefighters or [the Mayor]."

More importantly, when recounting the response of the US military to the hijacked planes, the Commission invented a brand-new chronology that contradicted every single news report since 9/12, as well as the Commission's earlier reports. There is no mention or explanation of the numerous discrepancies in the Final Report.

David Ray Griffin has written three books about 9/11, including "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions". (Note: One chapter in his book "The New Pearl Harbor" draws heavily from an article I wrote in 2003.)

In his list of 115 omissions and distortions, Griffin finds that the Commission ignored:

- the FBI's admission that it "has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11";

- the existence of WTC 7, the collapse of which FEMA admitted it could not explain;

- David Schippers's (the House Judiciary Committee's chief investigator in the Clinton impeachment trial) claim that several FBI agents knew the targets and date of the attacks as much as six weeks before 9/11, and his futile attempts to interest anyone in Washington of these warnings;

- reports in Newsweek that, on the night of September 10, several top Pentagon officials received a "particularly urgent warning" and quickly cancelled travel plans for the next morning;

- the 3.5 hours of testimony by former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds that revealed 9/11-related cover-ups by FBI officials; and

- the fact that as many as 12 war games were being staged on the morning of 9/11, including simultaneous hijackings of passenger planes and the crashing of a plane into a government building. For some of the military games, false "blips" meant to impersonate hijacked planes were placed onto FAA radar screens.

The Commission also failed to tell us that two hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi -- two men the CIA knew had connections to the USS Cole bombing -- had a close relationship with Abdussattar Shaikh, an undercover informant who had worked closely with the FBI for years on terrorism cases. Alhazmi lived with Shaikh in San Diego for nearly a year -- and two other hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Hani Hanjour, may have also hung around Shaikh's house.

In his book "Intelligence Matters", Florida Senator Bob Graham, who co-chaired the Congressional Joint Inquiry into the attacks in late 2002, discloses how the FBI failed to tell the Inquiry about Shaikh, refused to allow him to testify, moved him to a secret location "for his own safety", and apparently set him up with "a well-known former Justice Department attorney [who had] a strong relationship with the FBI".

In the Commission's Final Report, Shaikh was referred to only once, as an anonymous "homeowner".

***

Griffin's "Omissions" deals extensively with the lies and half-truths given for the US military's response on 9/11. Paul Thompson, the editor of the Complete 9/11 Timeline (order the book version now!), has found seven different versions of the military's response:

1. September 13, 2001: Richard Myers (the acting head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 9/11) admitted twice under oath before the Senate that no planes were scrambled until after the Pentagon was hit (nearly 90 minutes after it was known the first plane had been hijacked); a top NORAD official agreed.

2. September 14: CBS News quoted unnamed sources that planes were scrambled, but arrived at each destination too late.

3. September 18: NORAD used some of the CBS information when it revised its own timeline.

4. May 2003: NORAD officials' testimony before the 9/11 Commission.

5. January 2004: Details from "Air War Over America", a book commissioned by the military.

6. July 2004: The 9/11 Commission's Final Report in July 2004, which rewrote the entire chronology, in a blatant attempt to shift blame from the military to the FAA.

7. September 2006: Details from the NORAD audio tapes featured in Vanity Fair.

Thompson: "There's been nothing but lies and contradictions all along. It's like they keep trying different stories until they find one that sticks."

911truth.org offers the Top 40 reasons to doubt the official story, but what should be the main focus? What someone believes should be the #1 item with which to educate the general public might be #7 or #28 to me.

There's so much verifiable evidence that members of the Bush administration were complicit in the attacks that I can't help but think those "researchers" who waste time arguing about outlandish theories are actually disinformation agents, intent on making everyone in the Truth Movement look like tinfoil-hat wearing kooks.

I'm much more receptive to people gathering information from government officials, media sources and books, and asking questions about what they have found, than someone linking to a grainy video and telling me "what really happened". Many of the videos are visually compelling -- I have a ton of them stored away on various discs -- but in my own research, I tend to focus on the written word.

In addition to the books by Thompson and Griffin, I would also recommend Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's The War On Truth: 9/11, Disinformation And The Anatomy Of Terrorism. ... On the web, 911 Blogger is a great place for links to all kinds of 9/11 research. And check out Jeff Wells's Coincidence Theorist's Guide to 9/11.

One video released this week, 9/11: Press For Truth, is based on Thompson's research and was produced for the general viewer. I highly recommend it. Two 10-minute excerpts can be found here and here and Google Video has the whole thing here. (But if you watch it and like it, please buy a copy.)

In 2002, Bob Graham said (my emphasis):

was surprised at the evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States. ... Most of that information is classified, I think overly-classified... It will become public at some point when it's turned over to the National Archives, but that's 20 or 30 years from now.

The 9/11 Truth Movement is well ahead of schedule.

9/11: the personal

Long-time readers may recall that I have written an essay comparing my own recovery from sexual assault to my (former) city's recovery from the September 11th attacks. I'd been trying to get it published, without success, for a long time.

Once again, persistence has paid off. You can now read it on Common Dreams: My September 10th.

back

We are back. We had a good visit, and are happy to be home.

We got in late last night, are working today and on the weekend, and I have two writing deadlines on tap. Consequently, I'm feeling a bit scattered, without a lot to say. I'll talk to you when something materializes.

news

Yesterday, the biggest news in New York was the release of an important study about the people who worked at Ground Zero: 70% of them have problems with their lungs.

In the largest study so far of post-9/11 health problems, almost 70 percent of workers who helped with the cleanup of the World Trade Center site suffered new or worsened respiratory symptoms, researchers at Mount Sinai Medical Center found.

The study found that people who worked on the cleanup had pulmonary abnormalities of twice the rate in the comparable United States population and that the abnormalities persisted for many months and, in some cases, years after exposure.

The findings are based on medical examinations performed between July 2002 and April 2004 on 9,500 workers and volunteers who took part in the cleanup of the twin towers, doctors from the center said at a news conference today.

The report found a high rate of illness among those studied, and also found that the illnesses persisted in high proportion years after the 2001 event.

"Many who worked at ground zero in the early days after the attacks have sustained serious and lasting health problems as a direct result of their exposure to the environment there," Dennis Charney, the dean for academic and scientific affairs at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, said in a statement issued with the report.

"This study scientifically confirms high rates of respiratory problems in a large number of responders — including construction workers, law enforcement officers, utilities workers and public sector workers," he said.

I have a very distinct 9/11 memory of seeing the workers - still thought of as a rescue workers - on TV, and saying, "My god, they're not wearing masks, what are they breathing? Are they all going to get asbestos lung damage?" A short time later, the US government ordered the EPA to falsify air-quality tests, in order to claim the air was safe.

Today the New York Times reports that 30% of New Yorkers still think about 9/11 every day.

Five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, two-thirds of New Yorkers say they are still "very concerned" about another attack on their city, a level of apprehension only slightly reduced from the fall of 2001, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News polls of the nation and New York City.

Nearly a third of New Yorkers said they thought about Sept. 11 every day. Nearly a third said that they had not gone back to pre-Sept. 11 routines and that they were still dealing with changes caused by the attacks.

Outside New York, however, Americans, in many ways, have adjusted to the "new normal" of the post-Sept. 11 era, the national survey suggests.

In contrast to the frantic fall of 2001, their fears of another attack seem less acute and personal. Only 22 percent in the national poll said they were still "very concerned" about an attack where they live, down from 39 percent five years ago. Three-fourths said daily life had largely returned to normal.

New Yorkers were more likely to say that they felt uneasy about the prospect of terrorist attacks. City residents said they believed that the air quality in Lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11 attacks was more dangerous than officials said at the time.

And they were less likely to say the federal government had done all that "could reasonably be expected" to protect the United States from future terrorist attacks. Seventy-two percent of New Yorkers said the government could do more, compared with 58 percent in the national survey.

Nearly 6 in 10 New Yorkers said they would not be willing to work on a high floor in a new building at the World Trade Center site. Forty percent said they still felt nervous and edgy because of the attacks.

There's also a story about the divide between New Yorkers who've moved to New York after September 11, 2001, and those who lived in the city at the time. That's something I've often thought about, too.

The top US story today is the Resident's admission that the CIA has been holding terrorist suspects in secret prisons (the first time the White House has acknowledged the existence of the prisons), and that 14 detainees have been moved to the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay.

As we were leaving Canada, the biggest news was the five Canadian troops killed in Afghanistan. Allan and I tell our US friends, with amazement and admiration, how every Canadian death in Afghanistan garners tremendous news coverage. By contrast, Americans see and hear almost nothing about the continuing death toll in Iraq. Shameful.

This morning I see Michael Ignatieff, in his bid for leadership of the Liberal party, says Canada cannot pull out of Afghanistan because the mission is a "a moral promise". How convenient for him.

October 28th: Canada out of Afghanistan.

postcard

Newsflash: New York is dirty, loud, and difficult to get around when it's raining.

Yesterday: a heavenly lunch at Union Square Cafe, then an outing at one of the world's great bookstores, and later, our friends Alan With One L and Fred. Today: our friend NN, another person I miss so much; tonight, a family dinner.

I love it here. I feel at home the second my feet hit the ground. I'm a bit homesick for my old town.

away

We're off for New York this morning, where we will jaywalk to our hearts' content, getting in touch with our inner New Yorker. We plan to see friends and family, and have lunch at our favourite restaurant. I might blog from my mom's.

handshake

From Frank Rich, "Donald Rumsfeld's Dance With the Nazis":

If we owe anything to those who died on 9/11, it is that we not forget how the administration diverted our blood and treasure from the battle against bin Laden and other stateless Islamic terrorists, fascist or whatever, to this quagmire in a country that did not attack us on 9/11. The number of American dead in Iraq — now more than 2,600 — is inexorably approaching the death toll of that Tuesday morning five years ago.

You can read it here.

what i'm reading: barbara ehrenreich

I recently finished the extraordinary book, The Places In Between, by Rory Stewart. It is a brief, brilliant book that I won't soon forget. Accompany Rory Stewart on his walk across Afghanistan. You won't be sorry.

I realize it may seem that I love every book I read. But in fact, I only write "what i'm reading" posts for books that I really like. If I don't like a book, I won't blog about it. Writers work too hard, for too little, to be cut down by my personal preferences. I don't want to discourage anyone from reading anything.

I just started reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait And Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. This is a follow-up to her great book, Nickled And Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America. I loved Nickled And Dimed - it's required reading, as far as I'm concered - and I'm expecting good things from Bait And Switch.

Of all the political writers I read, Ehrenreich is perhaps the one I most admire, the person whose career I am most envious of. That's because she writes for everyone. I love to read (for example) Katha Pollitt, and I don't know what I'd do without her insight, wit and vision. But Pollitt writes mainly for other lefties, where Ehrenreich brings her progressive vision to a mainstream audience. Both are necessary and important - and believe me, this is not a slight to the great Katha Pollitt. Ehrenreich does, with tremendous success, what I'm always trying to do with my own writing, in any small way I can.

changes

Two months ago I was thinking of ending this blog on the first anniversary of our moving to Canada. But that day has passed, I've gotten a second wind and now I'm thinking about a renovation.

Loyal reader and infrequent commenter Mike asked if I had thought about getting my own domain name. I hadn't thought about it, but man, once the idea was in my head, I liked it more and more. So Mike, you might not comment often, but you've had a huge effect on wmtc!

And so, I am pleased to announce wmtc's future address: www.wmtc.ca. (Does this make me master of my domain?)

I also want to overhaul the blog's look. Several readers suggested using the design of the wmtc book, and Allan would like to see an Ontario license plate reading "wtmc". I like both ideas. I'm going to contact the person who designed the book jacket and see what he has to say.

I still want to use Blogger, because I really like it, compared to Wordpress, Typepad or other blogware I've seen.

This will take a while; it's not like I have a lot of time to dedicate to this. But stay tuned, I'll get there.

just walk

New-Yorker-turned-Torontonian Diamond Jim gets it exactly right.

I've met Jim. He's a gentle, sweet, caring kind of guy. He doesn't support American exceptionalism, capitalist empire or Homeland Security. He just crosses against the light when there are no cars coming.

Come on, Canadians: you can do it! Don't let a little sign boss you around. Look both ways, take a deep breath, and cross that intersection.

what i'm watching: lewis black

I'm not a big fan of stand-up comedy, but one comedian I really like is Lewis Black. He's never been as funny or as cutting as the first time we saw him, broadcast from Tompkins Square Park on New York's lower east side, but he still really makes me laugh. (Naturally I love his politics, but that alone is not enough for me to like someone's comedy.)

Last night I caught a bit of his "Black on Broadway" on the Comedy Network. Thank goodness Canada isn't afraid of putting certain four-letter words on the air; the US's Comedy Channel would bleep the fuck out of Black's stand-up.

In case you haven't seen this, I have to report the Obligatory Canada Reference. Black was holding forth about Americans who declare the US the greatest nation in the world, and how obnoxious that is. "You know how I know it's obnoxious?" he ranted. Because (paraphrasing here), if there was a guy who worked in your office who kept popping in all day to say 'I'm the greatest fucker here!', you'd want to bash his head in.

Black points out that many people who claim the US is the greatest country on earth have never been to another country.

There are people who have never left the country who talk about how it's the greatest country on earth. How would they know? There could be countries where they give shit away for free every day. [pause] Canada is one of those countries. You know what they give away free there? [pause] Health insurance!!

I notice Black is playing Toronto's Massey Hall in October.

protect insite (updated)

When I attended the Global Village at the 2006 AIDS Conference, I learned that InSite, North America's only safe injection site, is in danger of being closed. I meant to blog about this right away, then didn't... then I thought it was too late. JenJJP, a friend of wmtc, woke me up. It's not too late, and it's vitally important.

To operate legally, Health Canada granted Vancouver Coastal Health an exemption under Section 56 of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. Health Canada has not yet committed to allowing Insite to operate beyond September 12, 2006.

This is an important program that offers humane drug treatment and saves lives. Jen's site, Protect InSite, says it all, so I'll going to quote extensively from it.

How a Safe Injection Site works (pers. comm. from my tour and the Insite webpage).

-Clients in the waiting area sign in the first time and sign waiver
-12-seat injection room where they can inject their own drugs under the supervision of trained medical staff.
-Self report drugs and recieve equipment and instruction for proper use.
-Have access to clean injection equipment including spoons, tourniquets and sterile water, aimed at reducing the spread of infectious diseases. All equipment must be left in the injection room.
-Average time in injection room: 20 minutes.
-After injecting, they move to a post-injection room where, if appropriate, staff can connect clients with other on-site services. These include primary care for the treatment of wounds, abscesses and other infections; addiction counseling and peer support; and referral to treatment services such as withdrawal management, opiate replacement therapy and other services.

Why this is important and necessary

- Injection drug users have access to resources the rest of us take for granted: an interdisciplinary healthcare team, clean equipment, social services and outreach.
- There is access to injection site assessment for abcesses, infection, safe injection technique.
- All equipment is safely disposed of, not left in the streets, alleys, public trash.
- Common practice prior to the site opening included using any available water source for injecting, for example puddle water.
- Individuals are giving the dignity to shoot up in a private space and public order is improved as there is now less conflict between injection drug users and other members of the community (for example business owners, like the Chinatown Merchants Association, who, while initially sceptical or opposed to the site, are now overwhelmingly supportive)
- There is a reduction in crime in the community
- Individuals inject individually, and equipment can't leave Insite; so, there is no chance of shared needles

Staff

Along with the on-site coordinator, two registered nurses are present at all times with an addiction counsellor and physician support available on-call. Program assistants from our partner, the PHS Community Services Society, help greet and register people, as well as provide peer contact to encourage safe injection practices and orient drug users to use the site.

Facts and Figures (from Insite homepage and pers. comm from my tour)

-People using Insite are more likely to enter a detox program, with one in five regular visitors beginning a detox program
-Over a two year period 4,084 referrals were made with 40 per cent of them made to addiction counseling
-To date there have been over 500 overdoses at Insite. Thanks to prompt medical attention there have been no deaths.
-Daily average visits: 607
-Number of nursing care interventions: 6,227
-Number of nursing interventions for abscess care: 2,055
-Busiest day: May 25, 2005 (933 visits in 18 hours). So, nearly 1000 needles kept off of the street, nearly 1000 instances where a needle was not shared.1000 instances where an individual had the opportunity to access the healthcare system, not only for drug-related treatment but also for mental health, HIV/AIDS care, pregnancy testing and maternity care, social work services, counseling and peer-support.

Key Research Findings (thanks to S. Evans, VCH)

-Insite has attracted and retained a high risk population of injection drug users, including those at high risk for HIV, overdose, and involved in public disorder.
-The opening of Insite has been associated with improved public order, including reductions in public injecting and discarded syringes
-Insite is associated with reduced syringe sharing. Data obtained before Insite opened showed that the reduction in syringe sharing only emerged after the opening of Insite. These are the first ever published findings to demonstrate an impact of a Supervised Injecting Facility on syringe sharing among Intravenous Drug Users.
-The opening of Insite did not lead to negative changes in community drug use patterns. Therefore, the recently reported benefits of Insite on HIV risk behaviour and on public order have not been offset by negative community impacts.
-Use of Insite and any contact with the facility's addictions counselor were both independently associated with more rapid entry into a detoxification program.
Funding

Jen also offers tips for effective letter writing, as well as who to write to.

Many thanks to Jen, a nursing student, for doing this work and posting this information.

Please take a few minutes to contact the people who can keep InSite open.

****

Update: I was later than I thought. Update from CBC News:

Federal Health Minister Tony Clement announced Friday his department wouldn't give another three-year exemption to Vancouver's safe-injection site for heroin addicts, adding that the site will remain open until a decision is made by the end of 2007.

Clement said in a statement that before a decision is made, additional studies will be conducted into how supervised injection sites affect crime prevention and treatment.

"Do safe injection sites contribute to lowering drug use and fighting addiction? Right now the only thing the research to date has proven conclusively is drug addicts need more help to get off drugs," Clement said.

"Given the need for more facts, I am unable to approve the current request to extend the Vancouver site for another three and a half years."

CBC story here, with some good background links. Thanks to Impudent Strumpet for bringing me up to speed.

oct 5 update

I recently blogged about World Can't Wait, the massive peace and justice demonstration planned for October 5. I thought it was a global demonstration, but in fact it is being organized specifically in the United States.

I emailed the organization to note that their current sign-up form is only for US addresses; since this can be understandably off-putting to the rest of the world, I was wondering if they could change it. (I asked this very gently. As an organizer, I'm very sensitive to people who aren't doing any of the work appearing to say "you should do this".) The organizer who replied said:

We have been in the main geared towards calling on people inside the US to act and take responsibility for the actions of their government - because if there is not a movement coming from inside the US to stop this regime, it probably won't get driven out and people around the world will think all Americans are just going along. This is not at all to be "American-centric" - it's called "the world can't wait" for a reason, and a big part of the point is to say to Americans that when your gov is carrying out war crimes on people around the world, you have a responsibility to stop this.

I thought that was great.

Meanwhile, I contacted the Canadian Peace Alliance to see if they are planning anything in conjunction with World Can't Wait, and if they are, to get involved. I haven't heard back yet. I see that there is an action on October 28: Canada Out Of Afghanistan. My guess is all their people and organizing resources are going towards that.

So. Canadian readers, including myself: October 28. American readers: October 5. All of us can help publicize these important events.

Local chapters of World Can't Wait are holding organizing meetings on Thursday, September 7. Find a meeting here.

certainty

I don't follow US news very closely anymore, and when I'm working on writing assignments, barely at all. I often catch up with an event after reading the response to it.

That's how I learned of Donald Rumsfeld's recent Orwellian speech at the American Legion National Convention in Salt Lake City this week. Straight out of Bizarro World, without a trace of irony, the Evil warned against "a new type of fascism". Indeed.

I only read about this speech by seeing Keith Olbermann's excellent response to it. An excerpt:

The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.

Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.

Mr. Rumsfeld's remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday demands the deep analysis—and the sober contemplation—of every American.

For it did not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence -- indeed, the loyalty -- of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land. Worse, still, it credits those same transient occupants -- our employees -- with a total omniscience; a total omniscience which neither common sense, nor this administration’s track record at home or abroad, suggests they deserve.

Dissent and disagreement with government is the life's blood of human freedom; and not merely because it is the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of as "his" troops still fight, this very evening, in Iraq.

It is also essential. Because just every once in awhile it is right and the power to which it speaks, is wrong.

In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld's speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis. For in their time, there was another government faced with true peril—with a growing evil—powerful and remorseless.

That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld's, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too, had the "secret information." It alone had the true picture of the threat. It too dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld's -- questioning their intellect and their morality.

That government was England's, in the 1930's.

It knew Hitler posed no true threat to Europe, let alone England.

It knew Germany was not re-arming, in violation of all treaties and accords.

It knew that the hard evidence it received, which contradicted its own policies, its own conclusions — its own omniscience -- needed to be dismissed.

The English government of Neville Chamberlain already knew the truth.

Most relevant of all — it "knew" that its staunchest critics needed to be marginalized and isolated. In fact, it portrayed the foremost of them as a blood-thirsty war-monger who was, if not truly senile, at best morally or intellectually confused.

That critic's name was Winston Churchill.

Sadly, we have no Winston Churchills evident among us this evening. We have only Donald Rumsfelds, demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain demonized Winston Churchill.

History — and 163 million pounds of Luftwaffe bombs over England — have taught us that all Mr. Chamberlain had was his certainty — and his own confusion. A confusion that suggested that the office can not only make the man, but that the office can also make the facts.

Thus, did Mr. Rumsfeld make an apt historical analogy.

Excepting the fact, that he has the battery plugged in backwards.

Here's another brilliant response, this one from Rocky Anderson, the mayor of Salt Lake City. Anderson delivered this address at a rally in opposition to Rumsfeld's visit, and sent it to Common Dreams for publication. It's very long, so I will only post an excerpt (still lengthy) here. Do read it. I found it inspiring.

A patriot is a person who loves his or her country. Who among you loves your country so much that you have come here today to raise your voice out of deep concern for our nation--and for our world?

And who among you loves your country so much that you insist that our nation's leaders tell us the truth?

Let's hear it: "Give us the truth! Give us the truth! Give us the truth!"

Let no one deny we are patriots. We love our country, we hold dear the values upon which our nation was founded, and we are distressed at what our President, his Administration, and our Congress are doing to, and in the name of, our great nation.

Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism.

A patriot does not tell people who are intensely concerned about their country to just sit down and be quiet; to refrain from speaking out in the name of politeness or for the sake of being a good host; to show slavish, blind obedience and deference to a dishonest, war-mongering, human-rights-violating President.

That is not a patriot. Rather, that person is a sycophant.

. . .

Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.

We are here today as truth-tellers.

And we are here to demand: "Give us the truth! Give us the truth! Give us the truth!"

We are here today to insist that those who were elected to be our leaders must tell us the truth.

We are here today to insist that our news media live up to its sacred responsibility to ascertain and report the truth--rather than acting like nothing more than a bulletin board for the lies and propaganda of a manipulative, dishonest federal government.

We have been getting just about everything but the truth on matters of life and death...on matters upon which our nation's reputation hinges...on matters that directly relate to our nation's fundamental values...and on matters relating to the survival of our planet.

In the process, our nation has engaged in an unnecessary war, based upon false justifications. More than a hundred thousand people have been killed--and many more have been seriously maimed, brain-damaged, or rendered mentally ill.

Our nation's reputation throughout much of the world has been destroyed. We have many more enemies bent on our destruction than before our invasion of Iraq.

And the hatred toward us has grown to the point that it will take many years, perhaps generations, to overcome the loathing created by our invasion and occupation of a Muslim country.

What incredible ineptitude and callousness for our President to talk about a Crusade while lying to us to make a case for the invasion and occupation of a Muslim country!

Our children and later generations will pay the price of the lies, the violence, the cruelty, the incompetence, and the inhumanity of the Bush Administration and the lackey Congress that has so cowardly abrogated its responsibility and authority under our checks-and-balances system of government.

We are here to say, "We will not stand for it any more. No more lies. No more pre-emptive, illegal war, based on false information. No more God-is-on-our- side religious nonsense to justify this immoral, illegal war. No more inhumanity."

Let's raise our voices, and demand, "Give us the truth! Give us the truth! Give us the truth!"

Let's consider some of the most monstrous lies--lies that have led us, like a nation of sheep, to this tragic war.

[He then recounts a summary. It takes quite some time to sum up even a partial list of the lies.]

As we demand the truth from others, let us also face the truth. Our government all too often has not cared about the human rights of people in other nations--and it doesn't really care about democracy, unless it leads to the election of those who will do our bidding. Consider the irony regarding the claims that Saddam had chemical weapons and, because of that, we needed to rush to war in Iraq. When Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons--first against Iranians, then against his own people, the Kurds - our country provided him with biological and chemical agents and equipment to make the weapons. Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush refused even to support economic sanctions against Hussein for his use of weapons of mass destruction. What did our nation do in response to Hussein's use of chemical weapons, killing tens of thousand of people, when he actually had them?

We befriended, coddled, and rewarded him--with government-guaranteed loans totaling $5 billion since 1983, freeing up currency for Hussein to modernize his military assets.

Perhaps those in the US government who aided and abetted Saddam Hussein to further US business interests, while he was gassing the Kurds, should be sharing his courtroom dock as he is being tried now for crimes against humanity. No more lies, no more hiding of the truth, no more wars that more than triple the value of stock in Dick Cheney's prior employer, Halliburton--and which, as of last September, has increased the value of the Halliburton CEO's stock by $78 million.

We are patriots. We're deeply concerned. And we demand change, now. No more lies from Condoleezza Rice about whether she and President Bush were advised before 9/11 of the possibility of planes being flown into buildings by terrorists.

No more gross incompetence in the office of the Secretary of Defense.

No more torture of human beings.

No more disregard of the basic human rights enshrined in the Geneva Convention.

No more kidnapping of people and sending them off to secret prisons in nations where we can expect they will be tortured.

No more unconstitutional wiretapping of Americans.

No more proposed amendments to the United States Constitution that would, for the first time, limit fundamental rights and liberties for entire classes of people simply on the basis of sexual orientation.

No more federal land giveaways to developers.

No more increases in mercury emissions from old, dirty, dangerous coalburning power plants.

No more backroom deals that deprive protection for millions of acres of wild lands.

No more attacks on immigrants who work so hard to build better lives.

No more inaction by Congress on fixing our hypocritical and inconsistent immigration laws and policies.

No more reliance on fiction rather than the science of global warming.

No more manipulation of our media with false propaganda.

No more disastrous cuts in funding for those most in need.

No more federal cuts in community policing and local law enforcement grant programs for our cities.

No more inaction on stopping the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

No more of the Patriot Act.

No more killing.

No more pre-emptive wars.

No more contempt for our long-time allies around the world.

No more dependence on foreign oil.

No more failure to impose increased fuel efficiency standards for automobiles.

No more energy policies developed in secret meetings between Dick Cheney and his energy company cronies.

No more excuses for failing to aggressively cut global warming pollutant emissions.

No more tragically incompetent federal responses to natural disasters.

No more tax cuts for the wealthiest, while the middle class and those who are economically-disadvantaged continue to struggle more and more each year.

No more reckless spending and massive tax cuts, resulting in historic deficits and historic accumulated national debt.

No more purchasing of elections by the wealthiest corporations and individuals in the country.

No more phony, ineffective, inhumane so-called war on drugs. No more failure to pass an increase in the minimum wage.

No more silence by the American people.

This is a new day. We will not be silent. We will continue to raise our voices. We will bring others with us. We will grow and grow, regardless of political party--unified in our insistence upon the truth, upon peace-making, upon more humane treatment of our brothers and sisters around the world.

We will be ever cognizant of our moral responsibility to speak up in the face of wrongdoing, and to work as we can for a better, safer, more just community, nation, and world.

So we won't let down. We won't be quiet. We will continue to resist the lies, the deception, the outrages of the Bush Administration. We will insist that peace be pursued, and that, as a nation, we help those in need. We must break the cycle of hatred, of intolerance, of exploitation. We must pursue peace as vigorously as the Bush Administration has pursued war. It's up to all of us to do our part.

Thank you everyone for lending your voices to this call for compassion, for peace, for greater humanity. Let us keep in mind the injunction of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

I am very moved that the mayor of a Western town, especially one with such deep religious roots, gave this speech. You can thank Mayor Anderson by emailing his office at mayor[at]slcgov.com. Be sure to put something like "thanks for your recent speech" in the subject line.