11.11

It's taking me forever to read the Siegfried Sassoon books, the fictionalized memoirs on which Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy is based. I've put it down a few times to read other things, and I've been writing, so I haven't been reading it as much as I would like.

As a result, I find myself on this Remembrance Day reading a first-hand account of that most terrible and useless war.

Unlike most people around me, I don't wear the red poppy symbol. No matter what anyone says about honouring veterans' sacrifice, and how it's supposedly politically neutral, it just doesn't work for me. I feel the remembrance excuses, normalizes and glorifies war.

Canadian should never have been sent to die in the trenches of France and Belgium. Neither should the British or the German. And although the Americans only showed up briefly at the end, and are often mocked for it, they never should have been there at all.

Did you know there was a huge anti-war movement in the US at the time? It was led mainly by socialists, and it was systematically repressed, often with pre-emptive arrests.

Obviously people born in Canada have a different view of war than those born in the US, and a different vision of what it means to be a soldier. But for me personally, the official remembrance condones the sacrifice. I feel this is especially true for a war that never had to be fought, and for which such an enormous price was paid.

As I say every year: honour the dead by working for peace.

the roller coaster that is my working life

They withdrew the offer.

The HR person called me yesterday, stammering and stumbling over her words. It took her so long to get it out, I thought something much worse was coming.

She said they ran the numbers, and realized the salary they had agreed to was considerably higher than they're currently paying people in comparable positions. (Should I paraphrase Joe DiMaggio? "Then those people are very underpaid...")

They still want me as weekend coordinator, and if I don't want that at the salary they're offering, they'd still like me to stay on permanently in my current position. So it's not awful news.

The weird thing is she didn't even have a counter-offer. Did she think I was going to keep guessing downward until I hit it? I told her I need more information before I can make a decision. She actually acted surprised.

They're going to give me a number early next week.

Sometimes I remember that I boarded this roller coaster of my own volition, and I wonder why I left Crappy Firm in the first place. Then I remember. It was crappy and I was miserable.

a hero of justice

You might be interested in this profile of Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz.

Diaz is the only US serviceman to be imprisoned for an act of insubordination aimed at the Bush administration's detention policies. He was court-martialed and convicted after he tried to help the prisoners being held - still, they are still there, without charges or trials - at Guantánamo Bay.

Diaz tried to get the names of the 551 prisoners then at Guantánamo to lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights. The names of the prisoners. The Bush regime had not even released a list of their names. The United States Supreme Court has upheld the prisoners' right to challenge their detention, but this government has nothing but contempt for the law and the US Constitution. It is beyond the law.

Diaz tried to do something heroic, on the order of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. He took a great personal risk to stand for justice, and to help other human beings. He was not successful, but he tried, and is paying a very high price for his courage.

Article here.

all hail the mighty blogosphere

Since I am old enough to have grown up without the existence of the internet, I am always aware of the change it has made in our lives.

In my own life, I often see this in the simplest of ways, such as when I'm watching a movie, and wonder, what else have I seen this actor in...? I used to call my mother and say, "What was the name of the Alfred Hitchcock movie where Ingrid Bergman's husband is making her think she's losing her mind...?" Those days are gone. I still call my mother, but we talk about other stuff. (Answer: Gaslight.)

How has the internet changed my own life? Just off the top of my head: making friends all over the world, who I meet in person whenever possible; the complete transformation of political organizing (the costs have plummeted and the reach has skyrocketed); planning a trip (does anyone remember planning trips before the internet?); getting directions; following an out-of-town baseball team; reading non-local newspapers, and reading newspapers and magazines from anywhere in the world; staying in touch with friends and acquaintances from past jobs or activities; selling or giving away unwanted stuff, or buying someone else's; getting help with every day problems.

And for me, above everything, always: emigrating. Before we moved, every person we knew in Canada, we met through the internet. I have said this so many times, but it's a bedrock truth of my life: this experience would have been far scarier, and far lonelier, without the internet.

One of the things I love most about the internet is how it has fostered a spirit of giving. The free exchange of ideas and the ease of connection has led to, I believe, a greater willingness to help strangers.

Generosity is contagious, and it spreads quickly. So many people have extended themselves to us in our move here and our adjustment to our new lives. I try to help people who email me for information, and I assume those people will do the same for others. We've all seen it in forums, blogs and bulletin boards: people helping each other, just because.

These connections are more than just information exchange. They put us in touch with our ability to give help and to receive it, two essential aspects of human society. They expand our humanity.

* * * *

Another arena the internet has transformed is consumer activism. Allan recently hit paydirt in this department, when he blogged about a huge problem he's having with downloads he bought from Major League Baseball.

Readers ran with it, including someone who posted it at Boing Boing. From there, it's been on Slashdot, Wired, TechDirt, and many other tech-related sites. Writers picked it up on Yahoo, AOL, Tech Wag, Privacy Digest, Daily Tech News, the Guardian's technology blog, Consumerist and probably several others we haven't seen. The Globe and Mail called for an interview, as did the L.A. Times; the The Washington Post emailed. Several lawyers have mentioned class action suits.

And here's the really big news: by the end of the first day, Allan was on a conference call with representatives of Major League Baseball. They claim they're fixing the problem, now and for the future. You can be sure everyone is watching to make sure they do.

This would have been impossible without the internet and the blogosphere. Allan already had been sending emails and making phone calls - all ignored. He could have tried to interest some media, but that's extremely time- and energy-consuming. Without the play online, it's unlikely that he ever would have gotten either a refund or access to his downloads. Now Baseball has been forced to fix the problem, not just for one consumer, but for everyone.

ssod

I used to do these "search string of the day" posts every so often. Then I changed the way the blog was published, and lost my stats. One little advantage to going back to a blogspot URL is that I have Statcounter again.

Here's the latest in a collection of search strings that lead people to wmtc - along with the usual "moving to Canada," "want to move to Canada," "how do I move to Canada," "is it hard to move to Canada," and other variations on that theme.

customer review on outlet shopping south of the border from Niagara Canada

what is considered a professional hairstyle for a black person

no iron sheets in canada

has Canadian healthcare stayed the same or is it different for society of the yesterday and today and tomorrow

why do people join the national guard

how to write a cheque in canada

how to write a america cheque

will canadians get rid of the neocon harper

i just move to canada will they use my US credit history to apply for a mortgage

quiffing girl

are canadian women having sex in afghanistan while serving in the canadian forces

why did the usa move to canada

416 vs 647 vs 905 cell phone area code

Why did the USA move to Canada, anyway?

general strike

The October issue of Harper's has one the best ideas for activism in the US that I've heard in a long, long time. It's available online by subscription only, but it's something that should be circulated around the net as widely as possible. Garret Keizer calls for a general strike.

Of all the various depredations of the Bush regime, none has been so thorough as its plundering of hope. Iraq will recover sooner. What was supposed to have been the crux of our foreign policy—a shock-and-awe tutorial on the utter futility of any opposition to the whims of American power—has achieved its greatest and perhaps its only lasting success in the American soul. You will want to cite the exceptions, the lunch-hour protests against the war, the dinner-party ejaculations of dissent, though you might also want to ask what substantive difference they bear to grousing about the weather or even to raging against the dying of the light—that is, to any ritualized complaint against forces universally acknowledged as unalterable. Bush is no longer the name of a president so much as the abbreviation of a proverb, something between Murphy’s Law and tomorrow’s fatal inducement to drink and be merry today.

If someone were to suggest, for example, that we begin a general strike on Election Day, November 6, 2007, for the sole purpose of removing this regime from power, how readily and with what well-practiced assurance would you find yourself producing the words "It won’t do any good"? Plausible and even courageous in the mouth of a patient who knows he's going to die, the sentiment fits equally well in the heart of a citizenry that believes it is already dead.

Any strike, whether it happens in a factory, a nation, or a marriage, amounts to a reaffirmation of consent. The strikers remind their overlords — and, equally important, themselves — that the seemingly perpetual machinery of daily life has an off switch as well as an on. Camus said that the one serious question of philosophy is whether or not to commit suicide; the one serious question of political philosophy is whether or not to get out of bed. Silly as it may have seemed at the time, John and Yoko’s famous stunt was based on a profound observation. Instant karma is not so instant — we ratify it day by day.

The stream of commuters heading into the city, the caravan of tractor-trailers pulling out of the rest stop into the dawn’s early light, speak a deep-throated Yes to the sum total of what's going on in our collective life. The poet Richard Wilbur writes of the "ripped mouse" that "cries Concordance" in the talons of the owl; we too cry our daily assent in the grip of the prevailing order— except in those notable instances when, like a donkey or a Buddha, we refuse to budge.

The question we need to ask ourselves at this moment is what further provocations we require to justify digging in our heels. To put the question more pointedly: Are we willing to wait until the next presidential election, or for some interim congressional conversion experience, knowing that if we do wait, hundreds of our sons and daughters will be needlessly destroyed? Another poet, César Vallejo, framed the question like this:

A man shivers with cold, coughs, spits up blood.
Will it ever be fitting to allude to my inner soul? . . .
A cripple sleeps with one foot on his shoulder.
Shall I later on talk about Picasso, of all people?

A young man goes to Walter Reed without a face. Shall I make an appointment with my barber? A female prisoner is sodomized at Abu Ghraib. Shall I send a check to the Clinton campaign?

There have been successful general strikes in the United States, most famously in Seattle in 1919. I found a terrific website from a group documenting and commemorating this seminal moment in labour history: The Seattle General Strike Project. That same year, a time when socialism was flourishing in North America, there was also a general strike in Winnipeg.

The city of San Francisco saw a general strike in 1934. In 1886 Chicago, workers were preparing for a general strike when the Haymarket Massacre took place. Alarmed by labor and class activism, frightened city officials likely planted the supposed "bomb-throwing anarchist" to provoke the rioting, which led to the deaths of both workers and police, then the convictions and show executions of more innocent people.

A call for a general strike also has roots in the concept of the Moratorium, which I've blogged about several times. The 1969 Moratorium to end the war in Vietnam is thought to be a key factor in preventing Richard Nixon from using nuclear weapons against Southeast Asia.

In 1985, former President Richard Nixon revealed that he had considered using nuclear weapons to end the war in Vietnam. Richard Nixon went beyond merely 'considering' the option, he actually decided to use nuclear weapons.

In August 1969, the United States began a sequence of threats against North Vietnam, beginning with an ultimatum personally delivered by Henry Kissinger, stating that if by 1 November 1969 there had been no ceasefire by the Vietnamese resistance, 'we will be compelled -with great reluctance - to take measures of the greatest consequences.' Two nuclear bombs would be dropped on North Vietnam.

To demonstrate the sincerity of his intentions, President Nixon ordered a full-scale nuclear alert, raising US nuclear forces to their highest level of alertness, DEF CON 1, for 29 days.

On 13 October 1969, one of Nixon's aides sent a Top Secret memorandum to Henry Kissinger warning that 'The nation could be thrown into internal physical turmoil', requiring the 'brutal' suppression of 'dissension'.

That month, the US anti-war movement was organising a massive wave of demonstrations and mobilisations culminating in the Vietnam Moratorium demonstration in Washington. President Nixon later wrote in his memoirs, 'A quarter of a million people came to Washington for the October 15 Moratorium... On the night of October 15, I thought about the irony of this protest for peace. It had, I believe, destroyed whatever small possibility there may have existed for ending the war in 1969'.

The key factor in his decision not to drop an atomic bomb on North Vietnam was that 'after all the protests and the Moratorium, American public opinion would be seriously divided by any military escalation of the war'. Mobilised public opinion averted the world's second nuclear war.

I could go on with this history all morning. Few things excite my mind more than discovering what the struggles of ordinary people, organized and committed, have been able to achieve.

Those achievements are present in our lives every single day, in paid time off, in workplace safety codes, in Social Security, in fire codes, in fair lending laws. In Canada, that list includes universal health care. Hell, every time you read an ingredient list on a label, you're using a resource brought to you by organized consumers.

In the US, every single one of these hard-won gains has been at least threatened, and many of them under serious attack, since the Reagan era. That is less so in Canada, but Canadians - like people everywhere - need to guard and protect their rights against forces that would just as soon revoke them, because it would increase their profits.

So. Back to the general strike from Harper's.

You will recall that a major theme of the Bush Administration’s response to September 11 was that life should go on as usual. We should keep saying that broad consensual Yes as loudly as we dared. We could best express our patriotism by hitting the malls, by booking a flight to Disney World. At the time, the advice seemed prudent enough: avoid hysteria; defy the intimidations of murderers and fanatics.

In hindsight it's hard not to see the roots of our predicament in the readiness with which we took that advice to heart. We did exactly as we were told, with a net result that is less an implicit defiance of terrorism than a tacit amen to the "war on terror," including the war in Iraq. Granted, many of us have come to find both those wars unacceptable. But do we find them intolerable? Can you sleep? Yes, doctor, I can sleep. Can you work? Yes, doctor, I can work. Do you get out to the movies, enjoy a good restaurant? Actually, I have a reservation for tonight. Then I'd say you were doing okay, wouldn't you? I’d say you were tolerating the treatment fairly well.

It is one thing to endure abuses and to carry on in spite of them. It is quite another thing to carry on to the point of abetting the abuse. We need to move the discussion of our nation’s health to the emergency room. We need to tell the doctors of the body politic that the treatment isn't working — and that until it changes radically for the better, neither are we.

No one person, least of all a freelance writer, has the prerogative to call or set the date for a general strike. What do you guys do for a strike, sit on your overdue library books? Still, what day more fitting for a strike than the first Tuesday of November, the Feast of the Hanging Chads? What other day on the national calendar cries so loudly for rededication?

The only date that comes close is September 11. You have to do a bit of soul-searching to see it, but one result of the Bush presidency has been a loss of connection to those who perished that day. Unless they were members of our families, unless we were involved in their rescue, do we think of them? It's too easy to say that time eases the grief — there's more to it than that, more even than the natural tendency to shy away from brooding on disasters that might happen again. We avoid thinking of the September 11 victims because to think of them we have to think also of what we have allowed to happen in their names. Or, if we object openly to what has happened, we have to parry the insinuation that we’re unmoved by their loss.

It is time for us to make a public profession of faith that the people who went to work that morning, who caught the cabs and rode the elevators and later jumped to their deaths, were not on the whole people who would sanction extraordinary rendition, preemptive war, and the suspension of habeas corpus; that in their heels and suits they were at least as decent as any sneaker-shod person standing vigil outside a post office with a stop the war sign. That the government workers who died in the Pentagon were not by some strange congenital fluke more obtuse than the high-ranking officers who thought the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea from the get-go. That the passengers who rushed the hijackers on Flight 93 were not repeating the mantra "It won't do any good" while scratching their heads and their asses in a happy-hour funk.

An Election Day general strike would set our remembrance of those people free from the sarcophagi of rhetoric and rationalization. It would be the political equivalent of raising them from the dead. It would be a clear if sadly delayed message of solidarity to those voters in Ohio and Florida who were pretty much told they could drop dead.

As an organizer, I find it very irritating when people make suggestions that they have no intentions of helping to implement. To the familiar refrain "You know what you guys should do...?", I took to saying, "That's an excellent idea. If you want to start organizing it, I'd be happy to help." Not being in the US, I'm not in a position to do any hands-on organizing for a 2008 general strike. So with that important caveat, I'll say I'd be very proud to see it happen, and I'd do anything I could from here to help.

blood lust: more on the tories' de facto death penalty

An excellent and important column from Jeffrey Simpson.

Richard Doyle, the former editor of The Globe and Mail, had a rule. Only put the word "I" in what you are writing if something quite extraordinary happened to you. Otherwise, remember that journalists are observers, not participants in stories.

It's a sturdy, golden rule much neglected these days. But with due apologies, let me use the Doyle exception: I once spent two hours interviewing Ronald Smith, the Canadian on death row for 25 years in Montana. I interviewed him in 1998 for a book I was then writing, and never figured he would be much in the news until he was either returned to Canada or was put to death in the United States.

But Mr. Smith is in the news now. His appeals all but exhausted against the death penalty, Mr. Smith discovered last week that the Harper government won't try to help him.

Previous Canadian governments had asked for Mr. Smith's extradition to Canada to serve a life sentence for his murders of two men in 1982. The Harper government will make no such appeal.

"Murderer! Murderer!" yelled Conservative backbenchers of Mr. Smith, approving their government's announcement in the Commons.

Presumably this blood lust came from Conservative MPs who approve of the death penalty, and would like its return to Canada. Denied that possibility, they applaud its use elsewhere. Mr. Smith has therefore become a symbol of their own frustration that the deterrence they crave, the death penalty, exists there but not here.

Mr. Smith murdered two Blackfoot Indians near Glacier National Park in northern Montana on Aug. 4, 1982. Mr. Smith had a long criminal record in Canada. He had been in the U.S. only eight hours when "liquored up," in his words, he shot the two men. At trial, Mr. Smith recalled for me, he demanded the death penalty.

"I'm guilty as hell. Give me the death penalty," he told the judge. And the judge obliged.

The special room where lethal injections are administered lies adjacent to the building in which Mr. Smith has since resided at the Deer Lodge prison, about an hour west of Helena, the state capital.

But Mr. Smith had a change of heart about wanting to die. He had had a daughter who in turn had produced two children. He wanted to be near them back in Canada. So he applied for his sentence to be served in Alberta - a life sentence with no chance of parole.

When I interviewed Mr. Smith, he never denied his guilt. But he was a changed man. Even the prison officials said so. He had taken courses, kept himself in good shape, abided by all the prison rules. He had been elected president of the prisoners' counsel.

He had become, in essence, a model prisoner, even though he knew he would serve the rest of his life behind bars and might eventually wind up in the lethal injection room. The reason he wanted to keep living, he said, was to return to Canada. If that door was closed, then bring on the death penalty, he said.

"Going back to Canada is the only thing I'm looking at right now," he told me. "If I was looking at getting my death sentence commuted and staying here, I would have to give serious thought to not commuting my death sentence."

Montana officials refused Canadian entreaties to extradite Mr. Smith. Canadian officials were modestly hopeful that a former governor, Marc Racicot, might agree as his term ended. He left office without acting.

While Mr. Smith's lawyers kept using every appeal against the death penalty, Canadian officials petitioned Montana officials. They had marginal influence at best on a U.S. governor, but they were willing to keep trying. Now the Harper government won't even try.

The argument is simple: The U.S. is a democratic country. We might not like U.S. laws, but they have been democratically adopted. If murder there is met by the death penalty, so be it. That's the way the cookie crumbles.

You either oppose the death penalty, or you don't. If you oppose it, you don't want it befalling a Canadian wherever he or she is. You work to get the Canadian home, behind bars.

Unless, of course, you really favour the death penalty, but don't want to risk a debate in Canada. And you've got a bunch of hang 'em high backbenchers for whom the death penalty there is the next best thing to having it here.

students face expulsion for peace demonstration

Students at an Illinois high school face expulsion for an anti-war demonstration at the school on November 1.

Over 70 students participated in a sit-in against the Iraq War on All Saint's Day, Thursday, November 1st.

It began third hour when dozens of students gathered quietly in the lunchroom at Morton West High School and refused to leave. The administrators and police became involved immediately and locked down the school for a half hour after class ended. Students report that they were promised that there would be no charges besides cutting classes if they took their protest outside so as not to disturb the school day. The students complied, and were led to a corner outside the cafeteria where they sang songs and held signs while classes resumed.

Despite a police line set up between the protestors and the student body, many other students joined the demonstration. Organizers say they chose November 1st because it is the Christian holy day called the feast of All Saints and a national day of peace. They wrote a letter and delivered it to Superintendent, Ben Nowakowski, who was present at the time, stating the reason for their protest.

Deans, counselors and even the Superintendent tried to change the minds of a few, mainly those students with higher GPA scores to abandon the protest. The school called the homes of many of the protestors. Those whose parents arrived before the end of school and took their students home, or left before the protest ended at the final bell, received 3-5 days suspension. All others, an estimated 37 students, received 10 days suspension and expulsion papers. Parents report that Nowakowski stated those who are 17 will also face police charges.

More information and how you can help here. Please sign the petition in defense of the student protestors.

Thanks to my researcher-in-chief.

the price of occupation

A few items about the cost of the US occupation of Iraq.

Over there:

BAGHDAD, 17 October 2007 - Barira Mihran, a 36-year-old mother of three, scavenges every day in other people's dustbins in Baghdad for leftovers on which to feed her children.

Widowed and displaced by sectarian violence, the unemployed mother said she had no other way of providing for her children.

"In the beginning it was very difficult. I never imagined that one day I was going to be forced by destiny to feed my children from the remains of other people's food," Barira said. "We always had good food on our table when my husband was alive but since he was killed in August 2005, my life has gone from bad to worse."

"My children are under age and so cannot work or beg in the streets," she said.

"Sometimes you have to fight for a dustbin. Many women know which houses have good leftovers and so they wait for hours near the houses until the leftovers are thrown in the bins outside. Then you can see at least 10 people, women and children, running to get it, and I will be in the middle of the crowd, for sure," Barira added.

Survey

Barira, an educated woman, has now joined hundreds of other mothers who rummage through rubbish bins for food to feed their children, according to the Baghdad-based Women's Rights Association (WRA), which conducted a survey of displaced families and people living on the streets in 12 provinces (excluding the Kurdistan region) between January and August 2007.

Mayada Zuhair, a WRA spokeswoman, said the survey showed an increase of 25 percent, since the previous survey in December 2005, in the number of mothers who fed their children either by scavenging in people's rubbish bins or by becoming sex workers. Of the 3,572 respondents, 72 percent were women (mainly widowed) and of these 9 percent said they had resorted to prostitution and 17 percent said they scavenged for food in dustbins and at rubbish tips. The survey was published and distributed to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and local government offices.

"This is now a common sight, especially in Baghdad - mothers standing near dustbins trying to find some food for their children," Mayada said. [Article here.]

Closer to home:

The Army began its recruiting year Oct. 1 with fewer signed up for basic training than in any year since it became an all-volunteer service in 1973, a top general said Wednesday.

Gen. William S. Wallace, whose duties as commander of Army Training and Doctrine Command include management of recruiting, told reporters at the Pentagon that the historic dip will make it harder to achieve the full-year recruiting goal - after just barely reaching it in the year ended Sept. 30.

Achieving the Army's recruiting goals - a challenge in the best of times - is not only more difficult now but also of more consequence. That is because the Army has decided that it must grow its active-duty force by several thousand soldiers a year in order to relieve strain on war-weary troops.

Wallace said he expects to reach the goal of 80,000 recruits, with extra effort by his recruiters.

"It's going to be another tough recruiting year," the four-star general said. [Article here.]

The aftermath:

Thousands of U.S. troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with physical injuries and mental health problems are encountering a benefits system that is already overburdened, and officials and veterans' groups are concerned that the challenge could grow as the nation remains at war.

The disability benefits and health care systems that provide services for about 5 million American veterans have been overloaded for decades and have a current backlog of more than 300,000 claims. And because they were mobilized to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly 150,000 National Guard and reservist veterans had become eligible for health care and benefits as of Aug. 1. That number is rising. [This article is from 2004.]

Wounded Times is a blog veterans' post-traumatic stress disorder.

From the National Priorities Project, the cost in dollars: what Americans aren't getting because they are paying for endless war. Click around.

To see something of the cost in Iraq on the ground level, I once again encourage you to read The Deserter's Tale, by Joshua Key and Lawrence Hill. Excerpt here.

a military used for peace. what a concept.

We went to Matt Bin's book launch last night, which was great. He read excerpts from his new book, On Guard For Thee; the gathered audience heard from Canadian peacekeepers in their own words. It was very moving.

I'm still getting up to speed with the whole concept of a country's military being used in the furtherance of peace.

Most non-Canadian readers will be familiar with the concept of peacekeeping, in which neutral forces go into a region of conflict, to help stabilize it and allow a peace process to begin.

What you may not know is that peacekeeping was born in Canada. The concept of UN peacekeeping was the brainchild of Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957. Beyond national defence, Canada's military is supposed to be used expressly for this purpose. I say supposed to, because many of us, including me, feel that Afghanistan is not a peacekeeping mission and that Canada should not be involved there.

(A discussion of Canada's role in Afghanistan is already going on here, continued here, so let's keep it there, please.)

I come from a country that has been invading other nations since its inception, first within its own self-declared borders, then around the globe, mostly to further the economic and political interests of a tiny, powerful class. Check out this list of United States military "interventions" since 1890. A few of them were arguably justifiable, one or two clearly so (although the prosecution of the war itself may not have been). It's a long list.

Most Americans are aware of very few of these. Even the most educated and peace-loving among us would be surprised by some of the entries. It's a long and ugly history, one we are not taught. (And we can't all memorize our Howard Zinn!)

This is another essential way that Canada differs from the US. When Canadians worry about the country being "Americanized," they should think of this. It's definitely a slippery slope, and we should be very careful to not tread upon it - but it's a long, long way down to that level.

Matt's book, however, isn't about the politics of any peacekeeping mission, the relative success or failure of peacekeeping, or anything like that. It's about peacekeepers themselves - what they've done, what they've witnessed, and how it has affected them personally. You can read my mini-interview with Matt here, and buy the book here.

"the dumber the populace, the easier it is to rule and control and launch unwinnable wars"

One of the categories of wmtc is "US regression," my shorthand for my former home devolving into a third-world country. (I believe the expression is now "developing nation," but the US is not developing, it's devolving.) The signs are everywhere: the ever-widening gap between haves and have-nots, the disappearing middle class, runaway privatization, rigged elections, the near-total collapse of public education, the poverty draft. You can scroll through the category to see the kinds of things I mean, or you can just think about Hurricane Katrina.

Allan recently sent me this link about a Tennessee town that has run out of water.

Between 6 and 9 every evening, the town scurries. Residents rush home from their jobs at the carpet factories outside town to turn on washing machines. Mothers start cooking supper. Fathers fill up water jugs. Kids line up to take showers."

The 145 residents of Orme, Tennessee, have access to water for three hours each day. But you can be sure the golf courses in gated communities from South Carolina to Arizona are lush and green.

In this column, Mark Morford gets to the heart of the problem, both cause and effect. Emphasis mine. Thanks to both Allan and M Yass for the send.

I have this ongoing discussion with a longtime reader who also just so happens to be a longtime Oakland high school teacher, a wonderful guy who's seen generations of teens come and generations go and who has a delightful poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and his family and his beloved teaching career.

And he often writes to me in response to something I might've written about the youth of today, anything where I comment on the various nefarious factors shaping their minds and their perspectives and whether or not, say, EMFs and junk food and cell phones are melting their brains and what can be done and just how bad it might all be.

His response: It is not bad at all. It's absolutely horrifying.

My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are, absolutely and without reservation, short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero doubt.

Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are overprotected and wussified and don't spend enough time outdoors and don't get any real exercise and therefore can't, say, identify basic plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again, these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored, nothing new.

No, my friend takes it all a full step — or rather, leap — further. It is not merely a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that.

We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.

It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumbification of the American brain. It is just that bad.

Now, you may think he's merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it. It's a bit like the melting of the polar ice caps. Sure, there's been alarmist data about it for years, but until you see it for yourself, the deep visceral dread doesn't really hit home.

He cites studies, reports, hard data, from the appalling effects of television on child brain development (i.e.; any TV exposure before 6 years old and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life), to the fact that, because of all the insidious mandatory testing teachers are now forced to incorporate into the curriculum, of the 182 school days in a year, there are 110 when such testing is going on somewhere at Oakland High. As one of his colleagues put it, "It's like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it."

But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even "democracy." Not a single student could do it.

It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.

It is, in short, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers like my friend nearly powerless to stop it. The worst part: It's not the kids' fault. They're merely the victims of a horribly failed educational system.

Then our discussion often turns to the meat of it, the bigger picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens.

Hell, why should they? After all, the dumber the populace, the easier it is to rule and control and launch unwinnable wars and pass laws telling them that sex is bad and TV is good and God knows all, so just pipe down and eat your Taco Bell Double-Supremo Burrito and be glad we don't arrest you for posting dirty pictures on your cute little blog.

This is about when I try to offer counterevidence, a bit of optimism. For one thing, I've argued generational relativity in this space before, suggesting maybe kids are no scarier or dumber or more dangerous than they've ever been, and that maybe some of the problem is merely the same old awkward generation gap, with every current generation absolutely convinced the subsequent one is terrifically stupid and malicious and will be the end of society as a whole. Just the way it always seems.

I also point out how, despite all the evidence of total public-education meltdown, I keep being surprised, keep hearing from/about teens and youth movements and actions that impress the hell out of me. Damn kids made the Internet what it is today, fer chrissakes. Revolutionized media. Broke all the rules. Still are.

Hell, some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs, and so on that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation's top universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning mentality, to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and acumen. How did these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible public school system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of America? Did they never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were they all born and raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did they all go to Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and play with firecrackers and take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids flukes? Exceptions? Just lucky?

My friend would say, well, yes, that's precisely what most of them are. Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled ... and increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America — and many more who aren't — now put their kids in private schools from day one, and the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system, it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the populace?

As for the rest, well, the dystopian evidence seems overwhelming indeed, to the point where it might be no stretch at all to say the biggest threat facing America is perhaps not global warming, not perpetual warmongering, not garbage food or low-level radiation or way too much Lindsay Lohan, but a populace far too ignorant to know how to properly manage any of it, much less change it all for the better.

What, too fatalistic? Don't worry. Soon enough, no one will know what the word even means.

My mother used to teach public school. Often when we talk about the sad state of the US - whatever the specifics - she says simply, "The education system is so bad. What can you expect?". And the flip side, "It's the education system. It makes everyone very easy to control."

And suburban New York State, where she taught, has relatively good schools. And she's been out of the classroom for 30 years. And it's only gotten worse.

* * * *

From The Gate:

Mark Morford's column on SFGate.com last week, headlined "American kids, dumber than dirt - warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history," drew one of the largest reader responses in recent Chronicle history. It was the most viewed story on SFGate for several days, and prompted, at last count, 546 reader comments there. A large number of posters - young, old, students, teachers, many with their own firsthand observations - agreed with the Oakland high school teacher who, in Morford's words, regarded the prospects of the "next generation" as "absolutely horrifying." There was blame aplenty - it's the parents, it's the teachers, it's the educational system, it's society in general.

But there were other voices, from the "dumbest generation." They felt personally dissed, and they hit back hard - at Morford, his teacher source and the "Boomer generation" sitting in such judgment.

I can understand young people taking the column personally, although it was actually meant in their defense. I'm glad to see their feedback: it's a ray of hope. The comments are here.

u.s. readers: ask canada to let them stay

Courage To Resist has launched its "Dear Canada" campaign in support of US war resisters in Canada.

If you are an American who believes that war resisters - former US soldiers who refused to continue to participate in the occupation of Iraq - should be allowed to stay in Canada, I urge you to get involved.

Please visit Courage To Resist's Canada page to learn how. You can write a letter or donate money for postage. If you can go one step further, encourage others to sign the letter online. You can order "Dear Canada" postcards for your own outreach efforts. Graphics and other "Dear Canada" resources are available here.

These men and women have turned their backs on torture, murder and destruction. They have refused to kill innocent civilians. They have placed true conscience above false duty.

They have, quite literally, risked everything for peace. We who stand for peace, but who sacrifice little, have an obligation to help them.

Please take a few minutes and ask Canada to let them stay.

life is short. enjoy.

Very rarely, if ever, do I agree with Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente. But somewhere in the depths of this blog, you can find a post where I agree with John Tierney (conservative columnist for the New York Times) and maybe even David Brooks (arch-conservative and idiotic columnist for the same New York Times).

Well, let's not go that far, probably not David Brooks. But one time Allan and I were driving home from Baltimore, trying to find a baseball game on the radio, and we heard something on talk-radio that we agreed with... and it turned out to be Bill O'Reilly! This was at least five years ago, and we still remember it.

So if I could agree with Bill O'Reilly once in a lifetime, I can surely agree with Margaret Wente once a year or so.

I love this column. Three cheers for Margaret Wente. Eat, live, enjoy.

Cancer is your fault ... or is it?

I see you out there. I am looking straight at you from this page. I can see you sipping on your weekend latte, as you stuff that warm, flaky chocolate croissant into your mouth. You know you're killing yourself, don't you? But maybe you don't care. Are you irresponsible? Or are you simply weak?

That was the message of the biggest health story of the week. "Poor diet ratchets up cancer risk," blared the headline in the paper. According to a massive scientific study, one that made news around the world, a significant amount of cancer is preventable - if only the public makes the necessary lifestyle changes. Shape up, people! You're too fat! Your gluttony and sloth are killing you!

"The most striking finding in the report is that excess body fat increases risk for numerous cancers," said Phillip James, one of the study's authors and chairman of the British-based International Obesity Taskforce. Millions of cancer deaths could be prevented, said the experts, if the public paid more attention to diet, exercise and weight.

Well, who wants cancer? Not me. So I read carefully to find out what I have to do. The first thing I learned is that I'd better lose weight. In fact, almost everybody should. Not being overweight isn't good enough, the experts say, because what you really need to be is thin. A 5-foot-4-inch woman (not unlike myself) should weigh, say, around 117 pounds and fit into a size 6. Even a slight amount of excess weight is bad.

As for food, I'll have to cut out steak and other kinds of red meat, especially if it's barbecued. I should stay away from bacon, beer and wine, as well as anything with a high calorie count. I really should restrict myself to skinless chicken, whole grains, water and lots of fruit and veg. Exercise? An hour a day is best.

I ought to be thrilled at the news that I can significantly cut my risk of getting cancer. So why am I so depressed? I'll tell you why. Unless you are genetically blessed with skinny genes (I'm not), avoiding cancer means a lifetime of vigilance, calorie-counting, portion control and deprivation. The alternative is a lifetime of guilt and fear. I know what I'm supposed to do. And I'm not doing it!

Fortunately, there are two fundamental problems with this study. It isn't nearly as authoritative as it looks. And even if it were, the advice it offers is worthless. That's because the vast majority of people who want to lose weight are unable to keep it off, no matter how hard or how often they try, no matter how little they eat or how much they exercise. You might as well tell them they ought to walk on their hands instead of their feet.

That's not to say you've got a licence to gorge on chocolate croissants, or disregard what you eat. What I'm saying is that your control over your weight is quite limited. Each of us has a natural weight range of perhaps 20 or 30 pounds, and you should be thrilled if you can stay toward the bottom of yours. Even the most motivated, disciplined, focused people with the best possible behavioural, nutritional and exercise support cannot maintain a significant weight loss. Even Oprah gains it back.

Why do we refuse to face this sad but liberating truth? Well, lots of us would really, really like to weigh less. And we've been thoroughly brainwashed by the obesity industry, whose relentless message is that people can lose weight if only they try hard enough, and if they can't, it's their own fault.

The obesity industry is vast and growing. It includes drug companies, weight-loss centres, government bureaucrats and thousands upon thousands of nutritionists, doctors, scientists and academics. It encompasses a huge range of economic and professional interests. As New York Times reporter Gina Kolata says in her indispensable book, Rethinking Thin, there's something in it for everyone. Read it, if only so you'll stop feeling guilty.

Okay, so maybe you're not as weak and hopeless as you think. But according to that cancer study, you're still doomed. Doomed to significantly higher risk of cancer because you're fat, or even a size 12.

Don't believe it. There is no epidemic of cancer among fat people. There is an epidemic of cancer among people who live in the developed world in comparison to the Third World, which means that if you really want to cut your risk you would be well advised to live like a Chinese peasant (minus the cigarettes). If you're a woman and you're scared of breast cancer, you should also skip the proteins, not menstruate till you're 15, make sure to have eight or nine kids and breastfeed them.

A useful critique of this week's cancer study, which was issued by the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research Prevention, is available on the JunkFood Science website. I highly recommend it. Although this study bills itself as the definitive meta-study of all time, it leaves a whole lot out. For example, it leaves out a massive Harvard study (71,910 women and 37,725 men followed for 15 years) to find out whether eating fruits and vegetables lowers cancer risk. The short answer: No. It also leaves out the largest meat study ever done, which aimed to find out whether eating red meat and processed meat increases the risk of colorectal cancer. The short answer: No. Nor does it mention a landmark study of diet and health, known as the Women's Health Initiative Dietary Modification Trial. In this massive trial, 48,835 postmenopausal women (the age most at risk for developing heart disease and cancers) were randomly assigned to two groups. One group ate an unrestricted diet, and the other group ate the kind of low-fat "healthy" diet prescribed in the cancer study. Both groups were followed for more than eight years.

The researchers expected to find significant clinical benefits from the "healthy" diet. But the results, published last year, were a major surprise. Eight years of "healthy eating" made no difference to the women's health. There was no effect on the incidence of cancer or heart disease. Not only that, there was virtually no long-term effect on their weight. They wound up weighing around a pound less than the women in the unrestricted eating group.

Wouldn't you be mad if you were in the healthy group? Think of all those calories counted and chocolate croissants forgone, and for nothing.

So here's my two cents of advice. Don't blame yourself if you can't stick to a diet. Don't blame yourself if you get cancer either. Honest, it's not your fault! Eat a steak once in a while.

Pick one with lots of fat. Enjoy it.

In case anyone wants to discuss this (and it's fine if you don't), let me put this right out there. I'm heavy. I eat healthfully, because I care about myself and my well being. I exercise, because it's healthier for a body to move than not move, and because I feel so much better when I do.

Of course it's healthier to eat fresh, whole foods than fast food. Of course we shouldn't load our bodies with salt, trans fat, processed white flour and white sugar. Of course it's healthier not to drink alcohol to excess, and not to smoke. Garbage in, garbage out. I know that, and my life reflects it.

But having lived on the weight-loss treadmill for many years - and having driven myself nearly insane on it - and having written about people who almost died on that treadmill - then having liberated myself from it through years of hard work - I've come to see these perennial scolding weight-loss stories in a new light.

Food is wonderful. Eating is wonderful. Creating good food belongs with music, art or architecture, on the list of wondrous human endeavors, and eating good food is one of life's great pleasures. For me, so is drinking wine. Neither needs to be done to excess to be enjoyed, but a little excess once in a while is all right, too.

Food is not poison, always to be avoided, or only sampled with apology. Life is too short for so much self-denial.

I don't want to go into my whole diet and weight-loss history. It's boring, and it's behind me. I'll just say this: I used to care a lot more about weight. Now I care a lot more about health, and happiness. I am heavier, healthier and happier. It's a gift I wish I could give every person who beats herself up (usually herself) over her weight, or lives in a state of constant denial*.

In all the years I've been writing wmtc, I have only touched on this issue once. That's because part of my healthy attitude about my body shape and size - my hard-won, liberated attitude! - is that I don't talk about it. I have wholly rejected the obsessive discussion of weight-loss that much of our world engages in (and that I used to do, too), and I don't want to bring it to this blog.

But this column was just too good to pass up. Thank you, Margaret Wente. There, I said it.



* Denial meaning restriction, denying yourself things that you want, not the psychological defense mechanism of not acknowledging potentially painful subjects.

practical question of the day number two: restaurant needed for interview

This question is Toronto-based. I need a place where I can take someone out for an inexpensive, relaxed meal and conduct an interview.

In New York City, I used to do my interviews in coffee shops - what would be called a diner in the rest of the country (even across the river in New Jersey). Coffee shops were perfect: large menu, decent food, I could afford to pick up the tab, and no one ever rushes you. The relaxed atmosphere, unpretentious and anonymous, helped people feel comfortable talking.

But do coffee shops or diners exist in Toronto? I haven't seen them. I don't want to go to a Tim Horton's or a Starbucks, I need something with a decent menu for dinner. Maybe what I need in this town is a pub? There certainly are a lot of good pubs in T.O.

In any case, pub, diner or coffee shop, those are the requirements: inexpensive, decent food, relaxed and informal atmosphere where we won't be rushed. And preferably near College & Spadina. Any ideas?

practical question of the day number one: air miles

Do you use Air Miles?

Crazy as it seems - considering I live to travel and we spend quite a bit of money at the LCBO - we do not.

Air Miles are a huge, Canada-wide, loyalty-incentive program, and the LCBO is the provincially controlled wine and liquor retailer in Ontario. The LCBO awards one Air Mile for every $25 spent there.

When we first moved to Canada, someone told me Air Miles were not actually redeemable for air travel, but only for "rewards," i.e., designated junk at designated stores. And I believed them. I took a cursory glance at the website, saw all the store logos and "merchandise rewards," and didn't sign up.

Plus, I'm like an addict when it comes to loyalty programs. I purposely don't get a lot of loyalty cards, because when I have them, I let them control all my spending habits. When I had a card from Athlete's Foot - buy 10 pairs of sneakers, get the 11th at half price - I went out of my way to buy my sneakers there, to a ridiculous degree. I had a punch-card from a salad place in Rockefeller Centre. I lived for that 12th, free salad. You get the picture.

I don't like this consumer behaviour, and I get tired of being asked for points cards everywhere I go, so I avoid most of the cards in the first place. I only use the ones that give you a discount on the spot, like Chapters or PetSmart.

Well, that's not completely true. We collect Petro Points, but then, we have to buy gas anyway. And I am filling up cards from Extreme Pita, but I love those pitas! Do you see what I mean?

Anyway... Combine this loyalty-addict tendency with my incorrect belief that Air Miles don't really buy free travel, and we never signed up.

So do you collect Air Miles? Do you use them? Is it a good program, where you can easily redeem your points for travel? Are the travel awards highly restricted? Can you put a bunch of points towards air travel, and pay for the balance, or do you have to collect all the points needed, and pay entirely with points? Are there a lot of catches, in general? I don't want to save points for years just to learn that I can't use them for this or that, or that they expired, or some other surprise.

I've looked at the FAQs on the Air Miles website, but I'd like to hear from people who've actually used them.

And then, how do I live with our two years of LCBO purchases from which we didn't get Air Miles?? I don't think you can answer that one.

stockwell day uses de facto death penalty against alberta man

As I'm sure you already know, the Harper government announced that it will not intervene on behalf of a Canadian citizen on death row in the US.

Citing the desire to "preserve public safety here in Canada," Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said the government will not bring Ronald Allen Smith back to Canada. Smith, from Alberta, has been on death row in Montana for more than 20 years.

Day told the House of Commons on Thursday: "We will not actively pursue bringing back to Canada murderers who have been tried in a democratic country that supports the rule of law."

A democratic country that supports the rule of law? What country would that be, Mr. Day?

As you know, I have not been overly alarmed about the Harper government, and have felt that their resemblance to the neocons to the south is often exaggerated. Well, those days are gone. The alarm bell just went off.

Harper and Day are reversing 30 years of policy in Canada with no public debate or citizen input. At a time when increasing numbers of Americans are withdrawing their support for the death penalty, this Canadian government is allowing a Canadian citizen to be executed.

Do you see the connection between this and what happened to Maher Arar? Does Canada think it can keep its hands clean while it allows other countries to do the dirty work? It doesn't work that way. The government's refusal to intervene on behalf of Smith amounts to a de facto death penalty in Canada.

I've seen some blogs by Canadian wingnuts with the predictable spew: the Liberals and NDP support murderers, and Ronald Smith did these really bad things, who needs him in Canada.

These transparent pseudo-arguments only further prove the point.

In not using capital punishment, Canada aligns itself with the civilized world. There is no death penalty here. Period. It doesn't matter what the man did. And no one is asking for Smith to be released. He can live the rest of his life in prison in Canada - his natural life, that is.

I don't know if Stephen Harper and Stockwell Day would really try to re-open the death penalty debate, or if they are just kissing up to the US and won't do anything to cross them.

Either way, this is very frightening. Heaven help us if these people ever get a majority government.

(And PS will the Liberals please get their heads out of their asses and call an election already?)

did the mmp referendum ever have a chance?

Fair Vote Ontario, a program of Fair Vote Canada, has called on Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty to address the flawed electoral reform referendum process. They say that Ontario has not met its commitment to give voters an opportunity to make an informed decision on the best electoral system.

June Macdonald, President of Fair Vote Ontario, pointed to three design flaws in the referendum process that denied voters the opportunity they were promised.

First, the citizens' assembly process – which we enthusiastically support – was unnecessarily delayed until the end of the government’s first mandate. With four years to take action, the government did not convene the Assembly until one year prior to the referendum date. By the time the Assembly could issue its report, the referendum was less than five months away, including the summer vacation period, which left little time for public debate.

Second, the public education program was glaringly inadequate. The referendum was triggered by a recommendation from the Citizens' Assembly, which asked that the public education campaign include the Assembly's rationale for recommending MMP. Unlike the British Columbia referendum, the Assembly's report was not distributed to all households – in fact, the government stopped printing the Assembly's summary brochure several months before the referendum, blocking widespread distribution to voters.

Third, while it had no effect on the October 10 vote, the application of an unfair referendum threshold of 60 per cent is simply unacceptable in a modern democracy. Prior to the application of the rigged threshold in two other recent electoral reform referendums, no provincial or federal referendum in Canadian history used any threshold other than the democratic standard of 50 per cent plus one. The all-party Select Committee on Electoral Reform, which had a majority of members from the Liberal Party, recommended a simple majority threshold.

Premier McGuinty promised a citizen-driven process for electoral reform, including a citizens' assembly to assess the need for reform, and a referendum to decide upon any recommendation from that assembly. That was the right approach, but the implementation was so severely flawed, Ontarians have not yet had the chance to make an informed decision on electoral reform. As the new government begins setting its agenda for the coming year, we call on Premier McGuinty to address this issue as soon as possible.

There's lots of good information at the Fair Vote Canada website, including a Democracy Quiz (test your knowledge of Canada's electoral system) and a petition to make every vote count. Read and learn.

a reader survey: should canada let them stay?

I've been blogging about the War Resisters Support Campaign for a while now, and even longer about war resisters in general. You all know I feel strongly that Canada should allow these brave men and women to make a new life in this country. Most Canadians I've spoken to agree.

Of course I have received some negative comments, as will happen about nearly any issue. The negative views are based on ignorance and false assumptions: the argument says the soldiers volunteered for duty, and so have an obligation to continue. This is not actually true.

The negative opinions are probably also based on some bigotry. Some Canadians believe too many people are allowed to live in Canada, that immigration is "out of control", and they react negatively to almost anyone's desire to stay in Canada.

In addition, some people love all authority and hate all defiance of it. A soldier breaking ranks to leave the military is offensive to many people, and they look no further.

In this post, I'd like to hear your thoughts. I'm soliciting all opinions, and none will be deleted, unless they violate the comment policy of this blog. I ask, however, that you read this entire post before commenting.

The background:

Many people joined the US military after the attacks of September 11th, because they wanted to help protect their country and the world from terrorism. Others joined - and this is one of the most common reasons for joining the military in the United States - because they could not find employment with a living wage, lacked the education to find anything but minimum-wage employment (now a whopping $5.85 per hour!), and lacked health insurance.

Military recruiters work on a quota and commission or bonus system; their livelihood depends on signing people up. They are notorious for telling recruits whatever it takes to get them to sign.

Joshua Key, for example, was promised dozens of time that, because he had a family, he would not see active combat. He was promised this up until the minute he signed, then promptly shipped to a combat-training unit and off to Iraq. [Source: The Deserter's Tale, by Joshua Key and Lawrence Hill, and Key's sworn testimony to the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board.]

The contract that recruits sign contains a clause giving the military the right to change the contract at any time, forbidding the recruit the right to change anything, and requiring the recruit to adhere to the terms of the contract forever, no matter what they become or how they are changed.

Soldiers who have served out the full terms of their contracts in Iraq are then "stop-lossed": their contracts are involuntarily extended and they are ordered to return to combat. They have no legal recourse; noncompliance constitutes desertion of the military during wartime, a capital offense. Is this service voluntary?

Many links about stop-loss can be found in my comments here. As I say there, calling the US military "voluntary" is like calling breathing optional.

Even those soldiers who consider themselves volunteers did not volunteer for what they are experiencing. They are not protecting their country. US troops in Iraq are, on a daily and routine basis, terrorizing the civilian population, attacking and killing civilians, torturing civilian prisoners, and committing war crimes as defined by the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg Principles and all other applicable international law.

The Nuremberg Principles state:

Principle I: Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore and liable to punishment.

Principle II: The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law.

Principle III: The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.

Principle IV: The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

Principle V: Any person charged with a crime under international law has the right to a fair trial on the facts and law.

Principle VII: Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.

In other words, AWOL US soldiers are not only following their consciences and their humanity, they are complying with international law. The United States is in violation of international law. The AWOL vets are only in violation of US law.

If they are forced to return to the US, AWOL soldiers face criminal prosecution, imprisonment and a possible death sentence. They face a dishonourable discharge, which effectively ends one's prospects for jobs, education loans, mortgages, and the like.

The war resisters are asking only for the chance to start again in Canada - to live here legally, to work, to pay taxes, to become part of Canadian society.

* * * *

That's the background. Everything is verifiable, although I will not get caught up in demands for proof.

My questions are:

Do you think Canada should allow former US troops who are absent-without-leave to remain legally in Canada? Why or why not?

Rules:

1. Please read this entire post before you comment.

2. If you challenge any of my information, be prepared to back up your claims.

3. Please refrain from personal attacks. Bigoted statements of any kind will be deleted, and you will be banned from further discussion.

Obviously this is not meant to be a scientific survey. I just want to hear what you all have to say. Thanks.

rcmp says it will release taser video

The RCMP now says it will release the video, shot by bystander Paul Pritchard, of Robert Dziekanski being tasered - that is, murdered - by police.

Pritchard went to court this week to try to get back the video, which he voluntarily handed over to the RCMP. The RCMP now says they will return the video. They've said that before. Pritchard says he will continue with his lawsuit, just in case.

fear of veils

Jeffrey Simpson had a good column in today's Globe and Mail about the Conservative's ridiculous proposal to require Canadian voters to show their faces in order to vote.

As many people have pointed out, this would mean that all the Canadians who spend the winter in warmer climes - and those currently serving in Afghanistan - would be barred from voting. After all, a requirement is a requirement, and if it's fair for a few women in Quebec, it's fair for a few thousand Canadians in Florida and Arizona.

But of course this proposed amendment to the Canada Elections Act isn't about fairness. It's about bigotry and xenophobia.

If logic prevails - which, in this case, it likely won't - about 80,000 Canadians who voted by postal ballot in the last election will be denied the chance to vote that way in the next one.

The reason? Nobody sees their faces. They vote from Florida or Hawaii or Arizona or Europe or wherever without ever showing their faces at a polling booth or sending along a piece of photo identification. That's the way postal balloting works, and always has.

But, according to a foolish amendment to the Canada Elections Act introduced recently in Parliament, anyone who does not show his or her face at a polling station will not be able to vote.

So, by logical extension, "snowbirds" and other Canadians out of the country for an election should be disenfranchised.

But, of course, that's not likely to happen, because the amendment is not about logic but rather about fear and prejudice.

This amendment arose because of xenophobia in Quebec, where a handful of Muslim women wanted to vote fully veiled.

The province had already embarrassed itself through worldwide media coverage after the town of Hérouxville started passing resolutions against stoning and other manifestations of extreme Muslim law.

Capitalizing on this irrational fear of the "other," Mario Dumont's Action Démocratique du Québec did surprisingly well in the Quebec election in April. In this climate, alas, a big deal was therefore made about veiled Muslim women voting in three federal by-elections called in late July, even though it was estimated that only 700 veiled women might conceivably have wanted to vote in the three ridings, almost all in Outremont.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper inflamed matters more by comments delivered while in Australia. He declared, quite wrongly, that Canada's Chief Electoral Officer, Marc Mayrand, was rewriting Parliament's law that the Prime Minister insisted required visual identification. Mr. Mayrand, said the Prime Minister, should apply Parliament's law, not reinterpret it.

But the law, as it then stood, said no such thing. It allowed people to vote without showing their faces provided they had two pieces of identification or had their identity vouched for under oath by another voter from the same district.

Mr. Harper, therefore, was either pandering to base instincts in Quebec on the eve of by-elections, or was genuinely misinformed about Parliament's law. We shall never know the motivation.

. . . .

The amendment, of course, leaves the inconsistency that the grandstanders now must fill. How does Parliament insist on visual identification for Muslim women who wish to veil themselves, while allowing tens of thousands of sun worshippers and others outside the country to vote by postal ballot?

These postal voters outnumber the veiled women by, oh, 8,000 to 1, so do we disenfranchise them? Should Parliament make them submit a copy of their passports with their postal ballots? The grandstanders in Parliament and the xenophobes who made a mountain of this molehill will presumably give us the answers.

Or they will throw logic aside, and crack down on veiled women and let the postal voters do what they have always done without a fuss. But if this were to be the result, the rather ugly motivations behind the amendment will be unveiled.