Spoon-Fed or Forked Over?

With the recent Julian Assange fiasco growing ever more convoluted with each passing day, it’s articles like Julie Webb-Pullman’s, Wikileaks: Play The Ball Not The Man and Check Who’s Kicking, that makes everything that much more difficult to follow.

Or so it would seem. But it’s words such as these that serve to “ground,” at least my opinions, concerning matters at hand. There are much more aspects to any one “story” than you hear from any one source or group of sources. “Play the ball not the man,” indeed. But it is what Julie wrote to end today’s Dissident Voice piece that everyone would benefit from;

But you don’t need me to tell you — read the links and their footnotes, and anything else you can get your hands on [emphasis mine!] — and take a stab at coming to your own conclusions. It beats being spoon-fed, or forked over.

No truer words could be written about these or any other issues of the day…

It Needs to Stop!

I haven’t much of anything interesting to say (not that I ever do), regarding the events that occurred on this day in 1989. But I couldn’t let this day pass without, in the very least, mentioning it’s significance.

Today, sadly, marks the 21st anniversary of the Montreal Massacre. Marc Lépine, “armed with a legally obtained Mini-14 rifle and a hunting knife,” walked into Montreal’s École Polytechnique and “shot twenty-eight people [killing fourteen women, while injuring ten more women and four men, all in an attempt to “fight feminism”] before killing himself…”

Continue reading It Needs to Stop!

Can You Seriously Blame Haitians?

Just a quick note this morning, a purely reactionary one to a bit I heard on CBC this morning, concerning Haitian distrust over solutions (read: medication) to fight the raging cholera epidemic. And apparently Voudoo is getting the blame for that distrust.

However I do think the a much more relevant reason for why Haitians apparently distrust advice from people trying to help them is, remember, where this advice (read: “guidance”) is coming from.

The same people who have occupied their country since a Western backed coup of their democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 2004? The same people who have exiled him and continue to keep their President banished in central South Africa? The same people who refuse to let the most popular political party in Haiti, Fanmi Lavalas, to run in the upcoming elections. The same people who, arguably, brought this epidemic to Haiti, in the first place (apparently the strain of cholera making its rounds in Haiti right now is endemic of Nepal, not the Caribbean)? The same people holding back aid money that was promised to them after the January 12th earthquake? I could go on…

Continue reading Can You Seriously Blame Haitians?

When all is said and done

What could I add to a quote from Robert Fisk’s recent piece The shaming of America about the recent WikiLeaks disclosure of “The Iraq War Logs”? Not a fuck of a lot. So;

The truth, of course, is that if this vast treasury of secret reports had proved that the body count was much lower than trumpeted by the press, that US soldiers never tolerated Iraqi police torture, rarely shot civilians at checkpoints and always brought killer mercenaries to account, US generals would be handing these files out to journalists free of charge on the steps of the Pentagon. They are furious not because secrecy has been breached, or because blood may be spilt, but because they have been caught out telling the lies we always knew they told…

Typical Fisk fashion, pure class!