Friday 8 June 2012

All Dead But One

It’s time these Canadian heroes were recognized

8 June 2012 — Quick, identify the Canadian battalion that celebrated its 75^th anniversary in May.

If you didn’t guess the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion (Mac-Paps) you’re not alone. Few would.

Their founding date, May 1937, went unheralded and the vets who served with them in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) won’t be celebrating either. Of approximately 1,543 original members, only Jules Paivio is still alive and at 95, he’s too frail to be kicking up his heels.

There was a time when Canadians held the Mac-Paps in high esteem.

In my high school days in the 1950s, a classmate’s father had served with them, leaving me and my chums awestruck. We knew the background — they were Canadian volunteers who’d gone to Spain to fight the fascists.

For me at the time, with one brother dead at Dieppe in 1942, and a second a North Atlantic navy vet, the Mac-Paps were heroes of the highest order.

You should abandon foreign wars, come back home to free

293,000 American teen slaves: a slaver penalty is only $500

05 June 2012 COLUMBIA Maryland USA —

They walked to his car, and he pushed her inside.

As he drove away, the girl opened the door and rolled out, a maneuver she’d learned from Denene Yates, founder of Safe House of Hope in Baltimore, which provides support services for victims of human trafficking.

Yates speaks at schools around the area, and about a month ago she spoke at the Bain Center in Columbia to more than 100 about a trade she said was right under their noses.

The girl didn’t want to report the incident, said Yates, but there are still substantial reports of trafficking nonetheless.

“The Department of Justice recognizes [that up to] 293,000 of our own teens” are involved in human trafficking, said Yates. (More)

Harper Conservative Randy Hoback

	Paranoid red-bater Joe McCarthy

“Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”
 
With those words Republican Senator Joe McCarthy set off a 10-year witch hunt in the US for just about anyone whose political colour was a redder shade of pink. He was finally censured by the Senate but not before he ruined a lot of lives and dealt a body blow to democracy in the USofA.
 
Whenever I came across the old news reels of that time, I thanked God I didn’t live in a country that would permit that sort of bigoted, callow, scape-goating attack on its own citizens.
 
I can’t say that anymore. In the House Finance committee, a week or so ago, MPs were hearing expert testimony on the impact of Bill C-38, the Budget Implementation Bill. Randy Hoback is a member. He’s the Conservative  MP from Prince Albert Saskatchewan, which is not far from Tommy Douglas’s old riding.
 
Hoback attacked the credibility of United Steel Workers economist Erin Weir by demanding, “Have you or have you ever been a member of the NDP party, or are you presently a member of the NDP party?”
 
Clearly Hoback is not as eloquent as Joe McCarthy was, and so he blunted his own attack. But his demand resounds like a siren.
 
Was it a question of his own making? Or was it one that the Prime Minister’s Office put in his mouth?
 
Not that it really matters ... for it begs another, more important question. What are we becoming that a democratically elected Canadian can even ask such a thing, and in such a manner, in the heart of our Parliament.
 
© David McLaren May 2012

A Close exception on mental illness

08 June 2012 — A long career in journalism leaves one leery of the usually vain, shallow and self-centred species known as celebrities. They gain undeserved space in newspapers and magazines and far too much attention on radio and television. They make grocery store checkouts loathsome places.

With that caveat, I will make my second exception to my anti-celebrity status — the first being Jean Beliveau, the hockey star who personifies a class act.

Actor Glenn Close made a presentation to the anti-stigma conference in Ottawa put on by the Mental Health Commission of Canada. Her remarks were all about living with mental illness and not about herself. She related personal experiences of her family to make her point about the need for society to recognize and deal with mental illness. She called it “the last and most challenging civil rights issue of our time.”

The Future of Farming

Building a sustainable food model for cities

This was the end of the thirties and there were no M 2 fast highways connecting the country. After stopping for breakfast in Carlysle on the English-Scottish border we arrived at our destination to be reunited with our husbands and fathers. They had arrived weeks earlier and were now living at Dollarbeg, “the castle,” a rather posh refugee camp for antifascist Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia.

Beating the Drum

The Techno Junkies

08 June 2012 —

Mars One, the company behind the initiative, has earned the endorsement of a Nobel prize winning physicist, Gerard ‘t Hooft, who says the plan is possible.

There’s just one catch. The team won’t come back.

Instead, Mars One participants will create settlement on the red planet, where their lives will be recorded as part of a bizarre, lifelong media stunt.

On its website, Mars One explains, “The entire world will be able to watch and help with decisions as the teams of settlers are selected, follow their extensive training and preparation for the mission and of course observe their settling on Mars once arrived.” (More)

The new report* shows that the figure for Europe accounts for nearly 69% of the total global number of expected nuclear power reactor closures by 2030, the largest amount for any region. Baring any changes, the European commercial nuclear decommissioning market value stands at $81,484m.

As of January 2012, France, the UK and Russia have the highest decommissioning market values in Europe, with market values of $21,494m, $18,717m, and $13,446m, respectively. (More)

05 January 2012 —

“Ugh, I’m only eating lettuce and peas. I got so fat over Christmas.”

You turn around to find that she’s a tiny little size two bombshell and as you take your delicious turkey and cheese melt, you shoot eye daggers of hatred her way.

Sadly, you’ve seen girls like her before. (You may even have been that girl before.) “I think most women who fat talk are thin or healthy,” says body image researcher and Northwestern University professor, Renee Engeln-Maddox, Ph.D.

But before you cast your wrath on them, take a minute to wonder why they do it. (More)