Regarding the tumbling torchbearer:

http://news.guelphmercury.com/News/article/594745

last line:" On Dec. 28, a group of protesters ran into security personnel surrounding a torchbearer during the relay through Guelph’s downtown. Cortney Hansen, who was carrying the torch, fell as a result."

I think if she really was tripped they would have had some great footage. Every inch of this ridiculous run has been covered ad nauseum by CTV. They show a reel of runners EVERY NIGHT.

Somewhere there is film. Buried.

Love the tone of this one:

http://www.guelphtribune.ca/news/article/201963

Titled: "Unions nix pay plan, service cuts due"

Yup, you read it right It's the city worker's unions fault that the services are getting cut. It just so happens that the amount they are attempting to save is almost the exact amount that our city has spent acquiring property to build the new mega library see:

http://www.unionbook.org/pg/blog/labourshow/read/19937/family-thrift-store-the-long-lost-article

The building is empty and the heat is off - its been almost a year now and it may sit for at least another five! A functioning popular business in the downtown was kicked out by the landlord and the new landlord is the city.  Left to rot like downtown Brantford.

http://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/article/759021--in-brantford-heritage-treasures-or-hopeless-hovels

The Tribune is our flyer wrapper free paper and the city is one of it's largest advertisers. Many read it,  others not,  but every home gets a copy and most will parse the headline not hearing the full story. Enter the Angry Red Bloggers!

Short version is the city workers backed most of the members of the current council in the last election who are now imposing this new deal on them. Screw your collective agreement folks, you're getting furlough days whether you want them or not. Its for the best. The people love it when we spoiled public service brats get shat on. Beat on the brat the Ramones said. Oh yeah!

They are calling them "Karen Days" after the mayor:

http://news.guelphmercury.com/article/594564

But the events in our teeny tiny town have got nothing on Glasgow these days:

http://www.scottishsocialistparty.org/SSP-Trade-Unionists/labours-war-against-public-services.html

How do they keep calling themselves the Labour Party? How is our council Progressive?

Maybe its time to take a run at it in October...

Another boneheaded Republican Reform a Tory move:

http://www.cepal.ca/?p=695

And the habit of stacking EVERYTHING with whackjobbery:

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/article/759582--harper-s-new-grim-consensus

An exerpt from this:

"...In a phrase used four years ago by Michael Van Pelt, one of Harper's new appointments to Rights and Democracy, the agency is part of the older "pan-Canadian consensus" that the present government wants to change.

Writing in the magazine Policy Options, Van Pelt (who heads the evangelical Christian think-tank Cardus) and associate Ray Penning argued that this old, small-l liberal consensus – which both Liberals and Tories ascribed to for years and which emphasizes "an aggressive rights-based polity that identifies with tolerance" – is ending."

I would say "has ended" actually.  We have been blessed with the worst kind of idealogues. Granted there are many on the left too but COME ON! The Tories are the only party that could make an "earth is only 6000 years old" believing dropout the President of the Treasury board. But he is handsome though. Wow I feel confident! You betcha!

http://www.stockwellday.com/EN/stockwell_day/

Stockwell is " identified as one of Canada's leading voices in advocating democratic reform, and presently serves as Vice Chair of the International Democrat Union. "

Truth about that gang here:

http://www.idu.org/history.aspx

Margaret Thatcher as Champion of Democracy?! I threw up a little bit in my mouth writing that.

Now...there are stellar dropouts and fantastic Christian people. You know who you are. Hearts.

Please run for office if only to proove that the current regime does not represent you. Back somebody that isnt a balloon.

Folks, they have to go. I have accepted the fact that our riding will be Liberal and Im only just okay with that because it isnt the Tory and I also accept that the electoral system is damaged goods.

So do what you have to - the coalition wasn't so bad an idea, was it? Is that not how we got Universal Health Care? A national pension plan? The Tory wags keep calling it the attempt to "seize control", as if Castro was backing it.

30% + 10.5% + 17.5% = 58% (of seats) is a D on an exam but a true majority nonetheless. Add in the Green vote and I believe its a "C".

37.65% is a failure in anybody's book.

Heck, here I am commenting on another conference at our beloved University. I have a stronger link to this one as I have been to it about 18 times. The 29th Guelph Organic Conference is taking place this weekend. This is the first year I have gone as "media" but no matter. I didnt attend a single seminar.  Nothing for a labour reporter to report, really. Well there is and I might track that down this afternoon but Im feeling a bit woozy....

Good friends of mine are organic farmers. It was my time on their farm that led me here in the first place and let me sort out a direction, another way of approaching living that was a great help to an angry 20 year old gen xer with no prospects, skills or bearings. They are still doing it, taking on apprentices every year and passing on a skill set and way of life that is rapidly disappearing in this country. We need more of them, and fast.

Like most Gen Xers, I hate when things are co-opted. Things truck along merrily for a time and then you realise that something you supported and loved is just not the same, not what it was and not in a good way; we always used to say it had "sold out"  Such is the case with the Organic Conference.

I used to always get the dirty hippy label.  One day heading to work two detectives drove up on to the sidewalk and searched me and my stuff, illegal I know now but what do you do.  I was just some schlub going to work. Fresh back from the farm and sporting an Amish-y beard. Part beatnik, part biker. I had a  great part time union job in a supermarket. I knew which side I was on...

So when a very loaded ($ wise) woman in a Ford Escalade and a massive rock on her finger waved me down and asked me for directions to the Organic Conference yestreen, as she was a volunteer, I gave her directions but I have to say, yes I did judge.  Not a personal judgement really but a demographic one in that the organic food movement has been hijacked by corporate interests. Whole Foodism. Yes we are great and fair trade and organic etc but only the elite can afford our stuff and we treat our workers like shit but hey, its worth it! There is something about a vehicle that seats eight being driven by one person that just doesn't square with me in an organic sense.

This sums it up- the $11 organic stuffed pepper entree at the conference was sold to the students today for $4.39.  Same food! Why pay more? Why charge more? Because its organical and perhaps ecobio. Better. Higher yum factor! Or is there a captive audience caught by the yarbles here?

Tis probably just me though. I tend to run when I smell money. Hence my lack of seminars. And a pathetic lack of media availability was evident. Put it this way- six interviews booked, one successful chat. They all stiffed me. I tried. Fair Trade, Co-ops, literacy among migrant workers, I had it all covered.  But I bring in zero $. What is it all about, really?

And trying to be coherent on a blog after a couple of tinnies (and I mean that in the old sense) is just ridiculous.

Good fresh reasonable organical food for all!

Eco Bio was the tongue and cheek name that my old boss in the Crop Science department thought would be a good name for a quasi-organic food label. Greenwashy and says it all. Great stuff.

I was reminded of this at the yearly envirosci conference on campus yesterday.  This years topic was "environmental economics" with the afternoon session being "alternatives to capitalism".  Cue cartoon eyeballs falling out of my head. Needless to say, it was fairly disappointing. The kids have lost any hint of the fight the man verve that once existed.  Here is a quote from the 1969 yearbook from U of G, which I fished out of the garbage one day. (Having it in my posession is considered "theft" by the way):

"The XXXII CUS congress, held this year at Guelph, attacked the socialising effect of the modern North American education system, the corporate control of universities and the basic organisation of society itself. Delegates strongly criticised the authoritarianism and repression of Canadian society and advocated a democratic, non-exploitative alternative."

Wha?

One of yesterdays speakers was from HP, yes that HP, talking about how envrionmentally friendly their products were. Meanwhile, elsewhere on campus, a pile of e-waste sits comprised of shitty dead inkjet printers, most of which are .... HP.

Eco Bio!

But the clincher was the endnote speaker, Frank Dejong, former leader of the Ontario Green Party and still a candidate somewhere in Toronto for the mysterious election we might be having this year maybe. I knew Frank back in the day, as I was in when there was still room for lefties, but the following quote will reveal why he is still with them and I am not:

"It doesnt matter whether a job from Canada goes to China or India."

Wha?

This was not a slip of the tongue. I think it should be called a "vert-ian slip", wherein a Canadian Green reveals their genuine conservative libertiarian colours awash in a sea of Greenspeak.

Eco Bio!

Getting pretty sick of this:

http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2009/12/30/parliament-prorogation-harper.html

Our conservative masters (a minority though) have suspended parliament again until after the Olympics! Reason given: none! Probable reasons: "...widely seen as a strategic move by Harper to gain a majority on Senate committees while possibly also avoiding criticism over the Afghan detainee issue."

Call the effen election!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

One of the torchbearers took a tumble in town today.

Wasnt there, cant really say but here's what the paper said:

http://news.guelphmercury.com/News/article/579210

The Doobie did a "run" in a horse drawn carriage around the downtown.  The Royal Bank, Coca Cola and CTV decided who got to carry it.  A step up from 1936??

From the BBC:

"... the flame's arrival in Vienna prompted major pro-Nazi demonstrations, helping pave the way for the Anschluss, or annexation of Austria, in 1938.

In Hungary gypsy musicians who serenaded the flame faced within a few years deportation to Nazi death camps.

Other countries on the relay route like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia would soon be invaded by Germans equipped not with Krupp torches but with Krupp munitions.

And Carl Diem, the relay's inventor, ended the war as fanatical military commander at the Olympic stadium in Berlin, refusing to accept that the Third Reich was over."

The fascist fire becomes the beacon of capital.  Plus ca change....

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2009/12/25/accident-construction.html

This would not normally get any coverage but since this time of year is generally slow for news it has gone national. They have stated that it has been difficult to get in touch with the families because it is Christmas but they have only today started refering to these men as "migrant workers" a phrase that NEVER appears in the mainstream:

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/742728--4-migrant-workers-die-in-plunge-from-highrise

Now that the world junior hockey is on we will never hear what happened. Except maybe here:

http://www.migrante.ca/

or here:

http://www.justicia4migrantworkers.org/

http://www.rabble.ca/babble/labour-and-consumption/four-workers-die-war-survive-one-more-critical-condition

http://www.olympicshame2010.com/

the animation is more hilarious than it should be considering the seriousness of the topic

the government is not pleased:

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/741704--could-a-cyberguru-make-us-look-cuddly

someone just needs to convince the Conservatives that the Olympic movement is anti-Israel and they will pull all of the funding:

http://www.rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/fwilson/2009/12/way-go-team-canada

man we really suck large these days. Im pulling out my dusty EC passport and joining

  The Non-Canadian group

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/428397/south_park_blame_canada/

check this out:

http://www.vancouver2010.com/sustainability/

some of the finest greenwashing our corporate masters could muster....