Month: January 2019

uruguayanabombada: yungsouthasian: Refugees Welcome And this…









uruguayanabombada:

yungsouthasian:

Refugees Welcome

And this goes to all the other Western countries too

Nicely done. 

Certainly goes for #Canada, too.  

Not only has Canada taken in fewer refugees than even the UK (in spite of Mr Trudeau’s welcome tweet), our government is showing no interest in undoing the “Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement,” an agreement sought by Canada to keep down the potential number of refugees.  

“Last year, Canada received less than 0.2 per cent of the overall refugee population in the world, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).”

— Globe and Mail: Are asylum seekers crossing into Canada illegally?         A look at facts behind the controversy [August 1st, 2018]

Meanwhile, Canada is the 5th biggest war spender in NATO.  

If we can afford to destabilize other people’s countries, we can afford to accept the refugees such military interventionism causes.  

uruguayanabombada: yungsouthasian: Refugees Welcome And this…









uruguayanabombada:

yungsouthasian:

Refugees Welcome

And this goes to all the other Western countries too

Nicely done. 

Certainly goes for #Canada, too.  

Not only has Canada taken in fewer refugees than even the UK (in spite of Mr Trudeau’s welcome tweet), our government is showing no interest in undoing the “Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement,” an agreement sought by Canada to keep down the potential number of refugees.  

“Last year, Canada received less than 0.2 per cent of the overall refugee population in the world, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).”

— Globe and Mail: Are asylum seekers crossing into Canada illegally?         A look at facts behind the controversy [August 1st, 2018]

Meanwhile, Canada is the 5th biggest war spender in NATO.  

If we can afford to destabilize other people’s countries, we can afford to accept the refugees such military interventionism causes.  

LA’s teachers are ready to strike on Tuesday, rejecting privatization of public education

mostlysignssomeportents:

Last year saw a wave of teachers’ strikes across America, but mostly in red states where public education has been starved of funds, putting teachers on starvation wages, subjecting kids to dangerous conditions, and stripping schools of resources and even putting schools on four-day weeks.

But on January 10th, the teachers who educate the 694,000 students of the LA Unified School District (comparable to the entire student population of the state of Oklahoma) are heading on strike, in a deep blue city in a deep blue state. Their cause reveals the true, underlying issue of the national teachers’ strikes: privatization.

The project to use public funds to pay for private schools has been a darling of racists and religious cultists since Brown v Board of Education, when the idea of “charter schools” was floated as a way to legally exclude black children from publicly funded education. The racist project found allies in among the grifters of Christian fundamentalism, who perceived a way to merge state and church and receive public funding for parochial schools where evolution could be denied in favor of Bibilical superstition and the 5,000-year-old Earth (this force also drove the British “academy” school movement). It was the same devastating alliance that put Reagan in the White House: rich crooks exploiting the fears of religious fundamentalists to seize power and funnel millions in public funds into their own pockets.

The Democratic Party establishment fucking loves Ronald Reagan and firmly embraces the doctrine that says that state functions should be shifted to for-profit private hands – the main difference being that Democrats want a diverse oligarchy where the makeup of the 150 people who own the world is representative of the global population’s genders, skin colors, and origins (Republicans want those 150 people to be white, Christian men).

Handing public money to underperforming, for-profit charter schools with unqualified and underpaid teachers is the one issue that Democrats and Betsy DeVos agree on. Why not? Merill-Lynch, speaking for the bipartisan donor class has spent decades trumpeting the investment possibilities in an education sector “that views families as customers, schools as ‘retail outlets’ where educational services are received, and the school board as a customer service department that hears and addresses parental concerns.”

The philanthropic money laundry has allowed billionaire ideologues to style their anti-public-education crusade as an act of charity, turning poor, predominantly black areas (Detroit, Louisiana) into laboratories where junk-science experiments are carried out on racialized children, creating a wave of segregated, underperforming schools. For grifters, these separate-but-equal schools represent a major improvement over the Jim Crow of old: they produce shareholder dividends.

The new leadership of the LA teachers union campaigned explicitly on pushing back against the privatization of public education, helped by money laundering/election fraud scandals where dark money networks were caught hijacking control over the massive LA Unified School District.

Red state or blue, the issues that have galvanized LA teachers are the same ones that sent teachers out last year from West Virginia to Arizona and beyond.

https://boingboing.net/2019/01/06/9-most-terrifying-words-2.html

Privatization of public utilities and services is always a bad idea.

If big corporations and the .01% actually paid their share of taxes, there could be adequately funded universal public education (not dependent on corporate gift$)

Gofundme jumpstarts a golden era of snake oil as desperate people raise millions for quack homeopathy cancer “remedies”

mostlysignssomeportents:

In Patients’ crowdfunding campaigns for alternative cancer treatments, published by researchers from Simon Fraser University in The Lancet Oncology (Sci-Hub mirror) we learn that thanks to Gofundme, 13,000 people have raised $1.4 million to help 200 desperate cancer patients pay for ineffective homeopathic “treatments.”

A third of these fundraisers were launched by people who explicitly rejected evidence-based medicine and were seeking money to commit an especially grisly form of suicide, while enriching scammers who sell water as medicine.

https://boingboing.net/2019/01/06/suicide-by-water.html

houseofgriffons: missmarionmac: counterpunches: theunimpairedco…



houseofgriffons:

missmarionmac:

counterpunches:

theunimpairedcondition:

bewareofattackmusician:

dammit-clint:

thirsty-mind:

stupendousmelody:

When you are one with the music

Luvs it

WHO IS SHE

ALONDRA DE LA PARRA

#a warning to anyone out there attracted to women#she looks great in a tux

Have some more photos of her in action, because I love her:

And my all-time favorite:

She looks like she’s casting spells

Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative Government…



Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative Government calls this draft legislation “Bill 66, Restoring Ontario’s Competitiveness Act, 2018″.

“If developers can bypass agricultural protections, as Bill 66 would allow, it threatens our economy and our food supply.”

”If Bill 66 becomes law, the only notice residents would receive of an impending development is when the first bulldozer arrives.”

— Hold The Line, Waterloo Federation of Agriculture, & Smart Growth Waterloo Region

[Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator Dec. 11, 2018]

“Restoring Ontario’s Competitiveness Act.”

Among its targets is the Greenbelt Act. Bill 66 would allow municipalities to circumvent Greenbelt protections by enacting “Open for Business” bylaws under which they could approve factories and business parks within the Greenbelt.

Smaller municipalities (under 250,000) would simply need to show the Ford government that their Greenbelt development would create 50 jobs. For larger cities the requirement would be 100 jobs.

Related measures in Bill 66 would empower municipalities to exempt developers rules designed to protect wildlife and municipal water supplies, including the Clean Water Act, which was enacted following the Walkerton water tragedy in 2000 when seven people died after drinking the town’s contaminated water.

–Geoffrey Stevens, The Record
Dec 10/18: Doug Ford’s hypocrisy on the Greenbelt

Other Acts targeted by the Ford government in the astonishing broad scope of ”Bill 66, Restoring Ontario’s Competitiveness Act, 2018″ include:

Whenever a Government creates “omnibus” laws to make sweeping changes to a wide swathe of legislation, it is never good news for citizens.  When Governments make laws they know we will like, they make a big deal about it, they don’t bury it in reams of paper no one is expected to read because they don’t mind us knowing what’s what.  

Government protections wrapped in red tape that protect citizens are spelled out in law.  Thousands were made ill and people died when the Mike Harris Sr PC Government cut the red tape protecting our municipal water supply.  I can tell you were are not adequately protected from toxins even before they cut red tape on the “Toxins Reduction Act.”  What protections are they stripping away from vulnerable senior citizens in the “Long Term Care Homes Act”?  And at the other end of the vulnerable citizens spectrum what protections are being removed from laws protecting children in Daycare and public schools?  

Although I have not yet had a chance to read my way through this draft legislation, much less all the referenced laws in which they plan to cut “red tape,” it makes me very nervous indeed.

When I speak to my Member of Provincial Parliament I will ask him to explain precisely what each change— both additions and subtractions— to each of these laws will do.  Because it is his job to know.

I’m not expert but the main reason for this law seems to be to open up “The Greenbelt” so developers can do what they like with land they bought cheaply precisely because it was protected.  In spite of what developers (or Mr Ford’s MPPs) may tell you, there is no shortage of Ontario land that could be developed.  We are not running out of places where factories can be built.

The reason the Greenbelt was protected in the first place is because most of Ontario drinking water is ground water, and much of the aquifers holding it is protected by the Greenbelt.

Hold The Line has put together a handy tool that will allow us to easily let our elected representatives hear from us; we can choose to send our messages to some or every sitting provincial and municipal politician in Waterloo Region.  

(If you’re not in Waterloo Region, feel free to borrow anything you may find helpful in your own letter to your MPP & municipal politicians.)