The Drummond Report - The Liberal Gravy Train Exposed As An Economic Train Wreck

Don Drummond author of
The Drummond Report

Well isn’t this just peachy!      

The Drummond Report has been released by Don Drummond, the former Chief Economist at TD Bank Financial Group who was commissioned by the Ontario Government to study and report on the state of the province's finances with recommendations on how to reduce the deficit.

It ain’t pretty but that doesn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone except all of those people who kept voting for Dalton McGuinty and his Liberals despite his dismal economic performance, his proven track record of breaking election promises or because they belonged to one of the special interests that got bought with taxpayer money so that he could protect his electoral votes.


Just five months ago, Mr. McGuinty won his third term in office by telling the people of Ontario that the other parties were over-reacting and that the province was in sound ecncomic shape. He went so far as to compare Ontario's economic leadership and job creation to California. He would have been better to compare it to Greece, Ireland or Italy.

Front page of today's Globe and Mail
Canada\s National newspaper

Reality bit hard today and the Liberal entitlement gravy train has come to a screeching halt or more accurately, has been exposed for the train wreck it actually is.

People are in paranoid hysteria on the Internet about some regulations being introduced to protect copyright. They scream about the threat to democracy but the Drummond Report underlines the real threat. When political parties are so careless with our tax money and lie to us in order to get elected, that takes away our right to make informed decisions and that is the real threat to democracy.

This report is so damning, the Premier should be horse-whipped in the public square for his duplicity and his incompetence. At the very least he should resign but don't hold your breath. There is a raft of political spin, finger pointing and excuse making coming. Those tend to be the only things at which Mr. McGuinty is really accomplished.

The Report is calling for draconian cuts to the provincial budget but the premier announced even before the report was released that he wouldn’t consider eliminating all-day kindergarten which is costing the province money if can't afford for no discernable benefit. Apparently saving face is more important than saving a province that was the economic engine of Canada before he took office and is now a have-not province actually receiving equalization payments from the federal government for the first time in the province’s history.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty

Liberal supporters castigated Mike Harris, the former Conservative Premier who ran on what he called the Common Sense Revolution and who brought Ontario’s finances under control with an overall 3.9% cut in provincial spending. Thanks to an orgy of mismanagement and spending irresponsibility, Dalton McGuinty’s “prudent” approach will require 17% in cuts. Read that as slashes in government spending which means public sector wage freezes and job cuts, closing hospital and increased service and user fees for reduced services.

Greece is starting to look pretty good by comparison.

There is no question that there will be countless media and blog reviews of the specifics of the Drummond Report online and I have provided a link to the full report at the bottom of this post so I won’t go through the details here.

My issue is with integrity in politics and an electorate so blinded by ideology (yes, it isn’t merely the right that has an ideology) that they willfully have allowed an incompetent politician to lead them to near bankruptcy.

During his first two terms, Mr. McGuinty handed out money to special interest like a drunken sailor handing out five dollar bills to waitresses in a strip club (although comparing drunken sailors to Mr. McGuinty does drunken sailors a disservice.)

Just about everyone in the public sector got significant raises during a time of fiscal restraint. Teachers, the provincial police and public servants, as well as, others received increases far in excess of inflation. Mr. McGuinty then announced he was freezing public sector salaries which is nothing more than cynical and dishonest grandstanding. Now many of them are going to lose their jobs. Those raises, which were used by Mr. McGuinty to buy support for his elections will look pretty feeble to those who traded their votes for a raise once the unemployment notices start rolling out and they are going to be rolling out.

Money was squandered, lost or misappropriated in the billions in places like the Ontario Lottery Corporation, eHealth and Ornge (the medical helicopter service). Full-day junior kindergarten was introduced at a cost of $1.5 billion and additional subsidies were handed over to post-secondary education even as the province was sinking further into debt.

Mr. McGuinty introduced his Green Energy act which now sees Ontario paying wind and solar providers seven to eight times what they pay for hydro-electric power at time when the province has a surplus of energy and is selling it to other jurisdictions at a loss. That's right! Under Mr. McGuinty's leadership, Ontario actually produces power which it then pays others to buy.

There was nowhere that Mr. McGuinty didn't seize the opportunity to buy votes with money the province didn't have.

Mr. McGuinty called this prudent leadership and sound fiscal management in the last election but it is clear that the Drummond Report is revealing anything but prudence or even a casual sense of responsibility to sound fiscal management of the province's economy.

The Liberals will blame it on the global economy but that will be just one more face-saving, self-serving untruth. The simple fact is that this is the most incompetent, cynical and dishonest government ever produced in Canada and it is the people who once again will pay for it.

Undeniably, Mr. McGuinty owes the people of the province an apology but they won't get it. A politician without the character to tell the truth during an election certainly doesn't have the character to admit his duplicity and apologize for what it has caused or the devastation and hardship it will bring to those he was elected to serve. For people like Mr. McGuinty, there is no such thing as feeling shame for having failed the people who bought into the lies and gave him their trust.

The only potential positive in this is that perhaps all those people who ranted in fear about the Conservatives while turning a blind eye to Mr. McGuinty’s record, will drop lemming-like party allegiances and vote based on values and common sense next time around. It would be nice but I doubt it will happen. People become so blinded by ideology that they will rave hysterically about the other guy while following an idiot down the road to perdition.

The people get the government they deserve and in Ontario, they’re about to pay very dearly for a government nobody should have even considered but they elected anyway.

Ontario isn't the only victim of cynical and dishonest politics. People are angry all over the world and they're angry precisely because of the kind of thing that is happening to what was once the richest province in the country. It isn't the global economy that is destroying our way of life, it is politicians and their backroom strategists from all parties who put winning power ahead of serving the public.

It is long past time that we stop clustering in self-defeating ideological chattering gangs, screaming about trivia like the threat to democracy of Internet regulation and got our collective act together by demanding integrity, leadership and sound economic management from politicians. A little vision wouldn't hurt either but that may be asking for too much.

It's what Mr. McGuinty promised in three successive elections. It is what the Drummond Report has proven to have been just one more in a series of cynical political lies.

The Full Drummond Report. If you live in Ontario and voted for Dalton McGuinty, read it and weep

http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/reformcommission/

Drummond Report Catalogues McGuinty Mess In Ontario
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/02/16/don-drummond-catalogues-the-mcguinty-mess-in-meticulous-detail/

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

The Demonization Ideology Of The Bourgoisie Elite

Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper
in a pick-up hockey game with fellow fascists

I spent a half an hour this morning in an online discussion about whether or not Stephen Harper, Canada's prime minister, is a fascist. I don’t know why I bother but it’s my own fault.

I know that as soon as I see or hear the words ‘regime’, ‘fascist’, ‘oppression’, ‘dictator’ and other words of their ilk, there really isn’t going to be much point to the discussion. In a country that is as democratic and free as Canada, using words like that betrays how poorly informed the individual and how weak the argument. It’s usually the sign of yet another ideological hissy-fit rather than anything closely resembling objective and informed analysis.

I get so tired of it. It’s almost like we’ve lost the ability to actually think rather than just react.

I don’t know when disagreeing with a government suddenly meant that the government was fascist but that’s the current buzz word. It’s being tossed about in democracies all over the world and against governments on both sides of the political divide. It’s absurd. The person I tried to speak with this morning went so far as to try and compare Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper with Benito Mussolini. It doesn’t get much sillier than that.

Personally I find it offensive. We have this wonderful opportunity to discuss and debate real issues in an attempt to find solutions but it is being squandered by unenlightened, petty-bourgeois, pseudo-intellectual elites intent on proving their prejudice and intolerance are actually righteous indignation.

People are dying in places like Syria to get out from under repressive regimes and gain what is so carelessly taken for granted here by people who throw around extreme language about oppression as they sip their Starbucks mocha lattes.

Canada is a country where people are free to say pretty much what they want, when and where they want, no matter how stupid it is. People have been tortured, died and/or have simply disappeared for saying a lot less in many other countries.

But let’s look at the issue. Is the Harper government fascist? According to Wikipedia, fascism is defined as follows:

“Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek rejuvenation of their nation based on commitment to an organic national community where its individuals are united together as one people in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood through a totalitarian single-party state that seeks the mass mobilization of a nation through discipline, indoctrination, physical education, and eugenics.”

While there is much for which to criticize the current Conservative government, I fail to see much in common with it and this definition. Let’s look at it point by point.

Individuals united in national identity  by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture and blood. The current government has a number of members from the English, French, Sikh, Chinese and other cultures which tends to contradict this idea. Goodness gracious, it even has gays and women in powerful cabinet positions. To go a step further, it was the Harper government that went so far as to introduce legislation recognizing Quebec as a distinct society within Canada which also contradicts this part of the definition and it was the Conservatives  who went out of their way to successfully attract ethnic voters (a constituency that had pretty much been the sole province of the Liberals) in the last election. So let’s move on.

A single-party totalitarian state. 

The last time I looked there were five political parties represented in the House of Commons one more than the four from the last parliament. There were even more which fielded candidates in the election. If a single-party state is an objective of fascism, either the Conservatives aren’t really fascists or in the alternative they’re just not very good at it.

Mass mobilization of the nation through discipline, indoctrination, physical education and eugenics.

Martial Law declared in Canada by Liberal
government of Pierre Trudeau 1970

It’s pretty hard to mobilize a country to one ideology when it offers the freedom to all to form their own opinions and to express those opinions freely. There has been no crackdown or censorship of the media or of free-speech.

Some have tried to suggest that the police response to rioters during the G8/G20 protests are an indication of a federal government suppressing the right of dissent but that was the City of Toronto police service over which the Conservative government has no control. Nor does it even come close to the Liberal declaration of martial law in response to the FLQ crisis which put troops in our streets (something the Paul Martin Liberals would later accuse Stephen Harper of wanting to do during the 2005 election campaign). It was state-control unlike anything Canada had ever experienced before (or since). Virtually over night, the rights of Canadian citizens were stripped and hundreds were rounded up, arrested and taken from their homes without warrant and held without habeus corpus, which the Trudeau Liberal government had suspended.

Canadian troops on streets in
Ottawa and Montreal

Even the state-owned national broadcaster trashes the government with impunity and gets paid handsomely ($1 billion/yr) to do so. The recent Occupy nonsense underscores just how far government is willing to allow dissent to go. It cost this country more than $2 million in damages but there wasn’t a peep out of the federal government or any attempt to shut Occupy down by the Conservatives. 

I don’t see any sign of eugenics happening any time soon either although the Conservative government did put through a small tax deduction towards certain sports activities for children. I suppose technically that qualifies as mass mobilization of the nation through physical education but to be honest it’s a pretty tepid attempt at state control at best.

The simple fact is that the current hysteria has nothing to do with fascism and everything to do with too many people who confuse their personal dislike for something as rational political analysis. Too many of these people are guided by ill-informed opinion that makes their positions so weak that the only thing left to them is to demonize the opposition. 

Personally, I don’t care if we agree or not on an issue and I enjoy a good debate where people trade points of view. It’s a time-honoured method of moving an issue forward but what passes for debate today is specious. It’s degenerated to the same kind of over-the-top and inane name-calling of spoiled school children who don’t like and bully the unpopular kid in the class.

If you removed the words Stephen Harper and/or Conservative and replaced them with the label of a religious or cultural group, some of the commentary would actually be charged as a hate crime and the person responsible would be prosecuted under existing laws passed by the Liberals.

The bourgeoisie don't like to see themselves that way, of course, they're too busy demonizing others but they should remind themselves that the thing we fear in others tends to be the thing we most fear in ourselves.

It’s absurd to suggest that Stephen Harper is a fascist just as it is absurd to label Pierre Trudeau a tyrannical dictator.

Most politicians are opportunists who walk a fine line between what they think the country wants and what they believe is best for the country.  Do they usually get it right? Sometimes but not always; opportunism and politics often get in the way for all political parties.

Most politicians and their parties pander to various special interest groups. The Conservatives, Liberal and NDP all have theirs and the Green Party would have more of them if they were larger with a broader appeal or could find more available groups to which to pander.

The simple reality is that all political parties campaign from either the left or the right but govern from the centre. That’s just a hard cold fact and even the Conservatives have been criticized extensively  by the media and others for hugging the centre line when they're not being accused of being Nazis.

How North Korea maintains control
of its citizens

Mussolini and Hitler were fascist dictators. Kim Jung Il, Stalin and Sadaam Hussein were tyrants who terrorized and murdered their own people. That’s tyranny. There isn’t a Canadian politician, including Stephen Harper who has even come close or a Canadian citizen living in anything that is even remotely akin to the oppression of countries like Syria, North Korea or China, so let’s tone down the rhetoric and get back to reality. 

It’s one thing to disagree with, debate and even criticize certain policies and political philosophy, it’s an entirely different thing to characterize those with whom you disagree as something they aren’t.  That’s nothing but cheap hysterical hyperbole at best or extremist propaganda at worst by an intellectually arrogant elite.

Whatever you call it, it is definitely self-indulgent stupidity and this country isn’t well-served by it.

Godwin's Rule Of Nazi Analogies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

Why I Now Celebrate Valentine's Day

It’s Valentine’s Day; a day when most of us will buy flowers and chocolates, small gifts and cards to express our love for someone. Like most special days, it has become very commercial with florists who look at today with the same drooling fondness that retailers look at Black Friday, only without the price discounts.

For me, Valentine’s Day has never held much meaning except for a period when my daughter was very young and I would buy her a large heart-shaped box of chocolates. She actually liked the box more than the chocolates which made it all the more special back then. After she grew older and had young men in her life who bought her flowers and small gifts, a Valentine’s Day gift from dad lost its appeal and the day lost its significance for me, until I met Maggie.

I didn’t choose the name Maggie’s Bear lightly. Almost from the day she met me, Maggie has called me Bear and she is the only one who ever has. She has always been Margaret until she met me and I started calling her Maggie  (a name I used to dislike) almost immediately.

Our first date was for breakfast at a very popular and cool diner that I like. We were to meet there at 10:00 on a Sunday morning but Maggie was delayed by the fact that I gave her the wrong address. Fortunately, she persevered and found both the restaurant and me and I knew from her smile when she walked in that I would be with her for the rest of my life.... or die trying.

We have been together ever since.

The simple fact is that I love Maggie. I love her for her compassion, her humour, her humanity and her warmth. She is a very special lady, a strange combination of a highly successful professional and a silly young girl. She is pretty in her own right and not only because I think so. She has a smile that can melt ice and a gentleness in her voice that can bring even a bear to heal. 

I love Maggie for those reasons but also because she has strength and I know she will not falter when the storm rages around us.

I love Maggie because she is sexy, feminine, funny, caring and as my mother used to say, cute as a button.

Mostly, I love Maggie because she fits. She isn’t perfect but she fits perfectly in me.  I would rather spend the worst day of my life with her than the best day of my life with anyone else.

She is my wife, my friend and my lover.

When we’re young, most of us have an idea in our thoughts about what the person will be like that we will fall in love with and with whom we will spend our life.  I wrote once that while I didn’t know her name or what she would look like, I would recognize her by her smile and by the fact that her hand fit perfectly in mine

I was right.

When I finally found her, I recognized her immediately by her smile and discovered after the first hour of the first day, her hand did fit perfectly in mine.

Her name is Maggie and she is the reason why I now celebrate Valentine’s Day.  For me, Valentine's Day is a celebration of her.

Gelukkig Valentine de dag, Maggie. Ik hou van jou - Bear

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

If Not SOPA, What?

I just bought a new computer and have been busy going about the business of setting it up. One of the first things I did, as most of us do, was install anti-spyware, anti-malware and anti-tracking software. There is just so much malevolence out there that without this software, your computer is like a bank vault left open all night.

My father used to say that a lock only keeps out an honest man and he was right.

Consider hackers like Anonymous who break into systems and computers to disrupt and steal data. Sometimes that data is highly sensitive, sometimes it’s financial. Sometimes, hackers break-in just to damage your system.

This is equivalent in the real world to breaking into your home or office and either stealing valuables or trashing the place. We absolutely don’t accept that in the physical world. We demand laws and enforcement of those laws to protect our property. We demand that those who are tried and found guilty be punished but online, we either ignore or actually go so far as to defend these actions by others out of some misguided sense of democracy in action.

It doesn’t stop there, of course. Anonymous for all of its recent attempts to present itself as a defender of democratic and individual rights has done more than its fair share of encouraging illegal and hate-filled behaviour while disrupting the lives of people  for no other reason than because they can and because they get a twisted kick out of it.

There are thousands of weak-minded thrill seekers all over the world, like Anonymous, sitting in their bedrooms or their basements plotting new viruses to send out into the world to do nothing more than destroy what belongs to others. This is like having a psychopath go on a rampage in your town, vandalizing and burning down buildings and smashing cars. Again, in the real world we protect ourselves as best we can with the rule of law using the police and the courts to bring those responsible to justice. |In the virtual world we merely complain about it and feed more money into the Internet security industry.

The real world is full of Bernie Madoffs, Enrons and far too many small-time fraud artists. We use the law to not only punish these offenders but to try and recover our lost money and investments. The virtual world has no end of scams. Whether it is some inheritance scam from Nigeria, mystery shopper scam, get rich quick scam or any one of a thousand others, there is no end to people online trying to scam others out of their money.

Artists  including musicians, painters, photographers, writers and others routinely have their work pirated by millions which means they lose money they earned through their creativity and to which they are rightfully entitled.

And then come the really twisted.

Consider all those sites with discounted pharmaceuticals, drugs that really aren't drugs at all but rather are useless imitations designed to scam people out of their money. It probably seems harmless when you're thinking about vitamins and even Viagra but what about those people with life-threatening illnesses like AIDS and cancer who are looking for discounted medication to try and prolong their lives?

It is illegal in most jurisdictions to council suicide and yet online, people have not only counseled it, they have gone out of their way to encourage the potential suicide while they watch online. A young girl died in Canada because of a male nurse in the State’s ongoing and persistent encouragement that she take her ownn life rather than seek counseling. In Florida, a young man was encouraged to go through with his threat of suicide by hundreds who had logged in to watch his live-stream. Nobody thought to call the police in an attempt to try and save his life. The Internet is now the primary entertainment provider for the truly diseased mind.

Others, thankful for their anonymity don’t go quite that far. Instead they surf the Internet in search of memorial sites for people who committed suicide, were murdered, killed in an accident or who died from a fatal illness. They get their kicks from logging in to these sites and leaving vile, disgusting messages designed to denigrate the deceased and hurt their family.

Social media sites like Twitter are over-run by small-minded people with even smaller vocabularies who take delight in spamming the community with profane verbal graffiti.

Pedophiles have embraced the Internet like an addict embraces their next fix. They have set up networks to share information and child porn which has created greater access and demand which only puts more children at risk, worldwide. Child-sex rings offer ‘tourist’ trips to exotic locations and access to children as young as infants.

Have an addiction? The Internet has folks only too happy to service it. Gambling. Drugs. Porn. Pick your addiction of choice, search Google or drop by a couple of chat rooms and in no time you’ll have more selection than you’ll find at an all you can eat buffet.

Even legitimate sites are not above tracking your Internet usage, packaging it up and then selling it to others who then use it to to make a buck or two. Where do you think most of the adware and spybots come from? If you spend any time online and belong to a social media site or two, your privacy is merely an illusion. The anti-tracking software I installed earlier today has already blocked more than 1000 attempts to track my Internet use and access my information. Without any doubt even more trackers got by my software.

It’s like having people you don’t know follow you around all day watching you, jotting down everything you say, you buy and you do and then selling it to other companies. It’s all so convenient. You don’t even have to belong to most sites. Just drop by for a short visit and they will take care of the rest.

Yes, there is software that prevents some of this but there is no software that prevents it all and especially not the sick, twisted and illegal behaviour of too many out there. In the real world, we have laws to protect us and to provide us with recourse when a crime happens. The Internet is simply anarchy and an unlimited playground for the morally bankrupt and dishonest....although some have confused that for democracy.

Recently, the United States government started to work on anti-piracy legislation to try and get some sense of order and protection on the Internet. The response online was the predictable knee-jerk reaction by those who don't think beyond their own self-indulgence.

Cries of outrage over the audacity of the government to even consider interfering with the Internet were over the top. Labels of censorship, oppression and tyranny started popping up all over social media and many of the big Internet players led the charge. Of course, for many of them, it was less about censorship than it was about income. It's an easy mistake to make when your business model is based on there being no laws or regulation.

Sites like Wikipedia and Twitter shut down for a day in protest. Go Daddy which offered tepid support of SOPA was almost put out of business by those outraged that Go Daddy had dared to voice a contrary opinion to the rest of the online community. So much for democracy.

But here’s the thing.

While I think SOPA is a flawed bill and needs serious rethinking, I believe we need some kind of enforceable regulation for the Internet to protect the innocent and the not so innocent from those who seek to rob and harm others.

Why should we have to armour our computers to protect our personal information like the military protects the gold in Fort Knox? Theft is theft whether it happens online or in the physical world. Child abuse in the form of kiddie porn spills over into the real world and viscious, threatening behavior is the same wherever it happens. We’re working overtime in North America to reduce schoolyard bullying even as we defend against regulation on the Internet where far more bullying takes place.

The Internet is a great place full of information, interesting things to do and places to go. It is how many of us now connect with each other and I use the Internet every day. But it is also too much like Dodge City before Wyatt Earp showed up and I believe it needs a little 'Wyatt Earping' to try and put some sense of civilized order to it.

Perhaps I'm an idiot but I fail to see why we should even consider accepting, let alone condone in many cases, online behaviour that we would not for a moment consider acceptable in the real world. 

The Internet has opened up an entirely new spectrum of information, entertainment and connection. Thanks to the anonymity and collective mindset it affords, it has also brought freedom to those who have no sense of responsibility, morality or respect for their societies or the rights, feelings or well-being of others. It is an attitude that is spilling over into the real world where an unwarranted sense of entitlement is on the increase.

To those who oppose any kind of online regulation, what do you propose to protect yourself and others? What are your solutions to child porn rings and suicide clubs? What do you propose to protect the privacy of individuals, not from government, but from Internet corporations who look on you and your personal information as nothing more than a commodity to tracked, captured and sold? How do you  propose to protect your family, your neighbours and your society from those who lack the morality, the values or the decency to act responsibly and honestly? How do you propose to defend society from those who see the Internet as an opportunity to destroy, to steal and to indulge every whim they may have no matter how perverse?

It seems to me that rather than give in to yet another simple-minded reaction against the idea, we would be better to ask ourselves, "If not SOPA, what?" and then get busy making the 'what' happen.

Here's a free app to block sites from tracking you online.  http://www.abine.com/

Links to just a couple of the millions of articles available on this topic. Do your own research and draw your own conclusions

An Overview of SOPA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

Why you don't get a cut of the billions mad by social media websites when theyt go pubic
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/your+content/6141515/story.html

Anonymous
http://www.religiousfreedomwatch.org/intolerance-hate/anonymous/

Encouraging suicide
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100526/1822349594.shtml

A quick look at some recent online scams
http://www.hotscams.com/

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

Suffer The Little Children and They Do, Even In Death

Braedon and Charlie Powell

Charlie Powell was seven years old; his brother Braedon was only five. Their mother went missing and is now presumed dead, killed by their father. The same father who killed them this week in a murder-suicide. 

A memorial service will be held for them today.

You would think that a horrific tragedy like this would stop the world’s madness if only for a moment but you would be wrong. The funeral of these two little boys will be the scene of even more insanity in a world where too many people have no respect for anything beyond their extreme and twisted objectives.

Westboro Baptist Church protesters

The Westboro Baptist Church will protest the memorial service of these two little boys to advance their own political agenda. They will protest to “remind Governor Chris Gregoire that these little boys died because of her rebellion” in reference to her support of gay marriage. To ensure that this memorial service will turn into a complete circus of the self-righteous, Occupy Seattle plans to protest Westboro’s protest. They claim they don't want to disrupt the service, merely protect it from the Westboro protest. What unadulterated hypocrisy!

It isn’t just self-indulgent sanctimony that drives them, it is cynical opportunism. Westboro knows the memorial service will draw large media coverage and attention. What better opportunity to garner attention for their pathetic cause? This is the same group of self-righteous hypocrites that protest the funerals of American soldiers who died in combat and Occupy is right there with them. Desperate to try to present themselves as the defenders of righteousness, Occupy Seattle will clamour for the same media attention by once again doing exactly what they are protesting against.

Every day, I read tweets and blog posts and media commentary decrying the state of things today. People are angry that their society is crumbling and quick to blame and accuse.  The anger is palpable and the hatred for the opinions of others is like a cancer eating away at what once made this democracy one of the freest in the world.

Chrysler ran a commercial with Clint Eastwood during the Super Bowl in an attempt to encourage Amerians to remember who they are as a people and what it is that made them a great nation. The response was criticism and sneering at both Clint Eastwood and Chrysler. There is no time for thinking now; there is only time for anger, suspicion and cynicism.

Too many throw around words like tyranny and oppression, treason and traitor. It is a country filled with people protesting that they are being treated like slaves and they’re right. But it isn’t politicians or greedy corporations that enslave them. It is hatred and intolerance but not hatred for a common external enemy but for their neighbours and other citizens with whom they don’t agree but who have the same rights and freedoms or should have.

What is happening at a memorial service for two little boys is disgraceful made all the more so because no one will defend the right of the family of these two little boys to hold their memorial in peace. Fanatics and opportunistic activists will demand their right to protest be respected while virtually everyone will ignore the right of the family to grieve in peace.

The world today has no time for decency but it will make time to defend the right of the zealots to use that memorial service for their own, tawdry purposes.

This is not what the founders intended or foresaw when they wrote the Constitution. They envisioned the birth of a great nation of people working together in liberty, tolerance and mutual respect. They would be ashamed to see how so many have cheapened and disgraced the ideals they set forth in the document they wrote. 

There is nothing Christian in the actions of Westboro Baptist Church. They, like extremists from all religions, have perverted the teachings and tenets of their faith to match their own prejudiced and twisted beliefs. There is nothing American in the actions of either Westboro or Occupy who pervert the very concepts of democracy and freedom upon which the United States was founded.

Sadly, Westboro and Occupy Seattle are not unique. They are merely representative of what can only be described as a growing and perverted madness; a madness that today will desecrate the memories of two little boys.

Four children die each and every day from abuse in the United States but nobody talks about it much. Everyone is too busy saving whales at Marineland, protesting SOPA and each other while advancing their own agenda of accusation, blame and outright hatred.

There is no time to be concerned that children suffer every day without much notice. and because there isn't, today, the memory of two children will be used by those with no values. They will get away with it because their actions will be ignored by those who believe their own values are beyond reproach.

It is not a day of which anyone should feel proud.

LINKS

The News Tribune: Westboro Church to picket Powell children memorial service

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/02/08/2018371/westboro-church-to-picket-powell.html

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

When Does Life Begin?

My daughter is pregnant with her second child, a girl, and we’re all quite thrilled about it. We know it’s a girl because of the ultrasounds she has had each month.  She sends us all pictures of the  baby growing in her belly but they aren’t all that attractive to be honest and I am reluctant to put them on the fridge beside the pictures of our grandson.

My grandson is also excited about the new baby coming. He talks to it through my daughter’s navel and kisses it by kissing her extended belly. It’s starting to move a bit and while he is convinced it will be a boy, he is excited to feel it move in her.

She is still eligible for a legal abortion and that begs the question. When does life begin?

I have no idea personally. I know what I believe but I am not so arrogant as to believe that my beliefs are the defining facts for determining the legal opinion. I’m not completely sure that anyone can make that determination but surely medical science is closer to having that capability than most of us.

The reason I raise this is that a Member Of Parliament in Canada has asked the same question in a private members bill. He hasn’t proposed that abortions be ruled illegal or banned. He has asked parliament  to consider forming a committee to gather experts together to examine the question of when life begins in an attempt to reach one defining consensus.

Why does he feel this is necessary? Simply because abortion remains a hotly debated issue some thirty years after they were made legal. It is clear that opinion has polarized and is based on beliefs and opinions rather than facts and it is his hope that by have medical science address the issue, it might resolve the debate so that society can move on. Of course, he is already being accused of trying to reopen the abortion debate but then that is always the first response of those afraid to look for the truth wherever it might lead.

Despite the personal attacks, he is on the record as stating that the answer may well be that life begins at birth or at some other point. It is clarity of the issue that is necessary and not just in regards to the abortion issue.

For example, if someone murders a pregnant woman, in some jurisdictions they can be charged with a double homicide; the murder of the woman and of the unborn baby. In other jurisdictions, they can only be charged with the murder of the woman. In those jurisdictions, the unborn child is not considered to be alive.

In some jurisdictions, assault on a pregnant woman resulting in the death of the unborn child can be treated as a homicide while in others, the crime is reduced to assault on the woman only.

It has led to some women being charged with endangering the life of a child because of substance abuse while they were pregnant but how is that possible if life doesn't begin until after birth? 

The simple fact is that in our polarized rush to legalize abortion, the more profound issues were trivialized and equal application of the law has had a considerable difficulty catching up. Definitions about life are inconsistently applied which has a direct impact on some women who become victims of varied interpretations of what does or doesn't constitute life . The current definition of when life begins used in Canada is almost 400 years old, a carryover from Britain.

There are more contradictions than just these. Abortion is legal up to the end of the second trimester but illegal after. Some are convinced that this is because it is unsafe to do an abortion in the final three months but that’s nonsense. The procedure would be different, more like a caesarian but just as safe as any other surgery and very easily performed. I suspect the truth has more to do with the fact that there is a fair degree of discomfort at intentionally terminating the life of a fully-formed baby and then throwing it in the garbage as now happens with aborted fetuses.

For all of our sophistication, we don’t know really when life begins. Some believe it is at conception, others at birth. Some have picked an arbitrary period in between but all are based on convenient opinion or religious belief. None are based on medical science or human ethics. 

It’s long past time that we settled that question once and for all so that we can put the hypocrisy of the debate behind us.

Hypocrisy?  Absolutely.

A recent study revealed that 85% of Canadian women are opposed to abortions based on gender selection. Why? If it is isn’t alive and a woman has the right to choose whether to carry the child to term or not, why shouldn’t she also have the right to determine what gender of child she wants to have? How do you police that? Do you take someone at their word that the abortion has nothing to do with the fact that the baby is one sex or the other?

We’re uncomfortable with that because it comes a little too close to the appearance of culling the race.

That’s the kind of stupid situation we put ourselves in when we are too frightened to drill down and seriously examine an issue beyond the superficial level upon which the ongoing abortion debate has been held over the past thirty or forty years.

The argument against illegal, backroom abortions is a powerful one. Too many women died and/or were seriously maimed by medical hacks incapable of conducting a safe procedure. None of us want to go back to that. But it is not a strong enough argument to simply demand abortion up to a certain point of pregnancy either.

It does not address the core issue. When does life begin and until we address that issue, none of us will ever really know. We’ll just continue to hold onto our beliefs, beliefs that are more about shoring up our opinion than they are about finding the truth.

For example, what if we learn that life begins at conception? How will we feel about ourselves then?  In the alternative, what if we learn that life begins with the first breath after birth, won’t that validate the decisions we’ve made?

It’s unfortunately, the way we address too many of the most serious and fundamental issues facing society today. For all of our yelling and brave talk, we are a society afraid to examine things below the surface because we are afraid of what we might find. We operate on emotion rather than fact. We form opinions and then defend those opinions against any and all examination of facts we fear might undermine them. It is the worst form of confirmation bias.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will state my personal position on abortion. Because I don't know when life begins, I am opposed to abortion for anything much beyond saving the life of the mother. But, because I don't know when life begins, I don't believe I have the right to make that decision for anyone else. I believe that it is up to each individual to make that decision for themselves. It is why I would like a better understanding of when life begins to help all of us when confronted by that decision. 

But then, I feel the same way about all of the major issues facing us today from the environment to the economy; from the justice system to….abortion.

In the end, it is polarized opinion, not truth, that is undermining  us. In the end, I believe, informed truth just might set free, all of us on both sides of each and every issue.

As a final point, I'm tired of those who scream that abortion is only a women's issue. It is an issue that defines our society, an issue that determines when life becomes life and that is not merely a women's issue, nor is it an issue of convenience. It is a very human issue and we all have a right to participate in the discussion of it.

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

I Have Seen The Enemy - The Enemy Is Us

Have you ever noticed how many people there are that seem to think that whatever it is they believe in or what cause they've embraced it somehow gives them the right to push it into your face?

Of course you have. We all have and most of us get tired of it after awhile.

Activists of all stripes, religious fundamentalists of all religions, political zealots from all political parties, extreme atheists…whoever; they all share that one thing in common. They have a need to elevate the importance of their cause or their opinion  by getting in the faces of the rest of us.

We had to suffer through it all last fall with the precious Occupy protests that confused the right to freedom of assembly with vandalism, violent disruption of our communities and generally making a nuisance of themselves as they alternately pouted, pontificated and threatened. We had to suffer through endless accusations of police brutality and the crimes of Wall St. even as they trashed our cities and allowed crimes including sexual assault, child endangerment and even murder to take place in their camps.

Gay activists feel the need to hold gay pride parades to flaunt their sexuality in as outrageous a manner as possible which always confuses me. We have gays in our family and we don’t see them as being any different from the rest of us or having anything in common with the drag queens and showboats who prance half-naked down Main St. in a parade. I thought gays wanted to be accepted as a normal part of society. What in the hell is the purpose behind trying to prove you are different and apart from the society you are trying to encourage to accept you?

I can’t even begin to imagine a heterosexual pride parade. Would we all dress up in shorts, sandals, wear drug-store sunglasses and build floats with lawn furniture and barbeques on them? How trite, trivial and boring the whole thing has become.

Religious fundamentalists are constantly jumping in your face with pamphlets, flyers and offers of salvation or threats of damnation. The Internet is littered with endless tweets of biblical quotes, threats of perdition or why God hates everyone who worships him in a different way in a different religion. Sometimes I think God must wish he had a better fan club.

Some atheists feel the need to prove some misbegotten sense of  moral or intellectual superiority by getting in the face of believers with insulting and usually ill-informed and heavily prejudiced accusations about the fallacy of religion, how stupid people of faith are or the crimes of some within religion.

Some religious extremists are only happy if they’re blowing something up or killing someone.

Too many on the right are constantly looking for ways to provoke or rip off those on the left while too many on the left drag their soap boxes around so that they can preach and lecture and condemn at a moment’s notice while they meet together to plan how to spend even more of other people's money.

It makes you wonder sometimes if the only reason we were given our middle fingers was just so we could wave them at someone else.

photo: media. photobucket.com

Politics isn’t a blood sport, it’s an animal show; a carnival of the absurd filled with hypocrites, cynics and fools.

You can always tell when a candidate is starting to fall back in the polls. The attack ads intensify against his or her opponents regardless of the damage it does to the party or to democracy by distorting informed debate. The ads air constantly in an obscene orgy of money spent pushing self-serving hypocrisy in our faces in a desperate attempt to convince of us something, usually something negative about the 'other guy'.

Campaign promises become extreme and pander to various special interests and any concept of responsible governance is thrown out the window while real vision for the future is trivialized into bumper sticker slogans. Like everyone else in the great circus of hyperbole, winning has become everything. Truth, and respect for others have all become irrelevant.

It's enough to make your head explode!

I’m tired of the hypocrisy behind it and the insecurity that drives it. I’m tired of the lack of respect for the rights of others, our institutions, our laws, our communities, the lack of civility and common courtesy that fuels it. I’m tired of selfishness and a lack of values masquerading as righteousness and I’m tired of the self-indulgence of too many who feel they and their cause, their belief or their opinion are more important than those of anyone else.

They aren't. It is self-importance inflated to self-delusion. It's a delusion that somehow empowers too many to believe they have been blessed with a moral superiority that gives them the right to attack others for their opinions and beliefs.

There is a considerable amount of talk about democracy and protecting the rights of citizens from government but it is the citizens themselves who undermine the very principles of respect, consideration for the opinions and rights of others, consensus building, the rule of law and decision by majority agreement on which democracy is based. 

I’m tired of the ongoing tyranny of minority groups and causes.

Are these really the values we want to teach
our children?

Today it is no longer enough to simply hold and voice your opinion. Today, it has become the norm to try and destroy the opinions of others. To personalize every issue and demonize those who disagree with you.

Today it is no longer enough to earn the respect of others for your race, your religion, your cause, your sexual orientation or your political beliefs. Today it is the norm to flaunt them in rude, insulting and often vicious ways as if they are somehow superior to everything and everyone else. How arrogant and insecure can people get?

The stupidity of it all is that twenty years from now, nobody will care or remember most of the chanting, the arguing, the slogans, the hate messages, violence or the senseless rhetoric being thrown around today which pretty much defines their value.

Ask yourself this question.

How do you want to be treated by others? It seems to me that whatever the answer is to that question is a pretty good benchmark about how to treat them. It also seems to me that behaving like those you don’t like pretty much makes you the same as them. What does that mean about how you really see yourself?

It would be one thing if this behavior was relegated only to the lunatic fringe but it isn’t. There are a lot of nice people in this world but unfortunately, too many can too easily forget that as they pursue some belief, some issue or some cause. 

We’re all in this life together but we’re only going to start realizing and benefiting from the strength of that when we stop behaving like self-righteous fools and start remembering that there are very few of us who have a monopoly on truth or righteousness. 

Each of us has a limited amount of time on this planet and it’s time to ask ourselves how we each want to be remembered after we’re gone. 

Do we want to be remembered by those who knew us as someone who contributed to life, was respected and who  made life a little better or would we prefer to be dismissed as just another crackpot who was a pain in the butt and who will be quickly and thankfully forgotten? 

We each get to make that choice but quite honestly, I can’t think of anything sadder than leaving this life and having nobody care because we left nothing of value behind us and contributed nothing but anger when we had the opportunity to contribute so much more.

There is an old adage that says the thing we fear in others is the thing we most fear in ourselves. Many of us would do well to remember that in future.

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others