I was watching CBC the other night and I learned that Canadian productivity levels are not so good compared to the productivity levels of our neighbours to the south. But there’s a really good reason not to give a rat’s ass about that (not that I need one, myself). Because apparently, those much valued higher productivity levels down south are the result of fewer people doing more work.

So there you have it. To the sorts of people who worry about national productivity levels, fewer people doing more work is better than lots of people doing less work.

Isn’t it nice to have one less thing to worry about? Yup. Fuck you, national productivity levels. Fuck you in the ear.

The City of Ottawa is paying to have a truck travel around the city watering our streets.

Yes indeed. Appeals were made to the Speaker of the House today by Derek Lee of the Liberals, Jack Harris of the New Democrats, and Claude Bachand of the Bloc that the New Conservatives be ruled in breach of Parliamentary privilege on the Afghan Detainee issue. Meanwhile, the bizarrest man in Canadian political history tweeted the following from the geographic center of Canada, Winnipeg, where he apparently spent the day not being in the political center of Canada – Ottawa: “Talking with Aboriginal students at a town hall here in Winnipeg today. Every Canadian deserves an equal opportunity to succeed.”

Uh. Yeah. Well. Maybe not every Canadian.

One fact there’s just no getting around for the New Conservatives is that we were rolling in money before they took over the government. Now we’re not. And no matter how they slice and dice their press releases on the economy, they can’t deny that they have spent a helluva lot of our money on their propaganda. And I’m talking about real live political party propaganda, not the usual government propaganda engaged in by other parties in power.

But here’s something interesting, the retired judge, Frank Iacobucci, who now has more power than Parliament (speaking of Reform Party principles, such as they are) stands to make $4,000/day according to the terms of reference (such as they are) for his gig as King of Ottawa. And the aforementioned terms of reference are designed to take the good judge on a very slow ride to nowhere, because, as we all know, the New Conservatives are so guilty that they absolutely cannot afford to have the truth come to light.

No matter. With our money at their disposal, they can afford to keep the lie going as long as they’re in office. And they will because they don’t give a rat’s ass about our money. That’s because New Conservatives know there are more of us than there are of them, which means that government money is really enemy money.

We’ve put the fox in charge of the hen house, fellow farmers.

Apparently, when White People kill, other White People call it “snapping”. And also, it’s not their fault when White People kill, it’s someone else’s fault. Oh, and words DO hurt, they hurt White People. If they didn’t, White People wouldn’t kill. Er, I mean, “snap”.

Indeed, such is the perceived wisdom of the White People of Alberta in response to a recent murder/suicide in Edmonton which seems to have the White People on “Free Dominion” (a forum for White People who believe in free speech for White People) suggesting that the rest of us need to learn a lesson about the harm words can do to White People. Please read the comment below by one of the White People who run “Free Dominion” (which I believe refers to a Canada of the past and future, but not the present, where White People are in charge of EVERYTHING). The last line is my favourite:

So, it sounds like most people who actually knew him thought the shooter was a pretty normal guy. However, someone decided he was a “racist”, and he was suspended from his job and his reputation was ruined. Then they wonder why the guy snapped and started shooting people! Well, all I can say is that I’m surprised that more victims of the “racist” witch hunt haven’t done similar things. Punishing people for their political beliefs is a lose-lose proposition. It does nothing to eliminate hate (it increases it), and, every once in awhile, the wrong guy is put in the position where he feels he has nothing left to lose. I would like to think that people might learn something from this tragedy, but I don’t really see it happening.

Could someone, perhaps a backroom boy, tell Michael Ignatieff that he’s wearing his pants too high? I mean, c’mon - grow a set, you good-for-nothing fluffers. I once told a friend – a friend, no less - that, unless she shaved her big old hairy socialist legs, or ditched the Leslie the Lesbian sundress she was planning to wear door-to-door in Forest Hill (a clingin’ to old money like grim death Progressive Conservative area of Toronto) and wore a suit, I wouldn’t lift a finger in her campaign to defeat Barbara MacDougall.

She wouldn’t, I didn’t, and Barbara MacDougall won. Probably because she had the good sense to keep her grating cowbell of a yap shut at the door and just silently hand her constituents pamphlets of herself surrounded by clean cut staffers on Parliament Hill wearing private school boy blazers and grey flannels and looking every bit as gay as their own useless twit sons and daughters.

And I did nothing because the niqab is an instrument of oppression used to dehumanize women in countries where women don’t have the right to an education, to not be raped in their own homes, to feel the sun on their faces, let alone receive second language training at taxpayer expense.

But boy oh boy, some of us Feminists are really getting it from all sides on our niqabism. Particularly from men, whether they be libertarian anarchist unibombers or leftwing labour activist dutch-treaters or rightwing corporate boot and ass polishers. All on account of how we aren’t exactly rushing to protect the niqab wearing rights of our Muslim Canadian sisters against niqabist government rulings that pretty much tell the good ladies to go back where they came from if they want to wear  niqabs.

Personally, I think Feminists should tell men of all political stripes to just sod fucking off on women’s rights issues, anyway. I mean, let’s face it – they’re men. Even the rightwing corporate boot and ass polishers. Or, at least, they’re almost like men if you squint and plug your ears. And none of them give a shit about women’s rights, you know. They just want to be seen to be giving a shit in hopes of getting laid. Or something. Whatever. They’ve got lots of shit to give because they’re full of it. I mean, it’s all really just academic to them, isn’t it. Neither here, nor there, as evidenced by their comparison of a handful of fundamentalists insisting on the right to wear, in public buildings, a symbol of oppression that offends many women, to other such hard won fashion rights as the right to wear pants. And vote.

Well, you’re not going to get lucky with me, pal. But please, go to Afghanistan and tell the women there all about your support for women’s fashion rights here in Canada. You never know. They might have had worse offers.

You know who I hate? Stupid people who get paid to do work that I do for free.

Take paid pundits, for instance – please. The other night, on CBC, our taxpayer-funded network, I witnessed an interview between Mark Kelly and a man so stupid I’m amazed he could walk upright. His last name was Velk and he is a professor somewhere out in Canadaland. The topic was “Torture” and whether or not it could be justified under certain circumstances.

Subtitled: “Wtf?!”

Uh… look… tax-payer funded network… I’m no professor, but torture, by definition, is wrong. Therefore, it can’t be justified under any circumstance. You may think you can justify it, even when the certain circumstances you are claiming make it necessary are in no way present (like in Afghanistan), but you can’t actually justify it. You’ve simply convinced yourself and others that something wrong, isn’t.

But back to a man so stupid he managed to out stupid the stupid argument above by arguing that torture could actually be a good thing. Like, say, if “bad guys” (i.e. the tortured) had a nuclear weapon that they were planning to detonate, but only torture would force them to reveal to us (i.e. the good guy torturers) where the detonation device was hidden, then torture would save innocent lives and we’d all live happily ever after.

Then he abandoned this Hollywood scenario to make a bizarre comparion between a kind of torture used by the Japanese during the war that sounded suspiciously not like torture at all but like murder, and the sort of torture we are talking about in the Afghan detainee situation which is apparently not torture at all but rather something he referred to as ”holy book mockery”.

I mean, he was unbelievably, incredibly, unbearably stupid and yet still he babbled forth in that insufferably smug way that especially stupid pundits can, with Mark Kelly grimacing painfully and bracing himself for the torrent of stupid that would inevitably follow his next question. Alas, which was not: “Why am I interviewing you, the stupidest man on earth, about one of the worst moral failings by our government in our nation’s history?”

I have an obsession with time lately. As in, time remaining, and I’m having a hard time justifying spending any of it working – for money, that is. I have no trouble justifying to myself the work I do for free. Free work is very fulfilling. Work for money is banal and stupid. Beyond meaningless, really. It’s inexcusable.

But I have no idea how to make money without working for it. Which is why I don’t understand how other people can have such an appreciation for capitalism. My experience with capitalism is this: unless you’re born into money (alas, no), you have to find some way to make money. And unless you find something to do for money that you’d do for free, you’re going to be spending a large chunk of your life trading time for money. The older you get, the less attractive the trade-off – especially when the evidence is in that only a chump works for money. I mean, let’s face it. Unless you own the mine, you’re just feeding the beast.

And if you own the mine, you are the beast.

So, the New Conservative Government of Canada is pretty obviously guilty of knowingly handing over Afghan detainees to a third party that it knew had tortured Afghan detainees that it had handed over at one time or another. Which means that it’s also guilty of lying about what it knew and when. That it went on to attempt to silence a whistle-blower on the whole affair is a third offence and a perhaps the most significant one, to my mind. The fourth offence would have to be the ongoing obstruction of justice in preventing the truth from becoming known to the Canadian public about what the government knew and when regarding the Afghan detainee torture issue.

What’s interesting is that so many Conservatives and Conservative pundits have pretty much admitted to the Canadian media that the first offence is true, because they then go on to rationalize why it shouldn’t matter that it is. They do this in much the same way that every offence by the New Conservative Government of Canada is rationalized - that someone else has a lower bar and therefore the only way “we” can possibly compete is to lower our standards to meet it. It’s the same argument so-called fiscal Conservatives will use to justify free trade deals with countries like Columbia, or union busting for Vale Inco, or allowing industry to dictate the environmental agenda, or selling asbestos to India.

We appear to have thugs running the government and their Conservative supporters throwing up their hands to say, “Well, if we didn’t have thugs running our government, how would we compete with countries that do?”

Canadians need reminding that to have a decent standard of living we need to have decent standards.