Rose's Place

Journalist Sheryl WuDunn, co-author with her husband New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof of Half the Sky, says it all at a recent TEDtalk. H/T to my longtime -- from high school! -- friend Mark Takefman, who walks the talk in India. UPPITY WOMAN DATE: Almost forgot. Under PM Stephen Harper's ''maternal health'' plan, women in these countries are not entitled to the reproductive freedom, including contraception, they would need to achieve equality. … [Read more...]

Another brilliant vid from Pale at A Creative Revolution , featuring the smooth but fuzzy blue sweater vocalizations of Reverend Paperboy from the Maple Syrup Revolution and the Beav. … [Read more...]

Paul Wells today on the bogus “academic” argument against Insite and the muzzling of RCMP's attempts to fix their earlier support of it."The only “research” the Harper government is prepared to rely on, as it fights Insite all the way to the Supreme Court, was not research; was secretly bought and paid for with federal tax dollars; contradicts the actual research; has been disowned internally by the police force that bankrolled it; and would have been disowned publicly by that police force if somebody at the RCMP’s highest ranks or outside it hadn’t put the kibosh on."In December RCMP … [Read more...]

Part One : Paul Jay interviews constitutional/criminal lawyer Clayton Ruby, who is defending satirist Charlie Veitch, the second person charged at G20 under the Public Works Protection Act. Because that act was amended in secret just for the G20, there was no way for the public to know how to obey it. Part Two : So do we have the right to protest, to peaceful assembly, at events like G20?Yes. Unfortunately, we have no effective way of enforcing that right. Hence, as Ruby says : "Beware the coming police state." . … [Read more...]

Well, I've moved to Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue. I was thinking of changing the name of this blog to "Feminist Mom in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue," but I'm still on the island of Montreal so I don't think that will be necessary. If anyone would like some helpful tips about moving with a toddler, the only sage advice I have to offer is "Don't do it." I think that I would prefer to have my son grow up in this small town than in the city. The best part about the new place is that we now have a backyard! At our old place we just had a lot of pavement. We did live a couple of blocks away from Jarry Park, which was … [Read more...]

What are your Dreams for Women? Antigone Magazine C/O WILLA Box 61 – 6138 SUB Blvd Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z1 OR antigonemagazine(at)hotmail.com See more postcards here. *Postcards posted between May 1- Sept 4 were created by young women in The Young Women Leaders Program, a mentoring program sponsored by the University of Central Florida Women’s Studies Program. YWLP originated at the University of Virginia, and UCF launched the program in the Orlando community. YWLP promotes middle school girls’ leadership abilities, pairing collegiate women with middle … [Read more...]

The August edition of Time magazine published a shocking cover picture of a young Afghan woman who had her ears and nose cut off, accompanied by the title : ‘What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan’.The story, Afghan Women and the Return of the Taliban, begins :The Taliban pounded on the door just before midnight, demanding that Aisha, 18, be punished for running away from her husband's house. They dragged her to a mountain clearing near her village in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan, ignoring her protests that her in-laws had been abusive ... Her judge, a local Taliban commander, was … [Read more...]

Hey kids, remember this?: And this?: And this?: Remember how we laughed and laughed and laughed at the feverish teabagger imaginations that produced such lurid spittle-flecked hyperbole? Obama, a nazi?  A Stalinist?  Hahaha! Yes yes, and you might also remember that while we were leaning over the fence pointing and laughing at the lunatic fringe to our south, in our own back yard progressives just couldn’t seem to catch an electoral break.  Sigh. Over 4 years and another election since Stephen the Corpulent first waddled to power, resplendent in the Blue Sweater-Vest … [Read more...]

Remember that two year Environment Committee study on the tarsands that was ultimately shredded because the four parties at the table couldn't agree on the wording of the witnesses' testimony? The Lib members of that committee have now released their own report on the testimony and as Andrew Nikiforuk reports at The Tyee, it is "scathing".~ Athabasca River is being polluted~12 barrels of freshwater required to produce one barrel of crude~world's largest man-made dams contain 170 square kilometres of toxic mining waste and they're leaking~steam plants could affect aquifers over an area the size … [Read more...]

The fired, the dismissed, the muzzled, the smeared, the set up, the forced out - the ones who spoke up and lost their jobs, the ones we know about :Cathie900ft JesusNext on the chopping block, according to Lawrence Martin at the G&M today, may be CRTC Chair Konrad von Finckenstein for not rubberstamping KoryMedia Fox News North's request for a Category 1 licence last month, which would require cable companies to include Fox News North as part of a basic cable package. Finckenstein's vice-chair has already been booted.On March 30, 2009, Stephen Harper, Kory Teneycke, Rupert Murdoch, owner of … [Read more...]

Norwegian freelance film maker and journalist Paul Refsdal embedded with Taliban fighters. He is later kidnapped by one of them for six days and released after he converts to Islam, the same deal offered to christians in the crusades nearly a thousand years ago.. … [Read more...]

“They don’t bother us. It’s just that they are annoying,”a "senior Conservative official" told the G&M's Dear Jane this morning about the public's uproar in reaction to the Cons' scrapping of the compulsory long-form census."Census freedom," this same anonymous Conbot amusingly called it.Apparently we the public are "annoying" to Steve now.And not just the Lib/NDP/Green/I-don't-fucking-vote-for-any-of-those-bastards public either.Not even Con voters support Steve's "Après moi, le déluge" style of government.According to Angus Reid, only 31% of people who voted Con last time "side … [Read more...]

Boris has already eviscerated Public Safety Minister Vic Toews performance on CBC, with a link to a good post by EFL also, but I was more appalled by the choice of questions CBC put to him.490 out of the 80,000 Tamils languishing in camps in Sri Lanka made it to Canada after three months at sea and here are the questions Rosemary Barton put to Toews, after an initial mention of possible terrorism :Australia managed to turn back this boat, and in our case we weren't able to turn back this vessel. Why can't we not do that?Shouldn't we be able to turn back ships before they get into Canadian waters?Are … [Read more...]

What are your Dreams for Women? Antigone Magazine C/O WILLA Box 61 – 6138 SUB Blvd Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z1 OR antigonemagazine(at)hotmail.com See more postcards here. *Postcards posted between May 1- Sept 4 were created by young women in The Young Women Leaders Program, a mentoring program sponsored by the University of Central Florida Women’s Studies Program. YWLP originated at the University of Virginia, and UCF launched the program in the Orlando community. YWLP promotes middle school girls’ leadership abilities, pairing collegiate women with middle … [Read more...]

Gaza flotilla video mashup. Lyrics.. … [Read more...]

A whale will typically repeat the same phrase over and over again for about two to four minutes.Of course it doesn't sound like ridiculous bullshit when a whale does it..Harper : "The economy remains the No. 1 priority for Canadians. That is why the economy is also the No. 1 priority for our government. And it is why all spring and summer, ministers and government MPs have been tightly focused on our economy.".Well, that and whaling away on the very foundations of what we call Canada. Apart from that..(h/t waterbaby for the "new" census link). … [Read more...]

No abortions for kitties, For me, the answer was obvious. She should be spayed ASAP. That’s what’s best for the population at large. For the owner, the answer was less obvious. Yet it didn’t take her long to agree that, given this particular set of circumstances, what was best for all was to spay. Problem solved, right? Not quite. Enter the woman who had originally found and captured the cat. She was of another mind (camp No. 1, for those keeping track). Must. Not. Kill. No. Matter. What. Okee-dokee. The problem was, she hadn’t filled out the paperwork and she wasn’t … [Read more...]

Four "Rethink Alberta" billboards in Denver, Portland, Seattle and Minneapolis proclaim the "Alberta Tar Sands Oil Disaster" is worse than the Gulf Oil Spill Disaster :There's also a vid:Alberta Preme Ed Stelmach is pledging $268,000 to mount a public relations offensive against the ads and has settled on a most unusual strategy :"Of 350 million Americans — 330 million of them probably don't even know where Alberta is," the premier said. "Let's not ramp this up too much because that's the kind of exposure the group wants."Of course not all of that $268,000 in public tax money is going to be spent … [Read more...]

The August edition of Vogue Italia features a fashion spread titled ‘Water and Oil.’ I believe that ‘Violence and Destruction’ better capture the content and mood of these photos. We are accustomed to the sexualization of violence against women. Now, we’re being asked to swallow the glorification of violent destruction of the Earth. I cannot believe that images that parallel photos of dying wildlife are being used to sell Self Tan Face Bronzing Gel that “keeps her skin golden.” Perhaps, ecofeminists and ecosocialists will have to rely less on dense historical and material analyses … [Read more...]

Colombian ex-Pres Alvaro Uribe has been appointed Vice Chair to the U.N.’s four-member international committee investigating the Israeli commando attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in which nine people were killed in international waters. The other three members are an Israeli, a Turk, and a former president of New Zealand.Interesting choice. Colombia is the US cats paw in South America in the same way Israel is in the Mid East.On the plus side : Uribe has lots of previous experience with false positives , the practice of murdering innocents and then dressing them up as enemies of the state … [Read more...]