New Media

The Robert Pickton pig farm serial killer trial is the big story – well, the only story, in Vancouver these days.

Every Canadian is entitled to a fair trial, but this is probably one time we can skip the formalities and lock up this very bad man in the darkest, deepest dungeon we have. I believe the old Diefenbunker is now available, although one of those Colorado mine shafts where they store nuclear waste would work just as well.

A flood of low-cost Chinese labor is hurting the economies of many African countries.

This critique of Chinese intervention in the continent would be laughable if the situation wasn’t so tragic. China’s government and business leaders make the case that these countries wouldn’t be letting them do business if it didn’t benefit their nations. Of course that’s true – starvation wages are evidently better than no wages at all for many Africans.

In doing business in Africa, China is setting up strategic footholds in resource-rich but economically backward parts of the world (Very much like China’s recent effort to acquire a controlling stake in our own Canadian mining companies). Westerners and some other Asian nations with a vague fear of Chinese domination may condemn the Dragon for its opportunism and ruthlessness.

But doing business with regimes where human rights are more of a passing thought than an enforced principle is a little more understandable when the investor is itself a geriatric thugocracy. China is really just doing what pretty much every other country traditionally does to Africa – only with a little more honesty.

Tags: Africa, China, exploitation, neocolonial

Canada is Texas.

Perhaps this explains our crazy weather of late.

A map compiled by a Norwegian blogger (and discovered on fellow Vancouver blogger Miss604’s blog) shows Canada where Texas ought to be. The enterprising map creator has simply transferred the names of countries on to where the state names ought to be, where GDP is equal to the economic output of that state.

It really reminds one that while the world’s first, traditional and next superpower looms on the horizon across the Pacific, the USA is still a terribly important piece of real estate for the time being and foreseeable future.

“The Zionists, it seems, are infatuated with blood.”

That’s the first line from a post on Vancouver Indymedia entitled Zionists and Blood. The full text of the post reads as follows:

“The zionists, it seems, are infatuated with blood. Tainted blood, that is, which they make to spread among large groups of the population of the world. These children are just the latest victims to be discovered, they are the recipients of this latest poisoned gift of the zionists”

It’s strange that the post is even available, since the volunteers who maintain Vancouver Indymedia wrote the following:

But, from this point forward, any anti-semitic trash or conspiracy theories in general will be deleted forthwith. Nobody has ever posted such a thing yet, and I hope they never do. But I will hit the delete button just as fast as I advocate others should do.

That’s odd. The post that nobody had ever posted and was supposed to be deleted just as fast as humanly possible is still there now. There are still a lot of posts with similar-themed content like this one. Or this one.

This, despite Indymedia’s announcement that their Winnipeg Indymedia branch has shut down, at least in part because of unrelenting commentary by anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists. It’s not really spam, as claimed in the Winnipeg announcement article, since such comments are in the main posts on the site, not merely in the comments. The Winnipeg site is merely the latest that has shut down for this cause.

The people at Vancouver Indymedia are trying to offer a provocative, revolutionary alternative to news provided by our main media conglomerates. Such enterprises almost invariably end up being hijacked by anti-Semites and the rest of the lunatic fringe.

Tags: Vancouver Indymedia, Zionist, blood libel, anti semite, conspiracy

When the biggest issue facing the ruling party in Canada is the environment, things must be going pretty well.

Conservative Party candidates will be attending an election training school in March (where they’ll be learning what, exactly? How to avoid gaining weight from all the pancake breakfasts and fundraising dinners?). It remains to be seen whether they’ll need any refresher course.

Liberal leader Stephane Dion says balancing the budget will be a big priority. News flash: we’ve had billion dollar budget surpluses for about a decade now and that has continued under the Tories.

Meanwhile, Dion’s party is once again raising the spectre of Canada not meeting it’s Kyoto commitments with Stephen Harper in power, conveniently forgetting that Canada’s carbon emmissions went up 30 per cent under Martin’s Liberals – to the point that meeting our targets this year would involve completely shutting down Ontario for the foreseeable future.

Dion’s environmental agenda also ignores Harper’s new promise to unveil plans obliging companies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 2015. Dion calls it opportunism, which it assuredly is, but no social benefit ever got passed by our parliament that didn’t meet the criteria of political expediency.

The economy is humming and life in Canada is pretty uneventful aside from our freak weather. If Kyoto is the only stick Dion has to wield against the Harperites, he’s likely to get smoked.