Currents

Here is an excerpt from Lyle Neff’s (aka Earnest Canuck’s) recent article about a Mobilization Against War and Occupation-organized hip-hop concert. A version of this article appeared in the Fall ‘07 issue of VR.

“Drury and MAWO aren’t really for peace,” K. said worriedly. “They’re for the other side. They are fans of the jihad. And mainstream publications like 24 Hours aren’t investigating such groups – they’re funding ‘em.”

Yes, they are. Brooding on this, I recalled the hip-hop consciousness of the Mississauga MC Zakaria Amara. Speaking his grassroots truth, comparing Muslims to Canadians, Amara spat out such rhymez as this:

Our sisters are purer
Than your Jennys and your Heathers
The only good thing about you
Is your Tim Horton’s muffin fritters

– just before he and the other Toronto bomb plotters took delivery of the alleged ammonium nitrate. Allegedly. Now, the MAWO cadres may genuinely believe MC Zak to be an unjustly imprisoned casualty of the neo-colonial Islamophobic imperialist apparatus. They have a Charter right to such a belief, the same way we countrymen of Zakaria Da Bomb uphold his freedom to express his frothing, murderous contempt for us.

Did the musicians and performers at MAWO’s circus realize the radical organizers were employing them in defense of blank-eyed little bigots like Amara, though? I suspect most didn’t. That’s why the “enlightened,” political division of hip-hop is almost as dull as the gangster division. Sorry, Kia; it doesn’t matter whether you’re “conscious” or not, if in point of fact you’re oblivious.

The pocket book. - yup, until the average driver gets hit over the head with a hefty gas tax, we’re just not going to be conserving our precious fossil fuels. The BC provincial government is doing the right thing by putting a carbon tax up for consideration in next year’s budget (as reported in the always vigilant Public Eye Online by Sean Holman).

Sure, make allowances for people who buy more fuel-efficient vehicles and for truck freight carriers that would otherwise get hit with a disproportionate share of the tax. But the wave of gas-guzzling SUV’s that has hit the roads over the past decade would never have gotten off the assembly line if we had implemented this measure in time across North America.

Oil is a finite resource and when we do use it, the planet seems not to like it. This carbon tax’s time has come.

The world is a nasty place today (as opposed to yesterday, when everything was just balmy).

Canadian opposition parties throw all their energies into defending a confessed and unrepentant double-murderer. Soon after, Conservatives begin negotiations with contractors to paint the House of Commons blue when Canadians vote them in unanimously in the coming election.

Yasser Arafat aims a laser beam at Jerusalem from beyond the grave. In related news, a new poll shows terrorist heads of thuggish kleptocracies are guaranteed a loving memory by the people they brutalize.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf imposes martial law to deal with the threat of rising Islamic extremism. No one saw that coming, right?

Olympic fever is inciting Chinese parents to use unconventional methods to prod their children into becoming superhuman overachievers. In a linked story, a father in southern China tied his 10-year-old daughter Huang Li’s hands and feet and watched her swim in a chilly river for three hours.

Who likes war? Not me. Neither does anyone I know. Yet the latest outing by the Stopwar.ca people outside the Vancouver Art Gallery just showcased the problem with the peace movement today: hijacking by loopy people.

Millions of Canadians would protest for peace if it didn’t mean standing next to dinks holding giant banners stating that 9/11 was an inside job.

How would it have felt for featured speaker Afghan parliamentarian Malalai Joya (suspended from the Afghan parliament for rightly calling out her fellow politicians for being war criminals and drug lords) to realize that she’d fallen in with a bunch of wingnuts? It must have been a hard thing for someone with such apparent integrity to make that sacrifice in order to keep bringing attention to her troubled homeland.

Joya has a lot of valid criticisms of NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan. Sadly, all of it was pretty much ignored as the crowd droned internally with their “Out Now” mantra - a position which Joya doesn’t actually seem to share, if one listens carefully enough.

“Out Now” and “Leave as soon as possible” are not the same thing.

So says Vancouver journalist Ian King about shallow moronic apologists for anti-Western zealots. The smug jerks are hitting out blindly at the latest Tyee column from acclaimed author and deadly accurate journalist Terry Glavin.

Glavin once again rips into the significant segment of the anti-imperialist left in Canada that is mute about the struggle of Iranian dissidents against the Islamic Republic’s thuggish regime.

Time and again in the comments section, the usual suspects trot out the same tired and dishonest rhetoric to defend their hero, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Once more, they gloss over the regime’s failings to strike at phantom Neo-con spies.

Yet Glavin couldn’t be clearer that Canadians who are upset with the totalitarian Iranian regime can condemn it without fearing to be seen as puppets of Bush:

Ottawa has taken a leading role at the UN in the focus on Iranian human rights, and after Kazemi’s murder in 2003, diplomatic engagement with Tehran was confined to human-rights questions. Canadians are well placed, then, to focus on shaming the regime and exposing its tyrannical violence, simply by helping pro-democracy forces tell their stories to the outside world.

King is dead-on with his own take on condemning Iranian human rights abuses, supporting dissidents and protesting any invasion of the Islamic Republic:

It is possible to hold all three views at once, rather than simply defaulting to “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. This is not rocket science.

Exactly.

Vancouver is tied with Calgary as the most polite major city in Canada (Moncton actually finished first of any municipality in the survey, so small-town values still count for something). Evidently, the pollsters were never in touch with any member of Vancouver’s Anti-Poverty Committee.

Here is a group which has abandoned any effort to protest its legitimate concerns over housing the homeless in favor of shock tactics and thuggery.

The Hell on Earth that is Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside has many causes, among them a decision long ago to release all mentally ill Canadians from asylums on to the streets, a thriving drug trade (the bane of any city with a half-decent port) and an extreme climate that makes most other Canadian cities uninhabitable six months out of the year for those without shelter.

But breaking into buildings for illegal squats that will inevitably get broken up by police is becoming a very tired tactic for getting attention, and a useless one in terms of actually getting homeless people indoors. So long as homeless people are represented by such dorks, they are badly served.

By the way, kudos to the Campbell government for providing $41 million in new funding for homeless shelters.

“We were wrong,” says dumbstruck Mobilization Against War and Occupation Vancouver representative Kira Koshelanyk. “Most Afghans actually think their country is headed in the right direction, and just 15 per cent of them want foreign troops out of their country right now. The rest think NATO should stay, at least until the country is secure. Who knew?”

Well, the statistics from the CBC and the Munk Centre are true, even if the quote and attribution shown above are entirely false. Koshelanyk and her colleagues at MAWO said no such thing.

Of course MAWO has no intention of issuing a press release showing that more than 70 per cent of Afghans think their president is doing a good job in running the country (Try to remember the last time a Canadian leader got such high marks). Considering the guy is leading the largely corrupt administration of a country that is facing an existential threat from opium-financed jihadist thugs, that’s a lot of admiration for a so-called puppet regime.

Will Afghanistan ever become the kind of country where Canadians can travel anywhere safely outside of a NATO convoy? The history of the country certainly doesn’t lend itself to optimistic predictions. But progress has been made; A real estate building boom in Kabul speaks volumes about the Afghan population’s morale.

Thanks to 24 Hours Vancouver reporter Ian King for the heads up on the poll. Nice post, Ian.

At Third Tuesday Vancouver, a cool mix of Vancouver-based marketers, public relations experts, writers and technologists are doing their darndest to get a handle on social media for communications, marketing and society - over a couple of beers, natch.

There’s a lot to learn from social media experts like Tod Maffin and Tanya Davis. One point (of many) that I took last night from a talk with featured Third Tuesday Vancouver presenter Joseph Thornley of Thornley Fallis: It doesn’t take all that long to become an expert and potentially monetize social media applications. (Full disclosure: while Joseph did not actually get to give his presentation due to a sudden venue change, I did manage to pick his brain later in the evening).

The process of figuring out how to convert Facebook links and Twitter messages into cash is sort of like a gold rush where no one actually knows where the gold is. The central problem is mitigated somewhat by the fact that you can Digg for the stuff from the comfort of your living room.

If you build it, they will come. Sadly, this mantra applies equally well to roads and bridges as cheesey Kevin Costner baseball movies.

When traffic congestion builds, the obvious short-term solution is to build more roads. But in the long term, the roads fill up, necessitating more and more roads until you end up with Los Angeles-style freeways. Get Moving BC’s proposal (as detailed in The Livable Blog) to build more bridges to solve our bottlenecks is just more of the same.

Thanks to Beyond Robson blogger Sean Orr for the heads-up (This is one issue where a lefty and a righty can meet in the middle).

I’m still astounded and disappointed by the defensiveness of some Canadian Conservatives whenever someone mentions global warming. After all, Conservatives ought to be embracing green issues, if only for crass political advantage.

Mind you, most BC-based Conservatives seem to get it, but east of the Rockies, environmentalists’ popularity is inversely proportional to the amount of revenue Alberta extracts from its tar sands.

Vancouver technology blogger David Drucker touches on the issues of sustainability in fascinating post on one of Isaac Asimov’s early influences, science fiction writer Lawrence Manning. The description of the 1933 story “The Man Who Awoke” is a reminder that long before the words greenhouse gases were even part of our vocabulary, North Americans were well aware of the environmentally-unsustainable nature of their lifestyles.

You don’t have to be green to save the ice caps. Just maintaining some fair measure of our own quite comfortable modern lifestyle within a paradigm of sustainability seems like a good enough reason to go green.