Canadian Corruption

Wow, what a week!

A lot of shit has hit the fan over the G8/G20 issue alone; not only is the RCMP investigating the questionable spending (for whatever that's going to be worth), but the Toronto Police Service and Canada's attorney general have been hit with MULTIPLE lawsuits over their treatment of innocents. Specifically, the young woman who was threatened with arrest by "Officer Bubbles" (real name, Adam Josephs) is suing, as well as a man who had nothing to do with the protests but was jailed, stripped, beaten, and denied a lawyer, seemingly just for making a flippant remark about the summit.

Not only that, but newly-released documents show that -- as many had suspected -- the protests were infiltrated by various police agencies. One has to wonder if any of these agencies were involved in the only real protester violence, that weekend: the Black Bloc riot that the police were ORDERED to let happen, by persons unknown.

One also has to wonder about Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, who was quoted in every newspaper today, as claiming that his cops were unprepared for the number of people. BULLSHIT! There were AT LEAST twice as many cops there as protesters, and they certainly looked like a well-oiled machine when it came to sweeping up and pounding people who were just standing in the street!

On another note... after a year's delay, some of the Afghan detainee documents were released. However, very little in the way of new information was made public, because the Harper Conservatives single-handedly declared the issue to be over. Mind you, what WAS made public is that Stephen Harper and his cabinet were made aware, that prisoners captured by Canadian soldiers were indeed being tortured when transferred to Afghan authorities. Whether or not Harper did anything to stop the abuse, is unclear. However, he certainly has gone out of his way to make sure this issue is not discussed or investigated.

Now, I'm not a legal expert, but I'm pretty sure that when you condone or assist in a war crime, that makes you an accessory. Even if no one in Canada can or will take Harper to task over this, the International Criminal Courts ARE looking into this. I hope forward to seeing what they have to say.

Harper's G8/G20 spending "revealed"

So now we get to see the G8/G20 report, that a lot of Canadians wished could have been released during the election.

As you might know, Parliament approved about $1.1 billion for the joint summits (which, incidentally, is a worldwide record). This was supposedly for security and infrastructure investments. However, not only was the majority of the money spent on things that have NOT been accounted for, but about half wasn't spent AT ALL.

In other words, the Harper Conservatives funneled hundreds of millions of tax dollars, and just let it vanish.

...um, I believe that's called FRAUD!

Sarah Palin's History Lesson

So if you haven't heard, apparently Sarah Palin claims to know more about American history than the actual people who wrote history books, and the people who spent years at university to learn how to properly understand it... or for that matter, anyone who can actually read the English language.

We all know about Paul Revere, right? He was a hero of the American revolution, famous for warning his comrades that the colonial British troops were coming to arrest them? You know, that thing called The Midnight Ride (though some of the details were embellished as it became legend). I'm Canadian and even I know about that -- so would any grade-schooler in the states, I hope (despite the best efforts of Texas).

Well, according to Failin' Palin, this is not true. Behold the following video -- recorded in Boston, no less.

Wow, I bet that went over real well.

But wait -- THERE'S MORE!

Apparently, Palin's gestapo zealots supporters in the Teabaggers Tea Party Terrorist Group Patriots have taken to tampering with Wikipedia, to change their Paul Revere article to reflect Palin's claim. Not surprisingly, the editors took exception to brand-new claims that Revere was effectively a traitor, and on top of that tried to protect rights in a Constitution that didn't exist yet. Especially when those claims are only substantiated by someone who honestly thinks that Africa is a country.

So let me get this straight... when moderates and liberals who are educated and sensible enough to pass a basic I.Q. test, simply repeat the exact text of a historical document, that is considered eeebil sochulist revishunism. However, when a clearly idiotic lunatic and her personal militia just pull random statements out of their asses, we're expected to bow down to them?

And conservatives wonder why the rest of us think they're idiots??

Stop Harper

A bit of a kerfuffle was made this week, over Emperor Harper's first throne speech, since being rewarded for contempt of Parliament with absolute power. Not so much over the speech itself -- though I personally am bothered by his promise to set up a Religion office, and scrap an effective gun registry, as well as bemused by his latest faulty economic promises. The controversy is over a Parliamentary page named Bridgette De Pape, holding a sign that said "STOP HARPER", right where Harper and other political big-whigs (and the media) could see it.

The 21 year old woman was quickly removed and fired for the stunt -- which is appropriate punishment -- but I still applaud this young lady for having the guts to take such a direct and public stand. We have seen many times over, that Harper and his supporters view the 75% of Canadians who didn't vote Conservative as a virus to be wiped out. I personally have seen HarperCons talk about killing every last one of us, and have been threatened and stalked over my statements. In this last election alone, we saw the Conservatives spy on and assault people who had any history at all with another political movement, and try to actually remove a ballot box (I'll remind you that this is the only party to my knowledge, to be charged with cheating in at least one election). Then there's that whole issue of who cut the brake lines of Liberal supporters in the 2008 election...

Sure enough, Harper has some supporters who feel that making disgusting put downs is the appropriate way to handle someone exercising their freedom of speech.

Check out this comment.

And this one.

This one too.

These are the kind of people that Canada just allowed to dominate us. Thanks a lot.

May's Morons of the Month

• Stephen Harper's supporters (including the 40% of Canadians who didn't vote) for not only accepting Harper's corrupt, incompetent, criminal, and possibly treasonous behaviour, but PROMOTING HIM FOR IT (he now has absolute power over Canada). Not only that, but they've taken to harassing people like me for pointing out the stupidity of this -- including phoning me at home!

(and we won't even get into Harper's appointment of DEFEATED Conservative candidates to the Senate, or appointing one of the largest cabinets in Canadian history, or making an unelected Senator one of our rotating Deputy PMs...)

• Various left-wing nutjobs for not only insisting that Osama Bin Laden isn't dead (seemingly just for the sake of it), but for calling him a hero -- no joke -- and for actually THREATENING ME because I point out that Bin Laden himself called himself a mass murderer (then there's the random and totally unprovoked calls that I'm an idiot and a troll, because I disagreed with some of the loonier things that the Zeitgiest movement stands for).
• The Ontario Provincial Police/Toronto Police Service for continuing to accept blatant law-breaking from the boys in blue (specifically, defaming Jack Layton with a dubious claim that he visited a massage parlour and received services -- with notes that were illegally obtained -- and then continuing to cover up for the G20 gestapo officers who beat up unarmed protesters).
• Hamilton Police Officer Oliver Mann, who --with his partner -- arrested Michael Dixon for robbing a jewelry store (and defending it even after losing a lawsuit over it this month), despite Dixon looking NOTHING like the robber, and having an alibi that multiple witnesses were willing to confirm... if Mann and his partner had bothered to look into it, especially when asked by the Crown.
• Evangelical nutcase Harold Camping and his followers, for their now-infamous prediction that the world was going to end last weekend... and continuing that act ever when proven wrong (again), and even after bilking many out of their life savings.
• Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu (and the Zionist lobby), for getting in a snit with Barack Obama over his request that they give back land that was basically stolen from the Palestinians, in 1967.
• Sarah Palin, for crediting Bin Laden's death to George W. Bush -- who had NOTHING to do with it -- and totally ignoring Obama's hand in it.
• The Tea Party for continuing to claim that Obama is a Muslim infiltrator (see Birther recognition last month), even after he CLEARLY KILLED MANY MUSLIM TERRORISTS.

"Earthquake" (film review)

"Earthquake" (movie review)

Saturday, May 21, 2011

In honour of today supposedly being the day of the rapture, it seemed appropriate to talk a little about this old disaster movie that I saw a few days ago: 1974's Earthquake.

It was made in the heyday of 70s catastrophe flicks, like Airport, The Poseidon Adventure, and The Towering Inferno, but if you haven't heard of it, you're not alone. Despite the movie being a hit at the box office, winning Oscars for its effects, and being the first movie to use the short-live Sensurround system (more on that later), and boasting a cast of screen legends (like Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner), even in the early 90s you were hard pressed to find it in any video store or on TV. In fact, the Universal Theme Park ride based on Earthquake is the only attraction there, to my knowledge, to have been renamed because no one knew about the movie that inspired it!

The plot is very simple: in Los Angeles, we follow a football player-turned-engineer (Heston), his estranged wife (Gardner), his actress mistress (Genevive Bujold), his father-in-law and boss (Lorne Green), as well as a disillusioned cop (George Kennedy), a daredevil (Richard Roundtree), his mechanic's sister (Victoria Principal), and an unhinged national guardsman (Marjoe Gortner) as they go about their lives amid strong tremors. However, the tremors -- getting stronger and more frequent all the time -- turn out to be the appetizer for The Big One; a cataclysmic earthquake that reduces L.A. to wreckage, and abandons its citizens to chaos. And things go downhill from there...

There's really not much to artistically say about this movie, but it is reasonably suspenseful and the characters engaging (if dangerously close to soap-opera territory). Marjoe Gortner in particular deserves praise for his psychotic yet believable soldier character. The really big problem with the earlier dramatic scenes is that they literally serve no purpose at all, except to make you care about the characters.

Simply put, this movie is pretty much a visual effects reel with some acting in it -- and oddly, a lot less irritating than the Michael Bay/Roland Emmerich movies that make at least a minimal effort to balance the formula out more. As far as the effects go, they were definitely stunning for the movie's time, but they are a bit dated today. Apparently, model effects weren't quite finessed in the early 70s -- I vividly remember a remake of the Big Quake sequence being created in the early 90s for the Universal Florida ride, and being very convincing even today. Probably the only difference was in camera technology and some materials, but it makes all the difference in the world.

In regards to the Sensurround that I mentioned -- which, by the way, is a feature on some DVD releases of Earthquake -- it's basically a subwoofer on steroids. As a gimmick for the film's theatrical release, Universal had theatres install these large speakers in the floors, and programmed the soundtrack to play sub-sonic vibrations through them, for the quake scenes. They didn't really make any extra noise, but they made you feel like the room was shaking apart.

The problem was, sometimes it really was -- there were numerous reports of theatre walls and ceilings cracking, and businesses next to theatres having their merchandise break when it fell off of shelves. As multiplexes became more common, this system was even more irritating than it seemed to be worth, so only four or five movies altogether were released in Sensurround.

Anyway, if you're interested in pure mayhem and melodrama, I very much recommend checking this movie out... though you may have to hunt for it on YouTube.

Harper Conservatives vs. Canadian Women

Remember how Stephen Harper promised that his government would never re-open the issue of abortion in Canada? Don't be so certain of that.

While Harper's supporters would like us to forget it, his core base includes the so-called Christian Right (ie. groups like Focus on the Family, the Canadian Family Action Coalition, the Institute for Marriage and the Family, and the other politely-labeled hate groups). And that core base turned out in Ottawa today, to demand that Emperor Harper ban abortion. It's even being Tweeted, that about 65 Conservative Meat Puppets will table a private member's bill to do just that (which is an extremely sleazy way for Harper to claim that he personally never re-opened this Pandora's Box).

Now, before we get into this rant, let me make something clear. I personally am very dodgy about abortion; I have a very big problem with it being treated like just another kind of birth control, and I have no sympathy for women who get them simply because they couldn't be bothered to make sure their partners wore rubbers. However, I have an even bigger problem with any group -- or government -- telling a group of complete strangers that they have no right to control their own bodies (especially in a case like rape or incest).

Am I the only one to find it a little odd, that the same people who claim to hate big and intrusive government, want to intrude on a woman's private parts? And that they claim to not want to control people's lives, but that is EXACTLY WHAT THEY ARE TRYING TO DO?

Of course, there's also that tiny little issue of how these groups claim to be "pro-life", yet they often hate public health care, hate welfare, hate day care, hate public schools, hate gun control, and are totally fine with pre-emptive wars and the death penalty (and often act like vegetarians are freaks of nature). George Carlin put it a hell of a lot better than I ever could, but it is pretty obvious that these zealots don't really give a shit about preserving life.

Finally, I know that social conservatives hate facts (as well as a lot of other things), but here are some big ones they need to respect: the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that forbidding a woman from getting an abortion is UNCONSTITUTIONAL. Whatever else your thoughts are on abortion, it's easy to see why: telling someone that they have no ownership of their own body, is essentially slavery. Furthermore, the majority of Canadians are pro-choice. By trying to force this agenda on us, you are directly saying that the voices of the majority do not matter -- I know that you don't think that this is important, but it would cost Harper big time in the next election (if he decides to allow one).

Oh, and while we're speaking of holes in your philosophy, can you please try to remember "judge not lest ye be judged", "forgive thy enemies", and "render unto Caesar, that which is Casesar's"? Thank you.