test blog #10

Earlier today, we put a sticker on our mailbox. It's meant to be a message for our letter carrier, to show support for her cause. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) has filed notice to strike at one minute before midnight on June 2. The overwhelming majority of its membership wants to strike, and from what I hear, have been pushing leadership to reject concessions and authorize the walkout. The posties' fight is not only about their own right to decent working conditions. It's for our rights, too: our right to good public services that put people before profits, our right to decent jobs that raise our standard of living, rather than force us to work ever harder just to stay afloat. Indeed, the posties' fight has echoes for our entire society, because as the income gap widens, our world becomes scarier, less safe, and less civil. During the Toronto municipal workers strike, many of us were horrified at the anti-labour, anti- human spew emanating from most of ...

In case you haven't seen it yet. On May 28, 2011 Television host Adam Kokesh and several other activists participating in a flash-mob were arrested at the publicly-funded Thomas Jefferson Memorial. Their crime? Silently dancing, in celebration of the first amendment's champion; a clear violation of their right to free-expression. In an excessive use of force, video was captured of Adam being body slammed and placed in a choke for his non-crime. Lest the expression "flash mob" bring to mind some action that could possibly deserve warning or arrest, please watch the video before judging the so-called crime. Adam Kokesh body slammed, choked, police brutality at Jefferson Memorial

Thirty-five talks (total), seven talks (attended), three panel discussions, three amazing short films. Several pints of beer, countless interesting ideas, dozens of thought-provoking comments, not enough sleep. Twice brought to tears of inspiration and joy. Chaired two meetings, and met one wmtc reader! About 200 attendees; eight new IS members - including Allan! Reports from Wisconsin, Egypt, Bahrain, Venezuela, Bolivia, Afghanistan; reports from Hamilton, Toronto, Quebec and Ottawa. Women, men, and at least one baby; a spectrum of colours, languages, traditions and backgrounds; ages 90s to 20s; union, nonunion, students, unwaged; questioning, learning, teaching, organizing. Learning learning learning. I'm exhausted, overwhelmed and deeply inspired. I feel - as I did last year when I attended my first Marxism Conference - that I have come home. That I have found my people. I want so badly to transmit what I learned and convey my excitement and hope, but it feels beyond me. But ov...

Please enjoy three minutes of inspired filmmaking. "Just another cog in the machine," produced and directed by John Wood (UK, 2009). Thanks to Kim_in_TO and CLiFF for showing us this.

THE SECRET TRIAL 5 INTRO VIDEO from The Secret Trial 5 on Vimeo . Last night's Marxism Conference programme ended with three excellent short films from the Canadian Labour International Film Festival (CLiFF). More about CLiFF when I write about Marxism. Meanwhile, please watch this outstanding video. Perhaps you'd like to become a producer of this important project .

We had a wonderful little getaway , despite some crazy weather. It was great to re-connect with our Windsor friends , now not only married but Canadian citizens. We had dinner at a terrific little Salvadorean joint ; if you find yourself in Windsor, it's worth looking up. Driving out to Windsor, we hit rain so intense, we had to pull off the highway to wait it out. But the following day, when the game started, we actually needed sunscreen. The storm clouds rolled in, but not as quickly as Boston's runs. By the time the raindrops started falling, the Red Sox had a 7-run lead. We quickly snagged two seats under the overhang - cushioned seats with extra leg-room and a little bench for your drinks - so when the downpour started, we were cozy and happy. By the 8th inning, the Red Sox lead was 14-2. The tarp came out and the fans streamed out. It was neat to be in a nearly empty ballpark, and great to see a big win in our only live Sox game this year. We had a lot of fun. * * * * Thi...

...not even a tornado. Dog crawls home on broken legs, three weeks after tornado . Wow.

For several months, Wil Hylton, an excellent writer from GQ magazine, has been interviewing Phil McDowell, an Iraq War resister living in Canada, along with many other war resisters and their supporters and detractors. The resulting article is now online: Just Deserts : Osama bin Laden is dead, but the wars he provoked rage on, claiming lives in all kinds of ways. Consider the bizarre case of Phil McDowell, a decorated American soldier who completed his four-year tour of duty but now may be deported from Canada and court-martialed as a deserter. How can you go AWOL when you're not even in the army anymore? On the eve of our first Memorial Day since we killed the guy Phil enlisted to fight, Wil S. Hylton investigates. [ Read it here. ] And from Canadian Press: A high-profile U.S. war resister facing deportation from Canada was illegally ordered to do a second tour of duty in Iraq, according to an investigative piece in an American magazine. GQ Magazine writes that the U.S. Army ha...

I'll be spending the next few days with several things I am passionate about: baseball, socialism, good friends - and Allan. Today we're heading to Windsor, having dinner with " Gito and Mrtew ", then tomorrow seeing the Red Sox in Detroit. Hooray, a day game! This is our only live baseball game of the season, so good weather and a win would be much appreciated. When we return, this weekend is the annual Marxism conference in Toronto. Last year I managed to attend Friday, Friday night and Saturday night. Since I had such a great time - and since we have no money to travel this year - we're taking the weekend off to attend the whole thing. I'm also helping out a (very) little at the conference, by chairing two talks. I'm really looking forward to both the socialism and the socializing. I won't be blogging much for a few days, then I'll be completely overloaded with material to write about and no time to write.

It comes as no surprise that NBA great - and peace-loving Canadian - Steve Nash supports same-sex marriage. But it's damn great to hear him say it. Does anyone know of a list or compilation of all the New Yorkers for Marriage Equality videos? Human Rights Campaign , the organization that's producing the videos, doesn't seem to have them archived. I've Googled the daylights out of it and can't find anything.

My annual Movie Season post is appearing later and later every year, but at long last, I've carved out the time to write it. We started out with TV serieses and comedies this year, especially a massive Larry Sanders Show binge. But once baseball spring training started, we sprinted through a flurry of movies. There were many excellent late additions to our Zip list , thanks to Roger Ebert . I wish we had discovered his year-end best-of list sooner, and I hope he's with us to write many more. As you know, every Movie Season wrap-up comes with a different rating system. For past wmtc movie rating schemes: 2009-10 , 2008-09 , 2007-08 and 2006-07 . These days I'm spending so much time doing what I must, and not enough time doing the things that make me happy. In keeping with that, this year's wmtc movie ratings are based on places - places that represent both a physical location and I would like (or not like) to be, and my state of mind when I'm in each place. This year...

Photo: Lianne Howie, Lucky Mutt Pet Photography In April, I blogged about a proposal in Ontario to legalize coyote-killing contests. This excellent article from a small, local newspaper explains why such plans simply do not work, and describes the best approach for dealing with urban and suburban coyote populations. As with so many things, a "zero tolerance" approach will only make things worse. Public education and coexistence is the way forward. Personally, I don't buy the evolutionary psychology theory about people's misplaced fear of coyotes, as humans have misplaced fears about so many things, and evolutionary theories strike me as cherry-picking at best. (Evolutionary psychology is often used as an excuse for sexism .) But I do know that fear and ignorance drive so many terrible ideas, whether its a ban on dog breeds or headscarves , or recent celebrations of a murder . From Inside Halton: "Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. N...

Frank Lindh, father of John Walker Lindh, asks, " Bin Laden's Gone. Can My Son Come Home? " Can everyone's son and daughter come home? John Walker Lindh and Omar Khadr? Those in Afghanistan, those in Guantanamo, those in Iraq? Everyone who hasn't been blown to bits. Everyone who survived their torture. Everyone who still lives and breathes. Now that the meaningless death of one man has laid the groundwork, can we please get the US and Canada out of Afghanistan, and let the Afghans rebuild and recover? How much more liberation must they endure? On the evening of May 1, we learned that Osama bin Laden had been killed. The following dawn, I left my house in the Bay Area to catch a bus to Oakland International Airport. I flew to Indianapolis for a scheduled visit with my son, John Walker Lindh, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. I love my son. I enjoy our periodic visits and our weekly telephone calls, but this visit felt different. “If Bin Laden is dead,” I ...

You all remember when my border-crossing troubles began: "the gray area": in which i am detained, harassed and threatened at the border . And then continued: border crossing take 2 . And so on. The routine - surrender the keys, armed escort into the waiting area, pointless detention, release - continued for just under a year. Allan filed a request for information about an "adverse border crossing experience". Then, after almost a year of hassles every time we crossed the border, we had one normal crossing last US Thanksgiving , and I recently had another, on my own in Pearson Airport. Imagine my surprise at checking the mailbox - paper mail, our home address - and seeing the Department of Homeland Security in the return address! For your entertainment, here it is. Your experience was most likely caused by a misidentification against a government record or by random selection. ...or because you used your passport to help a friend who had deserted from the US milit...

How close it came: WikiLeaks memo suggests Canada offered to aid Iraq invasion . And how it still goes on: WikiLeaks shows CSIS continues to secretly pass names to US watchlist .

The second of the three " books on books " on my spring-summer reading list was Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare , by James Shapiro. Contested Will is not an examination of who wrote Shakespeare's plays and poems, but rather of the Shakespeare authorship controversy itself. Shapiro looks at why, about 230 years after the death of William Shakespeare, a belief arose that he was not, in fact, the author of the plays and poems that bear his name – and why that belief persists to this day, supported by a thriving cottage industry. Contested Will is not so much about what people think – although some of the claims are necessarily woven in – as why they think it. James Shapiro casts a keen, critical, and always skeptical eye at all claims both for and against Shakespeare's authorship. A Shakespeare scholar, he dislikes that the authorship question has been "walled off from serious study", as he puts it, within the scholarly community. In the excellent intro...

For the past five years, Major League Baseball has held an annual "Civil Rights Game," in which the sport congratulates itself on becoming integrated, despite its massive efforts to remain whites-only. At this year's Civil Rights Game, somebody actually talked about civil rights in the present tense. And he was booed. Joy of Sox: Civil Rights Speech Booed At Civil Rights Game

Charles Dickens' letter opener The handle is the preserved paw of one of his beloved cats. I can think of few things sadder, scarier, and stupider than public libraries being destroyed by government "austerity" measures. This desperate budget-slashing would be unnecessary in a more rational economic system - and would be unthinkable in a more just one. This moving piece in The Guardian describes what is being lost in the UK (as bank CEOs get multi-million dollar payouts). As local authority budgets are reduced by the government's cuts, up to 500 libraries around the country will have to close. Librarians – traditionally seen as a mild, herbivorous breed – are up in arms. Partly because public libraries are often seen as a soft target; partly because they say local authorities consistently undervalue the breadth of what they do; and partly because the cutting will be done during a recession, which is exactly when everyone starts going to the library again. But the cu...

There is a beautiful snowball effect going on. In light of my recent posts about NHL player Sean Avery's public support of marriage equality - and two non-gay male athletes taking lead roles in anti-homophobia campaigns - when I see this, I can't help but think we are approaching a tipping point. From yesterday's New York Times , an excellent story by Dan Barry: A Sports Executive Leaves the Safety of His Shadow Life . The photo caption reads: "Rick Welts, the president of the Phoenix Suns, hopes his coming out can break the silence surrounding homosexuality in men's team sports." Someone - some high-profile male athlete in a professional team sport - has to take the lead on this. We know you're out there. Come out so we can support you!

If you have not done so already, please click here to send a message to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, calling on them to rescind Operational Bulletin 202. Today, May 15, is the International Day of Conscientious Objectors, originally organized by War Resisters’ International . On May 15, 2011, the War Resisters Support Campaign calls on the Canadian government to honour the human right to conscience by rescinding “Operational Bulletin 202”. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives won a majority with only a small increase in popular support – under 40% of the vote. US Iraq War resisters in Canada have always had the support of two-thirds of Canadians, and the recent federal election has not changed that. Parliament voted twice to let US war resisters stay, and the Federal Court of Appeal unanimously ruled that war resisters’ beliefs must be taken into account when their refugee claims are heard. Yet, in July 2010, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jaso...

Millions of non-queer people support full LGBT equality, just as millions of white people supported the civil rights movement, and millions of men support feminism. But straight men who embrace anti-bullying and anti-homophobia as a mission - from within the homophobic world of professional sports - are truly heroes. Following up on my recent post about NHL player Steve Avery's support for marriage equality , meet Ben Cohen and Hudson Taylor, straight male athletes who take support for equality take support for equal rights a step further. From OutSports: Ben Cohen and Hudson Taylor, the two strongest straight allies in the fight against homophobia in sports, met in New York this weekend and will work together on their joint passion.   Wrote Cohen on his Facebook page: Met Hudson Taylor last night what a great guy. We share the same passion on homophobia in sport and life in general. We also support the same charit[ies] which are GLSEN and It Gets Better campaign. This guy is a wre...

I've avoided any mention of the sickening spectacle of the GNOTFOTE thumping its collective chest because it (supposedly) took 10 years to assassinate one middle aged man with failing kidneys. Talk about security theatre! Surely this must be The Office of Security Theatre's Greatest Show on Earth. I do want to share a few items, though, related to this nonsense. One, Joy of Sox: The National Anthem and the Idea Of Respect . And two, Chomsky: We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic . Each coming from a different angle, and both well worth reading. Plus a bonus, in case you missed it, or didn't see proof: Fox "News" . The only positive is that bin Laden's death gives us all an opening to talk about getting the hell out of Afghanistan. Which Canada was supposed to do this year, a pledge the Conservatives had no intentions of honouring . In the...

Thank you to this Canadian for taking this public stand! Since September, advocates for same-sex marriage in New York have released 30-second videos of celebrities endorsing their cause. More than 30 have taken part, including the actors Julianne Moore and Sam Waterston , Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the former first daughter Barbara Bush . On Thursday, former President Bill Clinton released a written statement of support, too. Until now, supporters have come mostly from the worlds of politics, entertainment, theater and fashion. One type of New York celebrity was conspicuously absent: the athlete. Enter Rangers forward Sean Avery. He recently recorded a video, becoming one of only a few active athletes in American team sports to voice support for gay rights, and is believed to be the first in New York to publicly advocate for same-sex marriage. No active male player in a major American team sport has declared his homosexuality, and homosexual slurs remain in use to insult opponen...

May 15 is the International Day of Conscientious Objectors, originally organized by War Resisters’ International , and now recognized by anti-war groups around the globe. On May 15, 2011, the War Resisters Support Campaign calls on the Canadian government to honour the human right to conscience by rescinding “Operational Bulletin 202”. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives won a majority with only a small increase in popular support – under 40% of the vote. U.S. Iraq War resisters in Canada have always had the support of two-thirds of Canadians, and the recent federal election has not changed that. Parliament voted twice to let U.S. war resisters stay, and the Federal Court of Appeal unanimously ruled that war resisters’ beliefs must be taken into account when their refugee claims are heard. Yet, in July 2010, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney issued Operational Bulletin 202. This directive instructs immigration officers to flag all U.S. war resisters and label them as potent...

Emphasis mine, in more ways than one. The federal Information Commissioner and other access-to-information experts say a Supreme Court ruling denying the release of ministerial documents marks a significant reduction in government accountability and transparency. Critics said Friday the ruling will allow the government to withhold any information simply by taking it out of the hands of a department and placing it in the closed confines of a ministerial office. Some of the records the Supreme Court said could not be disclosed “were the only records of very important meetings that occurred between the Minister of Defence and the deputy minister of the Department of National Defence,” Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault told a news conference Friday. “I think Canadians should be seriously concerned that these meetings take place and that in this instance the only records of some of those records are no longer accessible.” Madame Justice Louise Charron said in a ruling released Friday...