test blog #10

Congratulations to Pooh Bear! and dogsled_stacie. Yukon Yahoos has its first litter of puppies! Readers of Stacie's blog have been following this saga since that fateful day Woody and Pooh Bear! got busy . (If you're not familiar with Stacie's blog, you'll really want to click on that one!) A few days ago PB! started to pant and look for a place to give birth. And today there are four healthy pups - two males and two females. There was also a pup that did not survive. It was born first, which must have been incredibly stressful and sad. But now both moms - fur and human - are doing great. I am really looking forward to watching these guys grow up. Even at this stage, blobs of fur blindly nursing, they are beautiful and amazing to see. Image by Cathy Lester .

On the seventh day of the seventh month, at the seventh hour... well, it's really the 19th hour, and anyway it doesn't matter because those time divisions are arbitrary... but if you're a wmtc reader and you're not a troll, and you don't work for Jason Kenney, the CBSA, the FBI, or the DHS, join us for wmtc7! July 7, 7:00 p.m. at a secure location in Mississauga. Email me for details.

Progressive bloggers, check your stats. The Statcounter for wmtc shows "multiple visits spread out over several days" from an IP address in the House of Commons, and a separate visit from the Office of the Privy Council. This visitor or visitors spent time at several of my "greatest hits" posts, information about my new career, my bio at The Mark, various essays, and a good deal of time searching for "ndp cooksville east mississauga kaminker" and "kaminker member ndp", and the like. The entry post was this: july 1 2012: national stop harper day . I noticed this post was tweeted a lot yesterday by many anti-Harper Twitter accounts. No doubt government operatives are monitoring those tweets. Sorry for the small font. There were so many, I could barely fit it in one snip. Is the Harper Government TM trying to show a connection between National Stop Harper Day and the NDP? (I have no idea if there is a connection.) Do they think "Stop Harper...

I want to begin my posts from Marxism 2012 with the Quebec Student Strike , because it's currently the most important progressive development unfolding in Canada. By now it should be obvious that the Quebec student strike is not only a student strike and is not only about Quebec. It  should be obvious, if the corporate media wasn't ignoring, minimizing, scoffing at, or narrowly spinning this major story. I posted ten things everyone should know about the Quebec student strike , cribbed from the Montreal Media Coop. It's a good list, and the full story is worth reading. But here's the most important takeaway: this is not only a student movement against an increase in tuition fees. It is a widespread, student- led movement against the austerity agenda, and against the attempt to transform Quebec from a socialized culture where services are universally accessible, or nearly so, to a privatized, user-payer system where access can be purchased by those who can afford it....

The photo is real. The interpretation, unfortunately, was not. Police in Frankfurt, Germany, did indeed remove their helmets, and they were walking ahead of Occupy protesters. However, they were not escorting, they were using a blocking technique similar to kettling. They also arrested hundreds of people who were peacefully demonstrating, and bashed a few heads in the bargain. A discussion is here , with links to more info. Organizers in Germany are upset that the photo was misinterpreted as the police identifying with and demonstrating with the 99%, and I can understand that. But we were given a brief glimpse of a possible future.

I can't find exact numbers on how many websites and blogs went dark in yesterday's BlackoutSpeakout campaign, but conservative mainstream media is saying that more than 500 websites and 18,000 people participated. Another marker of success is the government's reaction: 10 Members of Parliament were dispatched to media events to, Joe Oliver said, "set the record straight". That is, to counter the truth with lies. Bob Rae described it as a " truly Orwellian moment ". Resisting this majority government can feel frustrating. But the fight has broad, mainstream support, and it's picking up steam every day. When your opponent organizes a simultaneous counter-campaign on the same day as your event, he is fighting on your turf. You have made an impact.