The Greatest

Tonight, I fell in love for the second time.

Her name is Cat Power. I care to know nothing else other than the sound of her voice.

Unbelievable, unreal...

... and perhaps, unnecessary?

The United Nations has consistently fallen under a critical eye from yours truly. While no one, not even John "Damn I Love My Moustache" Bolton, is tough enough to offer an alternative, the international organization remains all the world has when it comes to a global community of nations, supposedly tasked with maintaining, "... international peace and security," or so says Article 1 of the United Nations Charter.

With that in mind, no one can question that the crimes against humanity being committed in the Sudan, and allegedly by instruments of the Sudanese state, constitute such a threat. The humanitarian crisis is appalling, and the conflict threatens (or has already) spilled over into neighbouring African states.

That said, and following the conclusion by the Prosecutor's Office of the International Criminal Court that enough evidence has been collected to formally charge the lead perpetrators of said crimes against humanity, the newly "reformed" United Nationas Human Rights Council on Tuesday was to adopt a resolution holding the Khartoum regime accountable for their role in the atrocities.

Instead, the Council turned its back on any hopes of gaining international respect and capital by refusing to accept a motion put forward by the European Union and Canada identifying the Sudanese government as a lead perpetrator in the crisis. Not only did the council (why bother using a capital "c"?) decide to pass a more watered-down version of the motion, it then refocused its attention on many of its members' favourite pastime - holding only one government in the world to task for human rights violations: Israel.

I loath having to agree with various right wing bizzerkohs south of the border but following this abject failure of the UN to (yet again) credibly address global human rights violations, maybe Chef Boyardee Bolton has been right all along... I truly hope not.

"A nation, united within Canada...

... but not to be confused with First Nations, the United Nations, or the latest Richard Linklater film, 'Fast Food Nation'."

Just what in the world did Parliament vote on this evening??? The National Post says, "The federal Parliament formally recognized Quebecers as a 'nation united within Canada'."

Whew... I was worried there for a second. Honestly, I thought Ottawa had decided to waste everyone's time and energy, and devote some serious political capital to, oh, I don't know, forging a real strategy for Afghanistan... or, um, stopping the crimes against humanity in the Sudan... or maybe looking at novel ways to fix Canada's health care system... perhaps those minor issues will show up on the agenda once we get through more pressing matters, maybe sometime around 2034.

While PM SH contended that Canadians witnessed an historic night on Parliament Hill, others watched blandly as 266 MP's voted for the Prime Minister's motion, which carries about as much legal weight as a Monopoly deed to four houses on Baltic Avenue.

Fortunately, there were at least two MP's who had their O2 canisters at the ready once the votes were counted and history made. The first quote of the night, from Gilles Duceppe, the Bloc Quebequois leader:

"We're a nation within Canada now and we'll be a nation and a sovereign country in the near future."

Grrrrreeeeeaaaaatttt... sure looks like we've kiboshed the separtist movement, yessssss!!!

And the second quote of the night, from Garth Turner, the recently banished ex-Conservative MP, now sitting as an Independent:

"It's completely out of whack. What are we smoking around here?"

Apparently not enough of the good stuff, Garth. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. Can someone pass me the poutine?

Vancouver doesn't need snowplows, c'mon...

Honestly, I could do a better job clearing the ice and snow off of Vancouver's roads with a salt shaker hanging out the side of my 10-speed. Does City Council even know what a snowplow looks like?

After setting rainfall records for close to two weeks, and having to deal with Ong Bak-like fights over bottled water in Costco ("Um, Steve, we need a clean up in isle 13 that requires a mop, bucket, and some plastic cuffs. Bring the bear spray if you've got it, too... Thanks."), the Left Coast is now getting slammed with a 30+ cm blizzard. Not good for a city whose residents consider an umbrella a wonderful substitute for a hat, gloves, snow boots, AND a shovel.

With the anticipated city shutdown on Monday in mind, here's the Fatty's 20 Words or Less movie picks for the week. Enjoy the shows, and snow...

"For Your Consideration" - Guest, Levy, O'Hara... plus Ricky Gervais & Fred Willard with a faux-hawk. 'Nuff said.

"Shadowboxer" - Cuba Gooding Jr. and Helen Mirren as assassins, lovers & um, mom and son. Beee-zarre.

"Feast" - Project Greenlight horror flick. Diverse cast, joke script, but monsters looking like back-lot rejects from "The Village."

"Lady Vengeance" - Third film in Park Chan-Wook's ("Oldboy") trilogy. Woman sent to prison. 13 years to plan her revenge. Jaw-dropping good.

"Spartan" - David Mamet's brillant take on the special men of special forces. Val Kilmer is lethal. The precursor to "The Unit."

Sadly...

... Alexander Litvinenko has died as a result of what appears to be an assassination through radiation poisoning.

His house of smoke and mirrors, condemned. By whom, we have yet to see. The play contiues to unfold...

A Cauldron of Intrigue

The plight of former KGB agent and Kremlin critic, Alexander Litvinenko, grows more dire. Now on life support, one wonders: Just what will this man take with him into the next life? And who wanted him there in the first place?

Additional background information on his previous cloak and dagger life can be found here. Of particular interest: His investigation and claims of government involvement in apartment building bombings in Moscow, initially blamed on Chechen terrorists, which led to Russia's second war in the region and the decimation of the capital, Grozny.

Dick, could you please pass the mashed potatoes and, um, the bogus intel?

Happy Thanksgiving the United States of Amnesia, especially today: is it just me of has every single American news outlet mixed mescaline with their turkey stuffing so the only thing they're reporting on are new Rachel Ray recipes for pumpkin pie gravy and how NOT to eat yourself into cardiac arrest over the 2006 Thanksgiving?

Source: Mark Bryan

Well, at least Seymour Hersh finished this piece before he was pushed out of the way by Yahoo news deciding to post this riveting journalism about the Macy's balloons having to fly lower during the parade this year.

Um, can someone give me the OJ story back?! Weather affecting the Macy's parade??? Who really gives a rat fuck?! Over 3,000 Iraqis were killed... IN OCTOBER. I'm getting dizzy from all the head shaking (or maybe it's that mescaline stuffing).

But back to the New Yorker piece: Hersh reports that one of two things could be on the horizon regarding the previously scheduled Battle Royale between the neocons and Iran: 1) Bush Sr. takes a more assertive role in his son's presidency and gets Jr. to play in the corner while the Carlyle Group attempts to fix the playground and sends Dick to detention; or 2) The Rummy sword-falling was all part of the plan, the talk of bipartisanship is a sinking ship, and Cheney is still at the helm, disregarding CIA intel suggesting that Iran has not been working clandestinely on a nuclear weapons program, and contending that the reason why Iraq is such a disaster is because Iran has yet to be taken out.

Well, at least the US hasn't been spending millions of dollars researching new, low-yield nuclear weapons to use insanely against Iran in a war likely to destabilize the entire planet. Oh, wait, yeah, I guess they have been... since 2003.

Yes, Americans have much to be thankful for...

Cuba??? I'm supposed to be going to Nassau...

This isn't good news. Indefinite detention of foreign nationals, and all you have to be accused of is having "ties" to a terrorist group? Like what, PETA?

Law abiding citizens of all countries ought to consider the legal ramifications if the Military Commissions Act 2006 is read in such a way. Will you think twice about having an overseas flight stopping in the United States? Apparently, King George thinks the situation afforded to Maher Arar was a pretty solid deal in the name of protecting the Homeland.

Just how much is a Canadian's passport worth anymore?

Well, next to nothing, if you also include travel to China and Iran.

Choda? What's a choda?

How about burnt choda?

Source: AP

In strange but hilariously true news, here's hoping this bloke was demo'ed on at least a bottle of Pimms, Absinthe, and White Out.

My bet is that something this painful tasted, and felt, "like burning."

Whatever happened to the simplicity of "Contra" and "Punch Out"?

Back to the (sur)real world of video games.


Apparently, we really don't have enough madness to fill our plates. Macro level: Poverty, Iraq, Columbia, bin Laden, AIDS, accidental thermonuclear war.

Micro level: Michelle Malkin, 30 Seconds to Mars, and video games where players get to make nerds piss themselves in class.

"Bully," developed by the Care Bear-loving pyros at Rockstar Games, is already raising, um, eyebrows. Gamers get to play a kid who has to adopt the basic mantra of bully or be bullied while he goes to school. This results in gamers providing protection to teachers caught on the wrong side of the tracks, demo'ing enemies with surprise gym class beatings, and hurling loogies in the face of band class kids.

Surprisingly, I haven't played it yet. I wonder if you can videotape your own ass-kickings in the high school parking lot? PTA members must be downing stale coffee double-time now that this educational multimedia tool is available for every 'tween with an inferiority complex.

But then, I guess things can't be all that bad in the Wii-XBox-PS3 world. At least we don't have kids role-playing Christian crusaders on their PC's, exterminating all the Anti-Christ followers attacking America after some Biblical apocalypse...

Um, wait a sec...

Time's 2006 "Men of the Year"?

Not likely...

Television's heralded network of "no spin zones" and ratings show-toppers including, "Who's Your Daddy?" announced today that they would air an unrestricted, two-part interview with the Juice. This historic piece of journalism would delve deep... no, not into his esteemed life of public service, but rather into how he would have killed his ex wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, you know, if he really had gone ass-fuck crazy and slaughtered them back in 1994.

As soon as I read this story, I thought I heard the Doomsday Clock inch closer to midnight. But no, that was just the time ticking down on Alain Vigneaut's coaching tenure in Vancouver. However, in mere minutes I found out we really are that much closer to hell after learning of the $100 million offer recently thrown to FedEx for his alleged sex tape with his soon-to-be-divorced wife, Britney Spears.


OJ making money on a blueprint for murdering his wife. K-Fed soon to be making money on a blueprint for how to bone his pregnant pop star princess wife, and yet still be a choda.

A friend of mine offered this piece of advice: Round up OJ, K-Fed, Tom Delay, and maybe even a few of the guys who oppose Pakistan's new anti-rape law, lock them down with the utensils available in Hostel, film the whole gongshow and release it next Halloween. There you have it - Saw IV, done and in the bag. I think Britney would approve.

Ok, I'll take a szechuan beef, um, some human rights...

Photo Source: CP/Fred Chartrand

Despite concerns that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's hair was actually so thick, it had been impeding his brain from receiving and recognizing rational thought (c'mon, some days, it really does look like a bald eagle dropped a dead beaver on his head), PM Shhh has finally stepped up to the plate and is making a stand for something the Liberals were arguably criminal in failing to address: Chinese human rights reform BEFORE dollars and cents.

Despite most media outlets framing a recent "rescheduling" of a proposed APEC meeting between Harper and Chinese President Hu Jintao as a major "snubbing," if I were Harper I'd keep the hair long when it came blocking out such rants. And not just from the press, but also from those made by former Liberal ministers who have no idea why we'd want to hold the Chinese accountable for committing more executions than the rest of the world combined (and now they've got mobile "death vans," sweet), running an illegal system of organ harvesting, and continuing to detain, without any consular access, a Canadian citizen. In short, and I never thought I would put this to paper, I commend the Prime Minister for taking a stance few, if any, Canadian leaders have dared to adopt.

The message is clear, China: There are certain values Canada stands for, and these values do not have a price, no matter how many contracts you offer Nortel to develop police surveillance equipment so the PRC can censor blogs like this one.

I knew this She-Ra sword would work with my Link costume. Rad!

On the lighter side of life...


People around the world who enjoy spending their time cutting out felt costumes of video game characters and pretending to play real sports with a white game wand that looks like a stretched iPod from the Hustler Store are rejoicing: the new Nintendo game console, the Wii (pronounced... aw, who gives a f#@!), hits stores in four days.

Personally, I'd rather learn the drums from a real human being. But from the looks of this demonstration video, who needs a teacher when you can rock out in the wardrobe of the former lead singer of Extreme, while your sister plays what looks like a cardboard tube as backup. Hell's yeah, the video game revolution is here.

...

NEWS FLASH: Fight Club memberships have increased 10-fold in anticipation of Wii's release.

The first rule of Fight Club: There is no such thing as Fight Club.

Impediments to Impeachment

(Source: AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Huh?

Last time I checked, there were quite a few minority leaders in the Democratic Party foaming at the mouth like Cujo to win the mid-term elections, and then follow the letter and spirit of the US Constitution in moving forward with impeachment proceedings against King George.

To quote Peter Griffin: "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa... whoa... whoa... Lois, this isn't my Batman cup."

Guess that whole, "Hey, you know what? Our country has been hog-tied and dragged through the mud of aggression and war crimes by a guy who really only wanted to be baseball commissioner, and we've got to right six years of disastrous wrongs," only had a shelf life of, um, 12 hours.

Thankfully, legal experts and generally concerned Americans are having none of this shirking of responsibility on the part of Pelosi and (gasp) Conyers.

The 110th Congress has a number of jobs to do. Investigating allegations of "high crimes and misdemeanors" of the Bush White House must be on its agenda.

When Presidents Attack

(Source: Business Week)

The shock and awe attack of the American electorate on the Republican party continues to sink in. While many architects (translation: war criminals) of the ill-fated Dubya Land foray into Mesopotamia are dealing with blisters from all of the backstabbing this week (see Vanity Fair's fantastic piece on Perle, Frum, et al. wailing at the real reasons for the Bush Administration's failure to organize a one-cart funeral, let alone a "war in error"), some Bush cultists are going the other way.

In fact, one of the National Review's leading "conservatives" is barrelling down the Yellow Brick Road of John J. Rambo, Lone Wolf, in offering suggestions as to "How Bush Should Handle Loss," and show the Democrats (hell, how about the whole world) he's still boss. Hint: Jonah Goldberg's idea of reasserting presidential authority involves a sweat lodge, a bowie knife, and a still-beating heart of a black bear.

Lorne Greene's New Wilderness, the National Review is not. But damn, it makes for funny reading now that such pundits have about as much influence over the American political scene as Kevin Federline has over his own sucking.

Did Georgie mean for it to be this tight?

Fashion faux pas aside, Steve-o Harper will hopefully have a better sense of the world when it comes to understanding the political shift south of the border.

While Americans have arguably been sleep-walking through a house of horrors brought on by the Bush-Cheney junta post-9/11, the alarm clocks finally went off in 2006 and perhaps, some level of sanity is about to return in, as Gore Vidal calls it, the "United States of Amnesia".

Canadians, on the other hand, despite handing Harper his quasi-chance at leading the country with a minority government, have been much quicker out of the gate in both understanding the al Qaeda threat (despite what the zealots will have you think) and a Conservative party that initially seemed bent on throwing down a carbon copy of Dubya-Land, particularly when it came to Kyoto and foreign policy.

Although Steve-o may favour ponchos and skin-tight cowboy gear to emmulate his Texas BBQ buddy, he would be wise to read the tea leaves and know that a) the Bush Clearing experiment of "freedom spreading" and fun time-war crimes is over, and b) Canadians never wanted to be near that laboratory in the first place.

Perhaps a good place for Harper to start, as a majority of our country now clearly wants out of Afghanistan, is to save five years of chest thumping, communications preoccupation, and government secrecy and actually step up, step out, and provide the Canadian Forces (and the Afghan people) with a real strategy, involving real goals, and set to real deadlines.

A number of sources have some decent analysis of both Canadians' attitude towards the Afghan mission, and the Liberals ranting against Harper from following the Bush train any further.

Ok, you can have Ortega, but I get Gates...

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." Fmr. Secretary of Offence, Donald Rumsfeld, 12 February 2002, during a DoD Briefing

Rummy exits, stage left, to go collect his millions from the rise in Roche shares as a result of the demand for Tamiflu. He may also lose some sleep at the loss of approximately 600,000 Iraqi souls, and almost 3,000 US servicemen and women, but it is more likely that his tossing and turning will be the result of having to change his future travel plans in the event of war crimes charges ever being brought against him in a European (or dare I suggest, a Canadian) courtroom.

And in his place, well, a fine gentleman indeed. Former Director of Central Intelligence under Bush #1 and current Texas A&M university president. Oh, he's also pretty knowledgeable about that thing called Iran-Contra... er, sorry, other people are pretty knowledgeable about his involvement in Iran-Contra. He's not so sure.

Really, though, we can all see Dubya slowly rolling his middle finger up like a jack-in-the-box, both to those who think he's ready to make peace in Washington, and especially his friends in Latin America. The reason for the bird flipping: Former Sandinista rebel, and US public enemy #1 (and a main reason for Iran-Contra), Daniel Ortega, rising like a phoenix from the ash-jungles, to take the presidency of Nicaragua.

The most surprising thing of all:

Dubya undertstanding, let alone applying, the concept of "irony".

Men with long beards and longer memories...

(Photo: Jason Reed/Reuters)

Senator Kennedy must still be boozing. And Dubya was already in bed before the Senate race results for Virginia steamrolled in on the AP wires earlier tonight.

Allen = out. Dems = control of Congress. Wheelbarrows are selling like hot cakes out of Beltway hardware stores in anticipation of the piles of subpoenas that will be carted into Democrat-led committees in 2007.

How do you spell impeachment?

C-h-a-i-r-m-a-n C-o-n-y-e-r-s.

All of the major news outlets have solid coverage of the Dems' win, but check out the CS Monitor and the Raw Story for analysis you won't find on the front pages of the NYT, WP, or Star.

http://www.csmonitor.com
http://www.rawstory.com

In other news, somewhere in the mountains, men with long beards and longer memories are putting away their loaded rifles... for now.

It has begun...

"I love scotch... Scotchy-scotch-scotch..."