Journal

Weytk, my semeh name is Troy Joseph Thomas. I am a Secwepemc of Switsemalph. I have no given Secwepemc name, but if you accept my selfishness, please call me Sayunsa ra Switsemalph, as I find Sayunsa (crow) to be a humorous, clever, and lively creature.

I've just returned home from T'kemlups, where the 2010 Secwepemc Gathering had been held. If I had left Switsemalph tired and burdened, I return refreshed. I still carry the same burdens, but now I bear the weight with some comfort.

"Let's focus our energies and seize the initiative. Let's cut to the heart of the problem and once and for all deal with the Indian Act," Atleo told representatives of more than 600 First Nations gathered in Winnipeg.

Atleo is saying some good things, but I also gotta disagree, here. We can't just do away with the Indian Act.

It's an incredibly complex legal document that had set out the relationship between First Nations and Canada. Or rather, it had set to set it out.

Am I saying we should keep the Indian Act? No. It's also an incredibly heinous document, which allows the federal government to decide who's indian. And it also denotes how we create our governments. It needs to go.

July 10, the Northern Insights posting I'm wondering related how Global TV salted its report by adding unrelated footage to its video report on the Toronto G20 demonstrations. People trust TV news in Canada to be honest and video should reflect reality not fiction.

Some readers indicated that I must have been mistaken, they could not believe that a national news service would broadcast a fake video report. Therefore, it is important to publish the evidence. During the live newscast, I recognized footage that originated in Vancouver during the Olympics when vandals broke a few windows and tipped over newspaper boxes. As you will see in the photos, captured from Global TV's July 10 5:30pm national news, one of the newspaper boxes being tipped was The Province. This happened on a Vancouver street February 13, 2010. In a case of yellow journalism, Global was trying to make the Toronto demonstrations more dramatic by spicing it with extra footage.

See the photos at:
http://northerninsights.blogspot.com/2010/07/global-tv-news-caught-cheat...

First published Oct 13/09 at Northern Insights / Perceptivity:

I recall Colin Hansen speaking as an opposition critic about the problems of BC Ferries a decade ago. He noted successive provincial governments had failed to install competent management and had subjected the corporation to impulsive political interference. Hansen expressed concerns about conduct of government business. He talked about the need for carefully structured planning, extensive consultation, full disclosure, orderly review and systematic risk analysis.

Hansen struck me then as thoughtful, insightful and articulate. He seemed relaxed and forthright. In short, both knowledgeable and trustworthy.

After the election of Gordon Campbell's Liberals, it was not surprising that Hansen played a senior role. He spent about three and a half years as Minister of Health, a position that presents near insoluble difficulties, conflicts and expanding demands. While not hugely successful there, Hansen was far from the worst health minister to hold the difficult portfolio.

Police are an extremely social animal. They exist as a social unit called a squad. Police travel and hunt in a group and perform almost all other activities in the company of fellow police.

The squad, the basic unit of police social life, is usually a tight group. It is made up of people related to each other by ties of affection and mutual aid. The core of a squad is a mated pair of police - usually two adult males although occasionally a female adult is allowed to join a hunt.

The other members of the squad are their associates: young ones ranging in age from rookies to constables and older politically astute one who remain always in the den, except during award and mating seasons, feeding off spoils of hunts conducted by younger members.

Squad sizes vary, most have 6 or 7 members, although some may include as many as 15. The squad size depends on many variables including the current numbers of the police population, the abundance of criminals, and social factors within the police squad.

Police are an extremely social animal. They exist as a social unit called a squad. Police travel and hunt in a group and perform almost all other activities in the company of fellow police.

The squad, the basic unit of police social life, is usually a tight group. It is made up of people related to each other by ties of affection and mutual aid. The core of a squad is a mated pair of police - usually two adult males although occasionally a female adult is allowed to join a hunt.

The other members of the squad are their associates: young ones ranging in age from rookies to constables and older politically astute one who remain always in the den, except during award and mating seasons, feeding off spoils of hunts conducted by younger members.

Squad sizes vary, most have 6 or 7 members, although some may include as many as 15. The squad size depends on many variables including the current numbers of the police population, the abundance of criminals, and social factors within the police squad.

After researching into the taxation system, looking at it from a couple different perspectives, I can only come up with a couple of conclusions regarding flat tax proponents: they're either being foolish, or they're lying.

I've come across two major arguments for flat taxes: they're fairer, and they're simpler.

However, the first doesn't take into account proportional burden, that twelve percent on someone making $10, 000 doesn't equal twelve percent on someone making $100, 000, because a person making only $800 a month could really use that $120 in their pocket because whether they want to or not, in all likelihood, they're spending all $800 that month, whereas the person earning $8000 a month might only be spending two to three times more than the person making $800. $8000 is ten times $800, but if the former isn't spending ten times the latter, then the fair argument falls more than quite a bit flat.

Well, it passed. It's a nice big piece of polished turd legislation.

Trying to ignore its massive and built-in follies is a bit hard, but it appears there are quite a few so-called progressives doing just that.

People are hoping against hope this bill will be somewhat fixed in reconcilliation, and a public option added in an up-or-down-vote, but the truth is, don't hold your breath.  It ain't gonna happen. That vote is a myth, and our bravest leaders in the progressive sphere will make sure it doesn't happen.

He's been cheering on the health care as it currently is: here, here, and here. It's rather a huge shock and letdown.

He's considers only one issue to be important; it's a nice symbolic victory for US progressives. It's the symbolism, stupid!

There are a great many symbols in this world, Professor Krugman: the Trojan Horse, as an example.

It's filled with rotted and weakened intentions. It will itself become one more burden for USians as they will be forced to buy insurance which has no price caps and no basic standard controls for a basic contract.

An Important Guest post by Tim Mcsorley. A new project involving the National Film Board of Canada, The YouthCo AIDS Society, Edmonton's iHuman Youth Society and Youth Restorative Action Project. Front paged to get some well deserved attention! -pale

The debate around harm reduction in Canada is a complex one. At it's simplest, harm reduction is any policy or practice that recognizes that sometimes people cannot simply walk away from risky situations - homelessness, poverty, drug addiction - but rather adopt ways to minimize risk in their daily lives.

Harm reduction is most often associated with drug use, and particularly needle exchanges and supervised injection sites like InSite in Vancouver. But harm reduction goes a lot further than that: it's outreach programs, employment training, counselling and support services.

Well, maybe you are and maybe you're not. If I say you are, anonymously or not, I would, and should, expect some backlash. So, myself, I tend not to defame anyone a great deal. I have called some a scum-sucking pencil-necked waste of skin ..., never in print, but occasionally in pixels. I have never got in trouble for it, but the day may come.

It has come for a blogger who defamed Liskula Cohen. Cohen is a model. An anonymous blogger posted a screed about her in a blog hosted by Google. The Supreme Court of the State of New York has ruled ( H/T to Scribd ) that Google has to turn over what it has, that identifies the blogger, to Cohen.

Hows that make you feel ??

Defame

Verb

1. Charge falsely or with malicious intent; attack the good name and reputation of someone

 

Slander

Noun

I think it's time for a cross post boy & girls.

In the wake of the murder of George Tiller and some of the subsequent reactions from the anti-abortion crowd, one has to seriously question just how pro-life those people who oppose abortion really are.

After reading and listening to all the people who actually celebrated the murder of a man, and who somehow saw fit to justify that murder while he worked as an usher in his own church, I now understand that the entire idea of their self identification as Pro-Life is the cheapest, most opportunistic and selfish denial of one's true nature that could be imagined, and worst of all, they steal the love of life from all others, because they can't identify with the living, so they have to claim to protect only a cowardly concept of humanity because the actual living might talk back.

Cross Posted at FeminismFriday - The Blog http://feminismfriday.wordpress.com/

During the last week in Thunder Bay a young native boys hair was chopped off by his teacher's assistant. Since this time the Crown and police have refused to charge the woman accused. Some people may not understand why this is such a big deal, so let's break it down.

The child was touched without permission, during this time the assailant was holding what we can easily refer to as a "deadly weapon" given that you could hypothetically be killed by a pair of scissors. In fact, it is not a stretch to imagine this happening.

The child is native and therefore having long hair is not simply a fashion statement but rather something tied to the child's culture. Cutting off the hair of male native children was regularly done at residential schools, where the goal was to "kill the Indian and save the child".

Based on these facts I would say it would be fair to charge the teacher with assault using a weapon or causing bodily harm. It would be a stretch but I also think this is a race based hate crime.

On March 27th, I did up a post called The Cons are simply racist. I got a response, which is here. I wanted to respond to it directly, but my thoughts twisted and turned about, leaving me a bit lost.

I wish to wander about in my thoughts, and was thinking perhaps some of you all might want to come along for the walk.

I'll start in my memories. We'll begin at the Trans-Canada, at the entrance to my reserve.

---

My hometown I.R. #3. Standing at the mouth of the reserve, we're looking down the old dirt road. We can see quite a ways, but it turns gently rightward. More so than the road, however, we see potholes. Deep, deep potholes. It's my own belief that there have been cars lost in them. The highways department grades the road every spring, but the potholes are ancient, having existed before time began, and so return the very next day, simply waiting.