Injunctions Be Dammed!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnBk6ovAv1w&feature=channel_video_title

INJUNCTIONS BE DAMMED!

Why do I get so heated up by injunctions! Because we are being ruled by them. How so? Because a single judge in the provice can allow enormous swaths of forests to fall, creeks to be ruined, wild animlas to die, and allow athemurderous fracking of gas wells. If a citican becomes so outraged he or she stands in front of this activity,or pitches a tent in general disgust with the society, immediately the injunctions seekers heads for the court to seek an injunction.

The Canadian Criminal Code is a living, breathing document that has evolved over the years with thousands of people being involved with the coding. In contrast,because a court ordered injunction(one judge’s order) is not encoded, it amounts to being only one person’s opinion. And if one is accused of not obeying the opinion of the judge, then one is charged with Contempt of Court. And there is no defense for Contempt of Court. Why not? Because Contempt of Court is not encoded. It isn’t in the Criminal Code. And this is exactly why the Province of BC loves them. It’t the one sure way to rob a citizen of all legal rights because it robs citizens of the right to a legal defense.

As there is no defense for Contempt of Court , if you are accused, all that is relevant is whether you disobeyed a jude’s order. If you did, you are guilty de facto of Contempt of Court. So is anyone else who is in a area of contention. It doesn’t matter whether you were trying to protest againt environmental destruction or connected to a protest like Occupy Vancouver. By adding Jane and John Does to the order, the sweeping nature of this of these additions could hypthocically include everybody in Canada, or for that matter, the entire world. See why logging and minining companies along with mayors and police chiefs just absolutely love injunctions? Injunctions relieves all responsibliey from private and public officials.
Why even bother with a police chief if hehad to go to court to beg the judge to do his job forhim. As police chief he’s supposed to arrest people breaking the law. But w hen instead of doing his job and ordering the protesters to move their tents when he decided that was what needed to be done, instead goes to the BC Supreme Court and asked Madam Justice Mackenzie to do it for him. She happily obliged. And was promptly elevated to the Appeals Court for her pains almost immediately after she issued the injunction order.

This is the same judge Patrick Dohm appointed to replace Madam Justice Bennet in the Basi-Verk case. This was done because Madam Justice Bennet was in the process of allowing the defense to call Premier Gordon Campbel and Deputy Premier Christy Clark to the stand to be examined for their knowledge of the scandle. No telling what they might have revealed under cross examination about their own actions. Patrick Dohm as protecter of the 1%’s dirty laundry couldn’t have that. So he appointed Madam Justice Mackenzie to set things right. She promptly accepted a two millin by out for guilt pleas from Basi and Verk and shut the trial down before it could do any realo criminal dmange to Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark.

You know what? I am off ened by this. I am offended by having this province’s fourtunes being ruled by crooks who have hijacked the Supreme Court of BC and uses facisit methods to shut down all opposition to their sellig off of the natural resourcws of BC along with the shut down of any hope of legal justice. It’s too much. It’s just too much. We demand a decent government, a decent BC Supreme Court, a decent rule of law. We’re citizens. And injunctions be dammed!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnBk6ovAv1w&feature=channel_video_title

ARAB SPRING? IN EGYPT? FOR WOMEN?

Hardly. Things will be worse for Egyptian women if the projected results of the current elections (by CBC, BBC, and Aljazeera) hold true. The Muslim Brotherhood will have the most votes (60 per cent first round vote) with the Salafists (ultra hard liners) and the Gamaa Islamiya, (more hard liners) taking most of the rest of the votes. Under these circumstances what can Egyptian women expect? Oh, the usual suspects…black robes for women, deschooling of girls and women, forced marriages of young women to old men as second, third, or fourth wives, death by stoning if women provoke jealously in their households, more honour killings. It means constant fear of men’s accusations of wrong doing, in other words, the complete captivity of women.

But wait a minute. Didn’t many young, seemingly well educated Egyptian women help start the Egyptians revolution, didn’t they work for it, risk their lives for it? Yes, and that was perfectly fine with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafists, and the Gamaa Islamiyas. But that was then, they seem to say, and this is now. Now that the battle is primarily won, it’s “Get back into your cages, women. And this time we will lock the gates good and tight”.

And many Islamists don’t necessarily cease to be hard line lslamists when they come to Canada. Islamic women continue to be treated as inferiors by their men in Canada in many instances. Remember the little girls in the Ontario school that holds Friday prayers for Muslims? And the young girls having their periods have to sit in the very back row away from the others? Boys in front, girls kneeling behind, then the menstruating girls, who are not fit to even kneel behind the boys in their supposed unclean condition and are delegated to the rear of the room.

What is wrong with Canada, with Ontario, to allow such a practice in public schools? Public displays of little girls being humiliated becaue of their life giving functions are akin, in a very real way, to pornography. And certainly it’s also akin to barbarism, that period of time when women were banished to special huts, away from any possible damage to men when the women were bleeding. I think Canada has gone bananas with trying to demonstrate how wonderfully political correct we are.

Enough is enough. Immigrants should adjust to Canadian society, not try to transform Canadian laws and social mores into what they left behind. The misogyny of Islam is notorious throughout the world. Why do we try to pretend that this isn’t so?
And how did Mohammad Shafia ,( Muslim from Afghanistan, making news right now for killing three of his daughters and his first wife) even get into Canada with two wives? I understand the first wife was listed as a cousin on the family’s immigration papers. How could a cousin be allowed entry into Canada when so many parents and adult children of immigrants are not allowed to be brought in with their families? Was it because Shafia is rich? Did immigration know or suspect the listed cousin was really the first wife and didn’t care because he was rich?

And how many other additional wives of rich Muslims families are allowed entry into Canada simply by being listed as cousins and aunts? This case is surely not the only one. And this case only came to light because the man killed his first wife along with his three daughters. Doesn’t Canadian immigration investigate the additional cousins and aunts that are brought in with these rich Muslim families? Especially since rich Muslim men are usually the only ones who can afford the two, three, or four wives that Islam allows. Curious minds want to know.

Borsa Italiana and Cocaine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGxN4C0PQ80

Borsa Italiana
Doesn’t that phrase just roll off your tongue? Sounds romantic, doesn’t it? Actually, it’s the name of the Italian Stock Exchange in Milan, Italy. I was surprised to read about this stock exchange. It seems the Italian politicians are linking cocaine used by traders to wild fluctuations on the Italian stock market (Financial Post, Oct.15, 2011). Italians are in the process of “requiring stock traders to take mandatory drug tests…Italian savings may be invested by people not capable of making decisions due to drug use,” said Undersecretary Carlo Giovanardi.

Diane Francis, author of the article, goes on to tell us that “substance abuse has been cited as pandemic in London’s financial district with media reports of bars that allegedly routinely offer cocaine to clients by credit card, but describe the purchases as wine. Cocaine has been the drug of choice for well heeled financial types around the world for decades…”

Well, isn’t that interesting? Cocaine. So that’s one of the reasons the stock markets seem so wired and weird lately. When one thinks about this kind of hard drug being readily and regularly purchased by hay wire, hi wired stock traders along with the amount of uppers, downers, and pain killer prescription drugs doctors shove into people’s lives for physical and emotional pain, medical prescriptions that addicts patients as surely and soundly as crack does, and then there are the poor and homeless heroin and crack users, add this drug use to all the Ritalin and other like medications urged onto children too young to defend themselves, along with habitual pot smokers and alcoholics then what we have is a drugged nation, a drugged international community, and except for China perhaps a drugged word (I understand that treatment for drug addiction is mandatory in China and that identifiable drug pushers who prey for profit other than enough to buy their own drugs, get executed).

Occupy Vancouver had a number of addicts in the camp, three overdosed and one died. That’s about par for the course in the general population. However, because these incidents were so visible, and were suffered by people who were either homeless, or aimless, they provoked disdain and even disgust from some members of the public. But don’t look away, my friends, or you will see yourself, or a member of your family, or one of your dearest friends, or someone you admire, or work with, or are falling in love with, someone who is either beginning, coming out of, or presently enduring a similar nightmare of some kind of drug addiction.

But I, too, felt extreme disappointment when so much of Occupy Vancouver came to be about drugs in the public’s minds. On Oct. 15 there were four thousand people there in front of the Art Gallery. The issues that brought that many people out are still there and we can’t be frightened away by a problem that is pervasive and deep seated in all aspects of our society. We can’t allow ourselves to be frightened away from something that is only beginning, and has the potential power to bring a new, more equitable order to the earth. An order that Gaia will accept.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGxN4C0PQ80

Gaia and the Mother Principal

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tobCjOoafEk

Yes, we are. We’re all in the belly of the beast of a crumbling economic system along with its tattered institutions collapsing around it. Meanwhile, some of us try not to notice the gasping breaths of Gaia (Mother Earth) who is choking and gagging on what humans are discharging into her environs. Gaia seems to be turning to her own medicine chest in attempts to cure her fever and she may shake off much of what she has built up over the eons. So we are experiencing the ice melts, earthquakes, tsunamis’, floods, hurricanes, famines and threatened volcano eruptions that in turn threaten all life forms. Unfortunately, the same people in charge of our economic systems are also under the illusion they can manage Gaia’s systems. Because they are control freaks, they can’t believe Gaia has the power to enforce her own laws.

These people are the 1%. And they are tearing up the house we live in. They have become so used to manipulating nature they think a fish that has the genes of other animals sliced into it is a perfectly fine thing, as is a deforested world. Ditto the mortgage they are leaving us. This 1% is leaving us a mortgage for a torn up house that none of us in the 99%, or our children, or grandchildren will ever be able to pay.

For my part I say let the capitalist system fall, it was a rigged game to start with. Capitalism could never, and has never, produced equality. Capitalism thrives on inequality. It thrives on most people in the world losing, so some can gain. This imbalance is an insult to Gaia, to the mother principal, the principal that strives for balance. What human mother of several children would favor one above the others, and praise and reward the favored one for being selfish and greedy while the others go hungry? Especially when the favored one is destroying not only the family house but the yard and fields and streams and threatening all living things with his consummate grasping for more, more, all the time more? A mother who would do such a thing would be completely deranged.

And Gaia is not deranged. However, on the whole, she is very slow. She has a tendency to give species lots of chances, sometimes millions of year’s worth, before she wipes them out if they are not doing well. If a species is okay with the way they are, like earthworms, and are beneficial to the earth house, she lets them be. With other species who like to experiment with gradual change Gaia may even help them along with a mutation or two. But Gaia’s basic rules do not change. Ever. She controls this earth and its systems and either we work with her within this system or we die.
Corporate greed of the 1 % (there are no other words for this) has forced Gaia’s hand. The banking-corporate world with its attendant need to strip Gaia of the careful natural balance she has built up over millions of years has given her a dangerous fever.

But Gaia knows how to cure herself. She will cough up the irritants, the bacterium and viruses of the uncontrolled logging, mining, and stripping and oiling of the oceans, along with all the toxic chemicals, including the genetically modified foods and the FrankenFish being so carefully guarded in West Vancouver. Gaia will spit it all out, clear her throat and start over. She’s had to do it before.
Occupy Wall Street (all the Occupies) is an expression of how human consciousness is trying to change in the face of Gaia’s impending implosion. Yes, there have been problems with the Occupy camps, and there will be more problems with the Occupy camps. But there will be other camps because Occupy is more than a camp, it’s an idea. It’s an intuition. It’s a dream. Occupy represents respect for the earth and the mother principal (men also have this). We can consciously choose to be part of Gaia’s recovery by mitigating our own actions, or she will make us a big part of her own self remedy. It is our choice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tobCjOoafEk

OCCUPY VANCOUVER

The End Times are actually here. Not the end times in the Book of Revelations that Stephen Harper is working toward and hoping for, but the end times for capitalism as we know it. I came to this conclusion last Friday when Madame Justice Mackenzie brought down her verdict (City of Vancouver vs. Sean O’Flynn-Mage, Jane Doe, John Doe). This suit concerned Occupy Vancouver’s attempt to stop an injunction being issued that would cause the people camping to be evicted and if protested, charged with Contempt of Court.

I attended court and this was an absolutely miserable and futile affair. But then I knew it would be from past experiences. Still, there was always this faint hope that I’ve clung to for almost twenty years; that the BC Supreme Court was not as corrupt as it seemed to be. How could the Supreme Court of British Columbia be corrupt? Isn’t the BC Supreme Court supposed to be fair and just?

But when Associate Chief Justice Anne Mackenzie gave her oral reasons for allowing an injunction on Occupy Vancouver I decided on the spot that I couldn’t kid myself any longer. I could no longer even hope a judge might appear who would understand and disapprove of the power of court ordered injunctions to allow corporations to destroy the environment and social justice.

I was forced to recognize the very moment Madame Justice Mackenzie brought in her verdict that there simply aren’t any judges, especially Chief justices and associate Chief Justices sitting on BC Supreme Court, who had ever met an injunction application he or she didn’t like. I painfully recognized that for twenty years I had been fighting injunctions and going to prison because of them, that I had been like a child longing for Santa Claus to come, and in all that was right and good, would bring a judge who would refuse the corporation’s application for an injunction (in this case, the city of Vancouver). No more. I have turned my face from hoping for justice from the Supreme Court of BC because in this case, the court’s bias was so palpable and the BC Supreme Court has become, in my mind, an enemy of the people.

In both Occupy Ottawa and Occupy Halifax where the police have moved in, there were no injunctions. Instead, the Chief of Police acted on its own in these cities, or was asked to act by their mayors; neither went to the courts of their jurisdictions, begging for an injunction instead of just doing their jobs. Injunctions are a coward’s way. And speaking of cowards, now Christy Clark had entered the fray.

She of the “you can run, but you can’t hide” dictum, has managed to hide her own legal transgressions very well (BC Rail fiasco) with the help of Madam Justice Mackenzie. I find it odd that Madam Justice Anne Mackenzie, who agreed to the two million dollar settlement case for Basie and Verk, thus preventing any further examination of Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark of this crooked deal, protected Christy Clark from perhaps going to jail herself. Now Christy Clark is out to make sure the riff raff of Occupy learn their place. She’s going for another injunction to remove Occupiers from their new digs at the Provincial Court.

Doesn’t our dear leader know there is already an injunction in place? Hasn’t her friend Anne Mackenzie Associate Chief Justice told her? That on the 18th the injunction was extended to include any new location? If Christy Clark doesn’t know this she should and if she does, well, my goodness, getting her face in won’t hurt and the 99% are so stupid they won’t know anyway. We of the 99% are not quite that stupid, Christy. I think many, many of the 1% will recognize this as the Occupy Movement expands, BC injunctions or no. I do believe this to be inevitable.

WRONG MOVE, GREGOR! DON'T DO IT!
Yes, I agree that it is a horrible thing for a young woman to lose her life in such a way…homeless, evidentially ill, with addictions or not, she obviously had no one to take care of her and she lived in misery in an uncaring city. To be homeless is to live in miserable conditions. Given the circumstances surrounding this young women’s death, I believe that Gregor Robertson is making a big mistake in seeking an injunction to make Occupy Vancouver pack up and move out of a public space.

Because the Art Gallery is a public space, it belongs to the people of Vancouver. And as long as the people who are camping there are not posing a threat to others, then they protected under Sec. 2 of the Charter. I would like to remind the mayor that because many judges don’t think twice about giving injunctions to logging and mining companies, this situation is different. A judge might give pause before signing a court order on request from the mayor and council that compels the arrest of people who are merely exercising their constitutional right to protest.

First, Section 2b protects freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. Unless the city’s lawyers can prove that the young women’s death was caused by the fact of simply being in a tent on public land there is no cause for giving an injunction. And if the young woman did come to harm by her own hand, which seems to be most likely as the police have stated foul play was not involved in her death, then Gregor may have trouble getting an injunction simply by declaring that the people camping are a danger to the public or to themselves. He has to have some proof of this, not just accusations. Are there other grounds? The tents a fire hazard?

There are buildings in Vancouver that are absolute fire traps and no arrests are made by the police. People use tarps over tents routinely everywhere. Having a tent catch fire is not like being caught in a burning building with no fire escape. This is not a good excuse for depriving people of their fundamental rights and hastening the idea that our constitutional rights are after all, what a mayor and council and a sitting judge say they are.

In my opinion, Gregor does not understand that even if he finds a judge willing to write an order there will be an enormous court challenge to this. The judges at BC Supreme Court consider corporations as persons, so when I, or any other environmental activist is arrested for blockading a logging truck it’s usually under an injunction, the claim being that one person, me, had interfered with another person’s rights (the huge, usually international corporation) to make a living. This is not the case here, Gregor. The Occupy people are simply demonstrating against injustice. They are not interfering with any other person’s livelihood. They are not a danger to others. They have a legal right to be where they are, doing what they are doing. It’s in the constitution. Unless you want long, expensive law suits to be placed once again, upon the backs of the people of Vancouver, like the Olympic Village, then don’t do it, Gregor.

Provocateurs In Occupy Vancouver

Today I heard there is a disturbing element embedded within Occupy Vancouver. And what is this disturbing element? Well, I heard there is one gentleman in particular who is camping at the Art Gallery with the other occupiers, but who has a different slant on the ways and means of occupying the space.
This particular gentleman last evening distributed a violent comic book to the other Occupiers and supporters, depicting the police as being violently brutal to people (popping out their eyeballs, etc.) and tucked within this violent comic book was a lengthy set of demands to be met by the authorities. The first demand distributed by this gentleman (and was read out by CBC radio this morning Nov.4) was free access to heroin. These demands, I understand, were not approved by the group for distribution to the public; in fact, I understand most of the group didn’t know this was happening. I believe the aim of the gentlemen who distributed the violent comic books was to promote fear; fear of the police and fear in general among the Occupiers ,and his list of demands were apparently meant to convey to the press that the main objective of the group was concerning free distributation of heroin. The guy, in my opinion, is acting like an agent, a provocateur. Is he a provocateur? I’m not saying he is, because I don’t know, but I am saying that by his actions he is acting like one.
There is usually at least one, maybe two, provocateurs in every group trying to confront the unequal distribution of wealth and resources. I’ve been in logging blockades where provocateurs were present and they frequently try to push people to violence by presenting the situation as being horrifically dangerous when it isn’t, or conversely, will simply try to demoralize people by promoting the idea that the demonstration is futile, and people should just go home. A provocateur can be hired by anybody, the RCMP, the police, logging and mining companies, CSIS, your local big bank, your politicians, even the mafia or other criminal gangs.
The gentleman who distributed the violent material and unauthorized list of demands should be confronted by the group and made to explain his attraction to violence and why he felt he had the right to distribute to the public, which included the press, this violent material and list of unapproved demands. I hope Occupy Vancouver holds fast against this gentleman whose actions seek to derail the wonderful work the Occupy Vancouver is doing for all of us. These Occupy groups are growing oasis’ of sanity in an increasingly insane world. Let’s come together to protect them.

Occupy BC Supreme Court

Occupy the BC Supreme Court

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jakSAzZAX1s

Why turn Occupiers attention to BC Supreme Court? Because this is where citizens are routinely divested of their rights to public property and given over to corporations who through their lawyers maintain that the corporations, too, are persons. I saw a sign in Zuccotti Park on the internet that read: “I’ll believe corporations are persons when Texas executes one”. And so will I.
I have had long experience with the personhood of logging corporations. By past court decisions (case law) that held corporations to actually be persons , our BC Supreme Court equates a dispute between real persons seeking to protect their public forests versus voracious logging companies bent on clear cutting the said forest, as a dispute between two persons. That’s it. And in these cases the BC Supreme Court has already given the logging corporation a piece of paper (injunction) that declares (in legal language) that the corporation’s personhood tops that of real persons, and an environmental protester, if he or she protests this crazy making kind of justice, will wind up in prison.
And it isn’t just in cases of the triumph of corporate personhood that our courts are the courts of the 1%. Remember how Madam Justice Bennet, an honest judge, who was in the process of giving consent for Verk and Basi to testify and call high political officers into account over the corrupt BC Railway sale (Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark come to mind) when Madam Justice Bennet was given, an abrupt elevation to BC Court of Appeal? And replaced with a judge who allowed an award of two million dollars to be given Verk and Basi If they would plead guilty and go away? Who could have confidence in such a court? When the BC Supreme Court is so obviously in the service of the 1%? Not I.

DFO Reply To FrankenFish

Several weeks ago the Women's Party sent a letter to the Prime
Minister's Office expressing indignation that Genetically Modified
Salmon (transgenic) were being reared in a West Vancouver facility
without notice to the public, or in public consultation with municipal
or provincial authorities. We questioned that these fish, as they do
... not occur in nature for they have the genes of other animals sliced
into them when in the egg stage, are in fact salmon. We were
particularly alarmed that these fish are patented. Genetically
Modified salmon are the very first animal in all of history to be
patented.

We have just received a reply from the DFO. In his letter Mr.Keith
Ashfield does not dispute that the FrankenFish (so called by the US
press) are indeed being raised and studied in West Vancouver, but
argues that the fish themselves are not patented by the Government of
Canada, and that the Government of Canada only holds the patent to the
foreign (to the fish) genetic material that is being inserted into the
FrankenFish and therefor stay inside the law of Canada which says life
forms cannot be patented in Canada.

We find this reasoning totally disingenuous. And unacceptable. We
know that the process of splicing foreign genes into salmon was first
researched and brought to fruition in Canada through Canadian
universities even if AquaBounty now holds another patent. If Canada
did the original research into the process of Genetically Modifying
FrankenFish and has patented the genetic material itself, how could
Canada (DFO) evade responsibility for breaking federal laws concerning
the prohibition of patenting life forms?

We would like a comprehensive answer to this question, please.

Sincerely,
Betty Krawczyk
Writing for The Women's Party

NANO...WHAT?

Yes, Nanotechnology is our third bad thing we have to consider after economic and environmental melt downs. With the trillion Euros flooding into the international banking system by European governments we’ll have a bit of a pause here, even though we can hardly hear ourselves think above the sucking noises this morning as that trillion is swilled up by other banks, investors, and lending institutions. And the 1% couldn’t care less that this trillion they’re swilling in the trough is actually the blood and tears and sweat of their people. Perhaps we should, in all decency, look away. Unsocialized people who are high on greed are a shameful spectacle. Let us look to the Occupy Vancouver people for inspiration.

I believe that the Occupy movement is the first wave of an upwelling of public discontent. This is such a strange time. We have increasing poverty and job loss but at the same time, great breakthroughs in scientific discoveries.
Like how to add extra genes to a Pacific salmon’s genome. And patent it for future commercial use. Kudos to our DFO for their help in creating artificial salmon. But the horrors of mangling fish genomes and patenting the process pales in significance compared to what nanotechnology has in store for us.

Just as our leaders in government and finance didn’t prepare us for the financial meltdown two years ago, they haven’t, and won’t prepare us for what lies ahead in the job sector. Mechanization and computerization has decimated jobs. The primary jobs for many young men in the future will be digging into the bowels of the earth for oil, gas, and minerals, or clear cutting forests for raw log export or building and staffing prisons. Or being a prisoner. When I was growing up young men who couldn’t find jobs could always join the army. Not so much now. Harper is cutting military personnel. It’s not just salmon who are getting rewired. So is the military.

Ordinary technology has already automated, mechanized or computerized everything a lot of private companies and public services can bear. But nanotechnology? That’s a whole new deal. You can see a computer. You can’t see a nanotech machine. They’re too tiny. They’re built from the bottom up by scientists who are learning to manipulate these tiniest of atomic particles to make all kinds of stuff. And some of the stuff you really don’t want made. Aside from probably killing off the rest of the jobs, even the resource extraction ones (but the prison industry will probably surge) this has the most direct, destructive, hellish applications imaginable. What is that? Or course, the military.

Specifically, the US military. They will have the military patents. Nanotechnology presents the perfect weapon for killing vast numbers of people. Undetected. The nano machines are much too tiny to be detected. Some foreign people raise a fuss about unmanned drones because they can see them. At least until the bombs are actually dropped. But by possessing nanotech military weapons that can’t be seen, even a very small group of people can possess the world. Maybe the same small group that posses the banks and lending institutions. The 1%. If anybody complained they would simply be vaporized. No mess, no bother. I think we all need to learn all we can about nanotechnology.

LET'S TALK FISH

Let’s talk fish. Specifically, salmon fish. There has been a lot of confusion surrounding our conversations concerning who, where, when and what has been done, and is being done, to our salmon. And I say, our salmon, because, at least for the moment, wild salmon still more or less belongs to the people of the earth who catch and eat the salmon ( with certain permission from government and First Nations) whether individually or commercially. The salmon also belong to the bear, to birds of prey, even to the occasional cougar, they also belong to the old growth forests where bear scatter salmon bones; an individual salmon belongs to whomever or whatever can catch one in the wild. But that may not always be the case, even if wild salmon survive the fish farms.

Fish farms are disgusting. There’s no other word for it. The salmon swim around in stressed, overcrowded, unhealthy conditions. They are in fish prisons. And they have endured horrors spared human prisoners. Our Charter forbids prisoners being forcibly sterilized and sex changed while incarcerated. But some of BC fish farms are using fish that have been sex changed and triploided (sterilized). Why the sex change?
In fish farm pens, 10 to 20 percent of male salmon “jack” early, that is they mature before the females do and die before the others are ready for market. Big loss to the fish farm owners. So in fish pens, at least, females are not just desired, they are demanded. So DFO biologists came to the rescue. They developed a process by which some female fry were exposed to enough testosterone that the process actually turned them into males. When mature these treated fish acted as males and made sperm to fertilize the eggs of the normal females. However, because these sex changed males were still genetically female, their sperm was composed primarily of the chromosome xx instead of a relative equal number of xx and xy’s. So fish farms could get eggs that were primarily from a sex changed parent.

But that isn’t all. According to Dr. Edward Donaldson, DFO, they now know how to apply estrogen directly to the fish. But what if these fish escape their captivity and mate with wild salmon? Could that not produce some bizarre fish genetic mutations? To counteract this every present possibility some of the fish farms are using a method called “Triploidy” to induce sterilization. But the process is not one hundred per cent successful.

Triploid fish can have an extra chromosome but this occurs in less than one percent of fish in the wild. These fish are always naturally sterile. But because they don’t put energy into reproducing or go through the maturing process they grow really big and fat. So of course our DFO people, always on the lookout for aiding fish farms, are really into this. They devised methods of shocking the fish eggs with heat or pressure that makes them into triploids. And had the DFO stopped there, things may not have gone over the top. But they haven’t stopped there. Not content to just sterilize huge numbers of fish they have also changed their sex and have then released them into the lakes and rivers and coastal waters of British Columbia. This from:

The Reproductive Containment of Genetically Altered Salmonids (page 113-114) (Biotechnology, Genetics and Nutrition Section, West Vancouver Laboratory, Biological Sciences Branch, Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 4160 Marine Drive, West Vancouver, BC V7V 1N6)

So we now have a whole lot of sex changed and triploid fish swimming around not only in some fish farms, but also in our lakes and rivers (fifty per cent of B.C. small lakes and rivers) and other coastal waters. Have they mated with normal fish? As the sterilization process is not 100 per cent? Nobody knows this for sure. These fish are referred to as genetically modified fish but they are different from transgenic fish, the ones that have been dubbed FrankenFish by the US press and are currently abiding in North Vancouver. These transgenic fish are also referred to as genetically modified fish, but they are far, far more genetically modified than the fish that have only been sex changed and sterilized. Transgenic salmon are an absolutely new thing on the face of the earth. And they have been patented.

• Transgenic salmon are no longer, strictly speaking, salmon. While they begin their lives as Pacific salmon that doesn’t last long. As eyes, other genes are sliced into them…Atlantic salmon genes, and the genes of an eel called the pout fish and rapid growth hormones. On top of this, the eggs are made triploid and somewhat later, treated with estrogen. So we now have a monster fish, mostly female, not completely sterilized, who is loaded with hormones. And this monstrosity is patented by a private corporation called AquaBounty that used Canadian universities and Canadian government resources to carry through the research to getting the patent.
Because these fish are patented they are being carefully guarded. They are being held in land tanks in West Vancouver and cared for by Dr. Bob Devlin.DFO (North Shore News, March 15, 2011, Sarah Schmidt, Postmedia News, Oct 16, 2011). At the moment, AquaBounty is seeking permission from the States to develop the Frankenfish for public consumption. Three of the advisers to the US health authorities have previously worked for Monsanto.

There are two huge problems with both the sex changed, sterilized fish that are not transgenic, and the monster Frankenfish who are. A major problem in both categories of fish is that both carry a load of extra hormones, mostly estrogen. Zenoestrogens, or estrogens than come into the body from the outside, are enormously dangerous. There is currently much scientific agreement that pregnant women who consume only small amounts of zenoestorgens at certain stages of their pregnancies can put their fetus’ at risk and that larger amounts consumed by eating fish loaded with residue zenoestrogens can cause learning disabilities in children.

As for the transgenic fish, there is not only the ethics problem of genetically altering our wild life … why has our government allowed an animal life form to be patented? Without our knowledge? Without our consent? What next? Consider. There is an artificial pig in line in the US waiting for his birth certificate in the form of a patent. Chickens, cows, goats, horses? As the patent holding corporations wipe out the natural animals will we find ourselves paying not only for the animals, but for the corporations holding the patents?

The other very serious problem with both categories of fish is that the public has not been advised or consulted on admitting either one to BC waters or BC land. Neither the federal nor the provincial movement is authorized to introduce genetically altered fish into our environment and we believe they have wildly over stepped their authority in doing so. We are not through with this. Betty Krawczyk

THINKING LIKE HARPER

Stephen Harper is secretive about his religious beliefs and religiously motivated actions. But when I consider our Prime Minister’s political motivations for making the decisions he makes, I go on my hunches. After all, a hunch is an educated guess gleaned from careful observation. And my hunch is that the awarding of the eight billion dollar ship building contract to BC was a direct political decision by Stephen Harper.
But didn’t Harper go to great pains to remove himself entirely from the bidding process so that there could be no accusations of political tampering? Didn’t he practically shout to the world that only the bureaucrats, his underlings, were in charge of the appointments and that he personally had nothing to do with the choosing? I think Mr. Harper doeth protest too much of his innocence, and that in hoping to ward off any possible questioning concerning the selection process, he raises doubts. At least in my mind. It is well known that Mr. Harper is a control freak. That he tastes his own words as well as the words of his cabinet members and others in his government several jillion times before uttering them (only a slight exaggeration) is common knowledge, and that all important and even trivial decisions are made by him.
So why would Mr. Harper leave such an important political decision, fraught with passion and potential election fall out to his underlings? In my opinion, the decision to award BC with one of the ship building contracts came from Mr. Harper himself.
But so what, you may ask, even if it’s true Harper made the decision himself? BC got the ship building contract and that’s all that matters. I agree, in the short run. Jobs are paramount. But in the long run, as my thesis (hunch) is that our Prime Minister doth protest too much over the purity of the selecting process, the question is…why would he chose BC over Quebec?

Well, let’s see, if I was Harper, given his mind set and beliefs, I would be somewhat worried about the NDP forming the next provincial government in BC. An NDP win would jeopardize Harper’s plans for an increased Conservative presence in BC. And while the revitalization of the ship yards may help Christy Clark in the immediate future, down the road it will help the Conservatives even more.

I think Harper believes that if Christy Clark wins, by the following election the province will be in such a mess the Conservatives can remind citizens that it was a Conservative government that brought a revitalized ship building industry to BC. And the resources in BC for a Conservative win are already there. My hunch is that this goal was the main reason Stockwell Day decided not to run again for the Conservatives and came back to BC. Stockwell Day, like Stephen Harper, is a fundamentalist Christian, believer in Armageddon and the Rapture, along with BC billionaire and fellow Christian fundamentalist Jimmy Pattison. Lots of religious and political clout here. But I am happy for the ship building jobs. Very happy. Maybe things will look up for a number of people.

OCUPPY AND DANCE

This could be the beginning of something very, very good...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Ax24Fj3qY

Georgia Straight On Betty Krawczyk

http://www.straight.com/article-478746/vancouver/betty-krawczyk-not-running-political-office-focusing-occupy-vancouver

Occupy Wall Street!

Talk about Wall Street protesters and GMO salmon in west Vancouver and CBC



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WYeX_p4d7E

the women's party and frankenfish

Sept. 29, 2011
The Women’s Party
Box 1117
Cumberland, BC V0R 1S0
Office of the Prime Minister Phone: 250.400.2444
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A2

Mr. Prime Minister,

It has come to the attention of The Women’s Party (a recently formed group composed of women interested in the health, legal and environmental rights of citizens) that your government has given permission for the rearing and researching of genetically modified salmon in West Vancouver, British Columbia. We are very opposed to hosting genetically modified salmon in our province for research or otherwise. The Women’s Party is very concerned with the food supply and distribution in Canada as well as the source and nature of the nation’s food supply.

The reasons for The Women’s Party opposition to Genetically Modified fish being on Canadian soil are as follows:

1. The public has not been warned or advised or instructed concerning the following:
2.
(a) In a Department of Fisheries and Oceans facility in West Vancouver, scientists are raising and studying Pacific salmon that have been genetically altered. Scientists have developed a method of splicing the genetic structure of Pacific salmon to include genes from Atlantic salmon, genes from eels and rapid growth hormones. The result are enormously altered fish that can grow up to ten times the size of a regular salmon and eats enormous amounts of food (Dr. Bob Devlin, North Shore News, March 25, 2011).

(b) These genetically modified salmon are the very first animal in all of human history to, first, have their genes altered with material from

other animals, and secondly, to have this altered fish patented. There
have been studies published that suggest that should any of these
fish escape, they could mate with wild, unaltered fish
although they are supposed to be sterilized it is not 100%) and run
the risk of escaped breeding which could contaminate large numbers
of wild salmon.

(c) Should escaped breeding occur with these patented fish the corporations who hold the patents could then claim they then own all the salmon within a certain river or coastline.

(d) The Women’s Party claims that raising GM fish in West Vancouver is not only posing unacceptable risks for the natural fish population in British Columbia, but also transgress a moral line. We see, as can most reasonable people, that giving a patent on a living, breathing animal such as a fish that has been genetically altered, is to open the door to patents on most animals of the world which could lead to one or two companies (Monsanto comes to mind) owning all of the salmon, chickens, pigs, cows, horses, etc. in the entire world.

(e) We believe that by transgressing this moral line we will be altering human consciousness to consider all animals as playthings of humans to alter as they like. We consider this to be the most profound disrespect possible to animals.

As the permission for sale of Genetically Modified Salmon to the public is now being debated in the US ( with past employees of Monsanto as advisers urging it’s passing), and we know that once passed in the US there will be much interest from fish farms in British Columbia for these fish, we demand that the Office of the Prime Minister respond to our concerns as soon as possible.

Cc to MP John Weston, Premier Christy Clark, MLA Ralph Sultan
Respectfully,
Betty Krawczyk email: betty.krawczyk@gmail.com
Gail Cotter email: gcotter@shaw.ca
Hard copy to follow for The Women’s Party

Prisoners Of Harper's Love

NOTICE!
I am trading in word blogging for video blogging. It's easier and more fun. Please view my first offering at :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B6y3-ViIxU
Please comment

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B6y3-ViIxU

Betty Krawczyk

AN APPLE FOR THE TEACHERS

With the teachers’work action dogging the BC Liberal government, does anybody remember Christy Clark’s vitriolic remarks about the teacher’s union when she was Minister of Education (2001-2005)?  How her thinly veiled, and not so thinly veiled, remarks about how the out of control greediness of school teachers were harming our children and how parents were demanding immediate reforms to the school system?

 Well, under Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark our school system certainly got reformed.   Or deformed. But was it true even back then parents were demanding school closures?  That parents were yearning for more students per teacher?  Was it true that parents felt librarians’ were unnecessary?   And that parents thought it didn’t matter how many children with learning disabilities were in classrooms without adequate teaching assistants?   Was it true that parents were against school lunch programs in certain schools, and full funding for kids’ school supplies? Was it true that parents thought music and art programs for their children were absolutely frivolous even when studies of how these activities help children learn proved otherwise (Premier Clark has no university degrees in anything, much less in education.) 

 But we know now, as then, that parents were really longing for smaller class sizes, more teacher assistants to help increasing numbers of children with learning disabilities , school librarians, music and arts programs, and school funded school lunches where they are needed, good physical education programs,  and adequate school supplies among other things.   And contrary to Premier Clark’s spin, most parents want to feel that their taxes pay their teachers on par with other Canadian teachers.  But Christy Clark’s government is pleading poverty. 

 However, if the province was and is so poor that it couldn’t, and can’t, provide adequate schooling for its children, where did all those billons, $4.33 billion of them, (Vancouver Sun) for the Olympics come from?  And how is it that Christy Clark’s government can happily cough up $365 million for BC Place Stadium for adult games and entertainments while children’s education is cut to the bone and their teachers treated with contempt by the same government?

And while two million dollars doesn’t sound like much in the face of other spending priorities of the Gordon Campbell-Christy Clark government, this sum bought guilty pleas from Basi and Virk in the BC Rail scandal.  Our (of course it was ours) two million went to these two confessed crooks just as blithely as the other millions and billions under BC Liberal priorities flew and fly to contractors and money changers, which drain funds from education and health care.

In the BC Rail trial, defense lawyer Michael Bolton said Christy Clark had participated in the scandal by providing government information to lobbyist Erik Bormann while she was acting as deputy minister of BC.  These accusations were not proven in court because Basi and Virk were bought off before they could testify. But as these accusations are out there, in the public domain, wouldn’t Premier Clark, if she is innocent of any illegal wrong doing, want to clear up this shadow on her name?

 Wouldn’t that be a wonderful lesson in democracy for school kids if Premier Clark said that she wanted to prove,  without a shadow  of a doubt, that she was, and is, not guilty of criminal activity, and called for an independent investigation into the BC Rail sale?  Wouldn’t that be a wonderful lesson, all over Canada, of how premiers should act when accused of criminal activity?  Instead of bad mouthing school teachers, Premier Clark, how about acting as a teacher yourself, which is what leaders are supposed to be?  And as you have no fall election to worry about, you have lots of time to do this.  Show this province what a real leader and teacher looks like.

Reading / Meet the author
"This Dangerous Place" 
Chapters Downtown
7:00 pm - 8:30pm
Thursday, September 15th
788 Robson Street (@Howe)

Local legend Betty Krawczyk's new book "This Dangerous Place,  My Journey Between the Passions of the Living and the Dead " is hot off the presses.
Betty, currently living in Cumberland, will appear at Chapters in downtown Vancouver for this not-to-be missed reading and meet & greet.

More About the Book: Betty Krawczyk’s characteristic sharpness of wit and evocative Southern-based turn of phrase make THIS DANGEROUS PLACE  an immense pleasure to read.  And like any cherished moment, the book is a delight to recall after inhaling its last pages. Krawczyk’s personal, idiosyncratic story transcends the particularities of time and space and takes you to a deeper place within yourself, a place of new possibilities.

(Producer/Director) FURY FOR THE SOUND; The Women at Clayoquot

Betty Krawczyk:
Born American 83 years ago, but reborn as a Canadian in 1966, she fell in love with the old growth forests of British Columbia at first sight.  Now a great-grandmother she lives, breathes, writes and speaks of the necessity of saving our public resources for the people of British Columbia and Canada.  She has spent over three years in the jails and prisons of British Columbia for blockading corporate logging trucks in public forests. 
Krawczyk has written three other books: CLAYOQUOT: The sound of my heart,  LOCK ME UP OR LET ME GO and OPEN LIVING CONFIDENTIAL.
Betty Krawczyk lives and works in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island.  You can contact Betty at bettykrawczyk.ca or  betty.krawczyk@gmail.com
Books: www.schiverrhodespublishing.com Blog: http://bettysearlyedition.blogspot.com

Posted by Monika Marcovici  acting agent for Betty Krawczyk at: monika@greenworx.com