from V-Day
One in three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime.
One billion women violated is an atrocity.
One billion women dancing is a revolution.
by Thom Hartman
The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference – see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that…. and we all should be too.
In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.
In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.
As Dr. Carl T Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, "The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search 'all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition' and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds."
It's the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, "Why don't they just rise up and kill the whites?" If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains….
…By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Blacks outnumbered whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings. As Dr Bogus points out, slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.
If the anti-slavery folks in the North had figured out a way to disband – or even move out of the state – those southern militias, the police state of the South would collapse. And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service the slaves of the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery, and the southern economic and social systems, altogether.
These two possibilities worried southerners like James Monroe, George Mason (who owned over 300 slaves) and the southern Christian evangelical, Patrick Henry (who opposed slavery on principle, but also opposed freeing slaves)….
by Richard Armitage
from OpenMedia
Rogers has struck a backroom deal with Shaw to take over assets crucial to delivering our mobile Internet and phone services – assets that were promised to create new independent choices for Canadians, not more control for Big Telecom.
We do not deserve this.
The deal will allow our biggest mobile phone and Internet provider, Rogers Inc, to go around the spirit of Canada’s key digital policy rules so they can grow even bigger, jack up your bill, and all but guarantee that Canadians have only three mobile telecom giants to choose from.
The deal will allow Rogers Inc, to go around the spirit of Canada’s key digital policy rules so they can grow even bigger, jack up your bill, and all but guarantee that Canadians have only three mobile telecom giants to choose from.
Shaw and Rogers should play by the rules like everybody else. Industry Minister Christian Paradis can stop this backroom deal; he’s in the process of making that decision right now. We have to tell him where Canadians stand, or Big Telecom lobbyists will get their way.
Send Paradis a message. Demand choice for the future of Internet access before it’s too late.
Click on the OpenMedia link below and go to the OpenMedia website to send this letter:
Subject: Stand up for telecom choice
Dear Industry Minister Paradis,
Please stand up for telecom choice and affordability. Big Telecom should not be able to prevent Canadians from accessing affordable mobile phone and Internet options. Shaw obtained public wireless assets at a premium – they should use them or lose them.
I urge you to stop Rogers from taking over key wireless public assets that were set aside for independent providers. It’s wrong.
Please do the right thing.
Yours truly, etc
from Why Poverty?
This powerful documentary explores the process by which America went from a country of mostly-middle-class people to a society of a "Grand Canyon divide" between the very wealthy and everyone else. Social psychologists explain the results of experiments which demonstrate how the monied feel entitled and deserving of wealth, while their empathy declines. The Horatio Alger story of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps is becoming less and less likely. Big money rigs the rules via lobbyists and right-wing think tanks who actually write legislation for state and federal governments. In the cross-hairs of the one per-cent? Public sector unions.
"Making money equals freeedom–freedom from any responsibility whatever."
from Windspeaker
The House of Commons Finance Committee has recommended the privatization of reserve lands. The suggestion was made when the committee presented its pre-budget report before the holiday break. The committee thinks a policy such as this would help reduce poverty on First Nations.
from Facebook
Dad joins baby in the crib.
from the Little Education Report
Having backed a mixture of Liberal and NDP candidates in a strategic voting strategy since 1995 and before, the teachers, education unions and perhaps some other public sector unions need to put on their thinking caps to work themselves through 2013 and an anticipated provincial election, notwithstanding coalition or working together talk emanating from some quarters.
from Our Times and the BC Teachers' Federation's Teacher newsmagazine
It's not a job really; it's what I am. You see, I'm a teacher and have been for 19 years. Other than taking time off in the middle to have my own kids, I have always been a teacher. And I'm a good one. I laugh with my Grade 4 and 5 students each day. I'm quick with a hug or a high five, a granola bar for a kid who's hungry, or a quiet word with a kid who needs that instead. I don't believe in much homework, especially not for nine- or 10-year-olds.
Kids should be outside, in boots and raincoats if necessary, building and digging and mucking about. At past meet-the-teacher nights, I've said to parents, "Go for walks with your kids. Play chess together. Play Monopoly. Watch something on Discovery Channel and then research it together. Snuggle on the couch and read a great book together. It's the relationship you build with the kids now that will hopefully see them through difficult times in their teens, or have them coming to you for advice instead of to their peers. Nothing is more important than that. Certainly not a math worksheet." And most parents agree with me, enthusiastically.
