Peddling propaganda

So what does the video have to do with peddling propaganda? Nothing really, but I couldn’t find any trace of the Vaughn Munroe song from the same era that the first sentence of the story by the Freep’s Aldo Santin - Transcona train plan back for 2nd look, immediately brought to mind - “A controversial plan to allow Canadian Pacific Railway to park its trains in the middle of a residential neighbourhood in northeast Winnipeg is going back to city hall“.

The song also by Vaughn Munroe was called ‘The railroad runs through the middle of the house“, and the words of the first verse went like this;

The railroad comes through the middle of the house

The railroad comes through the middle of the house

The trains all come through the middle of the house

Since the Company bought the land.

From that point on the rest of the story isn’t humorous in the least because it seems someone at the Freep is quite intent on blowing political smoke up the body orifices of the local citizens and I’m getting more than a little tired of it, because it’s getting far past the point of being news with a ‘liberal bent’ into engaging in peddling propaganda filled with lies and distortions.

Last week I did a piece Monopoly is a bored game that involved coverage the Freep’s Aldo Santin had given about Winnipeg City Council dealing with matters related to the CPR. In that so called breaking news story Santin makes the statement “The proposal will allow the CPR to block traffic on three streets in east Winnipeg — Panet Road, Plessis Road and Peguis Street — for up to an hour at a time, possibly several times a day, during a 11-month period beginning in September, as its east- and west-bound trains shuffle past each other.”

The statement is an outright lie, and doesn’t reflect what the Councillors were dealing with then, and the latest story about the so called second look is less than the whole story too. The council minutes and consultants report are available at this link as report number 10 and attachment to it. Here is the links to the second and thirdstory the Freep carried written by Santin.

“People are very upset with this plan,” Wyatt said Friday afternoon. “… People aren’t willing to put up with this.”

Close but no cigar Councillor Wyatt. People aren’t upset with the plan. What they are upset about is manufactured lies and propaganda - and that’s what they aren’t willing to put up with, and someone is going to get their knuckles slapped hard for this little escapade.

According to rumours, Ernie Gilroywasn’t happy in the least bit about the spin the Free Press gave the story, and supposedly has written a letter of clarification to the Freep. So far it hasn’t appeared. Those same rumours say the Minister of Transport in Ottawa is not in the least amused at the antics and the political game playing either, which is probably why Bill Clement finally got off his ass - he probably got it reamed out by someone.

Now Russ Wyatt may fancy himself a protegee of another well known Liberal from the area Bernie Wolfe, which is why he runs around with that ridiculous Fedora hat and trench coat all the time, and supposedly he has pretensions of running for mayor. Given the amount of print space he gets at the Freep, obviously he’s someones pet project, but hell and Winnipeg will freeze over before that happens.

In a way I kind of feel for some of the journalists at the Freep. Joe Bowtie had a real number done on him while supposed City Hall Star Bart has been off on a journalistic vacation. It has to be tough to toe the editorial party line and duck the flack from both the public and management while trying to earn an honest living.

Last fall Santin trots down to the Empire Club in yet another of Wyatt’s political escapades, and pumps out the story Big mugging at Empire Cabaret, then 3 weeks later someone gets killed at the club. Can’t be easy to have to live with that kind of stuff and keep generating political PR stories for Wyatt.

Wyatt and City council and Ernie Gilroy will be told what is and isn’t acceptable to the Minister of Transport and federal legislation, not the other way around, so all the sound bites, verbiage, and claims by Wyatt amount to nothing more than fresh air, no matter how the Freep wants to portray it.

Here’s the words to the rest of the song, just in case someone is interested and remembers the tune;

They let us live in the front of the house

They let us live in the back

But there ain’t no livin’ in the middle of the house

‘Cause that’s the railroad track

When a bill collector comes to the house

He knocks and bangs on the door

So we sit him right down in the middle of the house

And he never comes back no more

No, he never comes back no more

Oh, he railroad comes through the middle of the house

The railroad comes through the middle of the house

It comes and goes through the middle of the house

And the trains are all on time

And here comes the five-o-nine

The railroad comes through the middle of the house

In and out of the middle of the house

Right smack dab through the middle of the house

Where the parlor used to be

There’s a great big door in the front of the house

There’s a little old door in the back

But we can’t have doors in the middle of the house

‘Cause that’s the railroad track

A relative came to visit the house

He liked to scream and fuss

So we sat him right down in the middle of the house

And he never more bothered us

No, he never more bothered us

Oh, the railroad comes through the middle of the house

The railroad comes through the middle of the house

It comes and goes through the middle of the house

Since the trains are all on time

I’m singing this song in the middle of the house . . .

 

Svengali returns

“He looked me straight in the eyes and told me he had no knowledge of an insurance policy offer,” she said, recalling a conversation from more than two years ago. “I knew he was telling me the truth; I could see it in his eyes.” - Dona Cadman 

“The Tories have said that Mr. Brodie does not recall having a conversation in which he discussed the NAFTA issue.”

 

Parallel Universe?!?!?

This one is a keeper. Wait until it dawns on Lou Dobbs that Jack Layton is one of them ‘pinko socialists’ he despises and the New Democratic Party has no association/relationship what-so-ever with the American Democratic Party.

Oh well, on the bright side at least Countdown’s Keith Oberman tumbled to the story about Clinton’s people and NAFTA-gate - even if they screwed up the video link on the MSNBC web site where he discusses it with Howard Fineman. The story is being covered, which is bad news for Ian Brodie because his ass will be grass and like it or not Harper will have to start the lawn mower, because Oberman promises to take another whack at it tonight and he has a bigger audience than Bill-O.

UPDATE: It looks like they’ve corrected the ‘Clinton and NAFTA‘ link and it’s playing the correct interview with Howard Fineman now.

 

Cigar Store Indians

When I was young I remember a pawn shop that had three brass balls hanging over the door down on Main Street, and it seems all barber shops had red and white stripped poles on them. But I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever seen a wooden cigar store indian ‘in the flesh -so to speak, in Winnipeg.

What got me thinking about the subject had to do with a news story of some American Navajo Code Talkers that showed up in the media on Wednesday at a First Nations Language Symposium. I find it more than a little ironic that it seems everytime Indians start talking about traditions, culture, heritage, preserving aboriginal languages being crucial to maintaining cultural connections the person’s name that’s involved is usually quite Anglo-Saxon or a derivative of Anglo-something or other.

Not that I expect the charge of the rediscovery of culture to be lead by someone named Maytwayashing, Shingoose, or Two Dogs Chasing a Deer, but I do kind of wonder sometimes what it is that they are seeking given the current definitions of status indians never mind Metis and non-status Indians.

The whole thing of native cultural identity seems to have become a growing cottage industry in the last 50 years. Titles abound and hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money flows while everyone gets back to their ‘roots’. Alex Halley and Kunte Kinte would be very happy I suppose.

I’ve got kind of mixed emotions about the subject. I’m proud that my ancestors have been kicking around here for well over a couple of hundred years, but I’m also aware that they’re likely responsible, in part, for the virtual extermination of the prairie bison for no real and valid reason other than exploitation and the greed of others.

It’s that same thing - greed and exploitation thats kept me from joining up with the Manitoba Metis Federation. Not that they’re the only Metis group around, but they, rather than the Union nationale métisse Saint-Joseph du Manitoba, which for some inexplicable reason refuses to recognise that not everyone of French heritage speaks French, seem to have been anointed by governments as the ‘official representatives’ of the Metis - which by default is the Indian organization for those who don’t meet status Indian eligibility.

But it was something that showed up on Derryl Sanderson’s Metis blog - Forensic audit of MNC to proceed on Wednesday that makes me think there might be some hope for the future. The MNC stands for Metis National Council, which is yet another level of bureaucracy for Metis organizations - complete with more titles and money resources at taxpayer expense.

I’ve been waiting for something to show up in the MSN, but so far there’s been nothing. Not that I find that strange since Derryl claims to have been keeping two Freep sources up to speed with Metis matters. Actually I haven’t been able to find anything about it on any government web sites either, so it seems to be still in the rumour stages.

It’s not that I consider non-status Indian to be cigar store Indians - i.e. not real indians, but it’s long past time that the goals of the MMF were severed from the aspirations of non-status indians wanting to seek parity with status Indians. The Metis have their own grievances that have nothing to do with status and non-status indian rights, treaties, and claims.

I’m hoping that the Harper government has the balls to start looking at not only the MNC, but the MMF as well. In fact I hope that they’ll take a good look at the growth industry in all Metis organizations, and they’ll eventually they’ll clean up the legislation dealing with the definition of aboriginals and put a quick end to the abuses that have been going on.

 

Husker du

I’ve always had a special affinity for the Scandahoovian phrase ‘husker du’ which translates into English as ‘Do you remember‘, because one of my grandmothers commonly used it in a rather sing song way, as if it was the openings words of some old country ballad of some kind. She was a terrible singer, but I still enjoyed hearing her songs because they were always kind of like a familiar lullabye of happiness when I visited.

I’ve tried a few times to search the Internet looking to see if there is some song from the late 19th or early 20th century Scandinavian song that starts with those words, but all Google keeps serving up is endless pages about the 80’s rock group, and the memory game. I suppose it could narrow it down by being selective in the search words, or changing the search engine, or even finding someone old enough to remember.

The Internet age is funny that way. Sometimes it’s quite easy to find information, but sometimes the only way to find trivia or background information is to find someone with a long memory.

What got me going on this trip down memory lane was something Warren Kinsella posted today on his blog - ‘Marc Lemire: A cautionary note‘ where he makes the statement “What it doesn’t tell you is why some conservatives have taken leave of their senses, and are promoting him”. In doing so he provides some decade old link to a Metro Toronto report by the Canadian Jewish Congress.

Of course all this is taking place as Ezra Levant  is waxes eloquent about ‘Richard Warman’s attempt to block U.S. websites‘, and how we should all give him money to ensure he protects the rights of the unheard - a la - even if he doesn’t agree with them he’ll defend their rights to free speech to the death.

The thing is one of the sites that Ezra is pimping is tied to William White. The other site he names is a blog and I don’t have access to the registrant info but I suspect it’s tied to another neo-nazi nut named Grosvenor. For those of you who don’t know William Grosvenor or William Gruber as he is also known, is a neo-nazi - same as Marc Lemire.

Grosvenor has a lonnnnnnnnnng history of posting in the part of the Internet known as Usenet or newsgroups with his neo-nazi anti-Semite crud. To give you an idea of how prolific he is Google shows over 33,000 hits for his name as opposed to 3,300 for Lemire. The thing is both of these bozo have been posting using hundreds of aliases so the real count of posts will run into the hundreds of thousands.

Over the years Grosvenor had been responsible for so much crud and abuse of the Internet as well as on the Internet, that he was sentenced to the global kill file by most newsgroup administrators. In short that means whatever he posted didn’t get propagated anywhere else but on whatever dim witted Internet service provider gave him an account.

The thing is Kinsella doesn’t have the balls to come out and say what’s on his mind. Instead he mentions the political right and makes some vague reference to an extremely dated material by the CJC - the Canadian Jewish Congress. Then again perhaps he isn’t playing dog in the manger - maybe he really is that dim.

The history of the Internet and all it’s predecessors is a very long and, for most people, boring story even in readers digest version. But some background is in order. Over the last 16 years of Canadian Internet there’s been a variety of pain in the asses and characters, some American and some Canadian, that the descriptive term ‘net-kook‘ was applied. Grosvenor was long ago identified as a net-kook and problem, as have most other extremist nut jobs.

So why would Levant make a pretext of supporting the right to free speech of  neo-nazis such as Grosvenor and White? I don’t know. But after several decades of using computers and the various forms of computer communication that have evolved,  I do know that for every neo-nazi that has popped up they’re matched by the number of neo-con Zionist extremists and other assorted nut jobs that are bound and determined to turn newsgroups, web sites, and blogs into a battle field in some personal war with them that most people don’t give a rats ass about.

At the same time the CJC - Canadian Jewish Congress and to some degree the B’nai brith has been whining about how much abuse and hatred Jews are being subject to on the internet. The problem is a small handfull of people have been actively engaged in fomenting the discord and creating situations then citing them as evidence by these organizations of some growing organized web of hatred.

Anyone that complains about the antics is branded an anti-semite, a bigot, Jew-hater, etc. followed in many cases by a complaint to their ISP. Sorry but a ket-kook like Grosvenor dumping massive amounts of posts into newsgroups is just as vile as the stuff coming from Ken McVay and his Nizkor web site or Sara Saltzman et al. If you want to see how vile the whole lot is tune into the newsgroup alt.revisionism.

I’m tired of having Human Rights Commisions being subverted and bastardized into intruments of personal religious and political views. I don’t care if it’s a Jew, Muslim, or a neo-nazi that’s abusing the system. I’m tired of the antics that have been going on for years to turn the internet into the same kind of farce.

It’s bad enough that access to this resource is only available by a small handful of commercial Internet Providers that don’t have any qualms about corporate intrusion into every aspect . Politicians and government wants to get their greasy little meathooks in there too. It shouldn’t come as a big surprise that special interest groups of all kinds want to ensure that they have the ability to exercise power and control too.

It’s going to happen eventually - the people using the internet will be paying the bills, have all the responsibility, but any rights, power, and control will have willingly been transfered to an elite. Perhaps when that day happen someone will stare at their monitor and say ‘husker du’ - even if it’ll be too late by then.

 

Monopoly is a bored game

First we were treated to a rather stupid idea that someone in the media was trying to peddle about supporting Mayor ‘Slippery Sam’ entry in the World Mayor contest. Now the big media cause is having Winnipeg named on a new version of the Monopoly Board game.

I suppose it’s one step better than being known as the murder capital of Canada (thank you Edmonton), or the car theft capital of Canada, but it’s like putting lipstick and a dress on a pig - it might make the pig feel better about itself, but it’ll still be a pig. Not that there’s anything wrong with that unless your dietary rules don’t include eating fecal encrusted animals.

Unfortunately, according to a Freep story slugged “Transcona residents face huge train delays” it looks like our city council has decided that governing our city is like a game of monopoly and they’re the new Railway Barons following a visit from Dipper Doer bureaucrat Ernie Gilroy, CEO - Manitoba Infrastructure and Transportation & Manitoba Floodway Authority.

After reading the story all I could do is shake my head at the level of profound ignorance. First of all the CPR tracks are north of the Transcona residential area. Blocking the streets will have an effect on hundreds of residents and businesses in East Kildonan and Elmwood but it doesn’t affect Transcona residents. Lagimodiere Blvd is already accessible From Ravelstone via the Almey intersection just as it’s been ever since Lagimodiere Blvd was built, and I’m told it’s rarely used by any emergency vehicles - police, fire, or ambulance.

Railways such as the CPR are governed by Federal legislation. The Winnipeg city council doesn’t have the power or authority to alter any federal legislation governing railway operations. The subject of blocking crossing is covered by the Canadian Railway Operating Rules which states:

No part of a train or engine may be allowed to stand on any part of a public crossing at grade, for a longer period than five minutes, when vehicular or pedestrian traffic requires passage. Switching operations at such crossings, must not obstruct vehicular or pedestrian traffic for a longer period than five minutes at a time. When emergency vehicles require passage, employees must cooperate to clear public crossings at grade and private crossings as quickly as possible.

That’s not to say that the Federal Minister of Transportation,  Lawrence Cannon doesn’t have the power to temporarily alter the enforcement/adherence of that rule by Transport Canada and the CPR, but that power is well beyond city council. There’s a good reason why the feds kicked in money for the floodway widening, and it had to do with the costs of altering infrastructure (bridges - railway and highway) tied to Federal jurisdiction. It wasn’t done because it was a free gift by the taxpayers of Canada.

It may well be that Gilroy and/or the CPR has filed for some form of exemption of the Railway Safety Act which covers construction projects, but the process provides for a public complaint and hearing process. This whole thing smells an awful lot like the Doer’s Dippers trying to pull a fast one, and City council cutting a deal with the CPR - remember the story about moving the yards?

Whatever is going on doesn’t add up. The CNR rail bridge just north of Highway 15 was replaced without that railway suffering any real operating problems, and there’s no real reason why the CPR can’t do it also - regardless of whatever tall tales Doer Dipper Gilroy wants the public - and Winnipeg City Council - to believe.  

 

The power of one

I see that the Freeps Dan Lett - Crocus reversals a flip-flop fandango finally picked up on something that shows up in the Global TV video in my blog entry “Some More Crocus Humour” from last week - “Bellan told a local television reporter that “a courtroom is hardly a place where you’re going to get to the truth.”

A giant Tim the Tool-man confused  - “Haaaaaaaaarugh” to that one. Last time I heard the oath or affirmation used in court included something along the lines of “Do you swear/affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”.

Does this mean the oral evidence covered by the testimony will be filled with complete candor and honesty? Well, no it doesn’t. Because the truth in this context has only to do with answers to questions that are asked, and if the right questions aren’t asked then the truth isn’t relevant.

So then what is Bellan saying by his statement “a courtroom is hardly a place where you’re going to get to the truth”? Damned if I know. But I do know one thing - he is the sole plaintiff in a class action, where the class action lawyers have reached tentative settlements that allow all the defendants to never publicly disclose anything about the events at Crocus.

In exchange the shareholders will get back less than 5% of what Crocus was supposedly worth when the Manitoba Security Commission applied to the Courts to have Crocus put into Receivership. Let’s do the math. On paper Crocus was worth 170M $$$ - 5% of that is 8.5 M $$$.  The settlements total about 12M $$$, less lawyers fees that leaves about  7 M $$$.

But, but, but here’s the interesting part. Manitoba has what’s called ‘litigant friendly’ class action legislation. In a nut shell what that means is that every shareholder of Crocus is automatically included in a certified class action and will be bound by whatever terms Bellan and the class action lawyers agree to with the defendants.

In other words one crocus shareholder can prevent not only every other shareholder from hearing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but arcane concepts such as candor and honesty as well.

Maybe that’s why I find badly done parodies in You Tube,  like this one, so funny - especially if they make me think about Crocus.

 

The basic Black appeal

Conrad Black reports to prison

 

Sadly it is the good that die young

Legendary Toronto blues guitarist and old-style jazz aficionado Jeff Healey died yesterday in Toronto’s St. Joseph’s Hospital after a lifelong battle with a rare form of cancer — retinoblastoma — that blinded him in his first year. He was 41.

 

Buffalo Bill blended right in

I’d never seen this web site until today, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, thinking at first that because of the ‘goldiproductions‘ bit that it has something to do with Marty Gold’s blog and his latest efforts. At any rate there’s a couple of links from the web site out of Toronto that make for some ’interesting’ and amusing reading on the Asper Museum and the Upper Forks.