Easter and fecundity, Easter and chocolate

My favourite Easter joke — which I told countless times as an adolescent because there was bound to be someone among family members and Francophone community who would take offense — was this one.

Jesus has been nailed to the cross, he's weakened by his ordeal and his disciples gather below him.  Peter notices him staring, struggling to say some words.  Resources are marshaled by the small group to get Peter up near Jesus so his last words can be heard. 

(Elaborate details on the maneuvers and acrobatics required to do so.) 

Finally Peter is propped up to a level where he can hear what Jesus is whispering: "Look Peter, we can see your house from up here."

Location, location, location. Ba-da-bing!



But seriously folks, it's become a tradition for me to allude to chocolate, as well as the pagan origins of Easter.  Check these inks to past posts about "spring spheres", and eclectic paschalaphilia.

Feast upon this splendid article about cocoa: its history as well as current current ethical and cultivation challenges.

Conveniently, cacao is already a hybrid by nature. “If one cacao plant is compatible with another, they will mate,” Adler says. “Cacao is a slut. A cacao pod can even have more than one varietal strain inside of it. It can be pollinated multiple times.”

There are more than 14,000 known varieties of cocoa beans around the world, the two most prominent being “Criollo,” which originated in South America and traveled to Mesoamerica, and “Forastero,” a native of the Amazon rain forest basin. As soon as they met, these two got it on, creating “Trinitario,” named after the island of Trinidad where their union was discovered.

"Cacao is a slut"... perfect, since it's a legal drug that stimulates production of endorphins and seratonin, those brain-happy substances.

While casting about the weird world web, using search terms for chocolate and also Claire Brétecher, I came upon an illustration of hers for a book of bandes dessinées, a fable about endangered species, over-breeding and extinction ...

What is the Occidental Bolot? A small mammal closely related to the dog with a rampant libido that makes it hump anything that moves, its fertility rate is decreasing.  Females now only produce a litter of 20 to 30 piglets.  Before the rise of CO2 emissions, they would typically birth 50.  This deplorable situation has incited the Bolot to seek refuge in a beautiful reserve dedicated to endangered animals...

Mmm.  Sounds amusing.

My Easter Story

Years ago, my sister had gum surgery. (Note: Avoid if at all possible.) She was in pain and feeling shitty so I went to her place to keep her company.

It was around Easter and some network was running the de rigeur Ten Commandments. We were lounging on her bed watching and getting bored. So I went and found a bible (as an art history student, she sometimes needed to look stuff up), turned the sound off, and pretended to read relevant bits from it.

OK, she was weak but I was ON FIRE!

She'd laugh, then grimace in pain and tell me to stop.

Well, of course I didn't.

More laughing, more grimacing, more demands to stop.

Nope. I WAS ON FIRE!

This went on for quite a while.

I felt kinda bad, but I WAS ON FIRE!

Finally, she knocked me off the bed, physically shoved me down the hall to her front door, and literally threw me out of her place.

Only time I've ever been forcibly ejected from somewhere.

It was totally worth it.

Happy Easter. If you're suffering today, may you have as rotten funny a sister as me.


BONUS: How the Red Sea was parted.

Git your souvenir oilsands globe here!

The pitch (yeah, eh, eh, eh):



The innovator is Dan Murphy.

For extra fun, enter the search term "A Celebration of Tarsands!" at  youtube.

M408 Blowed Up Real Good

The Iron Fist of PMSHithead comes crashing down on Warawa's Wank.

Conservative MP Mark Warawa has lost his appeal to bring a motion condemning sex-selective abortion to the House of Commons for debate.

The procedure and House affairs committee upheld a decision by its subcommittee that Warawa's motion, M-408, isn't eligible to be debated by MPs, despite the advice of a non-partisan Library of Parliament analyst that the motion was in order.

Warawa has five days to appeal to the House of Commons. He said Monday that he has the backing he needs to bring the appeal, with the support of five MPs from two recognized parties. That appeal will lead to a secret ballot over whether the motion can be brought for debate.

Warawa said he's "very disappointed" but was going to take a few days before deciding whether to appeal. He can also introduce another private member's bill or motion instead of appealing the decision.

I never doubted that it was voteable. It was just a non-binding motion, after all, a shiny thing for the fetus fetishists in the CONtempt Party to amuse themselves with when they weren't being called upon to smear the Opposition.

A sop to the base, in short.

Who could have foreseen that the rigid control of the PMO would cause such a delightful ruckus?

And it appears that other zygote zealots were gobsmacked too.

Under the heading Parliament complicit with sex-selective abortions, Campaign Lie SHRIEEEKS.

"The decision to crush M-408 is proof that Harper will go to any extreme to distance himself from any reference to abortion, even if that means compromising on democracy," said Jim Hughes, President of Campaign Life Coalition.

And what do we have here?

Yesterday CPC phoned for donation. Me: "Fuck off." Caller: So you don't want to support the CPC right now? Me: "Fuck off."

— Paul Tuns (@ptuns) March 28, 2013

Ooh. Very bad language from Paul Tuns, editor in chief of The Interim, 'Canada's Life and Family Newspaper'.

I'm calling it: SPECTACULAR FAIL.

The Blue Army Chorus Revolts

The kerfuffle over Warawa's Wank is becoming even more FUN!

Another CON backbencher has been designated attack dog on this and calls the malcontents 'rogues'.

The Conservatives admit they have “rogues” within their party as one MP said his colleagues “must suffer the consequences” for their anti-abortion stance amid the most open show of rebellion under Prime Minister Stephen Harper to date.

He does have a point. All CON candidates campaigned knowing Harper's frequently repeated vow 'not to reopen the abortion debate'.

Yet they happily campaigned under the CON banner.

The NatPo quotes our pal Stephen Woodworth, he of Woodworth's Wank fame, and the noted anti-choice wordsmith does not disappoint.

“It may be that’s what’s at play here, that this abortionism philosophy has led the sub-committee members to put abortion above the independence of private members, above the right of Parliament to comment on an important issue, above the right of members to be able to vote on such an issue,” Kitchener MP Stephen Woodworth said Tuesday.

Abortionism?????

Noun
abortionism (uncountable)
1. The advocacy or practice of abortion.

Usage notes
This term appears to be used principally in pejorative fashion by opponents of abortion.

For a longer nuttier explication of the term see Abortionism: American's New Established State Religion.

And for those who may have forgotten Woody's previous feat of wordsmithy, here again is his deathless M312, Fixed-Wing Technology and Ballooning.

The title of this blogpost comes from the NatPo story, quoting Bob Rae.

[Rae] agreed with Conservative backbenchers that there should be more freedom for MPs to speak their minds and to vote free of party discipline. It’s no surprise they’re finally rebelling against Harper’s iron control, Rae said.

“I think they’re annoyed and tired of the harness. I think they’re tired of having to respond to everything by acting like the Blue Army Chorus and I think they want to be able to speak their minds,” he said.

As I said: FUN!

So, where's the CONspiracy? Has #TGDN gone global or delusional?

#TGDN = Twitter Gulag Defense Network.

In case you don't gaze towards the Excited States of America much these days, or don't tweet, this little right-wing nutjob conspiracy hoohaw might have not caught your attention.

From here:

Twitter makes it easy to report accounts for spam. When enough users report an account, it automatically gets suspended. Some users abuse this feature by organizing a group to report or “spam-block” a single account in order to get it suspended.

Conservatives created the “Twitter Gulag Defense Network” or #TGDN to stop spam-blocking attacks. Aware that accounts with more followers are less likely to get suspended, they mutually followed anyone else using #TGDN. Now that their group is organized and members are protected, they have begun targeted spam-blocking of progressive accounts, exactly what their group was created to oppose. Ironic.

Bloggers at LGF have been diligently following this phenomena and its permutations. Many have posted about the various Hatriots and other right-wing, firearm-fetishizing nutjobs who are involved.

One of my twitter friends, @fem_progress, drew my attention to this item:

A little known policy slips quietly under the radar in January 2012 as our friends at Twitter announce they will censor tweets, if a country’s government requests them to do so. A year later, Australia becomes the first modern democracy to identify, filter and ban free speech whilst not in a state of War.

In recent weeks, the censoring of tweets by Australian conservatives, or, indeed anyone who dares to either engage in political debate or offer opinion on the ruling Labor-Green alliance, has become so pervasive many have thought it was a bug with Twitter. You can read Twitter’s well hidden censorship policy here.

But now I can reveal that Twitter is actively censoring Australian tweets at the direct request of the government.

It sounds like the rantings of disgruntled Australian RWNJs and neo-cons, but if that Twitter policy does indeed exist, it could be deployed in accordance with the whims of a tinpot dictator like PMSHithead, at the request of his PMO/Politburo, to censor progressive or anti-Harper conservative tweets.

So, if this Aussie idiot has stumbled upon a MASSIVE ploy by his government, why hasn't that happened in Canada yet?  Critics of the Harper regime have certainly been quite vociferous in their excoriation of CPC electoral fraud, its corruption, its censorship of scientists and other public servants, its quasi-legal and illicit manipulations, its incessant prevarications and Rovian tactics.

My intuition tells me that it serves a greater purpose to have us scurrying around in plain view, expressing our anger, our fears, our hopes.

Harper's CPC is focused on perfecting the military precision of a volunteer and staff infrastructure that will facilitate the rigging of the next federal election in their favour, while their opponents are distraught, scattered and distracted.

Their May 2011 machinations were a taste of things to come.  Alison at Creekside has done an extraordinary job of investigative work on this matter.

So we have to get cracking on the coalition and cooperation-building NOW.  Talk is cheap, and the Cons have millions in their election war-chest, likely from the Koch Brothers foundations and possibly more that will be siphoned off from public funds now that Kevin Page is gone.

MPs' Rights? Yeah, Right

This is adorable. (bold mine)

Backbench MPs are turning up the pressure in frustration over the Prime Minister's Office stifling debate in the House of Commons.
MPs who oppose abortion and want to see legislated limits for it are pushing back against caucus discipline, particularly in light of an all-party committee shutting down debate last week on a non-binding motion to condemn sex-selective abortion.

But they aren't the only ones upset with heavy-handed tactics on the part of the Conservative leadership. That frustration boiled over Tuesday in the House of Commons, leading several MPs to raise public complaints about a party that has so far maintained strict control over what its members can say.

"There has been predominantly informal discussion about what is, or what is not, our rights, and MPs have to decide what's wrong and what's right, and what our rights are," said one Conservative MP, who requested anonymity.

A bunch of white male fetus-fetishizing MPs, plus Elizabeth 'Nuance R Us' May, whinging about their rights as MPs under the most micro-controlling Prime Sinister ever.

And the issue? Right. Recriminalizing abortion. Stripping rights away from half the population.

Norm Spector pointed out:

#CPC MPs complaining about party discipline ran under a leader they thot was lying 2 Cdns or are hypocrites. In either case, shame on them

— Norman Spector (@nspector4) March 26, 2013

Me, I'm going with lying, hypocritical scumbags.


ADDED: Aaron Wherry with what was said and what it means. 'Here's the rot.'

Manifestos! Lots of Manifestos!

The decision to deem Warawa's Wank non-voteable is producing some foot-stomping, manifesto-issuing fun.

Fetus fetishists are turning against PMSHithead BIG TIME.

First, it was the Fetal Gore Tour Gang with its 'Against Stephen Harper: A Pro-Life Manifesto'. About what you'd expect but with a handy list of Harper's evil anti-life deeds.

Then SUZYALLCAPSLOCK got into it with her own screed. Same title, note.

http://www.bigbluewave.ca/2013/03/against-stephen-harper-pro-life.html

Against Stephen Harper: A Pro-Life Manifesto

The problem is that there are a lot of pro-lifers in the Conservative party who support their leader, for whatever reason.

They figure: well, we won't get fetal rights, we might as well get a balanced budget (another illusion) and other conservative policies.

Here's my advice: If your MP carries the ball on pro-life issues, vote for him. [sic]

Otherwise, stop voting Conservative.

Yes, I realize we could get an NDP government.

But you have to understand: sometimes it needs to get worse before it can get better.

If you don't punish your politicians, they won't listen.

If they don't listen to you, you're screwed.

We have to punish those conservative politicians who think they can take our vote then not give us ANYTHING in return.

When we stop volunteering for Conservative campaigns, when we stop giving, when we stop voting, they will pay attention.

Master Chess Player PMSH seems to have stepped in it this time.

And everyone can play.

If M408 is found to be voteable, opponents can squeal 'HIDDEN AGENDA!' If non-voteable, everybody can squeal 'DEMOCRACY SCREWED!'

And now, so-conned citizens -- the whopping 5-6% of Canadians who want to ban abortion altogether -- are maybe finally getting the message: PMSHithead doesn't give a rat's ass about your issues.

Fetus Fetishists Enabled Gosnell

Kermit Gosnell's trial for murder has begun and the fetus fetishists are fapping themselves into a frenzy. As we pointed out here, he will be The Poster Boy for Evul Abortionists forever, or until another one comes along.

Also in that post, we pointed squarely at the fetus fetishists themselves for creating the stigma, harassment, and onerous and pointless regulations that allow such monsters to operate and, indeed, flourish in poor neighbourhoods.

But this little morsel is delicious. It seems the clinic harassers did NOT target Gosnell.

One former patient at the clinic told a state Senate committee that women in her neighborhood knew Gosnell offered the cheapest abortions available. Another Gosnell patient told the Associated Press that she had intended to go to a Planned Parenthood clinic but was scared away by antiabortion protesters. An acquaintance suggested Gosnell's clinic, where protesters - ironically - were not an issue.

Suburban church ladies and gents didn't feel comfy in the 'hood?

And now for some SHOCKING news. Bill O'Reilly, loudest enabler and cheerleader for the assassination of Dr George Tiller, is making shit up about the case.

Really, O'Reilly, the facts are bad enough. But liars gotta lie, I guess.

And I'll note again for our dim Canadian fetus fetishists -- this would not happen in a civilized society that treated abortion as a private medical procedure. You know, like Canada.