A Most Opportune Death

well, it wasn't for Flaherty but it most certainly is for Harper.

We will all die.  Every one of us.

But let us consider Flaherty's CONvenient demise and how Harper will play it out.

All in all, Flaherty's sudden death after dumping Harper and his party, is awfully CONvenient for PMSHithead - if he needs to strike fear in his partisans.

Paul Wells, a most rigorous and understated political reporter, gives us an insight into the internal gears of Harper's CPC that are grinding Canadians down as well as a portrait of a corporate conservative, here.

Flaherty's death offers Harper's Politburo glorious, flashy opportunities to display him in a *good* light which is a tactic that PMSHithead badly needs to deploy right now.

So, let's watch how Harper plays the Canadian and international media in order to exploit Flaherty's death for his own purpose.  It can be his new sweater-and-kittens schtick!

Will Harper insist that Flaherty receive a state funeral, with all the pomp and protocol, and the attendant bells and whistles? I bet he does exactly that. PMSHithead's government needs a MASSIVE sparkly diversions from all the attention the lies, the fraud and the corruption that Harper has facilitated.

As tweeter @dexterdyne asked: The Harper government has cut programs and funding for our veterans, scientists, health care, unemployed, the CBC, the public service.  So what exactly are they spending it on? 

In order to evade such probing questions, Harper's Politburo in currently in full War Room mode.  Right now its richly-paid communication flunkies are spinning tactics to best exploit Flaherty's death for maximum benefit: to make PMSHithead look *good* to voters and to the media.

They are probably looking to North Korea, as they did when they wrote the *Fair* Elections Act, for inspiration on how to shine up Harper's image.

Perhaps Harper's Politburo will claim C23 was Flaherty's brainchild; thus any critic of any word of the Elections Reform Act could be smeared (or worse?) for "disrespecting" his memory.

I suggest instead of listening and watching a week of disgusting and crass CPC Con glurge, Canadians might view _Angel Heart_ or any film that explores what happens when someone sells their soul to the devil.

Once you start thinking of Harper in THAT light... 

Adieu, Jack.

« Si le rire sacrilège et blasphématoire que les bigots de toutes les chapelles taxent de vulgarité et de mauvais goût, si ce rire-là peut parfois désacraliser la bêtise, exorciser les chagrins véritables et fustiger les angoisses mortelles, alors oui on peut rire de tout, on doit rire de tout : de la guerre, de la misère et de la mort!

Au reste, est-ce qu'elle se gêne la mort, elle, pour se rire de nous ? Est-ce qu'elle ne pratique pas l'humour noir, elle, la mort ? Regardons s'agiter ces malheureux dans les usines, regardons gigoter ces hommes puissants, boursoufflés de leur importance qui vivent à 100 à l'heure. Alors ils se battent, ils courent, ils caracolent derrière leur vie, et tout d'un coup, cela s'arrête, sans plus de raisons que ça n'avait commencé...

Alors le militant de base, le pompeux PDG, la princesse d'opérette, l'enfant qui joue à la marelle dans les caniveaux de Beyrouth, toi aussi à qui je pense et qui a cru en Dieu jusqu'au bout de ton cancer... Tous nous sommes fauchés un jour par le croche-pied rigolard de la mort imbécile, et les droits de l'homme s'effacent devant les droits de l'asticot. »

Pierre Desproges, dans Le Tribunal des flagrants délires réquisitoire contre Jean-Marie Le Pen (28 septembre 1982)

"If the sacrilegious and blasphemous laughter that bigots of all religious dogma claim to be vulgar and in bad taste, if that laughter might desecrate stupidity, exorcise genuine grief and castigate mortal anguish, then yes: one can, one should laugh at everything: war, misery and death!

After all, does Death hesitate to laugh at us? Is Death not a practitioner of black humour? Look at those unfortunate people stirring in the factories, look at men of power swollen with their importance who scramble to live at full throttle. So they fight, they run, they prance behind their lives, and all of a sudden, it stops, with no more reason than it had started ...

So it is for the activist, the pompous CEO, the princess of operetta, the child playing hopscotch in the gutters of Beirut, and you too who believed in God until the end of your cancer ... All are mowed down eventually by death's imbecility, and the rights of men give way to the rights of the maggot."

Someone on Radio-Canada observed that Jack Layton was a ferocious negociator. Who knows what deals people make when they learn that insidious, merciless cancer is raging within them? When my sister fought ovarian cancer, she confided in me that she *asked* for two years. And she lived, in the time left, to the fullest.

From Joan Baez:

"You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now."

Death by Childbirth

Northern Ireland is struggling towards ensuring that women have choice with respect to their reproductive potential. However it does have something to offer pregnant women that is enviable and admirable.

According to the United Nations, a woman’s chance of dying in childbirth in the United States is 1 in 4,800. In Ireland, which has the best rate in the world, it is 1 in 48,000. In Sierra Leone, it is 1 in 8.

One in eight. Think of eight women you know that are pregnant or who have recently given birth. Name each one out loud. Imagine one of them dying while giving birth. Perhaps a friend, a relative, a neighbour or someone very close to you almost died, but with the intervention of prompt, efficient professional health care workers, she survived and so did her infant.

Fatmata Jalloh’s body lay on a rusting metal gurney in a damp hospital ward, a scrap of paper with her name and “R.I.P.” taped to her stomach. In the soft light of a single candle — the power was out again in one of Africa’s poorest cities — Jalloh looked like a sleeping teenager. Dead just 15 minutes, the 18-year-old’s face was round and serene, with freckles around her closed eyes and her full lips frozen in a sad pucker. …

More than 500,000 women a year — about one every minute — die in childbirth across the globe, almost exclusively in the developing world, and almost always from causes preventable with basic medical care. The planet’s worst rates are in this startlingly poor nation on West Africa’s Atlantic coast, where a decade of civil war that ended in 2002 deepened chronic deprivation.

The women die from bleeding, infection, obstructed labor and preeclampsia or pregnancy-induced high blood pressure. But often the underlying cause is simply life in poor countries: Governments don’t provide enough decent hospitals or doctors; families can’t afford medications.

The above was first posted at Birth Pangs in 2008.

More recent figures on maternal mortality are available in the World Economic Forum's recently released Global Gender Gap Report which measures the size of the gender inequality gap in four critical areas:

1) Economic participation and opportunity – outcomes on salaries, participation levels and access to high-skilled employment

2) Educational attainment – outcomes on access to basic and higher level education

3) Political empowerment – outcomes on representation in decision-making structures

4) Health and survival – outcomes on life expectancy and sex ratio.

Antonia Zerbisias scrutinizes the Catholic Family and Fetal Rights Institute's distortion of the World Economic Forum report and exposes C-FAM's twisted logic and fallacious premise here. She does an excellent job of deconstructing the Institute's partial fact selection about medical care provided to women of child-bearing age, its use of false equivalency and its MASSIVE obfuscations and lies.

She demonstrates how The Fetus©™ fetishists do not value the lives of those they view only as Gestational Support Units, better known to non-zealots as women who are mothers, daughters, wives, sisters, friends and lovers.