The Pope is at the centre of the Catholic Sex Scandal. Which Pope???

It seems that child abuse flies under the radar in the church - any church - but this one particularly. I suspect (with utterly no evidence to support the suspicion) that if there is no penetration, the catholic church does not consider sex to be sex: therefore, molesting little boys and girls doesn't count....

This is supported, however, by what I know to be the practice of 'chaste' sex among pre-married or unmarried catholic couples. Everything but penetration goes....

I'm willing to wager there is all manner of means by which these deprived and depraved priests mitigate in their minds what they're doing and the damage done to these little ones.

Sex is sex is sex; however one engages, which parts one puts into action, if the genitals are involved, it's sex, call it what you will.

Where it comes to children, however, it is sexual assault, sexual abuse and rape.

The Catholic church has, for centuries, found any loophole it can where it comes to sex and that's what makes the whole thing so stinky. One can no more tell a human body to cease breathing than one can order the human body to ignore other necessary functions.

Gloria Steinham still thinks women are too stupid to figure out how to prevent pregnacy...

Lack of reproductive freedom my backside.

Gloria Steinem still thinks that a woman's ability to kill her unborn child and women's right to be irresponsible prior to sex by not accessing birth control/prevention means women don't have equality.

Bullshit.

In the US and Canada, women have unlimited access to legal, free information and FREE conception prevention via the Internet, the local family planning, their doctors, etc. etc., yet in these two countries, women are still becoming pregnant when they say they don't want.

Two issues here: if women say its their body and their right to control it, then why are they NOT acting on those rights and controlling their bodies PRIOR to becoming pregnant with children they say they don't want?

NOT acting is not being in control. Failure to take advantage of the EXTENSIVE pre-conception options available in this country and in the US is irresponsible and flies in the face of control. A woman in control only in rare occasions becomes pregnant when she doesn't desire it.

Secondly, Ms Steinem and others like her never touch on the issue of median age of those who choose abortions, nor do they talk at all about the age of those who are having their second and third and in some cases fourth abortion. It is idiocy to say these women are in control of anything.

Finally, there is a demographic that chooses to abort because doing otherwise would expose an extramarital affair. I make no comment here on the morality of extramarital sex; however, for those who choose it and for those for whom that choice results in conception, they too cannot be confused as people who are in control.

The high numbers of abortions in this country and the US must logically show that women are decidedly not taking control of their bodies but resorting to an act that is incredibly hard on the female body and terminal for the being that body contains.

And for those who say 'it isn't a baby,' or 'it isn't human,' those arguments are ridiculous. Humans cannot conceive anything other than human and yes, tiny as that being is, it is a human child with the same start in life as the body carrying it. Changing the labels or covering one's eyes to reality doesn't change the fact of the 'operation.

It is irresponsible for those who say they support women's equality and rights to continue diminishing women to the status of irresponsible children, when all of - more than - the necessary tools for fully in-control behaviour are readily available.

Women cannot expect equality when they refuse to take a credible stance on this issue.

How dumb/lazy does one have to be?

Ok, seriously. How hard is it to make guacamole?

Answer? Unless you're dead (and even that might not be enough), it's dead (ahahah) easy.

I just read that a woman is suing Kraft Foods over their guacamole because she said it didn't taste 'avocadoey' enough. No surprise either: Kraft's guacamole only contains 2% avocados.

And by the way, if you think food labels tell the truth, you'd be surprised...

"Guac" is insanely easy to make.

Three large, ripe avocados
1 large, ripe tomato
1 ripe jalapeño pepper
1 -2 cloves of garlic (optional but delicious)
1 lime
salt and pepper
pinch of sugar.

Cut the avocados in half and extract the nuts; score the 'meat' by running a knife through it lengthwise and crossways (don't cut through the skin). By doing this, when you scoop the meat out, it will already be cut into small chunks.
With a soup spoon (those are the big spoons in your set, for those who don't know the names) scoop the meat out of each scored section.

SAVE one nut***

Wash the tomato and the jalapeño (with soap please; you don't know where the hands that touched it before yours have been or what they've been up to... yuck).

Cut both into small chunks. Most of the seeds will come out; save them and, if it's warm enough outside, chuck them into the garden. They will grow!

NOTE: unless you like REALLY hot guacamole, don't put the jalapeño seeds into the mix. Also, DON'T touch your eye, nose or mouth after touching that jalapeño. If you do, you'll know why I said don't.

Put all the chopped stuff into a bowl big enough that you can mash the contents without spillage.

Cut the lime in half and take out any seeds you can get at: squeeze the lime juice over the avocado/tomato (and then pick out any other seeds that fall out of the lime)

Add 1/2 tsp salt, some pepper and a pinch or two of sugar. The salt and sugar keep the avocado from going brown, as does the lime.

With a fork, mash everything together. Guacamole can be chunky or smooth, so do whatever you like.

If you're going to store this for a while, put the saved nut in the centre of the mixture and then tightly cover the bowl with either a lid or plastic wrap. The nut also retards browning.

If, however, you're not superhumanly full of willpower and you're going to get into this immediately, serve on toast, rice cakes, tortillas or pita. Guacamole is also delicious on hamburgers and with omelettes and eggs.

Now. After tasting the home-made kind, why on EARTH would you buy guacamole? C'mon....

My daughter speculates that the above-mentioned law suit may have been, in part, designed to expose a large 'food' manufacturer for what exactly is in that 'food.'

Despite what every fast-food/convenience-food ad would like you to believe, you really can make it yourself - for less money, with fewer chemicals and far less risk of ingesting a ton of "What's in that stuff?"

Next up? Pre-cooked, frozen potatoes ....

Sometimes I wonder....

.... what it would have been like to be one of those kids whose parents doted on them. That kind of parent that was at every event and kissed knees better and who said "I love you," and meant it: the kind of parent who enjoys being around their children just 'cause: the kind who isn't in competition with their child and who doesn't take every thought their child has as somehow about them - against them.... I don't know Joannie Rochette.

I'd never heard of her before her mom passed away the day before Joannie was to compete at the Olympics. All I know about her really is that her mom was at every performance and practice for Joannie's entire life. I can't imagine. No, I can imagine what that would be like. 

The death of that person, a complete stranger to me, tears at me because I can imagine - that's all I can do: imagine - because I know what it is like to have the complete opposite: a mother who treats their child as an annoyance and a liability: a mother who wears her resentment as an impenetrable cloak: a mother who looks for ways and means to trip up their child; a father who is incapable of bending or straying off a rigid path. 

I know a father who, despite wanting to love his child, was so rule-bound that small transgressions took precedence over love; doing the right thing (his right thing) was the paramount pursuit; a father who would ignore a child's small hurts because to do otherwise would make his child weak and dependent: a father who didn't know the immense power of a simple hug and a kiss on the cheek to heal that skinned knee: a father who was mostly gone by the time I was five. 

Not having that sure thing -the solid foundation and absolute immovability of my parents' love - is what makes me weak and distrustful and scared all the time, even at my age: nearly half a century. And it is the not having but seeing it all around me that reinforces the endless loneliness: the endless being on the outside all the time. 

My father is dead; my mother died - the person she might have been - when she was two.... I can say nothing further to my father because he can no longer hear me. It is far worse with my mother. She is here still but defends herself from thinking or feeling or hearing by talking all the time, endlessly, about herself. Despite that she is there, that I can touch her and yes, I can scream in her face, she cannot hear me, she does not see me and she has never known or wanted to know me. 

I cannot rise because I cannot find the ground to rise above. There has never been solid ground. And so I float. For my own children, however, there is ground: absolutely solid, immovable ground. I will kiss them better no matter how small their hurt; I will encourage them, no matter how much their philosophies differ from mine; I will be proud of them, whatever they accomplish; I will tell them I love them - a million million; I will believe in them and be fascinated by them; and I will adore them simply because they are: and by this, I will care for that other child, who suffers still. Thanks to TShane.com for the beautiful photo.

How to Kill a Tiger

It is DISGUSTING how the very people who brought this young man to all this fame - those who coached him and nurtured him and encouraged the high level of competitiveness required for him to achieve what he has - have abandoned him now. None among them is willing to admit, "I too."

How many of them have similar skeletons in their own closets? How many of them were with Tiger on his escapades? How many helped procure? Do people REALLY think Tiger's caddy is a eunuch? His trainers are eunuchs? Other high-profile golfers are eunuchs? Seriously??? Do people really really believe that there isn't any other pro who's done exactly the same?

Tiger is a man. He is human. He has been made a commodity by his trainers and his fans; by the media that relies on him to bring them eyes and ears; by the golf courses that rely on his celebrity for their marketing campaigns and yes, even by his parents, who fostered his rise to fame and greatness. Yet, when he does the most human of all things, the entourage that has gained so much on Tiger's back runs and hides.

Anyone who thinks Tiger is unique in the world of sports is deluded and ridiculous. There are HUNDREDS of men at all levels of sport - and music and enterprise - who do exactly as Tiger has done but who haven't been caught or whose behaviour has been ignored - or encouraged if you're Gene Simmons or Steven Tyler or Wilf Chamberlain.

Frankly, if Tiger had been free to speak - and he most assuredly was NOT free; he was coached in this event, as he is in all others - he could - and should - have pointed fingers towards all those around him who are complicit and who are equally 'guilty' and who are, in their little minds, heaving a sigh of relief that they have escaped scrutiny themselves.

It is an incomprehensible quality of humans that we build up these people and adore them only until the point they reflect our own fallibilities. The second we see ourselves reflected, we're after them like packs of starving wolves.

The wolves howling at Tiger now are those who are desperate for the spotlight to fall as far from them as possible because, up until the 'accident,' every one of those wolves was jealous as hell.

Tiger hasn't failed in any way. He is exactly what he was trained and made to be. A highly successful, handsome, wealthy professional golfer. He is still all of those things. Except for the part where YOU, Joe Public, with all your own skeletons, have sacrificed him.

Makes me sick.

Update on the dishwasher thing...

Yesterday someone from Cannabis Culture Magazine posted a link to a British game show that was parodying the US prison system. They were attempting to make a joke of it - and it is a joke - but the reality is so brutal that, although one might laugh, it is the choked laughter reserved for the truly disturbing subjects.



Apart from all the commentary I could launch into about the state of US prisons and WHY they are structured that way, I make note of the percentage of appliances produced by inmates: 36% of all appliances are manufactured by inmates... in a country where it is illegal to import anything that is produced by those incarcerated....

As this relates to me, I'm curious to know whether my non-working, noisy (when it is working) mostly plastic appliance (the poorly-named 'dishwasher') was manufactured.

If anyone reading this knows how to find out if appliances were produced inside our out, please pop me a comment.

If mine was manufactured in a prison, I can somewhat forgive its poor construction: I'd be unmotivated too... what are they going to do? Fire the guys?

If, however, it was produced in a factory that people choose to work in and are paid for that choice, then there's no excuse for production of crap.

Oh, and Mr. Harper - yah, you! The dictator who is currently masquerading as the Canadian PM... what for is Canada accepting the garbage that passes for consumer products from the states? Hm? Is it penance for shipping our poisonous asbestos off to India?

Just a warning...

When we renovated our kitchen, we bought one of our new appliances from Trail Appliances in Calgary. We have a really crappy Amana furnace that has caused us all sorts of problems for over 20 years but the Trail salesman, Jason, assured us their new generation of appliances was much better and that we'd have no problems with our tall-tub Amana dishwasher....

What a scream! The dishwasher ceased washing dishes within four months. The design is such that the filter, which is meant to filter out small food particles, becomes completely blocked due to its very fine (plastic) screen and a grinder that doesn't grind finely enough for the intended filtering action to happen.

We went to Trail - went, as in went down there - asked to speak to the salesman, who passed us off to two other people (managers, he called them) who never crossed the floor to speak to us but who stood around on their phones for over an hour until we became disgusted and left.

Since then, I have fixed my own dishwasher several times but the filter now needs replacing. However, that problem is overshadowed by the fact that the door mechanism, which is where the electrical connection that allows the dishwasher to start is located, is completely broken.

Yet again, I headed to our local parts supplier for a replacement part, which I got after a three-week wait, only to discover the housing into which that part fits is also broken. The problem? Fittings that should be made of metal are plastic - fittings that are subject to pressure every time the dishwasher's door is opened.

Today, I received a link to my friend's great blog... about Trail appliances and his over $600 of spoiled food in his new fridge, purchased from Trail, which refused to help him....

So, be advised that you're totally on your own if they buy anything from Trail. They'll sell you the moon, but they will NOT help you in any way if that moon goes wrong. They do NOT honour their warranties in any useful way - they'll send you off to the product manufacturer rather than helping you - and they will literally pretend you are not there if you go in to the showroom, although someone will try to sell you something.

Scare them off by telling them you're there for a replacement. Believe me, they will scatter, warn off all other salespeople and leave you hanging for as long as it takes for you to become disgusted and leave. THAT is their customer 'service' policy. You'll get better service from a seller on www.Kijiji.com or www.craigslist.com

Caveat Emptor; buyer beware.
www.trailappliances.com AVOID.


Try Coast Wholesale instead.

Oh and buy European products instead. I'm all over the Buy American policies of the US, given that the stuff produced there is CRAP and should never, ever cross a border.

American-made appliances are representative of the poor construction and decay that characterises US society: looks ok on the outside but absolutely full of crap that will not last.

This is what I've been up to for the last 10 days...

Yeah. here's what we did:
CLICK




On January 12th, Haiti was struck by a huge and devastating earthquake. In another, wealthier country, such a quake would be equally terrible, but there would be the offsetting hope for quick rebuilding.

In Haiti, this will not be the case. Thanks to a devastatingly poor and under-educated population, a dictatorship that has been the puppet of many meddling US administrations, a general lack of technology and access to news and a population that is characterized by illiteracy, Haiti does not have the same hope.


A couple days following the quake, three of my Twitter buddies, Angela MacIsaac, Camilla di Giuseppe and Alex Ruiz, all seasoned media gals, dropped a few tweets about doing 'something.' Five hours later, that something had begun to look like something huge.

Within days, Calgary's Flames Central was on board with a venue; The Calgary Flames, The Calgary Stampeders, The Calgary Hitmen and the Calgary Roughnecks had all stepped up with offers of help, merchandise and donations. A day later the donations started to roll in - at a rate of about 60 emails a day - filling my inbox to the brim.

10 days later, my guest bedroom is packed with donations of all types: art, photos, team jerseys, gift certificates that range in value from $1000 to $4000 (that, thanks to WestJet, Canada's favourite airline). Oh, and yeah, that other one: a $15,000 travel package with return flights... yeah.

If you're in Calgary, Thursday night is your night to get on board, support this event and help the people of Haiti.

We can't fix what happened in that country but we CAN make a dent in it.

YYC4Haiti. Be there.

I Discovered a New Man Whilst Laying in Bed Last Night

Last night, whilst reading a lovely, metallic-sheathed copy of Wired UK, thoughtfully given to me by my man, who loves to indulge my very fleshy inner geek, I came across an article with a deck that caused my eyes to pop wide open.

"Will it one day be erroneous to view Al Gore as a saint," which was followed by, "Does history tell the truth?"

Did I just read that in PRINT? Glory BE!

This headline instantly convinced me its writer was not only brilliant but obviously supernaturally influential for having got such a deck - a subheadline - into a major publication.

Said writer is Matt Ridley, possessor of a PhD in Zoology from Oxford University and journalist since 1983.

The Ridley's piece in Wired.Uk is a bare page long, yet lays open a cavern of questions that sent me rocketing to my google search engine. In particular, Ridley's use of a gentle 'What if?' format lays open the criminal misrepresentation of the currently 'hot' climate debate as if it were a two week old cadaver subject to a giant slicing blade....

To quote, "The more I read, the more I find history full of fables."

More to the point - and this is the place where I went madly off to my search engine - was this part of the article:

"Item: As a good, green-reared conservationist, I thought acid rain killed forests in the 80s - until I read Gregg Easterbrook's account, A Moment on the Earth, of how the biomass of European forests actually increased during the 80s and 90s, while in the US, the official, ten-year, $500,000, 700-scientist, government-sponsored study did a great rash of experiments and found 'there is no evidence of a general or unusual decline of forests in the US or Canada due to acid rain.'

Ridley goes on to write, 'When asked if he had been pressured to be optimistic, one of the authors said the reverse was true;'" (I'm paraphrasing now) the Environmental Protection Agency worked to keep the researchers from providing Congress with their findings. Hm...

Sound familiar? Not six weeks ago, a massive raft of emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, England, was exposed to the public, all damning. These emails make it clear the CRU suppressed (at best), manipulated and flat out created information to support the ridiculous theory (as they state it) that humans are killing the planet via CO2....

And, to make matters critically more interesting in terms of information manipulation, CO2 - the gasses you and I and the entire rainforest and cows and your house-cat breath out - has been declared POISON. Yup. Poison. More on Human Events, HERE.

Weird, because I believe the destruction of the Amazon Rain Forest was HUGE news not 10 years ago.... So, given that CO2 is now poison, will that pave the way for its destruction finally? I smell CORPORATE INTEREST and PROFIT....

Here's my theory, based on nothing other than a gut feeling: certain environmental 'catastrophes' have been floated (as false flag events) to see if any could stick. Acid Rain; El Nino/La Nina; the ozone layer: none of those could stick because none of those had aspects that could be easily controlled/manipulated. CO2? Yeah, that can easily be manipulated and made as the foundation to foster fear. The fact that CO2 has now been declared a poison should give us some clue as to how far this insanity might go. Will it become a terrorist act to breathe?

I'll continue this shortly. I've just Twittered Matt Ridley to get his permission to quote him, link him and repost the Wired.UK article. in the meantime, I encourage you to search and read anything you can find from this writer.

Oh, and as an added bonus, Mr. Ridley is an evolutionist, which I know is a very dirty word if you're some people, so I'm even happier to include him in my list of people to read. Here's a bio via Reason Magazine.

Off topic, but related to Mr. Ridley:
To a (I hope) reader, LMA: this guy should be on the TOP of your reading list, particularly for his book, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation (1997), in which Ridley showed how natural selection led to human morality. Not a SKIFF of religion in that mix. A point: perfectionism is equal to control (and indicates a terror of being out of control), not diligence; those two concepts cannot be confused and are mutually exclusive.

Back soon. Off to stir the shite a bit.

Things that are tooooo stupid to hate...