Searching for Tao

Today is the day that we reserve for Remembrance, a day when each of us are expected to take a moment to acknowledge and remember the bravery and devotion to duty of the millions of men and women who fought and often died "for King and Country" in dozens of wars past. It's also a day when we must remember that it's not only soldiers who die in war, but civilians as well. Often it is the case that for every one soldier killed in the line of duty, ten, or even one hundred civilians are killed.

As a society, we tell ourselves that war is a terrible, but sometimes necessary Last Line of Defence against those who would attack our Freedoms. It is therefore with bitter irony that I must point out that today the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the National Union of Public and General Employees are co-hosting public hearings to examine police activity during the recent G20 Summit in Toronto.

Every Canadian owes it to themselves to read these testimonies. Canadian citizens, rounded up, arrested, and held for upwards of 32hours in squalid cells, or tagged with bogus charges like possession of tools for burglary (door keys). Unarmed, non-violent citizens punched and kicked, by police not wearing name tags or badge numbers. In one holding cell case, a woman apparently asked for a tampon and was told that she "should have thought about it before", after which he threw his sock into her cell.

In a Free country, citizens must be allowed to peacefully assemble, and to criticise the government openly, and they must be able to do this without fear of persecution from the state. What we saw in Toronto was not what Canada should be, but whether we like it or not, it was our Canada. Unless we stand up and fight those responsible for abridging our freedoms that day, claims that our military "defends our freedoms" will become even more hollow than they already are.

Please take a moment to read one of the following:

• The Canadian Civil Liberties Association's explanation on their own site
• Rabble.ca's live blogging coverage
• CCLA's twitter feed (live-tweeted from the event, and copied for archival purposes here)

I ran across two interesting things this morning on CBC:

British Prime Minister has finally quit parliament and is now moving into his new job as, (get this) peace broker for the middle east. First he spends years antagonising a people by invading sovereign nations under false pretences, and now he wants to play peacemaker. That guy's got some nerve.

The CIA has declassified some of it's past dirty work during the Cold War. Among some of the most glaringly illegal actions committed by the department:

• Assassination plots against foreign leaders such as Cuban President Fidel Castro.
• The testing of mind-altering drugs like LSD on unwitting citizens.
• Wiretapping of U.S. journalists, and spying on civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protesters.
• Opening of mail between the United States, Soviet Union and China — and break-ins at the homes of ex-CIA employees and others.

I wish I could say that I was surprised by either of these, but I'm not.

Well not really, but I saw this this morning on one of the mailing lists to which I belong. Apparently, someone realised that McCain's MySpace page was pulling images from their site rather than copying them over to their own server (essentially stealing bandwidth). But rather than taking down the image, the owner replaced the pic with one containing the following message:

Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage…particularly marriage between two passionate females.

Bloody brilliant.

I saw this online the other day and thought that I would share