And She Knits Too!

Life on the Cheque

I have some cool friends.  Doing some great works of activism in their communities.  I confess that I feel like my own path as an activist (something I was very into in my middle-twenties) has really stopped and while I write a lot about politics and social issues, I don't feel like I do much but contribute money and promote the works of others. 

But since changing what I do takes both time and the energy to do it (something I'm not feeling I have right now), I will continue to promote the good works of my friends and colleagues so at least I'm doing something.

Elaine Power is a woman I met after I boldly sent her an email after hearing her speak about food security issues on the CBC.  She was on a teaching contract at U of T the same time I was a grad student and she introduced me to some other fabulous students and researchers who were interested in public health issues and it really helped me overcome the isolation I felt as a new mother working on a PhD.  Beer and Theory became one of the highlights of my week and I could not have finished without all their support and enthusiasm.

Elaine is now an Assistant Professor in Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen's University and is the midst of producing a documentary about "Life on the Cheque" about six mothers living in poverty in Kingston Ontario.  I think film can be a powerful medium to comment and critique issues of the day and as someone who loves film I'm very excited to see Elaine mixing her academic work and community activism using this medium.

There are some really neat things happening on the site where Elaine showcases the film-in-production.  Have a look.  Provide support.  Spread the word.

Bike Lane On Bloor!

TO: Paula Fletcher

CC: Mayor Miller, Case Ootes, Kyle Rae, Adrian Heaps, Glenn deBaeremaeker

RE: TEYCC 16.26 Bloor Transformation Project

As a resident in your ward who bikes from Jones ave across Bloor/Danforth to my job at the University of Toronto, I've been watching the changes planned for the Bloor St. redevelopment between Yonge and University.  The plan to NOT include bike lanes (and from the drawings, even ring posts) is deplorable.  Traffic conditions along that stretch are very perilous for cyclists and I feel the City is missing out on a perfect opportunity to encourage active/green transportation by facilitating both pedestrian and bicycle traffic along Bloor St.  Just as buildings implement changes to encourage accessibility for people with disabilities, the City must endeavour to encourage bicycle traffic on our streets; bike lanes are integral to this strategy and their omission on the Bloor St redevelopment merely cements the primacy of the automobile for transportation.
 
I urge you to INSIST that a bike lane on Bloor be part of any redevelopment.  It was first proposed in 1992; 16 years is too long a wait.
 
 

***

Want more info?  Google Bike Lanes on Bloor, or visit Take the Tooker.  The vote is Monday June 23; let your councillor know how you feel!

Dark

Hope you had a good Earth Hour.

After I put the kids to bed I had a bath by candlelight. It was rather pleasant.

With "friends" like these...

There is a private member's bill on the Federal docket that's making me and a lot of other people nervous.

The Unborn Victims of Crime bill would amend the criminal code so that separate charges can be laid if a fetus is injured or dies as the result of harm against a pregnant woman. 

(As an aside, when I put in the link to the bill http://www2.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?Docid=3127600&file=4. that I pulled from a  pro-choice site, it goes to an anti-choice site that I won't link t0 called LifeSite news through some sort of internet trickery--ick.  I wrote to the Abortion Rights Coalition to let them know).

Apparently the bill was drafted in response to demands from the families of pregnant women who were killed in acts of domestic violence, which often starts or escalates during pregnancy.  However, instead of enforcing laws that already exist and actually doing something to prevent domestic violence, Conservative MP Ken Epp comes up with this bill which looks a whole lot like a thinly veiled anti-abortion law.

(Just so you know the abortion law was struck down 20 years ago so it's essentially legal, though access is not uniform/unproblematic across the country).

There is a good critique of the bill here and I urge you to read it.  The Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada also has a sample letter opposing the bill that you can send to your MP.  Private member's bills seldom pass, but the anti-woman stance of this government (even in a minority parliament position) makes me less optimistic.

I would like to  add that I am fed up with this exaltation of "breeders".  That being pregnant adds some other saintly dimension to a woman's personhood that makes crimes against HER more heinous than crimes against women who are older, younger, infertile or not currently gestating. 

Violence against women is WRONG regardless of the current state of a woman's uterus. 

Come to think of it, I can't name three

Rick Mercer's post today presented an interesting challenge:

You could take a hundred bucks, you could stand on a any street corner in Canada, offer people five bucks if they can name three cabinet ministers off the top of their head – double their money if they can name the minister of health. At the end of the day you'd still have enough money for dinner and a movie.

When I first saw it I thought, "I can do that!"  I'm up on current events, I listen to CBC radio every morning and evening, I glance at the newspaper (my Post-doc work which involved reading 11 papers a day for 6 months killed any desire I have to read the paper).  But guess what, I can't do it.

I'm rather ashamed really.  Wait, I can do it... (It was really bothering me).

Tony Clement (Health, I think)

Stockwell Day (Security something or other or something like that)

Jim Flaherty (Finance Minister)

Weirdly, I have that guy, the one from Nova Scotia in my head.  The one who dated Belinda Stronach...He's a cabinet minister, but for the life of me I can't think of his name.  Sure it would make four and I'm being a keener, but it's bugging me.

Let me go Google and see if I'm right.

I'll be back...

***

(5 minutes later)

Okay I'm back.  I went to this site (the first one that comes up when I google "parliament of Canada cabinet ministers").  It doesn't work.  Did Rick Mercer break the server?  Or is Stephen Harper up to something?

This one does work.

Peter McKay is the guy I couldn't remember and he's Minister of Defense.

Stockwell Day is Minister of Public Safety

I got Jim Flaherty right (all those years in Mike Harris' fucked up Ontario make him hard to forget)

And woohoo for me, Tony Clement is the Minister of Health.  (It's not good for Canada as a whole, but I'm feeling good about my political awareness).

So where's my 15 bucks?

Funnier than lots of the stuff out there

I haven't been following the US election that closely, except to listen to the radio reports (CBC Radio One is a constant in my house--even my kids have their clock radios set to 99.1) and read up on how mysogyny runs wild in response to Hilary's campaign. 

It's amazing how much a woman running for President makes sexism show.  You can follow it all on Feministing if you're so inclined.

This one is on the fence for me, only because it makes me laugh and doesn't call Hilary a bitch.

Not sure if it's real, but it is pretty funny.  Though the whole Monica thing was totally bizarre to me (and most other Canadians).

I know it's not the Handmaid's Tale, but it sure feels that way

I was going to write about knitting today.  I even took pictures, but then this showed up in my inbox (I read a number of Higher Ed publications) and it warranted a post.

Questions Delay Creationist Master’s Degrees

It seems the Institute for Creation Research (who I will not acknowledge with a link) is attempting to get accreditation in Texas to grant degrees in creationism (which I will not acknowledge with capitalization). 

This stuff scares the crap out of me.  Isn't education supposed to be about learning to think critically and apply that knowledge to discover things about the world?  Sure, that may be a bit pollyanna-ish but my feeling is that deciding a priori that there is a god and he (because it's a he) made the world in seven days and that he created humans in fully human form from the start goes against current scientific wisdom and is the complete opposite of critical thinking.

This blog lays out the problems with this kind of thinking here.  It is the most succinct explanation I've come across and it really worries me that this sort of  "vertical thinking" is taking hold, not just in America, but many places in the world. 

Of course, my atheism is also showing, but I haven't seen anything good coming from organized religion historically or now.  Having it become the theoretical foundation for a graduate degree (rather than something to study as theology or philosophy) will only make those tendencies worse.

And, just to bug.  Did you vote for my blog?  You don't need to be Canadian.  Thanks!

First remember, then work for change.

Today is December 6.  Today marks the day that 14 women were gunned down at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal.  I find it hard to believe it's been 18 years since it happened.  What bothers me more is how little has changed for women. 

Women are still beaten, raped and killed at alarming rates.  Police, lawmakers, and regular people still see violence against women and particularly intimate partner violence as a private matter or something rare.  We still don't put this violence into a political context which shows the inequal power relations between men and women.  Or examine how this is especially true for women who are economically disadvantaged, sex workers, women in countries where they have low/no social status, or are very young. 

And this isn't a problem that just happens in countries where women's rights are non-existent.  The problem happens here.  Brian Vallee, in his book The War on Women states that between 2000 and 2006 there were more women murdered by their intimate partners in Canada and the United States than there were soldiers who died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  We rarely hear about these cases, or the women who do not die, but live with violence every day.

People don't really get mad about that.  It makes me sad.

That's probably why I'm ambivalent about December 6th memorials.  There is a lot of remembering, but no enough anger or work for change.   

Funny thing is, I think I write the same blog entry every year.  Time to put it into a letter to my MP and a note to a local shelter with a donation.  It's not much, but it's a start. 

If you look up Patriarchy in the dictionary...

I saw a photo on the front page of yesterday's National (com)Post that really summed up the state of women in the world for me.

Here's a similar one from Boing Boing (because I can't find the original).

These women are participating in the Miss Landmine Angola pageant.  It is not bad enough that the patriarchal military industrial complex made land mines that blew their limbs off, now they need to tart themselves up in patriarchal standards of beauty and compete to see who's more pretty and feminine to win a fucking leg.  They are given clothes and makeup and some money for participating.

The idea is to show women with disabilities in a more positive way and to highlight the problem of landmines.  The goals of empowerment are stolen right from the pages of any good (liberal) feminist tome.  Couldn't that be done with women in their clothes?  Just change the women in the photo to men in speedos to understand how ludicrous this is.

And we happy folks in the developed world also get some disability porn too.  Look at those severed limbs, the carnivalesque women of colour with crutches on the beach.  It's so sad, but they are so beautiful and courageous.   Blah blah blah.  They may well be beautiful and courageous, but exploiting their situation like this is absolutely vulgar and yet again underscores women's worth as merely sexual objects.

The problem is that landmines are blowing off people's legs and the victims (yes, they're victims, not survivors--yes, they survived, but only because they were victimized in the first place) need health care and rehabilitation because they are missing their limbs, not because they are the prettiest.  AND, these landmines need to be removed and not manufactured and sold in the first place.  (Go visit the International Campaign to Ban Landmines to learn more.)

Monkey-Talk

This low-impact living thing is complicated.  There are some great comments in the last post about the true efficiency of Blackle (I have been chastened) and the routes to sustainability.  I found the fact that modern life is bad for the environment particularly interesting.  But I'm not sure where to go with that.  Sure we could use a whole lot less Happy Meal-toys and other crap (I love this satire on it) but I also like living in a centrally heated home with a fridge and stove, so I also want to balance progress (ie not living in a cave or sod hut) and comfort within this whole process, so keep those comments coming--I like when this blog has dialogue (especially since I've been a bit light on the blogging this month).

I do have a sock to show:

I love the fit and it was fun to knit.  The yarn behaved very nicely with no pooling and overall I'm very pleased. 

Tonight I'll start the second one.  I'm still in barefoot mode, but I know Fall is approaching...

That's because I'm off to Rhinebeck again!  I was dithering a bit about it because I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed with life and work and everything, but my very sweet husband kicked my ass and I asked for the time off and me and my pal Keri are goin' on a road trip to Rhinebeck!