The Harper Government's latest Big Lie

Well, it has a bag-load hauled out at those times when it is tactically expedient. This one however, is a slam-dunk.

Remember Jason Kenney telling us all how the rules on foreign workers were going to be tightened up? Well it turns out they were ... and they weren't. Canadians now go to the head of the line for non-union sex-work. For anything else, you wait until the union's busted by flooding the market with slave labour.

Go read Simon.  

Update: Not to be missed, Alison weighs in.

Freedom fighters . . .

MAYBE STUPID INSECTS aren't so stupid. According to George Dvorsky's article in io9, "Enslaved worker ants fight back through acts of sabotage", there are species that have developed effective resistance to slavery. 

The ant has been a creature respected by various cultures, and appears in the Bible in Proverbs 6:6 —

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise

Which John Wyndham used as the title for a rather fine novella, now forgotten, "Consider Her Ways", which is worthy of your perusal (Alfred Hitchcock thought so, adapted it for his TV show). 

The story is mostly a first-person narrative. It begins with a woman who has no memory of her past waking up and discovering that she is a mother of some description, in a bloated body that is not her own. After some confusing experiences her memory gradually returns and she recalls that she was part of an experiment using a drug to see if it enabled people to have out-of-body experiences. It seems that the drug has worked far better than anyone could have anticipated: she has been cast into the future. She also realizes that she is in a society consisting entirely of women, organized into a strict system of castes. Her initial contacts have never even heard of men.

Slave beatings and lynchings to follow ...

This is jaw-dropping astounding. Unless you are like me and believe that the Tea Party is nothing more than an extension of this.

South Carolina is about to celebrate the fact that that state seceded from union with the United States because it was about to have slavery removed from its very slave dependent economic structure.

Never mind the "States Rights" claim that the rebel confederacy tried to spin to the world. That was done because they realized that abolitionist countries would not support their original purpose. There was little chance of garnering support from England, an absolute necessity once war had erupted, if the "cause" upon which the agricultural south fastened its casus belli was in any way about maintaining slavery. The shift from demanding the right to continue slavery to a more acceptable "right to secede" for any reason was pure propaganda. And it was propaganda which has survived to this day with the overly-simplistic and fervent rhetoric spewing from the gapes of  the Tea Partiers.

The "south" can claim anything they want to. They've rewritten history to make themselves look like the victim of a war they brought upon themselves. The southern rice barons were instrumental in starting the Revolutionary War with England; their successors on southern plantations were responsible for fomenting the bloody conflict that would become the US Civil War. The oft-repeated claim of a "War of Northern Aggression" is nothing more than confederate bullshit repeated by today's Tea Party faction of a long-soured Republican Party.

Yes, Virginia, there is proof of what I say. On December 24th, 1860, it was spelled out in black and white in a document known as the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.  In that document the so-called "States Rights" which became the mantra of the southern effort was focused on a solitary item - the demand to be allowed to continue to enslave and treat as less-than-human, an entire population of people. It was all about slavery then and it is all about slavery now.

A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

And it continues:

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety. 

On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States. 

The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy. 

Sectional interest and animosity will deepen the irritation, and all hope of remedy is rendered vain, by the fact that public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanction of more erroneous religious belief.

Make no mistake, there is a huge segment of that same successor population who are true believers in that document. Their forefathers feared the demise of slavery because they had inexorably linked the southern US economy to it. To lose it meant a loss of lifestyle and a reliance on a completely different economic model.

The Tea party is simply an extension of the whole fear and simmering hatred. They want their mint juleps back.

And they would go back to beating and lynching if they could get away with it.