How to win friends and allies by insulting and rejecting their ideas

I met some people at a party tonight who think the Ancient Forest Alliance’s Park Aquisition Fund is an exciting and possible solution, but who also love and support that I am so vocal in my opposition to it, because my radical perspective makes the AFA’s idea look that much more moderate.

The phenomenoa at work here is one that those of us in the radical environmental movement have been aware of and made use of variously for decades.

I’d heard it said, around the campfire at the tree-sit or organizers conference some other place where we talk movement history, that Dave Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, was quoted as saying that EF! exists to make the Sierra Club and other mainstream environmental groups appear less radical and more reasonable.

health, or there will never be a world without people like me – a poem

I see the healers of my culture and decide i dont want to heal
I feel the right to be alienated where i am expected to be assimilated
I feel a right to be angry
to be sad
to be hurt
to be
NEGATIVE

BLECH, a poem

BLECH, a poem

Blech! at the commodification of food and medicine and everything this whole money driven blech! Marketing, networking, selling, buying blech blech employee employer boss slave blech money for the bank money for the landlord money for the oil companies, energy companies, corporations, blech blech blech!! Rent bills lease contract blech blech accounting counting storing moving piling packing shipping blech blech! Puke spit repeat decades decades change gonna come change gonna come peace blech blech bend over wait hunger i’m not sick we’re all sick i’m fighting to survive, I OWN this sanity, I AM this clarity and I am alive awake sick sick sick and hurt, alive and awake SANE RATIONAL and it hurts not to stand up it hurts to slave slave hide it away slave slave day-by-day one day one day peace gonna come blech, blech, blech we all do what we have to do could be worse blech makes me sick makes me hurt and i have to pretend blech that I can be BLECH one of the ones that waits works waits watches waits prays waits hope waits happy BLECH At least I am warm and dry and bombs are not dropping on me or my sisters and mothers and aunts and daughters are not being taken and forgotten at least they have not come and taken me to the mines or the slave ships cargo ships sick sick sick and it hurts still will that be cash or charge?

A Collection of Articles about Resistance to Island Timberlands and Brookfield Asset Management

Protesters block logging crews on Cortes Island
November 30, 2012

Sing, Stand, and Send I.T. on its Merry Way!
November 29, 2012

Protesters block logging road access on Cortes Island
Nov 27th, 2012

Cortes Island citizens prepare for logging protests
Nov 27th, 2012

Alberni groups protest McLaughlin logging
November 22, 2012

This article is definitely not called ‘Homeless for The Holidays’

December, the month I analyze media articles about homelessness, poverty and food insecurity. The month in which homelessness and hunger are given the most mainstream media coverage, usually via articles about charitable kindness and the deplorable sadness of being ‘Homeless for the Holidays.

Exceptions always exist that delve deeper into ‘the issue’ but it is rare that any encourage us to take action in ways that confront the status quo. This season there is a slightly higher number of articles, in ‘Canada’ and the ‘US’ media, about Housing First programs, and the logic underpinning them. (-That it is cheaper to house people than let them be homeless). So progress is there, but incremental progress, as usual.

The whole Housing First idea has been the dominant policy point that anti-poverty activists have been pushing for over a decade. Actual Housing First programs (funded by the government) have been around about as long as that. A radical analysis/approach to the idea of Housing First involves (as with everything) a critical dissection reflecting a preference for autonomous community action and resistance to systems of oppression and control.

The Leonard Q. Visitor Show #4- Fuck War

The Leonard Q. Visitor Show is a radio show I do every Wednesday on CKTZ-FM 89.5, Cortes Island Community Radio.

This is my first attempt at capturing the audio stream. For some reason, the first 10 minutes and the last 20 or so minutes are missing, but it’s still over two hours of music.

This weeks theme is war and peace, and the ceasefire in Gaza.

Click here to listen

Here’s a track listing:

1. Lowkey- Long Live Palestine
2. Black Sabbath- War Pigs
3. Edwin Starr- War
4. Pink Floyd- Two Suns in the Sunset
5. Saul Williams- Pledge of Resistance
6. Spearhead- Bomb the World
7. Rafeef Zadiah- We Teach Life, Sir (poem)
8. Marvin Gay- What’s Going On?
9. Buffy St. Marie- Universal Soldier
10. David Rovics- They’re Building a Wall
11. Cat Stevens- Peace Train
12. Bob Dylan- Masters of War
13. Eric B and Rakim- Casualties of War
14. MC5- Looking at You
15. Temptations- Ball of Confusion
16. Nena- 99 Red Balloons
17. System of a Down- B.Y.O.B.
18. Country Joe McDonald- Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die
19. Patti Smith- People Have the Power
20. Phil Ochs- I ain’t Marching Anymore
21. D.O.A.- War
22. Barry McGuire- Eve of Destruction
23. Dixie Chicks- I hope
24. Metallica- One
25. Beastie Boys- In a World Gone Mad
26. Neil Young- Living with War
26. Ani DiFranco- Self-Evident

Tarsands pipelines, Site C, Pacific Trails Pipeline, Fracking, and the stand against them.

I recently spent 6 days on unceded Unis’tot’en/Wet’suwet’en territory as part of a group of activists invited by the Unis’tot’en (the Big Frog Clan) and Lhe Lin Liyin (the Guardians) to witness their stand against the Pacific Trails Pipeline (one of 7 pipelines proposed to run through that territory.)

“The Unis’tot’en and Lhe Lin Liyin, along with other strong uncompromising allies will stop this destructive path, for the future generations, for the biodiversity, and for solidarity with our neighbours living amidst the heavy impacts in the Tar Sands affected areas in northern Alberta, and regions heavily affected by fracking natural gas and shale oil, as well as communities impacted by refineries, pipelines, and fuel terminals and port expansions.” reads the Unis’tot’en Action Camp website.