I’ve been a little delinquent on the blogging front lately because my brain fell out.
Meanwhile, life has continued to unravel as life does, and now I’ve got a bit of a backlog of things to blog about.
For example. Last night GC and I went to Paul Dewar’s art auction for Haiti at the Cube Gallery. This turned out to be a lot of fun, mostly because it was such a friendly and sociable crowd. I had some interesting and amusing conversations with likable strangers. There were some good-natured bidding wars. And there were almost a hundred pieces of art to look at.
This is a piece of Shannon Lee Mannion’s keyboard art. I don’t really know Shannon, though our paths have crossed quite a few times. We’ve met at aquarium society meetings, anti-SCAN legislation meetings, craft shows, and other places. She’s very outgoing and sociable, so we’ve had a number of conversations over the years. She’s got an eclectic set of interests, and her latest thing is keyboard art. She calls her keyboard art, generically, QWERKY B’s. Each one is unique, and most are theme-based.
There were three other pieces I liked a lot. A pottery bowl, a large painting that looked plain black at first glance but was actually a richly textured and colourful piece when you looked carefully, and an abstract called Sunshine that had three luscious colours blending into one another. It sat pretty much ignored throughout most of the silent auction, and then in the final moments became the subject of a multi-party bidding war.
In other news, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government announced yesterday that it will appeal the BC Court of Appeals ruling on the safe injection site, Insite, to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Insite has come to symbolize harm reduction in this country, which is why it’s being so aggressively targeted by the Conservative government. The principles of harm reduction run counter to Conservative ideology, which is purely about police and prisons, with a bit of treatment for youth thrown in, and maybe some moralistic, simplistic, fear-based propaganda masquerading as prevention.
Despite overwhelming evidence that the US approach to drugs and addiction is profoundly ineffective and hugely expensive, our government stubbornly continues to imitate it. I don’t get it.
What else? I finished that career counseling course, so I now have a Career Action Plan. It’s quite interesting, actually. I’ll blog about that later.
I think it’s because slogans like “Getting Tough on Crime” “War on Drugs” etc.. win elections. Telling the masses that they’re putting money into safe injection sites and drug treatment centers is too much of a hard-sell. People want the illusion that their government is actively waging battles against all the stuff they don’t like. Already there’s a well-friended FB group demanding a return of the death penalty in response to our local serial killer. Nevermind that the death penalty is a solution even more insane than the crimes it’s supposed to prevent. People want action and they want it NOW.
I am sorry to have missed the Haiti show, but it ended up getting squashed between work and trivia.
Do you know whether the wasp photo I donated sold?
I know Rob Nicholson and if you paid attention to the last proroguing it was mostly his bills that got shafted by Harper. I don’t think they play nice together very much but he still toes the old party line. If we can just criminalize enough people eventually we have to get a majority cause there will be no one left to vote left.
XUP, I think the simplistic slogans have something to do with it, for sure. It’s so much easier for many people to throw their political weight behind a slogan than to actually read and think.
Milan, you had a piece in the show? I must have missed it.
There were close to a hundred pieces in there, and I thought I saw them all, but maybe it was in a nook or cranny somewhere and I missed it.
Dave, I’m concerned that by proroguing, and then adding more Conservatives to the Senate, he set the stage for Bill C-51 to be returned to its original, unmodified state, which included mandatory prison sentences for growing a pot plant. The same may be true of the other Tough on Crime bills, I don’t know.
Harper often does things make me wonder if he’s secretly American.
This is definitely one of those times.
His stubbornly clinging to ignorance when everyone who has actual insight into the Insite matter asserts that it’s GOOD and EFFECTIVE is just so right-wing America that I feel nauseous and embarassed to live in a country that elected this douche.
Ugh, I don’t even want to look at Bill C-51…how about mandatory prison sentences for crimes with actual VICTIMS???