Tom Flanagan seems to support people's "right" to consume child pornography

While this has been a great week for seeing Stephen Harper's conservatives true colours (Senators, Porter, etc. links to follow) - essentially petty little hustlers desperately trying to dress up greed as some ideological higher calling...(“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith) there's darker stuff behind or beneath it all.

Tom Flanagan, Harper's so called ideological mentor and an incredible asshat in his own right, is so wrapped up in himself and what passes for a 'philosophy' of personal liberty etc. that he just seems incapable of realizing that child pornography IS child abuse. (and I'm talking about actual photos etc here, not drawings etc.)

Now whether eventually something entirely dark comes out about Flanagan personally, or as I guess I hope he's just stupid - that he really believes that his ideas concerning personal liberty excuse consumers of child porn from responsibility for child porn production, who knows? But here is the thing.

You have conservatives calling for mandatory minimums and all sorts of tough on crime initiatives for drug dealers and consumers etc, but then 'I'm not sure we should be putting people in prison because of the pictures they're looking at'.

I hope I'm missing some subtlety here - but I kind of doubt it. I think these conservatives (not all conservatives because there are plenty of excellent conservative ideas) THESE conservatives, are venal, selfish idiots - gusting close if not four sails to the wind of being evil.

Here you go...

Autonomy Now - or is The Do it Yourself open source revolution a road to sovereignty?

On Christmas Eve, while Theresa Spence went hungry, I lay awake worrying and wondering.

I eventually reached a sort of self justificatory epiphany. First Nations could achieve de facto sovereignty through the revolution in manufacturing technology. (As if anything is easy, but whatever)

(See Wired articles on DIY

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/ff_adafruit/


Foreign Affairs article "how to make just about anything"

(http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138154/neil-gershenfeld/how-to-make-almost-anything)

The idea was to help setup or at least share some links, so every community could open a Fab Lab - fabrication laboratory - that includes computer controlled milling machines (think your own ikea), 3d printers, cnc machines - computer numerical control
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_control) and a couple others...

The open source “revolution” means that more and more designs for more and more useful objects are freely available and groups like Open Source Ecology
(http://opensourceecology.org/) have set themselves the mission of designing, building, and then sharing the blueprints for the 50 machines necessary for a modern industrial civilization. Their goal is to entirely revolutionize the current economic model by freely distributing the knowledge necessary for anyone to create an autonomous industrial community.

Another incredible organization is the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group
(http://www.aidg.org/) who works in places like Haiti and Guatemala as a business incubator in “the arenas of energy, water and sanitation”

One of the grand daddies of what I see as cause for hope for the future is the Rocky Mountain Research institute (http://www.rmi.org/) where Amory Lovins has been leading practical research into solutions to many of the problems facing industrial society for decades. Their latest book “Reinventing Fire” (http://www.rmi.org/ReinventingFire) lays out the business case for heading to a low carbon future and the estimated $5 TRILLION savings it could unleash.

So there. Links ... Today's substitute for action...but I needed to get them out there. Read a great self-helpy list the other day “12 things successful people do differently” (http://www.marcandangel.com/2012/01/22/12-things-successful-people-do-differently/) that said “acquiring knowledge isn't growth - acting on it is” - which I've felt is a weak spot for me.

So, until I can actually say I've acted on these ideas, there's the link sharing.

#idlenomore links

Where did the 90 million go? http://t.co/zSti4oVg

Taking a second look at numbers
http://www.oktlaw.com/blog/taking-a-second-look-at-those-attawapiskat-numbers/

Treaty violations breakdown
http://www.scribd.com/mobile/doc/117667705/html5?


Chiefs kept out of hoc
http://nishswrk1006.blogspot.ca/2012/12/idle-no-more-chiefs-kept-out.html?m=1

C45
http://parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?Language=E&Mode=1&DocId=5942521

207.39.3 thttp://parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?Language=E&Mode=1&DocId=5942521&File=194

Tom Flanagan on it making it easier for FN to lease land
http://m.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/bill-c-45-simply-makes-it-easier-for-first-nations-to-lease-land/article6780103/?service=mobile

David maclaren. Sell a country why not sell the air?
http://jdavidmclaren.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/sell-a-country-why-not-sell-the-air-first-nation-property-ownership-act/

Some statistics
http://rabble.ca/columnists/2013/01/first-nations-long-shadow-assimilation