What if you lived by the largest body of fresh water in the world but could no longer afford to use it?

In Liz Miller’s video documentary, The Waterfront, residents of Highland Park, a struggling community on the shores of Lake Michigan are shown looking with distress at water bills totalling between 3 and 9,000 dollars.

One woman sits on a porch with her children and grandchildren and explains that on a fixed pension she will be unable to pay her bill, and since the city has decided to attach water bills to mortgages she faces eviction and foreclosure on her property.

(more inside…)

Dear Andrew Coyne and Maclean’s Magazine,

Just in case you didn’t get the memo, “a woman’s right to choose” is not, as you refer to it, an “elaborate euphemism.” Choice actually means that you can think abortion is wrong, you just don’t get to decide that for anyone else. It is the fundamental belief that all women have the right to choose what they do with their own bodies, including but not limited to pregnancy and abortion. It’s the idea that that choice is not yours.

Also, I’m with this guy. Do you actually think it’s bland to have fair and balanced coverage of women’s issues? Oh no, you think it’s a better idea to have a man write a thinly veiled pro-life piece that makes pro-choicers out to be oppressive monsters that are marginalizing anti-choicers.

Actually, last time I checked, the people who were screaming the loudest were in the minority and desperately trying to take my rights away from me. I know because they stopped by recently and used words like “murderer” and “whore.” Please don’t pretend that this qualifies as democracy. Thanks.

(Please go tell Maclean’s that this shit-stirring cover story is unacceptable.)

Since Catherine posted on the “pregnancy pact” that TIME reported at a high school in Gloucester, Massachusetts, I thought we should include the more recent developments on that story.

What emerged, after several days of musings from everybody but the girls themselves on what might have motivated such a pact, and various articles condemning them for being everything from irresponsible to radically right-on to borderline delusional, is that there seems not to have been a pact after all.

TIME hasn’t seen fit to publish a correction, although they did release this follow-up article reporting that the school’s principal is now “foggy in his memory” of how he heard about the pact in the first place, and that no one else has been able to confirm its existence.

The comment by principal Joseph Sullivan that sparked the first article deserves repeating:

“Sullivan told TIME on June 11… that “a lack of birth control played no part” in a quadrupling of the number of teen pregnancies at the school this year compared with last year. “That bump was because of seven or eight sophomore girls,” Sullivan told TIME. “They made a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together.”

Of course, what possible connection could there be between a lack of birth control and pregnancy?

Still, nobody has hazarded a reasonable guess at how seventeen girls came to be pregnant by the end of the school year. Peer pressure and small-town boredom don’t quite do it for me as an explanation.

Hat tip to Quill & Quire for this one.

According to Glenn Beck, time travel, Nazis, and spies are everything a boy is supposed to like:

Glenn Beck, a conservative political commentator who appears regularly on CNN Headline News, recently welcomed U.S. children’s book author Ted Bell to his show, in order to sing the praises of Bell’s new adventure title, Nick of Time. However, it seems clear from the lack of interest Beck shows in Bell that the whole point of the interview is simply to expound on the need for more manly books for boys. (emphasis mine)

I was annoyed with this interview within the first thirty seconds. It’s really just a thinly veiled diatribe on how he believes books for boys are too femininized now, and that he’s sick of seeing the girls save the day. I spat up my drink when Glenn Beck said this:

When was the last time the heroine did not save the brother, but the brother stood up and saved the girl? It doesn’t happen anymore.

The whole thing reeks of a need to return to outdated stereotypes simply because of Beck’s discomfort with progressive values. He calls for a return to a time where “the boy is the boy.” Gag.

…and then gives us special permission to break them so we feel like their product is the most liberating thing ever.

I was watching TV the other night when I happened across an ad for Shick Quattro, a razor for women (you can tell it apart from Shick’s razors for men because it’s pink, obviously). It’s a fairly unremarkable ad until you get to the tagline at the end:

“Such long-lasting smooth skin, you could skip a day or two.”

I can? Gee, thanks Shick Quattro!

I’ll admit it, it’s shorts season - I shave my legs if they’re going to be out in public. But I have never ever shaved more frequently than every three days, not for vacations or second dates or any of those things we’re not supposed to do without flawlessly smooth legs.

Now, everyone’s hair grows at different speeds, and if there are women out there shaving every day then who am I to find fault with that? But the assumption that all of us are just doing this every morning as part of our regular shower routine blows my mind.

This is racist food for thought from the Vancouver Courier:

“Mass immigration, mainly from the Third World, threatens to irrevocably alter the culture of western nations. In his article, Steyn compares shrinking western populations with exploding birthrates in Muslim countries. “Islam has youth and will,” he writes, “Europe has age and welfare.”

So, if changing demographics sweep Canada’s dominant Euro-centric culture into history’s dustpan, why should we care?

Here’s why. European culture spawned the now-universal tenets of democratic rule, personal freedom and Christian-based virtue—not to mention many of civilization’s greatest scientific and technological achievements. Immigrants flock to Canada not because it resembles the land from which they flee, but because of our liberating Euro-centric society.

Quebecers understand. Last year’s “reasonable accommodation hearings” officially acknowledged widespread anxiety in la belle province. Quebecers lined up to voice their concern about foreign influence on Quebec culture, thus demonstrating that the altering affects of immigration should be discussed openly—for the benefit of immigrants and residents alike.”

As the full article will tell you, the author is referring to immigration rates in Canada and actually talks about the lawsuit against the oh-so-right-wing Maclean’s from the Canadian Islamic Congress. In 2006 Maclean’s published an article by Mark Steyn entitled “Why the Future Belongs to Islam”, which they correctly allege discriminated against Muslims on religious and racial grounds contrary to Section 7 (1) of the B.C. Human Rights Code.

(For the record, that whole situation in Quebec I personally think unfairly represented what is also true in the rest of the provinces and territories)

Last time I checked, EVERYONE IS AN IMMIGRANT, and unless you are Aboriginal, the differences lie a few generations away from each other. And even then our First Peoples have varying stories of where we came from.

The Save Our Net coalition and Campaign for Democratic Media are hosting an event this weekend to discuss net neutrality and to strategize ways to prevent the internet from being tightly controlled by telecommunications corps, which are trying to limit what information we can access online.

Steve Anderson, national co-ordinator of the Campaign For Democratic Media, will speak about the issues, including: how these companies have already been caught throttling or slowing internet traffic to businesses and consumers, blocking access to websites that criticized them for doing so, and crippling consumer devices and applications.

Details:
Sunday, June 22
5:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m.
Windward Co-op, 34 Little Norway Crescent Lake-view room (one block west of Queen’s Quay)
BYOB, vegetarian refreshments provided
RSVP: saveournetcanada at gmail.com

I had to post this take on the “women’s vote,” given how accurate Sarah Haskins has been about yogurt and weddings.

There is something truly absurd about watching US presidential candidates talk about how we’re all waiting to see what happens on season two of Army Wives…

If I wasn’t chained to the Toronto ‘burbs for the next month pet-sitting, I would be at the Allied Media Conference in Detriot from June 20-22. And, of course, I would offer to take all of you with me!

Check out the program, which is all that the Women, Action and the Media conference that I attended in March (sadly) couldn’t be. They’ve got sessions like Transporting Silenced Voices Through Interviews For Film/Video, Revolutionary Parenting, Women Of Color With Disabilities Organizing And Building Community, and yes, a session on the media coverage/grassroots organizing lessons of the Jena Six and the Jersey Four (also mentioned in Issue 11 of Shameless). I’m in awe!

What I love about the way they have organized the conference is that sessions for/about people of colour are integrated within the overall conference design, and aren’t designed as a “space apart.” (Can you guess who must have organized this thing? You got it - a pretty diverse group of people - it sure helps.) Of course there are important times in the agenda for people of colour to get together in a safe space and talk shop. But what sometimes happens is that when sessions that deal with issues that directly affect people of colour ARE open to all, white folks never show up! This creates the ol’ conference colour divide (seen countless times in feminist conferences, circa 1971 all the way to the present). And everyone gets righteously angry because folks who are already multiply marginalized get remarginalized at conferences because of this low attendance and low awareness. And that makes me angry, too.

So, in conclusion, hooray for conferences that don’t divide and conquer, and boo to pet-sitting.