Jian Ghomeshi: a sorry son-of-a-bitch

(From today's Globe and Mail) Editor’s note: This is a statement delivered by Kathryn Borel, whose allegations against former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi were settled by peace bond on Wednesday. Mr. Ghomeshi admitted no criminal wrongdoing, but apologized to Ms. Borel in the course of the proceedings. He will no longer face trial. Mr. Ghomeshi was previously found not guilty of sex-assault charges in a separate case involving three women, four counts of sexual assault and one of overcoming resistance by choking.

Hi everyone. Thank you for coming out and listening. My name is Kathryn Borel. In December of 2014, I pressed sexual assault charges against Jian Ghomeshi. As you know, Mr. Ghomeshi initially denied all the charges that were brought against him. But today, as you just heard, Jian Ghomeshi admitted wrongdoing and apologized to me.

It’s unfortunate, but maybe not surprising, that he chose not to say much about what exactly he was apologizing for. I’m going to provide those details for you now.

Every day, over the course of a three-year period, Mr. Ghomeshi made it clear to me that he could do what he wanted to me and my body. He made it clear that he could humiliate me repeatedly and walk away with impunity. There are at least three documented incidents of physical touching. This includes the one charge he just apologized for, when he came up behind me while I was standing near my desk, put his hands on my hips, and rammed his pelvis against my backside over and over, simulating sexual intercourse. Throughout the time that I worked with him, he framed his actions with near daily verbal assaults and emotional manipulations. These inferences felt like threats, or declarations like I deserved to have happening to me what was happening to me. It became very difficult for me to trust what I was feeling.

Up until recently, I didn’t even internalize that what he was doing to my body was sexual assault. Because when I went to the CBC for help, what I received in return was a directive that yes, he could do this, and yes, it was my job to let him. The relentless message to me, from my celebrity boss and the national institution we worked for, were that his whims were more important than my humanity or my dignity. So I came to accept this. I came to believe that it was his right. But when I spoke to the police at the end of 2014, and detailed my experiences with Mr. Ghomeshi, they confirmed to me what he did to me was, in fact, sexual assault.

And that’s what Jian Ghomeshi just apologized for: the crime of sexual assault. This is the story of a man who had immense power over me and my livelihood, admitting that he chronically abused his power and violated me in ways that violate the law. Mr. Ghomeshi’s constant workplace abuse of me and my many colleagues and friends has since been corroborated by multiple sources, a CBC Fifth Estate documentary, and a third-party investigation.

In a perfect world, people who commit sexual assaults would be convicted for their crimes. Jian Ghomeshi is guilty of having done the things that I’ve outlined today. So when it was presented to me that the defence would be offering us an apology, I was prepared to forego the trial. It seemed like the clearest path to the truth. A trial would have maintained his lie, the lie that he was not guilty, and it would have further subjected me to the very same pattern of abuse that I’m currently trying to stop.

Jian Ghomeshi has apologized, but only to me. There are 20 other women who have come forward to the media and made serious allegations about his violent behaviour. Women who have come forward to say that he punched, and choked, and smothered and silenced them. There is no way that I would have come forward if it weren’t for their courage. And yet Mr. Ghomeshi hasn’t met any of their allegations head on, as he vowed to do in his Facebook post of 2014. He hasn’t taken the stand on any charge. All he has said about his other accusers is that they’re all lying and that he’s not guilty. And remember: that’s what he said about me.

I think we all want this to be over. But it won’t be until he admits to everything that he’s done. Thank you.

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The Secret Revealed: Amazing Weight Loss in SECONDS!

I keep thinking I've come to the bottom of the barrel of evangelical fakery, and then I find something like this. Lately I've seen hundreds, if not thousands of religious videos featuring astonishingly transparent acts of dishonesty and deception, eagerly embraced by not only the disciples shown in the videos, but by people posting in the comments section. These all seem to be of the "praise Jesus", "praise the Prophet of profit" variety. None of the comments are critical at all, and that scares me.

But no. Things are about to sink still lower. Michael will never row THIS boat ashore, because it's sitting on the bottom of the lake. Worse than useless prayer cloths mass-produced out of craft felt, more deceptive than "manna" made out of stale crackers, this guy's claims of INSTANT weight loss - I mean, dramatic weight loss that makes people's clothes fall off - are beyond astounding. They are ludicrous, but frightening at the same time. It's an example of the power of one man to bring everyone into line and get them all believing the same thing, even if the "thing" is a stupid, nonsensical act of trickery.

This is the "Prophet" Emmanuel Makandiwa and his amazing "Fat Burn" prayer rally, in which  middle-aged black women (who seem to make up practically his entire audience) claim to drop multiple kilograms while standing on the scale. This miracle happens with the usual histrionics and hysteria while Makandiwa yells "shrink! Shrink!", much the way Oral Roberts used to bellow "Heal! Heal!"

Women's skirts get loose, not in minutes, but in seconds, and even fall off. The entire audience screams its approval. No one knows if these floppy-skirted women are "plants" or not; presumably they are, and the scale is obviously rigged. But no one seems to doubt this guy. Probably he has several dozen Cadillacs parked on his estate, like most of these predatory fakes.

This is my favorite! The amazing descending scale.  Is this astounding weight loss permanent, one wonders, or will it fall apart once you stop praying/handing over your dollars to Big Mak?

Yes, God humiliates. He's referring to a woman whose skirt fell off from instant weight loss, but I'd be a little humiliated just to be in that audience.

Please forgive my frequent use of gifs (which sometimes take a minute or so to smooth out: they have to download or something); the video this travesty was embedded in was a long compilation, and I am sure when I post videos, very few people watch them (or at least not all of them, if you're like me).  This had convenient captions, though strangely enough, the man speaks in English. Perhaps this is meant specifically for export to YouTube. There has got to be a financial pipeline in there somewhere.

"God does humiliating acts." Oh really. God? 

Two cranes walking

Sandhill cranes at Burnaby Lake: up and over!

Magical encounter: sandhill cranes at Burnaby Lake

Found, lost, and found

This spring was Paradise rediscovered: we stumbled on a place we found years ago, then lost. Then found again. It's a wildlife magnet called Piper Spit on Burnaby Lake, with a boardwalk, a huge expanse of warm shallow water, marshland for nesting, and birds.

I find birds restful and spiritually soothing. Their song seems to pour balm on the rawness in my soul. We used to have tons of them in the backyard: jays, juncos, chickadees, wrens, thrushes and nuthatches, even the odd flicker. We're not sure why they're not hanging around any more, unless it's the cat staring out the window at them. But Bentley didn't seem to scare them last year.

When we stumbled on this place again, I had a feeling I've experienced only a couple of times in my life: that I had found a sort of heaven on earth. The birds here are so tame that they walk up to you (no doubt because they've been human-fed, a practice I don't believe in, though it leads to some amazing close encounters.) Every time we go there, we see new species. I'm also posting video of our incredible encounter with two magnificent sandhill cranes. For some reason, red-winged blackbirds love the place, and I had my hand less than two inches away from one of them. Now I'm tempted to try to get one of them to eat out of my hand, which I know I shouldn't.

I need this. I always feel frazzled in my brain somewhere, and often feel I can't really express myself on this blog, so I result to satire and silliness. I hate the wildfires in Fort McMurray, I fear that we are next, and am sure we at least contributed to causing it with our brutality to nature. I feel completely powerless, and the homilies on Facebook and the "hey, get involved" exhortations ring hollow.

So I have this.

I have this, which was there all along, but we somehow never knew about it. Except that we did! We went there once, years and years ago. Then the area was closed by construction and we got distracted and never went back.

Do things happen at the right time? No, they don't. Humans impose that idea on reality, to reassure themselves that (a) we are in charge of everything, and/or (b) the Universe wraps itself around our own particular whims.

None of this is true.

But I have Piper Spit, and I have just begun to explore it. I get that strange heaven-feeling I've had maybe twice before in my life. It's an enchantment that lies very close to the source of life.

HOLY SHIT! It's those Pentecostal guys - IN 3D!

Hey, y'all! It's Friday, so I thought I'd post something idiotic that I made last night. 

A few years ago, somebody came up with a Revolutionary New Idea for gifs: 3D! Basically, the figure stands there moving minutely back and forth while the background shifts slightly, and to be honest, my Grandma Smith's old stereoscope gave me a better 3D image than this.

Then came the NEW, IMPROVED 3D gif. This is being touted as a revolution in giffery, but I don't see it. I hate those white lines, for one thing. This is almost as bad as the "improved" MP4 gif with sound. Imagine a 3-second, irrelevant sound bite repeating over, and over, and over again. What people don't seem to realize is that you can watch a repeating image ad infinitum, but chunks of nonsensical sound are about as pleasant to listen to as a parrot on speed. Anyway, those lines just don't seem to do it for me, but the other night, lost in yet another late night YouTube labyrinth, I discovered. . . 

PENTECOSTAL PREACHERS IN 3D!

These are every bit as primitive, and wobble back and forth just as stupidly, with lots of distortion. Distortion is what I live for. These gifs were taken from a 21-part (no kidding - each video running for half an hour) denouncement or annunciation of the Toronto Blessing, also called Holy Laughter. I've explored this phenomenon in past posts, as expressed by Kenneth Hagin and many other equally idiotic types. But as much as this gospel of lunacy has its proponents, it also has many (MANY) detractors who seem to believe that laughing and rolling around on the floor is demonic.

I think this is Kenneth Copeland, or maybe it's someone else - I think they're all interchangeable. Most of this video was shot in the mid-'90s (how I love mid-'90s video in all its flickering, grainy glory!), but the commentator, while debunking these Pentecostal practices as demonic, keeps on freezing the frame. Well, ALMOST freezing the frame. This is as frozen (speaking of!) as a frame got back then. I can't reproduce the sound here, thank God, but the debunker kept running the "speaking in tongues" (a lot of nonsensical blather) slower and slower to make out words like, "I love Satan!" "Fuck you!" and "I buried Paul!" I'm surprised he didn't play any of it backwards. Hey, The Donna Reed Show would sound demonic if you slowed it down that much.

The guy on the right is supposedly responsible for all this hell-on-earth: Rodney Howard Browne. He comes from South Africa, which is suspicious in itself, isn't it? All that voodoo. One day in the mid-'90s he showed up at the airport church in Toronto and unleashed all this rolling-on-the-floor mayhem, and soon it caught on, contagious, like some ludicrous brain-suspending religious disease.

Uhm. The freeze-frame portions of these (21!) videos were rather limited, focused mainly on the evangelists themselves. But this has got to be the strangest manifestation of the Holy Ghost I've seen.

I'm really not sure what's going on here. Dirty little secrets? Manifestations of Satan? Sweet nothings?

This one isn't quite as 3D as the others, but it gets the feeling across. This is one of the more sedate manifestations of the Toronto Blessing.

Can't you just see the Holy Ghost shining forth in this dude? . . . You can't? YOU just try making yourself appear and disappear like that.

This Toronto Blessing thing has apparently made a much-more-modest comeback, after being fiercely denounced as demonic by Christian conservatives for years and years. It has now been "rebranded" and given a new spin as Catch the Fire.  There are slickly-produced videos with testimonials from fresh-faced, attractive individuals who have been paid to insist how this loony laugh-fest (now, presumably, somewhat toned-down) has changed their lives. Someone has been hired to give all this a much more sanitary spin.

But I'm not buying it. It's all the work of the Devil. In 3D.

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My candidate for President (no, really)

 

. . . and his staff. . . 

WE HAVE THE PROOF: This is actually just a big ball of tin foil!!

Tennis-ball sized diamond found by Canadian firm could fetch $70M

A Sotheby's employee holds Lesedi La Rona Diamond on May 3, 2016 in New York City. (Donald Bowers / Getty Images for Sotheby's, via AP)

The Associated Press
Published Wednesday, May 4, 2016 7:07AM EDT
Last Updated Wednesday, May 4, 2016 11:48AM EDT

LONDON - A London auctioneer says a diamond the size of a tennis ball that was unearthed by a Vancouver-based mining company could sell for more than $70 million US.

Sotheby's says it will offer the Lesedi la Rona diamond in London on June 29.

The diamond was unearthed in November in Botswana at a mine owned by Lucara Diamond Corp. (TSX:LUC). It measured 1,109 carats, the second-largest gem-quality rough diamond ever discovered.

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Canadian company unearths tennis ball-sized 1,111-carat diamond

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An 1,111-carat diamond is shown in this undated handout photo. (Lucara Diamond Corp., Lucian Coman/THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Its name means "our light" in the Tswana language. It is the largest discovered in more than a century.

The auctioneer said Wednesday that the rough gemstone could yield the largest top-quality diamond ever cut and polished.

Last year, Lucara sold a 341.9-carat diamond of the same type for US$20.55 million.

NEWS FLASH! Weekly World News reporter Horatio von Fraudster has peeled back the myth of the Lesedi diamond once and for all.  And you're not going to believe what he found. . .