Category Archives: capitalism

United Nations invites Pivot Legal Society lawyer David Eby to Geneva

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Dave EbyUN agency invites Pivot lawyer to Geneva

David Eby to present on homelessness and Olympics

May 31, 2007

Vancouver – A United Nations-funded housing rights agency has invited Pivot Legal Society lawyer David Eby to Geneva to make a presentation on the impacts of the 2010 Olympic Games on Vancouver’s most marginalized residents.

Eby’s presentation to the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) in mid June will be part of a larger workshop presenting final results from COHRE’s two-year study of the housing rights impact of international events, with a specific focus on the Olympic Games.

“I am honoured that this internationally recognized research agency has chosen Pivot to present on homelessness and the Games,” said Eby. “I will do my best to provide this international audience with a comprehensive report on Vancouver’s progress, or lack of progress on these issues.”

Eby has spent the last two years with Pivot studying the state of low-income housing in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Canada’s poorest urban neighbourhood. In 2006, he was co-lead author of Cracks in the Foundation, Pivot’s comprehensive study of housing issues facing low-income residents in Vancouver. In 2007, he was an editor of the Impact of the Olympics on Community Coalition’s Interim Report Card and is a member of the Board of that organization. Experts from the UN High Commission on Human Rights and UN-HABITAT are also scheduled to present.

“Given Vancouver’s experience with Expo ’86, I would have thought our governments would be more concerned,” said Eby, “but with just over two and a half years to go before the games, the affordable housing legacy promised in the bid process has yet to appear and through Civil City our city council is poised to harass and displace Vancouver’s most vulnerable citizens.”

Stops at the World Health Organization, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS are on Eby’s itinerary.

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The results of the COHRE study are announced June 14 and Mr. Eby is speaking on June 14 and 15.

For more information contact:

David Eby – Pivot Legal Society – (778) 865-7997

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About Pivot Legal Society
Pivot’s mandate is to take a strategic approach to social change, using the law to address the root causes that undermine the quality of life of those most on the margins. We believe that everyone, regardless of income, benefits from a healthy and inclusive community where values such opportunity, respect and equality are strongly rooted in the law.

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emo loser: the corruption of an innocent

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Not since Will Ferrell‘s heartbreaking portrait of a soused, abusive toddler landlord have we seen so wrenching a portrait of innocence lost. When the Dad has to bring up Nancy Reagan, you know it’s a desperate situation.

Just.

Say.

No.

To.

Emo.

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pic o’ the day: parenting lite

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segway into parenting 

This is rather reminiscent of those “condensed bedtime stories” designed so that busy parents won’t have to spend much of their precious time with their precious offspring. Looks like somebody needs a little lecture on safety and a large one on not looking like an ass in public.

Where does she put the latte?

From a livejournal of faraway and exotic Seattle, via reddit.

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quote o’ the day: the Caveman of Bondi on personal freedom

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Jhyimy Mhiyes 

cross-posted from running through rain

“If you remove yourself to the extremity of land’s end and that’s still not good enough, and people come down and deliberately stir you up and tell you that you are taking up too much room in Australia, where would you go? What would you do? Anytime Australia, or the Establishment, is so particularly threatened by one man living quietly, then we are not the same Australia we thought we were.”

Jhyimy “Two Hats” Mhiyles,
the Caveman of Bondi

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he’s got balls…and he wants you to eat them

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portrait of the artist as a young head of livestock 

Well you gotta admit it’s the most creative use of liposuctioned human fat you’ve ever heard of. It can’t ALL end up puffing up Lindsay‘s pout.

And it’s Art!

Marco Evaristti, a Chilean/Israeli/Danish conceptual artist (oh, aren’t they all) underwent liposuction (to, from the looks of him, no avail) and made the suctioned human fat into meatballs, which he then fried in olive oil, displayed in a gallery, and canned.

Then it starts to get weird.

“What I’m trying to do with these works is to give society a jolt and make it ask questions,” the 44-year-old said in a telephone interview from Denmark, where he lives with his wife and children.

“And it can answer those questions, and in that way maybe we can be a little better as human beings.”

Evaristti’s meatballs piece consists of 13 tins of the meat on a long table, in an echo of Christ’s last supper.

He says the work is about the sanctity of the body and an unhealthy modern obsession with food and weight loss.

“Firstly, I want to show people that meatballs made with my fat are no more disgusting than the meatballs you buy in the supermarket,” he said.

“Secondly, it’s a dialogue with a modern society that lives to eat, rather than eating to live as it should be.

“You eat, and when you’re fat, you go to a clinic, have an operation, have your fat removed and you start to eat again.”

When he displayed the piece in Chile, Evaristti invited 12 people to join him in eating the meatballs in a last supper.

How did they taste? “Even better than my grandmother’s,” he said.

In all honesty, now I’m hungry!

Would you eat those meatballs?

I absolutely would; I would be so irrationally excited at a chance to eat those goddammed meatballs you cannot possibly imagine it because if you tried to cram all that joy between your ears and run it through your little grey cells it your head would assplode! Like the Death Star! With paranoia and magnesium flares and Wookiee co-pilots and a bombastic, derivative John Williams score playing in Dolby Surroundsound!

It would be teh ossum.

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