I was hunting for a good long while to find something that has become internet legend.

Yep, it's William Shatner reciting Palin's farewell speech as beat poetry. Klein has a more serious piece on how Sarah-Palin-style capitalism is flawed. I guess she means the kind of capitalism that makes foreign investors buy up much-needed farmland in Africa to make export crops. Did no one watch Darwin's Nightmare?

Not so in Vancouver, which is poised to become the greenest city on earth, with its renewable energy and armies of hippies. Take that, Dubai.

However, I've noted a disturbing thing about rising violent sex crimes here. Recently a girl was forced off an early-morning bus and sexually assaulted. In Surrey - that place of unfairly ill-repute - a six-year-old was similarly assaulted two weeks ago. And then another in Abbotsford, my home for the four years before I moved to Van. Ah Abbotsford - the quiet little church-university town where nothing used to happen. It's now the crime capital. From the robbing of old women to a deadly ongoing battle between drug gangs, things are heating up.

Speaking of sex, prostitutes in Ukraine have formed an excellent group that make staunch political statements about everything from the bastardization of elections to the mistreatment of sex workers. Meanwhile in Saudi Arabia, that vestige of morals, a woman was named Queen of Morals as the title of a beauty contest where women win not via bikini modeling but by showing their dutifulness to their parents, family and society.

Now, I know I chide the Middle East and generally any place where gross patriarchy rules. Can't help it - raised by a feminist and such. But there is a form of feminism that makes me shake my head - colonial feminism. See, some people in the West have it in their heads that the Mid-East can perform radical changes to its culture and create a homogenized form of feminism over there as here. Complete bollocks. So when I see pieces in publications like the Wall Street Journal about the use of girl taxis in Lebanon where women are supposedly skittish about traveling with men, well, my head begins to shake. Knowing more than one woman in Vancouver that's had a scary taxi ride and wishes there were more female taxi drivers, I see this report as unfair. And Lebanon? You mean the most Americanized nation in Arabia?

I don't mean to get all "proud to be where I'm from," but there are things that require defense. Like the Palestinians when Israeli fundies storm their mosque. Or the fact that amidst all the oil, the one in five Arabs lives on less than $2 a day.

Palestine. Where the last bit of joy for a kid comes from breaking a world record on kite-flying. Where globalization is wringing out the last surviving keffiyeh-makers (keffiyehs became popular around the world after Rachel Ray wore one; global recognition did not however impact the actual recognition of the plight of Falastin).

Far worse, actually, it seems that Fox News (and I'm trying very hard not to take it as an indicator of Americans in general) misplaced Egypt on the map. Either that or else we will soon hear that Barack is hoarding weapons of mass destruction.

In the Middle East it seems there's more rage about the Uighurs than the Palestinians, especially with China claiming that 10,000 of them have note been disappeared. Where did they all go? They can't all be coming to the Olympics in Van. Yep, China with its 13 million abortions a year. And a shocking number of those are by people who just don't know about how to avoid pregnancy.

Yay, says those who talk about the need for population control. But, as shown in this sweet XKCD comic, people in poor countries have too much sex because the alternative would be to have sex with you. Makes me smile.