If a tree falls in the forest...

So Bush thinks he's going to make big bucks giving speeches after he is finished being president? People won't even come to listen to him NOW:

The event had inauspicious beginnings. Bush started 10 minutes late, so that APEC workers could hustle people [ie, business leaders] out of the theater's balcony seating to fill the many empty portions of the main orchestra section below _ which is most visible on camera. Even resettled, the audience remained quiet throughout the president's remarks, applauding only when he was finished.

Think about it

Professors Keil and Lehrer ask:

Have we arrived at the point where thinking critically has become a dangerous activity?

The answer sometimes appears to be "yes".
If poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads, then social science tries to find the toads in society's gardens -- which turns out not to be a very popular activity these days with some politicians and prosecutors.

Conservativism is just a theory, too

Could somebody please tell John Tory that the economic, social and political beliefs of conservatives could also be described as "just a theory" -- but this is what he expects the people of Ontario to vote for.
Here's the story: Conservative leader muses about creationism in schools

...the Conservatives are promising to give private religious schools $400 million if they opt into the public system, teach the provincial curriculum, hire accredited teachers and administer standardized tests. But that doesn't mean Christian schools couldn't teach creationism on top of the existing provincial curriculum, said Tory, who is embarking on his first campaign as Conservative leader. 'It's still called the theory of evolution,' Tory said ...

I guess this is the kind of dumb stuff politicians say when they are pandering to the religious right.
You know, I was raised in a Christian church and so I had always respected Christianity as a strong and robust religion which had, at its core, a profound respect for truth and truth-seekers. So I really don't understand what has happened in the last decade -- has Christianity now become just a thin and brittle veneer, that its adherents are afraid can be shattered by the simple scientific truth of evolution?

Pavarotti has died

YouTube - Luciano Pavarotti - Ave Maria - Schubert

A commenter on YouTube called him the greatest tenor of our times. He brought his music to millions, too.

Great line of the day

TRex at Firedoglake cheers Teh Craig for announcing he's not resigning (even though he already said he was) because he's not guilty (even though he already said he was) because he's not gay.
Yeah sure, you're not gay -- you just like to have sex with other men, perfectly normal hetro behaviour!
Anyway, TRex talks about how Craig's dithering will screw up Bush and the Republicans:

[from TPM] If Sen. Larry Craig reconsiders and steps all over Gen. Petraeus’ week of surge, Bill Kristol’s head will explode. That Penatagon media war room they set up will be useless in the face of this cable TV zoo.

Wouldn’t that just be delicious? All the millions of dollars worth of spin and PR that the White House and the NeoCons have put into General Petraeus’ Magical September Moment may well be wasted. All the fatuous crap about having it on the anniversary of 9/11, all of it, gone, poof! Because if there is, in fact, one thing on this earth that Big Media loves more than a rich, dead blond, it would have to be the spectacle of a nasty, mushrooming Gay Republican Sex Scandal.

Emphasis mine.

No wonder Harper wanted an election last spring

Canada silent as nuclear energy partnership with US, Australia, others takes shape:

The initiative, called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, proposes that nuclear energy-using countries and uranium-exporting countries band together in a new nuclear club to promote and safeguard the industry.
Central to the plan is a proposal that all used nuclear fuel be repatriated to the original uranium exporting country for disposal.
That should be big news in Canada, the world's largest uranium producer.
But to date, the Canadian government's response is a closely guarded secret. In fact, there's been virtually no public debate at all . . . Harper's minority Conservative government clearly does not want to engage the Canadian public in any discussion about the initiative.

You can't make this stuff up.

You can't make this stuff up

Remember yesterday, when Bush said that it wasn't his policy to dissolve the Iraq army in 2003 but somehow it just happened, he can't remember why but he thought he likely objected?
Well, today Paul Bremner says that he wrote Bush about it before it was announced.

Gag me with a spoon

Check out the second update on Glenn Greenwald's post today. Euhhhh!

Burning man

Well, I'm convinced. More and more of the news in the blogs indicates that Bush and Cheney are going to take the US to war against Iran -- see this and this and this -- and there's nothing we can do to stop him and it will be a disaster for the United States and the Middle East and the world. And Bush is now so out of touch with reality that he can't even remember anymore that it was his administration which disbanded the Iraq army.
But, as Tony Soprano would say, what are ya gonna do.
Escapism, anyone? Here are some neat photos from this year's Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert in New Mexico :


Here's an interesting art piece, which is reflecting some of the festival participants as they ride past it. Below, more festival art.




The festival-goers are just as unique. Here is Dave the Troubadour, playing a flaming tuba.


You can see the "man" statue in this photo of the festival site during a sandstorm. The festival ended when they set it on fire on Saturday.

Night of the Living Dead in Iraq

"Success" in Iraq? Well, I had been wondering about the actual figures, and here they are. Juan Cole about the ballyhooed surge in Iraq:

I personally find the controversy about Iraq in Washington to be bizarre. Are they really arguing about whether the situation is improving? I mean, you have the Night of the Living Dead over there. People lack potable water, cholera has broken out even in the good areas, a third of people are hungry, a doubling of the internally displaced to at least 1.1 million, and a million pilgrims dispersed just this week by militia infighting . . . The government has all but collapsed . . . The parliament hasn't actually passed any legislation to speak of and often cannot get a quorum. Corruption is endemic. The weapons we give the Iraqi army are often sold off to the insurgency. Some of our development aid goes to them, too.
The average number of Iraqis killed in 2007 per day exceeds those killed in 2006 . . . Nation-wide attacks in June reached a daily all-time high of 177.5l . . . US troop deaths haven't fallen. They are way up . . .
8-2007 77 8-2006 65
7-2007 79 7-2006 43
6-2007 101 6-2006 61
5-2007 126 5-2006 69
4-2007 104 4-2006 76
3-2007 81 3- 2006 31
2-2007 81 2-2006 55
1-2007 83 1-2006 62
I mean, how brain dead do the Bushies think we are . . . And why does our corporate media keep repeating this Goebbels-like propaganda?

Why? Because it just feels so good to be "winning" for a change.

Sand art

It's amazing what you can find on YouTube

The hockey player and the ballerina

Did ballerina's visit choreograph Team Canada's 1972 comeback?
Well, apparently not.
The story in Moscow is that the visit of Russian ballerina Maya Plisetskaya to the Canadian dressing room inspired Phil Esposito to win the Summit Series in 1972. Except that Esposito can't remember any such visit.
But why spoil a good story with the truth?

The only thing that matters

I seldom blog much about personal stuff, but this midwife tragedy makes me angry.
One of the most dangerous journeys we will ever take is down the birth canal. But in our recent zeal to make every human event into a kinder, gentler, personal growth experience, many now seem to think that women would have a better time giving birth at home with midwives instead of in hospital -- so cold and clinical and "medical" , you know.
What we cannot forget is this: the goal of childbirth is not that the mother should have a good birth experience. The goal is that the baby should be born alive and healthy.
Nothing else matters.
Nothing else.
Yes, its personal for me -- my first pregnancy was absolutely normal in every way, but when I was in labour, on monitors, the doctors could see that my daughter was in trouble. They weren't sure exactly why her heartbeat kept dropping, but they finally recommended an emergency C-section.
Was I disappointed that I couldn't have a "natural" birth experience like all the books and movies promoted? Didn't matter. At that point, my own feelings were irrelevant. We just wanted our baby to born alive and healthy. And so she was.
When I got home, the first thing my neighbour said was how sorry she was that I had had a C-section. I will never forget how stunned I was by her remark. Sorry? SORRY? -- as if my own "childbirth experience" meant anything at all, compared to my baby. I told her I wasn't sorry in the least.
The various news stories about this midwife case indicate that this mother was in labour for 14 hours, the midwives were exhausted, the birth was breech, and when the unborn baby suffocated on meconium, nobody called for help.
The coroner said that midwives should improve their training, but the president of the Quebec Order of Midwives got pretty defensive about it:

"Nothing will change in the sense that we are already doing our very best to assure the safety of mothers, babies and their families."

See what I mean? Its the safety of the babies that must be their first concern, not the mothers and certainly not the families (and why would the midwives association be dragging the families into it at all?)
If this case is an example of how midwives are already doing their "very best", well, it's just not good enough.

One day in the men's room

In a Daily Kos diary, Kharma describes his men's room experience:

Two weeks ago, the kids and I went on a trip to visit friends in San Antonio, Texas. On the way we stopped at a rest area just off the interstate. What happened next made me very uneasy...
I was drinking coffee heavily so that I would stay awake and needed to relieve myself pretty badly. I pulled into a rest area, locked the car doors, left the kids sleeping in the car, and went into the restroom. When I entered I noticed it was unoccupied except for a pair of sneakers visible under the second stall.
As I unzipped at one of the urinals and began to relieve my burning bladder I heard a voice say "Hey, what's up?". I looked around and there was no one else in the restroom. After a moments hesitation, I answered "Not much".
A little time went by and he says, "What ya doing?".
I didn't feel very comfortable talking to someone in a stall but I didn't want to be rude and answered, "Uh...we are heading to San Antonio to visit friends."
"Want to come over?", he says.
At this point I am really uncomfortable and I finish up and scoot over to the sink to wash up. "No I don't think so", I replied. Wow, was this something else. I had never even had someone next to me with a wide stance before and now I've got someone in the stall asking me over!
As I reached for the paper towels to dry my hands I hear, "Hey man, can I call you back? There's some asshole in the bathroom answering every thing I say."

Oh, for pity's sake!

When will Canada stop torturing Steven Truscott?
A judge is deciding on whether Truscott should receive compensation for the ten years he spent in jail -- for a crime he did not commit -- plus the lifetime of suspicion. And now the cheapskate judge is saying that because the Appeal Court had no DNA evidence on which to base a finding of innocence, therefore Truscott might not be entitled to compensation.
This is both stupid and cruel.
In 2000, then-Justice Critic Peter MacKay told the Commons:

. . . the Truscott case, as we know, has been a festering wound on the psyche of this nation and casts a shadow over the entire criminal justice system. The case against Truscott was based on ambiguous, circumstantial and inconsistent testimony from children, impossible medical analysis of the murder victim and Mr. Truscott himself . . .

Now the Appeal Court has finally acquitted him.
He should have been acquitted in 1959. He should have spent the next ten years playing ball and studying algebra and learning to drive and going on dates and goofing around with his buddies. Instead, this is what our justice system did to him:

REQUIEM FOR A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD
By: Pierre Berton

In Goderich town
The Sun abates
December is coming
And everyone waits:
In a small, dark room
On a small, hard bed
Lies a small, pale boy
Who is not quite dead.

The cell is lonely
The cell is cold
October is young
But the boy is old;
Too old to cringe
And too old to cry
Though young --
But never too young to die.

It's true enough
That we cannot brag
Of a national anthem
Or a national flag
And though our Vision
Is still in doubt
At last we've something to boast about:
We've a national law
In the name of the Queen
To hang a child
Who is just fourteen.

The law is clear:
It says we must
And in this country
The law is just
Sing heigh! Sing ho!
For justice blind
Makes no distinction
Of any kind;
Makes no allowances for sex or years,
A judge's feelings, a mother's tears;
Makes no allowances for age or youth
Just eye for eye and tooth for tooth
Tooth for tooth and eye for eye:
A child does murder
A child must die.

Don't fret ... don't worry ...
No need to cry
We'll only pretend he's going to die;
We're going to reprieve him
Bye and bye.

We're going to reprieve him
(We always do),
But it wouldn't be fair
If we told him, too
So we'll keep the secret
As long as we can
And hope that he'll take it
Like a man.

And when we've told him
It's just "pretend"
And he won't be strung
At a noose's end,
We'll send him away
And, like as not
Put him in prison
And let him rot.

The jury said "mercy"
And we agree --
O, merciful jury:
You and me.

Oh death can come
And death can go
Some deaths are sudden
And some are slow;
In a small cold cell
In October mild
Death comes each day
To a frightened child.

So muffle the drums and beat them slow,
Mute the strings and play them low,
Sing a lament and sing it well,
But not for the boy in the cold, dark cell,
Not for the parents, trembling-lipped,
Not for the judge who followed the script;
Save your prayers for the righteous ghouls
In that Higher Court who write the rules
For judge and jury and hangman too:
The Court composed of me and you.

In Goderich town
The trees turn red
The limbs go bare
As their leave are bled
And the days tick by
As the sky turns lead
For the small, scared boy
On the small, stark bed
A fourteen-year-old
Who is not quite dead.