You Want News? Don't Kill Journalism

So people, including prominent journalists, think social media will create a more informed public? One in which everyone will exchange the latest bumpf?

Don't bet on it.
Recent events have demonstrated the failure of traditional journalism when it adopted social and digital information exchange,  just as its greater failure  has been to cut its own throat by starving the readers for the past three or more years.

photomanipulation (c)Daisy Morant of image (c)designresourcebox.com

In the case of the Boston, journalism entirely abandoned its role as gatekeeper, verifier of fact, measured and accurate reporter of events, and yielded to the gross onrush of factoids, inflammatory and prejudicial speculation, a flood of tweets and other conveyances of incorrect information, out-and-out rumour and more.  This is what people want, they are told, and people will be damned if they won't get it - if not from the Daily Gatherer then the Nightly Blabberer.

The Gatherers and Blabberers forgot one essential fact:  People have been buying newspapers despite the presence of radio and television because the newspapers were able to provide an element of newsgathering and dissemination that radio and TV aren't very good at:  elaboration, summary, analysis, comment.  People sat down with their papers and took time to read all they could about the events that were on everyone's mind, facts they hadn't known about, other opinions and ideas, and ruminated on the whole.

In Boston media coverage was a messy, gory free-for-all with all the media tweeting and huffing and blowing trash into cyberspace.  Their abdication of their central role resulted in exaggeration and rumour that included a third explosion - not - and twelve dead - not.

This is not what journalism is about, nor is it what journalists do.  Do you want proof that people will pay for newspapers that they will then read?

Ask the Orange County (Cal.) Register, which has been hiring journalists and writers as fast as it can, to fill the needs for which the subscribers will pay.  The readers want more than 140 characters.  They want background.  Colour.  Quotes from a variety of people. Meat on the bones.

Stuff that in your beak, Twitter.

The Need For the Whole Truth

A doctored photograph of victims in the Boston Marathon bombings is published as fact, leading to a number of comments pro and con its publication.  What is particularly disturbing is that some comments are from people who have defended "the American way of life"; these people say by all means doctor the photo so that people won't be upset by more blood and gore".  My question is, do you really want to live in a system where you can never be certain whether you are seeing the truth? isn't that what all the fighting has been about, against regimes in parts of the world where this is a routine happenstance?


Journalists report the news; the news is what happens. Photojournalists report the news via photos they take of the events that have occurred; publishing photos that have been altered - for whatever reason - is not journalism and is one of the more egregious actions a journalist - editor, publisher - can undertake, because it violates one's notions of integrity, destroys one's credibility as a news source, and leaves one open to suspicions ever after that one is not being entirely truthful.  Do you want that attached to your name as a (photo)journalist? not bloody likely. If I were John Tlumacki, the author of the photo in question, I would be damn mad and demand an apology. (the photo was doctored to cover a severe leg wound on a victim with "pants".

I know this will perhaps cause someone to say "what about apologizing to the victim for intruding into his/her grief?"

Unfortunately there are instances in which a member (or members) of the public are swept up in circumstances that are unpleasant - or worse.  The fact that there is a public component to these events means, as well, that the notions of purely private hurt or grief do not apply.  Even if these events occur in a private space, the fact that they have public consequences (arrest and trial of perpetrator, etc) takes away their claim to be an entirely private event.  If we want to have the rule of law, we have to accept all aspects of the application of that law; this will include proof of the transgression (photos of victims) and proof of the state's sincere attempt to punish the transgressor.  Sometimes this does not occur, for one reason (insufficient proof) or another (the state overstepped its authority).  Then the chorus resumes: we should not make these innocent people suffer any more than they already do.

The point is this: if you want a free society you must maintain a free press.  A free press must be able to present the news as clearly, in as unbiased a fashion as possible.  Then you, as a citizen, can be informed and can base your decisions on the facts.  One feels for the victims of these blasts; one feels their agonies, their lost lives, their requirement to live henceforth with severe restrictions and hurt.  But one must also honour their sacrifice with the truth, not some doctored, prettified version thereof.

(c)Daisy Morant 2013

EYE CANDY - A FELICITIOUS ARRANGEMENT OF BLACK AND WHITE

CIRCULAR FORMS, (c)Garrick Palmer, 2009.  Mr. Palmer's chef d'oeuvre, and proof that wood engraving is a supreme intellectual challenge.  Edition of 20.  Three available.  If you are interested in purchasing, please leave your address in the comment box.

And now for something completely different

Prune and Sherry Ice Cream

What's ice cream doing in a blog that deals with fake fabrics, murders, and opinions on all manner of wacky things, you ask?


Every blog, no matter how serious, must come up from time to time to catch a breath of the air out there.  For me that includes ice-cream making, which I considered seriously a few years ago when I was eating excellent ice cream but rebelling at the price.  I can do it about as well as these guys, I muttered, frequently - and pointlessly, as I had no way of proving my puffery.

Then one of my darling daughters gave me an Ice Cream Maker - I capitalize the words to indicate the seriousness of the tool I was given.  Anyone can stick liquids of various sorts in the freezer and hope they come out somewhat scoopable.  But an actual Ice Cream Maker requires one to approach more seriously the entire art of the frozen delight.  Consider this (my preference, that is, you may have your own):  Like jam, ice cream must be

Ze doktor speaks!

Sweet
Tart/Tangy
Possessed of a pleasing texture, and
Capturing the essence of the subject at hand.


I live in Canada where almost all commercially made ice cream is way too sweet (and it is worse south of the border!).  Canadians are well-known to favour gooey, sticky, sweet ice creams/desserts, which is why, when one looks for fruit ice creams, one is almost always disappointed, just as North American jams are simply too full of high-fructose corn syrup and not enough of the fruit.

When we were making jams and jellies we held the proportions, wherever possible, as close to 50%-50% as we could.  When biting into a glob of berry jam one wants to be able to taste the berry as well as its sweetness.  In the same way one wants the ice cream to be sitting right at the intersection of sweet and tart.  One wants to feel blissfull and almost ready to weep at the same time - the way one does when one has something utterly sour in one's mouth but it is exactly what is needed to cut through the heat and the sugar.

Well, enough of that.

To resume:  ice cream must be sweet, and tart, and have a smooth, silky texture.  It must taste as it is meant to, not sugary.  It is not to have a granular texture, that's simply bad preparation.

And thus I began experimenting with the ice cream maker which worked like a charm and which has only the one drawback: it has no lid one can slap onto it - thus doubling as a proper ice cream container.

First ice cream:  apricot.  Not everyone in my family likes apricot - certainly not as much as I do.  Decades ago we were able to get half-pound packages of fabulously huge Australian glaceed apricots, about six to a package, that were all of the above: sweet, tart, with great texture - and no leathery bits of skin that some processors neglect to remove.  But we haven't seen them in a few years.  Last time they appeared as a Christmas gift we were utterly shocked to find they cost over fifty dollars for a pound and a half from the only place that had them, which shall remain nameless, but may be recognizable if you think of their overpriced cookware and their chi-chi snob appeal.  Exorbitant!  The giver of the gift understood that we were concerned for the health of her pocketbook; we have since ignored their mention in holiday catalogues and gift suggestion lists.  So one turns to the smaller Turkish apricot, ubiquitous in dried form, or - in a moment of desperation - to four-dollar-a pound French glaceed apricots, smaller, perhaps, but oooooooooooh soooooooooo wonderful.

Problem was, they did not yield the silken texture we were looking for.  Back to the Turkish apricots.  Very slow long cooking over gentle heat was the way to go; the skins slipped off nearly intact, the innards disintegrated almost entirely, and the resulting Philadelphia-style ice cream - apricot puree, sugar, cream - was bliss.

At the time we took home a couple of packages of apricots there was a special - three packages of dried fruit for ten dollars.  There sat the lone(ly) cellophane bag of pruneaux d'Agen, shivering in anticipation of being neglected.  We eyed the prunes; the prunes - I swear - eyed us, and before we knew it I had upended my glass of Pedro Ximenez sherry (rich, dark, pruney, raisiny, with an underlying tang and just a hint of a kick) into a glass bottle with the prunes.

Time passed slowly, measured by the twist of the wrist, the turning of the bottle upside down to ensure that the rich dark wine reached every part of the rich, dark prune.  We whiled away the hours by recollecting the French name fracas when someone wanted to name their daughter Plum instead of Prune, which eventually led to the archaic French name laws being overturned, or possibly swept away for a bit, to be revisited later.

Over time the prunes and the sherry began to exchange characteristics and when, one day, the sherry no longer looked liquid but rather more like jelly, we knew its time had come.

You cannot rush this sort of process.  If you wish to have prune and sherry, or prune and port, ice cream you should begin by macerating the prunes at least three or four months ahead of time.  Think that's silly?  By the time the prunes were ready their texture was meltingly soft.  None of the occasional stringy texture that runs alongside the pit, no leathery skin. They required but a little whirl in the blender - one does not want them to be a mousse; that would be entirely characterless and detrimental to the finished product.  One wants bits of prune to punctuate the smooth ice cream.

This is a custard-based recipe - custard has always been an irritant in our house.  It will refuse to set properly, it may even have curdle, once, but frequently the result is blah and bland.  But this was a new recipe - and the eggs were new.  Not fresh-new, but different, from a different farm, Omega-3 eggs.  They looked better, separated better, and mad an absolutely superb custard, which - believe it or not - did not form the nemesis of such squeamish cooks as I, a skin.  Custard/pudding skin is one of the most horrible things one may encounter, short of an alien concocted in Hollywood.  Let's leave it at that, explanations unnecessary and possibly liable to make one gag.  The custard was absolutely perfect, skinless, cooled down entirely when in went the prune/sherry puree.  From there into the Ice Cream Maker.  Twenty-five minutes later, bliss.  Of course with an amount of alcohol in the mix (even after all these months) the ice cream will not freeze rock solid but one doesn't want it to do so.  The next day when the Official Taster lifted the lid she oooooohed and aaaaaaaaahed at the surface of the ice cream: smooth, not grainy, rich, somewhat yielding, prune-flecked.  And the taste?

It is not an exaggeration to say that there are foods that can make one feel that one has approached the Divine, or that the Divine has decided to show us glimpses of the joy that awaits in Paradise -

The ice cream was perfection.  It is also so rich that one cannot possibly eat the entire amount in one go, or two.  One generous scoop - courtesy of a 1930s aluminum-handled ice cream scooper - is all one can manage.  And that's as it ought to be.  One shouldn't have to eat half a tub of ice cream before feeling that one has had a serving.  Even at that, the half-tub is mostly air, gums, fillers, extenders, fakery meant to make one feel that one has had a serving of dessert when in fact one has been diddled.  Again.  Even the expensive ice cream manufacturers are relying on some of these fakers; one feels it in the weight of the container.  Our prune and sherry ice cream is so heavy it requires both hands.  The - admittedly smaller - tubs of commercially prepared ice cream, while still heavier than the dreck that it is most people's misfortune to eat, are heavier than the "popular brands" but, weighed against home-made, they are short.  They also have stronger machines that beat more air into the mix; one of their manufacturers told me, straight-faced, that this extra air was required to make the ice cream more scoopable.

Hm.  Isn't it just as easy to take it out a minute earlier?

If it is the last thing you ever do, make your own ice cream.  Just once.  You will instantly grasp that
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your Pantry," to paraphrase William Shakspere (as correct as Shakespeare, btw).  So why not taste them!???

The Theft Of Words

I Said It First! - Terence

The three young journalism students who wrote the article in the Ryerson Review of Journalism, "Willfully blind: A closer look at the Margaret Wente plagiarism scandal and what it says about The Globe and Mail's institutional arrogance" should be justly proud of their article. 

The Globe has always, in my experience at least, positioned itself as "the paper of record", but for decades it has been retreating from that position - one of the most informative columns carried by the paper was What Was Said,  a partial transcript of the day's proceedings in Parliament.  That was a window on the process that has the most direct effect upon our lives, and it is sorely missed.  Moreover, in its first wave of computerization, at the end of the Seventies, the newspaper did away with compositors and proofreaders, thereby eliminating a tier of fact-checking that captured more errors - of fact, of grammar, etc - than one could imagine.  The removal of copy editors completed the gutting of the fact-checkers and grammarian nit-pickers that helped sustain the Globe's reputation.  Pick up any edition and you will find such unpardonable lapses as "[the late premier of Alberta, Ralph Klein] slayed the province's $23-billion debt".  I hear people groaning, opining that it doesn't matter whether it is grammatically correct as long as it is, factually. 

Bosh and hogwash.  The removal of these layers of inspection at publications has seriously damaged the overall quality of the written word everywhere, as is evidenced by missing quotes, spelling and grammatical errors, words falling off the page and widows (single words at the end of a paragraph, appearing alone at the top of a fresh column or page), random characters or words.  But hey!  as long as you get the gist of it, hein?

It is against this background that columnists found themselves able to use other writers' work more freely.  And I am not even suggesting that it was necessarily deliberate.  One may become so enamoured of someone's turn of phrase, or particular idea, that one may reuse it.  What of this:

"I have everything, yet have nothing; and although I possess nothing, still of nothing am I in want."

and

"As having nothing, and yet possessing all things."

and

"Lord of himself, though not of lands; And having nothing, yet hath all."


By our standards this would appear to be a case of plagiarism.  Yet the first quote is by the Roman Republic's playwright Terence (185 - 159 B.C.), who may have borrowed the idea - or the phrase - from previous Greek works.  The second is from the Bible (Corinthians VI, 10, approx. 55 A.D., written by Paul the Apostle, later St. Paul) and the third by Sir Henry Wotton (1658 - 1626).  From where we sit we cannot know whether the idea came independently to each writer - certainly it would not be the first time - or whether Paul, the author of the letter cited in Corinthians, saw the play Eunuchus (161 BC), from which the quotation is taken.  It seems more likely, though, that Sir Henry Wotton took his inspiration from the Bible and paraphrased it for his poem The Character of a Happy Life.  Had one of these phrases appeared in an article for the Globe, it might have been noted in the proof room, where some seriously literate writers worked while pursuing their own goals.  But there are no more proof readers or copy editors.

Because of our technological advances the ability to find quotations, citations and turns of phrase is greatly expanded, and writers who, for one reason or another, borrowed, recycled or stole someone else's work are discovering, to their cost, that they can't continue down this merry path.  Writers who may have a favourite phrase or two (such as "the pearly light of the North", which appeals so greatly to me that I have used it privately a couple of times after reading it years ago in a National Geographic magazine article on Paris/Notre Dame; it so completely describes with what I am so intimately familiar that I could not just let it slip into obscurity with the issue.) yes, even they are being accused of plagiarizing - themselves.  Whatever one thinks of someone's recycling one's own creations, I don't think plagiarizing oneself is the correct term here - unless you have included the "stolen" words in a work the moral right to which you have foolishly given away to a corporation such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; you can be sure you will be hounded mercilessly by such a beast, as that is its nature.

This takes us away from the Wente scandal, however.  In the case of the columnist who was once the Globe's managing editor, there are too many instances in which direct or slightly reworded phrases are used without attribution.  That the Globe is loath to punish her at all is evidenced by the length of her suspension - two weeks.  Journalists have been sacked for much, much less there - and elsewhere.  That the Globe does not follow its own policy on plagiarism is an established fact, once more  underscored by the leniency with which Wente was treated.

For all we know, Terence might have been exceedingly angry, had he known that Paul had taken his words.  Or he might have felt flattered.  I tend to think the former, as most writers jealously guard their words, their phrases, the felicitous manner in which one idea slipped effortlessly from the pen into the public mind.  We still have to eat, you know; we still must be paid for that seeming effortlessness.  And that, ultimately, is almost as important as a writer's ownership of his or her words, poems, ideas.

At times I despair because the word is in terminal agony.  Millennia ago people found that, to communicate, it was necessary to devise words, with specific meanings, and to abandon the pictographs and pictograph-type "languages" for being too unwieldy.  Well, we now have a world in which the word is falling into obscurity; we do not value books, magazines, newspapers, as highly as we do talking heads, whether on TV or the computer monitor, as we derive our entertainment from them and from the movies and computer games that are ever more about flash and trash, action and a skewed "reality" that appeals to the basest and grossest within our nature.  Moreover the plot lines, the characters, situations, and spoken words/done deeds are brazenly cribbed - plagiarized - by one another because they are proven to sell.

So I am afraid that before long people will loosen themselves entirely from the strictures of grammar - it has happened already, in the ghettoes, for example - and go down the road that leads to mutual incomprehensibility.  In the end there will be few of us left, each, as in Fahrenheit 451, remembering verbatim just one book, or - like Peter Ustinov in Logan's Run - spending our declining years safeguarding the contents of a library, while the rest of us  sit, stupefied, in front of our giant screens that show a world where plagiarism isn't a crime so much as it is a rule...



(c)Daisy Morant 2013

Love and Truth in an Arizona Courtroom

Travis Alexander in the shower shortly before his murder. (Court photo)

 

 

>sigh!< 

I wasn't going to weigh in on the whole Jodi Arias mess because the case is clearly delineated and should not take a jury more than an hour, at most, to decide, tho in truth it could be as little time as it takes for everyone to be polled, once.

Fast Recapitulation of facts:

This young woman drove from the northernmost part of California to Mesa, Arizona, had sex with her victim, her former boyfriend Travis Alexander, waited till he was in the shower, and murdered him, gruesomely ( 29 stab wounds, a slit throat, jugular vein, common carotid artery, and windpipe, and a shot to the head), threw the camera and bedding into a washing machine and returned to California.  She rented a car one hundred miles from her home, drove it 2,800 miles, had the car washed and removed the floor mats before police examined it.

Her first story - I was not there.

Second story - two people, a man and a woman, broke in, shot Travis Alexander, ignored her because she did not matter.  She did not call the police but went home, waited for the police to call on her, and lied to them because she "was afraid".

Third story - she killed him - but it was self-defence, because Travis Alexander was abusive to her, controlled her, was violent to her, etc. etc. etc.  The most egregious lie that Miz Arias has uttered to date is that Travis Alexander was a pedophile.  Let us be clear: There is no evidence anywhere that this is anything other than Miz Arias's blatant lie.

Some people will say anything to get out of punishment, let's agree to that.

So that when the stakes are high - as they are in this capital case - one will try to bolster one's assertions with expert opinion.

Well, the defence team has blundered badly in calling upon Alyce LaViolette to look over Miz Arias,  the emails and journals, and other such evidence so that she could stand up in court and declare under oath that she knew Travis Alexander stalked Miz Arias, that he was abusive to her, aggressive, controlling, etcetera etcetera etcetera.

Bad, bad move.  The prosecutor, Juan Martinez, is picking apart this woman's nonsense, bit by bit, verb by adjective by gerund. Apart from the optics - LaViolette's resting face has a seriously downturned mouth whose compressed lips suggest she is trying to prevent any number of oaths from flying out of her face.  Okay, you say, a person can't help how s/he looks.  True.  But the underlying musculature, which in this case yanks the corners of her mouth down, hard, is controlled by the habitual demands put upon it. Looking at LaViolette one sees a hard-bitten, unyielding nature, a combative, challenging sort. It is much in evidence at the trial because LaViolette, who markets herself as the grandmother of the abused/battered woman's defender, has taken up the pennant of Miz Arias, not only defending her but doing so gallantly, and to her own detriment.

Must be love.

LaViolette is going down in flames; her disgraceful evasions and sparring with the Prosecutor are not only redounding negatively on her, but are an insult to the court.  Period.  Petitions are circulating to kick LaViolette off the End Abuse Long Beach speakers' roster, because her testimony is so detrimental to the cause.  People are slagging her because she is a lesbian but let's not do that, she is what she is.  But what she can be slagged for is her  behaviour on the stand, and her testimony.

For an anger management consultant, she is not only annoying, but needling, provoking, and generally itching to punch her (male) interrogator - the Prosecutor - in the face. This is not someone who would give one's assertions any gloss of veracity, ruth or compassion. She continually wants to steer her answers away from the question asked, and into her fictive little compound, in which the world has been bad to Miz Arias and requires her protection.  She introduces unnecessary - and frequently incorrect - complications and qualifications, even after she has been instructed to answer only 'yes' or 'no'.

Even after the judge has told her to answer only 'yes' or 'no' LaViolette is carrying on in her irritating, grating fashion, still trying to shape the response her way.  She is like an annoying five-year-old who deserves a figurative smack on the bottom and bed without dinner.  If she has been undoing the socialization of her youth she is doing a fine job, turning herself into a pouting guerrilla Amazon in front of our stupefied senses. 

She might say: I am being paid $300 per hour to pontificate on the case at hand.

To which I say: You gotta dance with them that brung you, Alyce, you don't have to declare your undying love.

CBC - As Rapacious as the Next Corporation

Did anyone harbour any illusions about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's somehow being more upright, more moral, less rapacious than for-profit businesses?

Think again.

The emphasis, which is lost when one says "CBC", is on Corporation.  In its sleazy way, CBC is every bit as despicable as all the rest of the publishing coorporations that are single-mindedly stripping authors of their rights to their own works.

At issue?  The current Quebec Writing Competition, lavishly advertised with catchy little phrases such as "The future is unwritten . . . Just write it" which is paired, incongruously, with the ribbon feed of a now-obsolete typewriter.  One supposes it is a quaint touch meant to appeal to one's romantic ideals of a writer slaving away in a garret.

It promises big things to the winner: one thousand five hundred dollars, a gala dinner, one broadcast of your story, publication on the website of a magazine, which shall remain nameless as I am tired of giving free advertising to companies that have more than enough in their budget, in an anthology, and on the Corporation's website.

It isn't asking much to fill all the wide-open space that sits, like a ravenous beast, awaiting daily - no, hourly, updates.  Just your moral right to your own creation.

Listen up, all you starry-eyed youngsters who are licking your pencils:

After the fuss has died down, the money's been spent, and they're cleaning up the champagne glasses tossed so happily to the floor during the celebration of your creativity, you have NO FURTHER RIGHTS.  The Corporation can remove your name for ever from your work and you will have no recourse.  It can rearrange, re-edit, turn it into a game, a movie, a set of dish towels - whatever it wants, and you HAVE NO RECOURSE. When you see a lawyer about it, s/he will point to the clause that follows and will say "didn't you read this?  then what are you carping about???"

   ...By making a Submission, you give CBC a perpetual royalty-free license to reproduce your work and to communicate it to the public for all world territories, exclusive until December 31, 2014 and non-exclusive afterwards. You waive any moral rights you may have in such Submission. You acknowledge that CBC may publish Submissions in whole or in part on any medium (radio, television, internet or other) or platforms controlled or authorized by CBC....

Before you enter this contest, read up on your moral rights, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/property/library/moralprimer.html   What is interesting is that the US, after a century or more of pirating everyone else's works, saw fit to protect the moral rights of its authors as a corollary to protecting its publishing industry.

Or Britain, which also protects the rights of authors.  http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/copy/c-otherprotect/c-moralrights.htm  What is more important than being properly identified as a work's author? the right "to object to derogatory treatment[website emphasis] of the work or film which amounts to a distortion or mutilation or is otherwise prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author or director."

Then read how they are protected in Canada:

"Section 14.1 of Canada's Copyright Act protects the moral rights of authors.[12] The moral rights cannot be assigned, but can be waived contractually. Many publishing contracts in Canada now contain a standard moral right waiver."

Yes, you can exchange the copyright in your work with a publisher in return for royalties, but the moral right is inherent in the work unless it is specifically rescinded - but why take this right away from a creative person???  look at the second paragraph of the wikipedia article:

"Moral rights in Canada were famously exercised in the case of Snow v. The Eaton Centre Ltd.[13] In this case Toronto Eaton Centre, a large shopping mall, had commissioned the artist Michael Snow for a sculpture of Canada Geese. Snow successfully stopped Eaton's from decorating the geese with bows at Christmas."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_v._The_Eaton_Centre_Ltd. 

There you have it.  If the CBC wishes to staple, fold or otherwise mutilate your work, or put its words into the mouths of drunken sailors, or your story reappears with seasonal tie-ins, or political slant, or any other change that you, as creator of the work, might deem egregious, YOU HAVE NO RECOURSE.  Michael Snow did, but that was because he retained his moral right to be identified as creator of the work.  Even then, it required a lawsuit to exercise his moral right.


Think about it.  And remember: the CEEB is just another corporation.



*photo of Canada Goose (c)Rror; photomanipulation (c)Daisy Morant

ESMA

Let's take you now to Egypt where, despite the turmoil of the last two or so years, groups of dedicated volunteers, veterinarians and others have been doing their utmost to help the animals who are being ignored, abused or left behind.

That the attitude toward animals as friendly creatures deserving our respect is very recent is a given - one constantly hears of incidents that confirm this.  One of the lowest of insults is to call someone a dog - well then you also know how dogs are generally viewed.

But let's look at cats. This is a creature that looks more like a horror show than an animal that has been worshipped in Egypt for five thousand years.

He was scooped up from an Alexandria street early in 2011 by a rescuer and taken by train to Cairo where the Egyptian Society for Mercy to Animals - ESMA - attends to animals requiring their help.  It is a form of worship, a nod to god, if you will, for Allah - like the Buddha, Christ and other incarnations - does not look kindly on those who would cause grief and pain to animals. Animals do matter, they have souls, and our treatment of them shows our measure of humanness. 
At times, neglect can be every bit as bad as abuse, as was the case here.  The cat was in horrific condition - a vision from Hell.  He had lost his eyes to infection - a common occurrence in feral communities where the fight over scraps of food can be brutal. He was emaciated, filthy, with running sores, a broken jaw - he had suffered over a lengthy period.  The people at ESMA were told he should be put out of his misery, surely they could see that?

They did not.  They bathed him, fed him, removed his useless eyes, reset his jaw, but most of all they just loved him.  This was something new, something 
of which he had no prior knowledge, and after a short, ineffectual protest - simply to let them know that he might be ill and energy-less, but he still was a sovereign being with thoughts and ideas of his own -
he settled down into a routine of eating, sleeping but mostly just being loved.

ESMA Egypt http://www.esmaegypt.org/ is a registered charity.  Five years ago, in 2007, it was formed in order to better the lives of all animals, "including street dogs and cats, working animals such as donkeys, horses and camels, wildlife, animals in the Cairo zoo, those sold in pet shops and live animal markets, and all animals slaughtered for food." That they are highly effective is easily seen on their facebook pages, where they document their work in sometimes extremely gruesome photos that show the depth to which human beings may stoop.  And with the frustration, repression, and anger festering in a society that wanted democracy but had, instead, strongman after strongman, some of that emotion was vented upon the defenceless creatures that might cross their way, no matter what Islam said. We are all just   human beings, not gods, and most of us fall far short of the godlike ideals we espouse.

Well, this cat, this creature that presented as such a revolting bit of "useless life", came back to life under the influence of the shelter's various staff, needed a name - we all know that if you are nameless you are nothing.  It is a favourite trick of totalitarian regimes to deprive one of one's name, thereby erasing one's identity and turning one into a cipher that can be sent to limbo with the flick of a finger.
So he was called The Loved One.


It makes perfect sense.  He was recipient of what would heal him above any technical interventions - showers of love, oceans of love, love enough to drown the desert - but just enough to make him well again.
His jaw healed, enabling him to eat a variety of foods such as he had never  known.  He was bathed again, warmed up, cuddled in fat Egyptian cotton towels that felt like the rough tongue of a mother's love.  His fur grew in, and - surprise of surprises - it turned out to be long, silky, and very copious.  He was nearing the time when he could be adopted out.  Soon he found himself in a strange soft kennel, felt the sensation of riding a roller coaster, heard and smelled an overwhelming cloud of  strangeness, and found himself in the Netherlands, home to a wonderful woman who periodically flies to Egypt to volunteer at ESMA and returns to the Continent with a passel of cats.

(There is an entire subculture of Kittie Transporters - volunteers who, when flying, will take along an animal that is going to a new home. This needs endless paperwork, all required to be obtained in a particular order; it requires the cooperation of the airlines, some of which are easygoing about it, and others which are stubborn and try to dissuade one from this sort of act by making it nearly impossible to meet their conditions.)

Then it was November, glum and gloomy and cold, the sort of cold that gets into one's bones and makes one want to climb into a cocoon.

The Loved One had been at his new home for a while as his new family was waiting for his name to be revealed.  He was not socialized, so a cat therapist was engaged.  She first acclimated him to her presence, then the touch of a feather on his body, then a hand, taught him the meaning of the word "play".  The other cats in the house knew that there was a stranger among them but they couldn't see his shape just yet.  But the moment came when the door to his room remained open, there was good stuff all over the floor - cat cookies, catnip mice, toys with bells in them - so that it was the most natural thing in the world for them to mingle and sniff and greet - "hey, howya doin'? My name's Lobo, what's yours?"  And he  replied "Mr. Alexander Habibi.  Good to meet you."

Mr. Alexander Habibi shows that love and care can rehabilitate almost anyone, whether animal or person.  But it is expensive.  People donate all manner of things  that cannot be obtained inexpensively in Egypt to ESMA and ESAF - a similar charity,  the Egyptian Society of Animal Friends  https://www.facebook.com/esaf.egypt - whether it is their time, their money, or medicines.
It matters not at all to me that they are Islamic - there are a few people who allow this fact to poison their compassion but that should stop.  The fact is that everywhere there are animals to whom we owe respect, if nothing else.  And if we take them in as our companions we should treat them with love - they will blossom just as miraculously as The Loved One.

©Daisy Morant  All photomanipulations ©Daisy Morant of photos ©ESMA and/or Lia Theodoridis

THE MYTH OF UNPAID INTERNSHIPS

no big bills for you, intern!

One of business's greatest problems - in journalism as in banking, accounting, sales and such - is the attitude toward employees who are new to the World o' Work.  Everyone wants experience, nobody wants to provide it.  In this instance the employer is unwilling to provide a learning experience, leaving it to others to do so.  If it were an isolated case it would not be a problem, but this attitude is deeply ingrained in the mindset of business and industry.  Let someone else do it!  Of course, there are many internships but until recently they were almost all unpaid: a great way to pad the workforce without incurring extra cost.

That meant also that only those who had some other form of support - read parents, or a well-off partner - were able to take advantage of such an offer.  It is heartening to note that we now see lawsuits challenging the legality of unpaid internships (Cf "Black Swan" class action lawsuit against Fox Searchlight Pictures; Diana Wang on behalf of all interns v Hearst Corporation re Harper's Bazaar ).  It will not be long before someone decides to do the same in Canada.

And in the dirtiest move yet , "a  number of postings from  Absolute Internship appear on the York University website.   These positions require students to pay over $6,999.00 for the opportunity to complete an international internship." article here


$CAM $CAM $CAM $CAM $CAM $CAM $CAM $CAM 
(but you can see here for help if you are an intern)

Great scam!  Now you too can pay for the privilege of working for free! It is an employer's dream, free labour and a bit o' cash on the side.

There is another factor concerning internships, and that is employment law.  The ubiquity of what are, in fact, illegal positions stealing wages from frequently unwilling employees is going to boil over soon.   I do not intend to go to every jurisdiction, but in Ontario as it currently stands, a reading of the relevant law will probably make people realize that that they are being exploited (emphasis added):

"In mid-June Ontario's Ministry of Labour posted the first-ever fact sheet addressing the current state of the law on internships. Ss. 1(2) lays out a test with six conditions that all must be met before a person can be deemed a trainee and excluded from the ESA. The six conditions are:

1. The training is similar to that which is given in a vocational school.

2. The training is for the benefit of the individual.

3. The person providing the training derives little, if any, benefit from the activity of the individual while he or she is being trained

4. The individual does not displace employees of the person providing the training.

5. The individual is not accorded a right to become an employee of the person providing the training.

6. The individual is advised that he or she will receive no remuneration for the time that he or she spends in the training.


"The criteria [are] very stringent and given the ubiquitous nature of unpaid internships in Ontario it's not hard to see how young people are being mischaracterized as interns when they're really employees covered by the provisions of the ESA."

cited by Andrew Langille in this blog

 I don't know about you, but research, articles and other work done around a publishing environment (or anywhere else, for that matter) that help to fill the employer's needs - in this case, filling blank pages in the upcoming publication - constitute an unpaid benefit, which is provided gratis.  Rather, the only cost is the time of the person providing actual training.  No wonder everyone wants someone else to do the dirty work.

In the 1960s I threw over Bryn Mawr for journalism. I was enthralled to the extent that I volunteered to work three summers for free at a Thomson newspaper, a company so stingy that at one point we did not have copy paper and used the backs of incoming letters, or brought or bought paper. It was not an internship in any sense.  The day I began I was handed background for a number of articles to write, followed by many, many more, all of which I wrote.  What I was taught was very quickly made clear when I received my copy with editor's notes, or questions(article bad), or when it was sent on to be typeset(article good). I soon got a job at another Thomson newspaper - on the strength of my clippings from the first. This follows entirely in the Canadian tradition of having someone else do the training - in my case I didn't even have to be clewed in to Thomson style.

The whole construct of unpaid internships as a requirement, not for a job, but for consideration for a job, is a SHAM.  The entire World o'Work is a sham, especially since 2008.  Bad enough that greed almost took down the entire world economy.  What has happened since is DISGUSTING and I don't hear many voices saying so - everyone has been instilled with the fear of losing their job.  Employers are taking advantage of the maximum number of employees, cutting back on benefits, increasing work hours, and all the while they are sitting on mountains of - no, they are drowning in cash.

At the same time they are crying crocodile tears because they can't find employees for the jobs they are stripping of extras they are also crying crocodile tears about the economy - oh, boo hoo, nobody is buying anything...that's another column, though I will ask how you expect anyone to buy anything when they are working 48 hours a week, at minimum wage, with no benefits.  It's a direct line from the free labour of an intern to the scantily-paid work business claims it can't keep afloat.  Time to say NO to unpaid internships.

Butt Chugging, Nitrogen Martinis and Hand Sanitizer -

The weekend just past has brought us

1 - The story of a young woman whose life expectancy will be much shorter by virtue of having had to have her stomach removed - she drank two nitrogen martinis,  meaning martinis frozen with liquid nitrogen, which usually benign gas then boiled in her stomach at -196C and ate a hole in it.  Happy Birthday! - she was at a bar, celebrating independence with her friends, when cold hard science reminded us all that there are things one simply does not do.

2 - And a report that young people are now drinking hand sanitizers for the alcohol in them.  Not to mention many other chemicals not nearly so harmless.

3 - And - believe me - a student who "butt-chugged" enough wine nearly to kill himself, with a blood alcohol level of .45.  In any jurisdiction that is about as far above the limit as the recently demoted planet Pluto is from us.

Why???

Young people are anaesthetized by the time they are five.

They are thrown into an environment with far too much stimulation; there is never a moment's respite from the multi-coloured,  multi-noise stimulus toys to the television and now the internet, the endless parade of commercials that implant in unformed minds the vague desire to have something more ... and never a moment's retreat from it all.  Never a few minutes alone with a toy, or a blanky, or a nap. Then they get to school, where they are socialized to be good citizens, required to sit still for what, to them, are very long periods of time, causing a peculiar combination of passive-aggressive conditioning.  WARNING: I am not a psychiatrist, so this label has no medical validity.  But I would venture that, if one asked a psychiatrist or ten, they might agree with the mechanism, if not the label.  We demand that they take ballet, Mandarin, tai chi, advanced harmonica, speed-reading, computer programming and other fact-intensive, time-consuming subjects, as much to "be competitive" in the world as to keep them occupied and out of our way.

We don't let them outside any longer to run off steam, because "I haven't got time to watch them" or "they could hurt themselves" or "the school could be held liable" and so on.  By the time they enter adolescence, which in one's desire to be one's own person includes experimentation of more dangerous sorts, they are primed to do stupid things in order to feel something, whether it be drinking liquid nitrogen martinis, drinking hand sanitizer, or "butt chugging", which will kill you about as quickly as you can define it.  And all the while that they want to feel something, they want that something to anaesthetize them further.









It is not too late to change things generally.  It may be too late for some young people, who will bear the scars of experimentation on their abdomen or their throat or their liver, but generally speaking if we take just a few steps back we should be able to provide a better path for our children.

Restrict television and computer use, especially for the young; make them go outside and engage their bodies and their imaginations; make them take naps.  Let them drink alcohol from an early age (diluted with lots of water) so that the association is with pleasure, company, meals, and does not become something one does when one is down, alone, and hurting.  Set puzzles for them, hold a scavenger hunt, create the sort of simple adventure that doesn't cost an arm or a leg.  Allow them time to be alone and to do nothing.  To be children.

Everyone needs a retreat from the world at times, especially those with as-yet unformed, unfinished brains.

I Wonder Where Integrity Wente

I dedicate this column to the inimitable Frances L. Denney, my editor at the Kitchener-Waterloo Record in 1967-1968.

The Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente is at the centre of a plagiarism scandal that has been badly handled by her newspaper, which also saddled the position of Public Editor onto the shoulders of Sylvia Stead, who has been at the paper since the mid-Seventies, and who, even if she were able to be heroically independent, could not escape the appearance of cronyism.  The Globe has since shifted her on the org. chart, to report to the publisher - I wish her well, because it will be difficult.  Because one makes friends, perhaps has intimate relationships, with people over that long a time in a workplace.

I just posted this letter to http://sixthestate.net/?p=6653#comment-701838, but I am running it here, expanded.
    "I entered journalism in the early Sixties.  I have always had a horror of mistakes occurring in print,  because print does not go away -even when a paper folds - as a couple of my early berths have done -  the record is on microfilm etc. 

    "I have to say when a problem arises, nip it in the bud, over-apologize and go back to work.  As a writer I had one correction, which my editor ran reluctantly because it was not an error so much as a misinterpretation by a political wife (whom I admired!) during an election campaign.


    "In my role as department editor I ran three corrections which were the result of incorrect information being given to us. It is not bragging but a demonstration of the expectation we all had that one had to get things right."

When I began writing for a local Thomson newspaper there were two or three golden rules impressed upon me, heaven help me if I broke one of them:

    1- Don't offend the advertisers because they pay the bills.

    2- Keep yourself out of the (news) story, and always properly identify the person, the activity, the thought, etc. because print errors don't go away.

    3- When - as may be inevitable - an error creeps into print, run a correction.



In 1971 I took on the family department of the Oshawa Times, then a Thomson newspaper, now a stack of yellowing, highly acidic paper and a few stacks of microfilm or -fiche at the local Public Library.  When I arrived, the previous occupant of my post had taken the contact book with her and refused to relinquish it (even though the contacts had been acquired during the course of business, during work hours) so I had to start from scratch.

However, when I called local people I was frequently told "I'm not talking to the Times, you guys can never get anything right."  I'm not one to give up easily, unless there is a compelling reason to do so.  So I suggested "let's do this.  We'll run the story and if there are any errors, we will run a correction. But we will also include the origin of the mistake. If it's ours, we will say so, if it's yours, we will also say so."

That was fair enough for them. It helped that I had good staff who went on to greater things.  In my time there, we ran three corrections.  W had been given incorrect information.  As I said in my previous comment, this is not bragging but an acknowledgment of the expectation that, when someone puts him- or herself into the public eye - be it print or other - the least one can do as a journalist is to present an undistorted picture of the person.  And if one uses other people's work, one must attribute the ideas one uses that are not one's own. The staff that I had at that time knew this.  I wonder what has happened in the meantime to require so much sudden interest from j-schools.  The media have always had a lot of power, and plagiarism falls into the area of misuse of that power. It must be front and centre in their thoughts.

Saying "sooner or later everything will have been said" as an excuse to anticipate eventual plagiarism by everyone of everyone else is ridiculous.  People have their own speech patterns, idiosyncratic use of grammar, spelling, and tenor.  If I took someone else's words and ran them here without attribution, the reader would sense it.  Perhaps not know that they had been misused, but that something was not right. 
That is an insult to the reader and to the originator of the words, and diminishes me in my own eyes. 

(c)Daisy Morant

ENOUGH ALREADY!

Welcome to the University of Wisconsin horror show.

http://www.change.org/petitions/university-of-wisconsin-stop-experimenting-on-cats?utm_campaign=friend_inviter_modal&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=share_petition&utm_term=13501824

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin, using National Institutes of Health grants, gave this cat an early birthday present.

I cite the petition:

"According to documents obtained by PETA, a cat named Double Trouble had her eyes, ears, and brain operated on. Steel coils were implanted into her eyes and a stainless steel post was screwed into her skull so that her head could be immobilized during experiments. Then, she had holes drilled into her skull so that electrodes could be inserted in her brain. Experimenters then applied a toxic substance to her inner ears to deafen her and electrical implants were placed deep inside both of her ears."

And we thought that we had eradicated all the sadists and sociopaths that gleefully embark on experiments without a thought for their subjects when we held all those trials at Nuernberg a few decades ago.

We have found, to our cost, that this streak in human nature – callous, deriving pleasure from pain, disregarding the feelings of other life forms because we arrogantly assume that they have none, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding – is blooming. Its rank blossoms bear fruit in laboratories, backyards. In restaurants where a cat, stealing a fish, has his front legs sliced off by the chef. Even in Animal Care and Control, against which various organizations have been fighting for some hears.

Enough Already!

Writing to Bloomberg, mayor of all the (rich, business) people of New York City, is pointless. More persistent souls than I have tried. The man is a chunk of plastic. Nothing will move him or wear him down.

However, there is another politician who may ultimately have a more constructive and weighty position: New York State Assemblyman Michael P. Kearns.

Again, quoting a friend on Facebook:

“As part of an on-going campaign to contact those with influence in NYC Assemblyman Mickey Kearns has stepped forward to ask for more information about our concerns at the horrors at NYC ACC facilities. Please contact him if you want action...This is the email kearnsm@assembly.state.ny.us OR web link form http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/Michael-P-Kearns/contact/”

Assemblyman Kearns wants to hear from everyone who has an opinion – constructive, please. My own letter follows.

“Mr. Kearns:

For three years have been watching, on Facebook, as cat rescue organizations try to rescue animals from the city shelters, and as they try to get some assistance in cleaning up the horrendous filth in some of them, the poor organization, and the callousness of some of the workers. (On this last point I have to say that many people may feel the need to harden themselves to the work they are doing, and one has to respect that; however, there are many people who are simply too callous to be useful.)

Just one example of the horrid conditions - by no means the worst, is contained in my blog http://bluemlein.blogspot.ca/2011/08/off-with-gloves.html showing a mother and her kittens on the floor with a dirty broom by her head; the cage is SO SMALL that she cannot even sit up.[see below – look for the boxing glove]

And as a side issue let me point out the petition currently circulating which may not concern ACC, but most certainly concerns the welfare of cats. http://www.change.org/petitions/university-of-wisconsin-stop-experimenting-on-cats?utm_campaign=friend_inviter_modal&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=share_petition&utm_term=13501824 shows a video of what has been surgically done to a cat in the name of science. Again, it is by no means the worst, but it shows the egregious nature of attitudes toward animals that are wrong, not only because of the pain and suffering they inflict upon the animals, but also because

they dehumanize us all.

I am not a constituent of yours, but a neighbour. And I would like to ask you, as a neighbour, to please do two things:

1 - order an official inquiry into the operations of animal shelters in NYC and the state, complete with reorganization and a more humane approach to animals

and

2 - sponsor a revamped law against cruelty to animals that contains new, strict standards for the humane handling of animals; higher penalties, including jail, for abusing animals whether by an individual or by an organization; and (in this you would undoubtedly be a pioneer) categorically forbid, permanently, the use of domestic animals in any research. I would like to underline the word ANY. It is appalling that the sorts of things that are considered inhuman, at trials of persons accused of crimes against humanity, are constantly, blithely done to animals.

The laws concerning animal care and control are from the nineteenth century, in mind-set if not in fact. The attitude of scientists toward animal experimental subjects dates from that part of the twentieth century that still saw science in all its glory, without awareness of its darker side.

We are well into the twenty-first century. Enough is enough. I am hoping that you, sir, are the one who is steadfast enough, passionate enough, and brave enough to step forward to fight for those who cannot.”

(c)2012 Daisy Morant 

All You Aggregators Out There Be Warned

ALL parts of this blog are copyrighted.  You will require my permission to repost in any form.  Ask nicely; I'm easygoing.

Ah, Stupidity, Thy Name Is Youth

And this highlights what is wrong with the net: anyone can post anything, and others will respond in predictable ways.  The potential to do mischief is staggering.  The post below, concerning the young man pouring vodka down his seemingly unwilling puppy's throat, made it around the net in record time, with thousands of angry reposts which would have been justified if the image had been depicting reality.

Try to add it up - not in your head, it will give you a flipping headache - the time and energy wasted, the number of ulcers aggravated, the thousands of eggs on people's faces - including yours truly, who had checked and found nothing to indicate a hoax at that time - and the number of disturbed people who actually went so far as to issue death threats.  'tain't pretty, is it?
Let me put to rest all doubts you still may have.

Courtesy of the Barrie Police Dept.:

Occurrence Type: Social Media
Occurrence #: BA12039162
Date: Monday, August 13, 2012 - 11:00pm
Details:
On Sunday August 12th 2012, a complainant attended the Barrie Police Service to report a picture he viewed online of unknown male pouring vodka down a puppies throat.
After investigating the matter, Barrie Police located a suspect who advised Police that he had been at a friend’s who had a new puppy.
He advised the puppy would bite and chew anything possible and eventually started chewing on a sealed Vodka bottle.
The puppy was dragging the bottle around the floor while chewing the cap in a playful manner.
The suspect and owner thought it was amusing and took several photos, one of which appeared to portray the suspect pouring vodka down the throat of the dog
However the suspect stated he was actually taking the bottle out of the dog’s mouth while the dog was trying to pull away from him, and the puppy was not given any alcohol.
The suspect later posted this picture on his Facebook account and found the picture had spread to nearly 200 000 viewers, including animal rights activist groups.
He became concerned that the picture was being viewed out of context and deleted all of his email and Facebook accounts.
PC Jon BARNES of the Barrie Police Service spoke to the owner of the dog who confirmed she was present while the photos were taken.
She advised the puppy had not consumed any alcohol and had not been harmed in any way.
After a complete investigation, PC BARNES feels that the puppy was had not been forced to consume alcohol. The investigation was closed by Barrie Police.
However, York Regional Police are now investigating threats being made against the suspect in this matter.
Please contact PC Jon Barnes of the Barrie Police for any inquires.

  http://www.barriepolice.ca/newsroom/2012/08/press-release-nighttime-edition-august-14-2012

MEA CULPA

This image was all over Facebook on the weekend.  I usually check out Snopes.com and Tineye.com (for duplicate images) and found nothing to indicate a hoax.  Moreover, the picture was shared by a person I respect, in the animal aid field. . . she was fooled, as was I.  Thanks to the anonymous person who sent me the link: http://bonjupatten.com/2012/08/13/update-on-the-boy-feeding-the-puppy-vodka-picture/

Ditto and Dot - the irresponsible idiots who posted this picture without the text that is plainly seen in the linked image - deserve to be booted off Facebook.  I, for one, am going to stand in the corner for a few minutes. For the rest of you, please remember to be skeptical of provocative images or "news".  In my years as a journalist and a federal public servant I was fooled only once.  This time.  The idea that a picture is truthful is long obsolete; with digital technology we are arriving at a point where NO picture appears to be truthful.

The Admirable Gen. Romeo Dallaire

Canadian Senator Gen. Roméo Dallaire is the sort of man who deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for the depth of his conscience and the courage of his convictions. Will he get one? hmmmm. It is my cynicism, perhaps, but I think it is unlikely as he stands tall, and stands firm for his beliefs. This is Gen. Dallaire. Great man.

No such praise could be laid at the feet of Canada's current occupant at 24 Sussex Drive, Ottawa (the prime minister, for those who are unfamiliar with the address). This is Stephen Harper. Do you trust him?

Or his hideous crony, the doublespeaking, hypocritical and eminently loathable justice minister, Vic Toews, who declares that if you do not stand with him and his intrusive, invasive, illegal and disgusting snooping bill then you stand with child pornographer. How did this guy ever graduate from kindergarten? And let us not forget that he, who claims piety and steadfastness and who cheated on his wife with an UNDERAGED BABYSITTER. He's had other affairs, and has told many more porkeys, but WHY is he not in JAIL? or at least, in court? He and his crew are forever frothing epileptically about the beasts who have sex with underaged girls - how does he get a pass? This is Vic Toews.

And now we come to an unfortunate young man. His parents had beliefs that did not sit well with western society. They became great friends and supporters of Osama bin Laden, a rich punk who, for want of something constructive to do, decided to start blowing up western targets. What better way to disrupt the U.S. - and the world - than by taking out one of the nerve centres of the financial system? He may have been a fanatic, but he had a keen sense of how to create the most mayhem, which reverberates to this day. This is the World Trade Centre, eerily photographed by my friend, the English artist Garrick Palmer, shortly before it was destroyed.

Never, never disturb the dragon that currently rules the world. In this case the dragon's brain - at least, the idiot puttering around up there in its braincase, Gorge W. Bush - saw the perfect opportunity to best his father, finally, and stake a claim for being the better man. . . . well, you know, if you have read Greek tragedy, that there is always a catch, and no one ever wins. This is the inept Geo. W. Bush.

He decided to focus on Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Hussein was a pain in the arse because, although he had initially been in the pocket of the U.S. he decided to strike out alone. . . forgetting entirely about the dragon and not waking him up etc. The U.S. went after Iraq, blowing it to smithereens, destroying its infrastructure, its culture, its cohesive society - but not its oil, lifeblood of the aforementioned dragon. And when the dastardly Hussein (not a nice man, he, but rather beside the point in terms of politics, where nobody is very nice at all) was found, he was processed via a show trial and hung. This is Saddam Hussein, who was more gentlemanly and dignified at the hour of his death than the raving lunatics who surrounded him.

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to Omar Khadr. Is he a nice, honest, good person? how can one say he was not affected by the ravening idiocies of bin Laden? by his parents' brainwashing adoration of the man? How do we know what he might have been, had he not been warped by his own father, his own mother, and all those U.S.-hating, gun-toting "warriors" fighting the infidel? On July 27, 2002, when he was a boy of fifteen, he was captured by the U.S. after a four-hour gunfight which left him critically wounded: he had two holes in his back and one eye had been permanently blinded, and he was facing away from the battle in which the American soldier Christopher Speer was killed, ostensibly by Omar. This is Omar Khadr receiving medical treatment after being captured; I have turned the picture around so that the seriousness of his wounds can be more clearly seen.

In all the years that followed, Khadr was subjected to interrogation, torture, shunning, and other interventions which are documented and speculated upon to the nth degree. In any event, one would have to have been buried under an ice hotel in Antarctica for the last century not to know that the entire case of Omar Khadr touches raw nerves all around, not least because he was a child soldier, a prisoner at Guantanamo, and a Canadian citizen. And, as the United Nations reminded the powers that be which nonetheless did not listen, he was a child soldier. This is the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms - in French, one of our official languages.

In the complicated pas de deux, trois, quatre . . . .ad infinitum that followed Khadr's case eventually fell into the hands of an honest and upright American who fought for him, William C. Kuebler - there are many others, to whom one should be grateful, if one values one's rights and is dismayed by the ease with which a government can dispense with them.

The resolution of Khadr's case was that he pled guilty to a number of charges, which would mean his spending one more year in Guantanamo with repatriation to Canada to follow. That was October 25, 2010.

The government of Stephen Harper was re-elected, on May 2, 2011 with a majority, which freed Harper and his cronies to cast aside the masks of tolerance and civility that they had successfully used to persuade people that they were not the old Reform Party any longer, but "compassionate" "caring" etc. (The kind of bullshit that successfully moves people to go against their logically developed assessments continues to astound me. But then, I don't get politics.) Apart from the other excrement that has been hitting the fan since they were unmasked - disgusting robocalls, smear tactics, omnibus bills, lying in the face of facts, etc. etc. - what is more than upsetting is the fact that Omar Khadr continues to live at Guantanamo.

This despite the government's "assurances" (not worth the foul gas by which they're spread) that he is to be repatriated. The man is a Canadian citizen. He has paid his dues (which many argue were far greater than what he deserved). He and his lawyers and the American government have a long trail of paper concerning his repatriation. So far, nothing.

Why?

It is a lie. The same government that would think nothing of spying on everyone without compunction, which is rapidly running back to the worst of Victorian times, with its newly built prisons - required for all the felons whose numbers have been dropping for years - its emphasis on shame and its ridiculous defence of members who ought to have their ears boxed for misbehaviour, that government does not want him back and will use whatever delaying tactics it can. The head of this egregious entity - Stephen "after me, who cares?" Harper - is well on the way to having us all believe along with his minion Stockwell Day that dinosaurs happily trod the earth with people in 2000 BC. He has gutted the collection of statistical measurements upon which to rely for a reasoned redeployment of future resources. He has muzzled the public affairs component of the Public Service to the point where they are made a laughing-stock.

Which is why Gen. Dallaire has written a petition, which every person who values independent thought should sign. And everyone who values his or her citizenship. Who believes that, as in the past, the Canadian government will be there to help us if harm befalls us outside the country. Because we are Canadian citizens, all of us, and our government must be there for all of us. Even if they hate us.  

THE PETITION: http://www.change.org/omarkhadr

Another Unknown daVinci Is Unveiled

excerpted from the blog alloldmastersdontbelongtothequeen.co.uk:

"We have been following the astounding strides in art examination, particularly the recent expose by Artist Ron Piccirillo that the Mona Lisa is full of rather blurry animalist forms. But of course Leonardo was known for his ramblings en pittura, his virtuoso asides and his adolescentist humour- albeit in a deeply, profoundly futurist way.




In this rarely-mentioned da Vinci painting, Questo è una Pittura Bizzarro, there are concrete allusions to the machine age in the mechanical forms of the background that might lead one to believe that that is all there is; however, this is a painting about immigration. Prof. Georgina Morant, granddaughter of Prof. Dr. George Morant who famously unburied the crystal skull of the Aztecs, noted on close examination that a very clearly non-white woman in a bathing ensemble stands as though astride a porpoise in the centre-right near the edge, while an equally non-white man appears to be snoozing with his lion centre-left near the outer rim.

"Harrrrumph," Prof. Morant said after clearing her throat rather vigorously, "Leonardo meant to imply that the immigration of all manner, indeed, all colour of persons, would, at some future time - though we don't yet know when - emigrate to Canada, the land of multicult - and what could be more alludingly correct than Canada? Why, I have - this is totally speculative of course, I haven't had my tea yet without which I cannot counteract the effect of the Carruades de Lafite - yes, I have seen images of Canadian provinces, a side view of half of Gordon Lightfoot's head, and the tops of the heads of the fifteen thousand minions of Der Leader, bent over their daily slog, which must be reconstituted as benevolences flowing from God Harper. How can it not be Canada?"

Indeed.
-photomanipulation (c)Daisy Morant

Beeeeware the Beeeehive!!!

-pretend you're Ferdinand. Just sit and sniff the flowers


Many are the turkeys who are busy revamping FB in time for a splashy announcement at a tech conference this Thursday. This ilk presume to know what it is that you or I want without actually asking us.

Really, the paternalistic attitude is a bit much. This is the 21stC. Are we not supposed to be reaching a consensus on ideas, rather than allowing them to be pushed down our throats - then mumbling our gratitude as we tug our forelocks??? (At least, that is what the computer community has been pouring into our heads for the last decade and a half as they raced desperately toward blanket coverage of the planet. Everyone must get plugged in! instantaneous communication will be the new order of the day, just like that at the basic building block, the cell. Or the bee in the hive.) We are already more than halfway there. And it's been handled cleverly - at least until the great recession sprang upon us.

Everyone happy? no? then you should check your status to see whether your friends have included you in the latest event - check the ticker. What has become the social principal networking site, Facebook appears to be constantly worried about losing market share. Many and often are the changes thus pushed onto the users. Consequently FB is becoming less and less friendly as the company pushes its users toward a pay-as-you-go model. It is not enough to make billions from advertising, there are a few drops left in ye olde lemon, time to squeeze them out! hurry before google does! or myspace!(LOL)

It is not that one is against change; it has never been that. Rather, it is unnecessary change, illogical change, more time-consuming change, change simply for the sake of change, to give the illusion of movement. After all, is this new world not supposed to be one of constant change? constant adaptation? a more ruthless sink-or-swim?

The usual note from those working for FB and every other internet company has a tenor which can only come from being hopped up on 15 cups of lightly roasted java, and usually has the aura of just-enough-sense to make one sound sane.

The idea that there is virtue in being chronically overworked, overstressed, with insufficient resources to combat the incipient cold, the burgeoning conviction that it is all for naught, strikes me as absolutely ridiculous. Not just that, but also so tragically counterproductive. Other applications and other sites have had their moment; some did not change and others changed too much but all of them had this in common with FB - the same rabid attitude that has infected the online world and now spills over into reality.

I am for temperate movement of ideas as well as people, projects, communications. The email composed in anger and sent off in haste has haunted many a sender. Reflection is not supposed to enter into this new, reflexive world. The idea that sometimes an idea does not work even after it has been considered and debated, or tried, seems to have no place in this universe. The inference that things that do not work at lightning speed ought to be obsolete is, in fact, an obsolete idea.

There is value in everything, even the unconsidered afternoon sitting in a field, thinking or simply being. but not in this universe, which is supposed to be profitable everywhere and at all times, with everything superfluous jettisoned as a drag on speed.

Speed, however, can only go so far. Even now Google is falling over itself while one is entering a search term, anxiously shoving into one's face answers projected from one's partial entries.





-yes, this is what you'll get with reindeer urine! ©Ernst Barlach

While researching a title of a woodcut made by the great German expressionist Ernst Barlach I entered "Reitender Urian" - before I had finished, it was anxiously asking me whether I didn't really mean "reindeer urine, you great clomping twit, hopelessly challenged as you are by your fingers, are you certain you don't want to get your brain wired into Google?" No, I did not want reindeer urine, not in fact and not even in scintillating pixels. We appear to have gone into the deep end with all this nonsense. Machinery - whether mechanical or electronic - is meant to serve us, to aid us, to be there as a great resource. Not our master, not our director. We should take ten and think on it.



- everything one needs: oxygen, sunshine, time to think.

unattributed images ©Daisy Morant