Arts: Africa California Canada: African exhibit Paris bursts with creativity, while Calif can't discern limits of art

• Africa
• California
• Canada

Africa: Huge splashy exhibit in Paris features the creative edge of contemporary African artists

Le centre Pompidou, Paris' big art gallery and performance complex, thru August 8 features of huge exhibition of contemporary art by Africans - those located in Africa now, or dwelling and artmaking in the Diaspora (or both) - an exhibit with an atmosphere all its own, according to Emilie Boyer King, reviewing for The Christian Science Monitor, "Eye on African Art," July 22, 2005. Like an urban marketplace in a large African city or the smaller versions ubiquitously present in each village, the Pompidou bids us look well as stereotypes of African art evaporate.

"Africa Remix" is the largest collection of contemporary African art ever shown in Europe. For the first time, works by artists from the entire African continent and the diaspora are brought together in a vast, sometimes daunting space, filled with sound, color, and powerful, often disturbing, images. These works, which include painting, sculpture, photography, and video and music installations, would cause their Western counterparts envy.

We can at least dare to hope that this exhibition will travel from the Pompidou Center to North America, at least to New York and Toronto, heh? - Owlb



Kids pix from the terror-zone
Don't forget to look at this webpage of African children's art. - Owlie Skowlie

California: state's Department of Justice exhibits agitprop piece in cafeteria

To a mounting chorus of dismay and outrage, citizens of California are registering objections to a work of agitational propaganda by a California lawyer included in an exhibit of dozens of artworks in the cafeteria of the Department of Justice building, and sanctioned in the name of artistic freedom by the Deputy of that bureaucracy.

Under the rubric of "political artwork," the item consists of a ruff painting of the USA, shaped somewhat like a map of the country, with the California end sunk beyond view deep in a toilet. Along the left vertical edge is a large caption: "T'anks to Mr. Bush." Flushing the flag down the toilet, resonanting with the apparently false allegations of a GI flushing a Holy Book. However, in this case, all allegations are true, altho even Fox News Channel's email alert didn't mention the name of the agitprop lawyer.

"For those that it offends, they shouldn't look at it. For those that want to talk about public-policy matters and look at the art, they're free to do so. But it's their free choice," said Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer (search).

"They have a right to be upset with that piece, it's their right. They have a right to say that they don't like it, it's their right not to look at it," said Ellen Taylor of the California Lawyers for the Arts.

But critics say this isn't about censorship, it's about whether partisan political art belongs in the state government facility.

Artistic expression is a value that should not often be set aside, but at the same time art is not a limitless activity, nor its products without any constraints whatsoever in a society that has insisted there are hate-crimes which indicate a limiting criteria also for art. Usually, most objections to the display of art, even when it is questionable as just arted-up political graphics, are satisfied when the locale of exhibition or display carefully taken into account. Different places are subject to different decora, according to the specificity of the sphere involved. Two considerations come quickly to mind around the fact that the location in this case is not a free-standing artspace.

First, the display of this art by lawyers is subject to a decorum determined by its setting in a cafeteria; it is tasteless indeed to subject people who come to the space for lunch to the display of a political graphic that may seriously upset them, and indeed is calculated to do so. Not everybody in the cafeteria is a lawyer ready for a challenge, an argument, a case, and rebuttal at the noon hour. The display of this agitprop is not only tasteless; it violates the sphere-specificity of a location for enjoying a meal or snack, equally available to all whether they enjoy the defamantion of the President or not, and the displacement of anger at the President onto the American flag itself or not.

Second, the sphere-specifity of the cafeteria with its own proper decorum for discriminating what art is appropriate, what political graphics are allowable, is itself embedded within another sphere-specificity in this case - the larger context of the headquarters of the Department of Justice and the Attorney General (the top copy) of the state of California. Given the non-partisan values of a state police and prosecutorial task, there is little reason to think that art or political grahics on display should be devoted to any instance of displaying the American flag dipped in a toilet in order to interpret the policy of the President of the United States.

The idea that the freedom of art products to be exhibited anywhere at any time irrespective of their content and the community of those within a sphere-specific locality and its appropriate decorum assumes that art has no limits, that political-agitation graphics are art, and that such material should have free go in space provided for another purpose by the taxpayers of the state who expect all points of view to be expressed only within lunch-time and lunch-space decorum in accord with the justicial decorum of the broader institution in which this indiscriminate material was included. - Politicarp

Canada: website Artists in Canada includes hi-ly accessible regular art-education feature by Robert Glenn

A directory of artists and artnews sources that seeks to serve online all of Canada, includes as one of its regular features a weekly feature, "Robert Glenn's Weekly Letter: Insight and Inspiration for Your Artistic Career." Glenn seeks to be interesting in his write-ups for everyone who stops by to take a look and engage in a brief read, but it's obvious he wants to help young artists perhaps without much opportunity at art education in school, and artists of any age who are isolated or shy about seeking skill development in institutional settings. Thus, Glenn's weekly letters on the arts and the skills useful, perhaps necessary, to become a professional artist, however much one is self-tawt. This week his offering is on the theme of 'Finding form.'

A sample that struck my attention-button:

... [T]here's a difference between 'observed form' and 'developmental form.' To get an idea of this there's a simple exercise: Lay your hands on an ordinary rock, set it on a ground, light it and copy it. Leave out ancillary elements like moss or texture. Just stick to copying the form. Now try painting a similar rock from your imagination.

The website offers much more than its art-ed weekly feature. There are directories, including one of new artists who have linked up and to whom the voyaging art-voyeur can in turn click-link to see the amazing graphics displays in many media, all now digitalized for your Internet viewing. - Anaximaximum


Artists in Canada

Iraq: Constitution writing Canada's gmarriage hurts Women's Rights in new Iraq Constitution, I speculate

Yesterday's London UK daily The Independent is emblazoned with the title I hoped I would never see, "New Iraqi constitution must follow Islam on women's rights, says Shia," in an article by Kim Sengupta, July 21, 2005. Explicitly, women should be curtailed in their rights in regard to marriage, divorce, and inheritance laws, according to the committee drafting this part of the proposed constitutional text.

"We reject the changes prepared on the 1959 law because some Islamic parties want to kidnap the rights of women in Iraq," said Yanar Mohammed, a women's rights activist and head of Women's Freedom in Iraq Movement. "We reject such attempts because women should be full citizens with full rights, not semi-human beings."

I feel very sad at this news and the need for those like Yanar Mohammed to put their eneregies into such a basic concern that one would think would be easy for the Shia to grant. Emotionally, it connects for me with the worldwide publicity given to Canada's new laws demoting marriage and replacing it with a generic business arrangement without any reference to the differentia that make the three kinds of intimate union, each so richly unique in which the intimate union of 1man1woman constitutes a special bond across all the contrasts of physiogamy, biochemistry, mood structures, and stage-of-ife structures that make that kind of couple a special case, which the state may have its own interest of prioritization. Now that such distinctions are in pitiful shambles, and Canada's example touted around the world in that regard, why wouldn't Shia in Iraq react to the very idea of Woemn's Rights in marriage. But, then of course, for them there's the whole polygamy consideration. Maybe they can show Canada the way on that issue, I ironize. But, seriously, what happens to the chldren in the male-dominated Shia marriage, divorce, and inheritance arrangements? - Owlb

Juridics: Supreme Court: Bush nominee John Roberts undergoes process quite different from Canada's lame exercize

Heah cum da Judge! Bush nominee John Roberts - "A conservative with few hard edges," reports Warren Richey in The Christian Science Monitor, July 21, 2005

Bush's pick meets measured reaction - "Democratic statements on Roberts could signal a less-than-contentious confirmation", by Linda Feldmann and Gail Chaddock, CSM, July 21, 2005

Ideology's high profile in hearings- It's figured before, but not always overtly, by Gail Russell Chaddock, CSM, July 22, 2005

Roberts' record shows resistance to limits on Prez Power, by Warren Richey, CSM, July 22, 2005. "Clues on how Roberts might act on high court - His record while at a federal appeals court, though sparse, shows a resistance to limits on presidential power.

Advice and Consent: what the US Constitution says about Senate's role in Presidential nominations, Heritage House's Research WebMemo #800, on American founding and history, July 22. 2005 (part of a forthcoming book).

Supreme Court nomination process Canada

Justice Minister Irwin Colter defends farcical Supreme Court nomination processs, January 1, 2004

CBC calls this item "INDEPTH" but its' actually a thumbnail numbskull piece without any critical depth whatsoever, updated June 17, 2005

Report says Supreme Court nomination process "needs work," in wake of 2 recent quickie installations of justices by Paul Martin, August 27, 2004

Measuring the Growing “Democracy Gap” Between the Supreme Court and Parliament by Neil Seeman, Adjunct Research Fellow, Fraser Institute, August 6, 2003

Sports: Mixed Martial Arts: Once no-rules combat sports rise to compete with top boxing events

Combat arts, or in the older terminology "mixed-martial arts" such as the public has learned from Jackie Chan movies, are on the rise. Not just in movies, gymnasiums, and underground club-arenas, but in large events with ticketed boxoffices that make comparison with major boxing events possible and inevitable.

Stateline carries an indepth analysis and an enlargeable chart making that inevitable comparison. Extreme fiting, as its sometimes called

has existed since the early 1990s but only since 1996 has it followed a set of unified rules, according to Tim Lueckenhoff, national president of the Association of Boxing Commissions (ABC) and an administrator with the Missouri Boxing Commission. “Before then, there were very few rules that protected the participants from serious injury,” he said.

Some states are harnessing the sport’s popularity to generate tax revenue, while virtually the same number have taken a "not in my backyard" stance.

Mixed martial arts is a legal, regulated sport in at least 19 states: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Washington.

Nevada is the premier locale for the top events.

In his July 20 article online, "Combat sport in the spotlight," author Joseph Popiolkowski supplies a host of fascinating details about the historical background and crazy-quilt of state-by-state patterns of regulation and nonregulation in the USA, but he doesn't supply our thirst for something of the cultural links between the live events and the rash of ultra-extreme no-rules combat in video-games. As extreme fiting becomes better known, it will become increasingly controversial. When its consciousn and unconscious links to the video-games industry, now exposed as wilfully subliminally suypplying video-sex scenarios under the violence and rendering the whole experience one of violent sexual pleasure, we're going to come under a barrage of examinations also of the unconscious links between sex and violence, in the sense of esoteric rape, such as we have never before contemplated. Hey, Fight Club was mere peter-pannery. - Owlb

Asia: India & Nuke Proliferation:Upsetting Asia's Atomic Applecart

Today The Christian Science Monitor has published an important editorial, available online here, that notes without flinching just what the situation is in Asia in regard to the proliferation of nucelar weapons (a Weapon of Mass Destruction, folks). To get to the editorial's key point,

India, for instance, received the blessing of the Bush administration this week to expand its nuclear energy and weapons programs - despite the fact that India tested atomic weapons in 1998 and is not a member of the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty group]. Mr. Bush promised India's visiting prime minister that he would seek congressional and international approval to sell nuclear technology to this burgeoning US ally. Pakistan, too, has recently been let off the hook for its 1998 nuclear tests.

Later in the CSM's commentary, we get the companion paragraph on India:

To his credit, Bush did win limited concessions from India to suspend its tests and to allow international inspectors of its civilian nuclear programs. But that's a limited victory for nonproliferation if other nuclear powers, such as Russia, decide they, too, can go around a central rule of the NPT and sell nuclear technology to non-NPT nations.

That's the thumbnail on India and Bush's struggles toward a consistent regional policy amidst all the manoeuvering of the parties there, some of which seem to want to be ready to knock their own closest neighbours into oblivion.

The editorial goes on to make specifications about China, North Korea, and even Japan which now feels like Taiwan that it must be prepared for any eventuality arising from the combined nuke arsenals of the insane leadership of North Korea and the soaring ambitions of China to dominate the Pacific out from a conquered Taiwan.

J.D. McQuire of China e-Lobby comments on the US agreement to open up nuclear technology and advanced weapons to India:

So much for the [Chinese] Communists’ charm offensive [toward India] , the Communists never came close to what President Bush did: “give India access to U.S. nuclear technology and conventional weapons systems” [WaPo: see link below] as part of his plan “help position India . . . as a regional counterweight to China”. The deal must be approved by Congress, due to India’s refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act, the same treaty that has been so effective in stopping Communist China from aiding Iran and Stalinist North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. In an address to Congress, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh emphasized his nation’s “solid non-proliferation track record” [WaTi: see below], insisting India – a possessor of nuclear weapons since 1998 – has “never been and will never be a source of proliferation of sensitive technologies . . . even though we have witnessed unchecked nuclear proliferation in our own neighborhood which has directly affected our security interests." Did you hear that Communist China? Meanwhile, Singh also reiterated his full support for the War on Terror, and went further in insisting “We cannot be selective in this area” – a pointed reference to Communist ally Pakistan’s history of backing terrorists in Kashmir. ..."

I'm indebted to McQuire's paragraph above for this rich list of live links! Get better soon, J.D - that's health I'm referring too, not the quality of your China e-Lobby blog which is always top rate. - Owlb

Bush Officials Defend India Nuclear DealWashington Post, July 20, 2005
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh addresses US Congress, Washington Times, July 19, 2005
Indian PM Makes Nuclear Appeal to Congressby Patrick Goodenough, Cybercast News, July 20, 2005
Indian Pm back US against terror UPI/Washington Times, July 19, 2005

Terrorism: Religion opposing it: Toronto - Muslim leaders from all Canada unite publicly against terrorism in our society

Friendship with Toronto's Muslim Community

It's an honour in these troubled times in city life, to be able to express friendship with Toronto's own Muslim community. Because of events yesterday, now we can do so by citing a major concrete action taken by Muslim leaders here and from across Canada, who insisted the critical moment had arrived, despite any personal risk to themselves, to gather publicly and make their own affirmation of their part in broader communal life of Toronto and all Canada.

It's not as tho this move is something utterly brand new, something that has occured only after London 7/7. But what's new is that the affirmation has surfaced, has surfaced unitedly, and has even taken to the airwaves on TV where viewers could see calm, caring, intelligent people with human faces and words of encouragement for us all as to our prospects for an open urban cultural together.

Leading Muslim scholars and leaders have expressed in those tidbits the medium lets thru, powerful religious thawts about good neighbourlinesss that we all depend upon for the hi quality of civic life that Toronto enjoys, come what may at the hand of the terrorists enemies of all of us - whether we be Muslims, Christians, Jews, secularist Humanists, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, and people too who have no description or label to identify themselves according to their ulitmate values. The only line of normative division in civic Toronto is the one that sorts between good neighbours and terrorists or violent criminals. May God have mercy on us all! - Owlb

Toronto: Subway Greater Toronto Area terrorist-threat focused on transit system, especially subway

Toronto Subway Watch

Globe & Mail's Joe Friesen and Katie Rook, July 13, 2004, "Is Toronto prepared for a terrorist attack?"

At the end of the day, I don't know how you can prevent all this from happening. There's things you can do reasonably, and people are trying to do the best they can, but it's never enough and it never will be enough in this new world, this new norm that we live in. - Julian Fantino, Ontario Commissioner of Emergency Management

This article from December has the most hard facts, and gives the best informed overview of the situation. - Owlb
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Joel Johannesen's Proud to be Canadian blog, July 12, 2005, "It's like I planned it: Secret Liberal memos reveal terrorist plot to blow up Toronto subway."
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CTVNews, November 14, 2004, "CSIS monitored Toronto subway after Spain attack."
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Canadian Free Press, July 13, 2005, "Protecting Toronto's subway." Associate Editor Arthur Weinreb offers some deft analysis of the difference between the Toronto Transit Corporation's ridershp patterns and those of other terror-struck cities. Along the way, Weinreb again gets too feisty, using the occasion to express hostility to the TCC chair Howard Moscoe's style of response to media gangs with one-liners. Of course, there are many different on-camera styles, and what may work well in litening up a situation in an hours-long meeting, doesn't come out so well when swarmed. Weinreb doesn't have a fit sense of occasion in trashing Moscoe as a "bufoon," when in actuality he is a very hard working civil servant and politician. Still, Howard, you'd better heed the grouch's warning. Toronto is very much on the terrorist map, and the TTC's subsystem is a juicy prey for those looking for the best possible target here. To think Al-Qaeda isn't here, has no able-bodied, sharp-minded devotees here, is irresponsible. Our problem besides defendin the system itself and its customers, is to accept the presence of the terrorists in the city, and differentiate constantly what makes them the foe and enemy of all Torontonians, including our large talented hard-working civic-minded community of Muslims, most of them immigrants. Weinreb has something to learn in writing about these themes, but likewise Moscoe just has to self-censor the grab for a glib fallacy that can be ruthlessly offensive and produce reactions aimed at him, such as the one Weinreb hurled in a moment of huff. - Owlb
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Little Green Footballs, posted by Charles with 81 comments, December 13, 2004, "Toronto Subway Monitored After Spain Attack."
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Don't forget to click the live-linked headline that will take you to a Google page of mostly recent reports on with a focus on the subway as temptation for terrorist pleasure. - Owlb

Thursday updates, new blog entries, hot newslinks - Canadian drug tunnel closed by US

•New today: Human Diversity: Physiogamy & Development: Hermaphroditism - no miracle, just creation doing what God intended, I'd say
•New today : Canada: Senate: Upper Chamber makes it official: Generic "marriage" is in, trad mrrge out - Steele effect in full force?
•New today : Terrorism: UK London counts 1 injured, otherwise survives new bomb attempts
•New today: Economics: USA Employment down, manufacturing up - thumbnail background & forecast
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•New yesterday Toronto Special: Quirks of City Life : Toronto whacks Miss Universe
•New yesterday Philosophy: Science & Story: The importance of narrative in science, not only compatible, but inseparable
•New yesterday Juridics: Children's Rights: Martin Guggenheim asks, What's wrong with 'children's rights'? UPDATED WITH MAJOR COMMENTARY!
•New yesterday Sports: Baseball: Phillies hold their own, Nats surprise of the season; Jays seek breakthru past triumvirate
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New today - unblogged newslinks: none yet!
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New yesterday - unblogged newslinks:
• UN Reserve Fund could have prevented disaster in Niger's famine
• Hizbollah terrorist org's parliament members get ministerial post in Lebanon's govt
• Turk Foreign Minister condemns US Sen Trancredo's bomb-Mecca call if US hit by Islamic terrorists again
• Bush nominates Fed Appeals Court Judge, John Roberts, to become Supreme Court Justice
• South Africa's Mbeki pressured by oppositon Movement for Democratic Change: trade loans for Zimbabwe reforms
• Peruvians march to protest major govt corruption
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• New two days back Canada: Politics: 66% of Tories want to keep Harper as leader; 41% of all Canadians (voters?)
• New two days back Latin America: Guatemala: New info surfaces on rightwing death squads in Guatemala's recent past, some Pentecostal Christians implicated
• New two days back War: Terrorism Dead chldren killing Al-Quaeda. Plus: Al-Jazeera lashes back in its own propaganda war.
• New two days back Politics: Quebec: LeDevoir's Jean-Louis Bourque says only return of Bernard Landry will stave off PQ's disaster
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• New three days backEconomics: Social Audit of firms: Ethical investing faces self-serving business annual reports that hide anti-social practices
• New three days back: Science: Behaviourism: Behaviour causes attitudes, says blog Canadian Steele, so you'll get over State-imposed gmarriage
• New three days back: Politics: Asia: Pakistan is no true ally
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• UPDATE July 18, "China Wants War," Charles R. Smith, NewsMax.com on the Communist Chinese General's threat to use nukes to take-over Taiwan in the case of a US defense of the island
• UPDATE: July 19, "Mad-cow 'threat': overblown politics," a commentary by Froma Harrop, in The Christian Science Monitor throws further lite on the ongoing developments regarding the sale of Northern beef south of the border. Scroll to July 15 blog entry Commerce: US & Canada: How now beef fans, Mad Cow ban lifted!, wow!
• UPDATES: Karl Rove story(our original blog, July 13).
•• July 18 "Bush loses some luster on crediblity."
•• July 16 "Rove emailed security official about talk," John Solomon,San Fransisco Gate raises question of a "leak" not necessarily meeting legal requirements for penalty. It depends on several factors.
••Don't miss our July 15 update, "Valerie Palme's Soap Opera," to our blog entry for Wed, July 13 - the one about Karl Rove, Whistleblower in The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal.
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• Don't miss from the intrepid and always interesting Canadianna's Place on "Same-Sex, the RC Church, the UN, and so on...."

Human Diversity: Physiogamy & Development: Hermaphroditism - no miracle, just creation doing what God intended, I'd say

Yes, indeed. A South African online newsource put me onto this story out of Hlang Thar Yar, Myanmar (dated July 13, so it's aging nicely, but the reported event seems to have taken place on June 21). A person who had grown up regarding herself as a woman, had been appropriately socialized in that genderal-direction (we may presume), and was regarded by her milieu, the society around her, to be just that - a woman - suddenly had to face another reality.

Thin Sandar, a chicken seller in Myanmar, had always dreamed of being a man. When she inexplicably grew a penis last month, the 21-year-old treated it as an awe-inspiring omen - as have the thousands of stunned villagers who have traveled to a pagoda to see him.

"On the morning of the full moon day of June 21, I noticed my thing (sex organ) was not the same as before," Thin Sandar, who now goes by the male name Than Sein, told AFP in an interview at his home.

I had read of such cases before. One out of the Caribbean was reported in a story in the Toronto press (the Star, if I recall correctly), in a remote community where the clan had previously had individuals with experiences similar to Monk-in-waiting Than Sein (formerly Thin Sandar). In the Caribean case, the young woman dropped her hidden but maturing testes in a relatively rapid way also, acquired manhood as a result - and easily transitioned in that society from the daily rounds and duties assigned to females to those assigned to males, and with little performance deficit. There was apparently little psychological disturbance either, as the community accepted the transition and change. Now, the young man was expected to find a bride and marry, which if I recall correctly, happened in due course.

In the meantime, specialists at Johns Hopkins Medical School became involved, because of the intense curiosity of profession in regard to hermaphroditic existence (there are many varieties, and it is at term that covers many varied human developmental variations of development of sexual/reproductive physogomy and physiology). The famous Dr John Money was one of the Johns Hopkins specialists. And for an orientation to the these variations in sexual/genderal development of physiogamy, I recommend his attempt at a systematic study,Gay, Straight, and In-between, which is now some years old. One lamentable thing about Dr Money's career with hermaphrodite's is that he and his students and colleagues early-on felt that an infant should be medically classified as soon as possible, an education program conducted with parents of the physiognomically-variant children in these regards, and a program of operation/s should begin as soon as possible. This was understood as "gender assignment." A child just could not grow up healthily without that determination made by doctors and parents as early in the child's life as possible.

Now, however, with years of experience of children so assigned having grown up to realize that they were dsenabled from waiting for such a time as they mite make a determination of their sexual identity for themselves. One may wish to counter that sometimes bitter after-consideration of the person affected, as an inevitable complaint from someone who had the all-important choice made early and graciously so, for them. In any case, it seems that the surgical processes are no longer rushed; more discussion between parents and doctors, more options, and more maturation of the child is the rule now.

Many people want to substitute a strictly binomial absolute rule of a person being born either a female or a male. This is just not the case, altho the numbers of the general population who express this inherent variation according to biological-mathematical rules that can be somewhat traced and the results quantiified are a very small minority. Such people do exist.
Now, one of the major ideological approaches backing up strict binomialism in regard to human physiogamy of sexual-organic and genderal development hoooks itself onto the Biblical account of Adam and Eve. Especially nowadays, we hear often from the likes of Jerry Falwell that God didn't intend intimate unions of Adam and Steve. It's become a cultural cliché of far wider than the issue of the public-legal order's affirming the uniqueness and difference of the intimate union of 1woman1man in comparison to other kinds of intimate unions.

Entirely aside from what the law should recognize in regard to the three (main) types of intimate union, it does no one any good to bury one's head in the sand of strict binomialism of human physiogomy and psychology too, for that matter, regarding sexual-organic and genderal development. The Bible should not be exploited as a book of science, here particularly noting it is not a textbook of the philosophy of sex or the science of human sexuality in its stages of development. But, it certainly remains the Good Book, in that it gives us the vision of God's creation of humanity, of all humans being created in the image of God - exemplifying that, in the first chapters of the Book of Genesis, by focusing on the most usual and reproductively necessary two-sexed 1woman1man couple, who we may assume achieved orgasm together, but who we can not be so sure ever achieved intimate union of mutual and reciprocal love. That detail is held back from us by the Genesis story, interestingly enuff. In the story's parameters, of course, there's no indicatoin that they had any other options of other potentianl partners to choose from in regard to procreation.

So, in the Good Book's great story, there they were, and here we are - created in the image of God, hermaphrodites so created too, and all too well acquainted with sin, tho some more sinned against than sinning, and all in need of liberation and salvation, freeing from unequal bondage and gaining forgiveness of sins. At least that's the Christian conception. That is, the Christian conception when the community gets its head up out of the sands of biblicism to a truer appreciation of the Bible, read without imposing anti-scientific theories upon what kinds of human diversity come with the creation order in all of its glory, terror, mystery. and variety. - Owlb


Link

Canada: Senate Upper Chamber makes it official: Generic "marriage" is in, trad mrrge out - Steele effect in full force?

Yesterday, or rather very late Tuesday nite, with the legislation to alter the public-legal meaning of marriage having passed the mandatory three readings and votes in the House of Commons weeks before, the third reading in the all-appointee upper chamber of Parliament, the unelected Senate, was completed and at the end of the debate was voted upon. The Senate, composed chiefly of Liberals passed the legistlation: generic marriage is in by a vote of 47-21. And today, standing in for the Governor-General, the ailing Adrienne Clarkson, in her place the Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court, Beverley McLachlin, signed the decree of Royal Consent (I think that's the expression). We have us a new law here in Canada, becoming the fourth of the world's countries so to legislate (along with the Netherlands, Belgium, and quite recently Spain). Perhaps our countries could form a new international alliance, and ask for a seat on the UN Security Council.

Andrew Mills reports in the Toronto Star:

The new law follows the decisions of lower courts in all but four Canadian provinces and territories that overturn traditional marriage laws. So the effect of yesterday's signing is that same-sex marriages will now be performed in Alberta, Prince Edward Island, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories.

Earlier this year, the Conservative party tried to delay the Commons' vote on same-sex marriage, hoping to make it an issue for the next election.

That attempt failed, and for the past three weeks, Bill C-38 has made its way through the Senate. ...

Nevertheless, the Conservatives say that if they are elected to government they will reopen the issue by introducing a bill to redefine marriage as an institution shared by one man and one woman — the exact opposite effect of the new law.
"We take the view that marriage is a heterosexual not a homosexual institution," Tory justice critic Vic Toews said. "We don't take away rights. This is simply a recognition of a very unique relationship that is heterosexual in nature."

But gays and lesbians advocating for same-sex marriage would see such a move as stripping away rights the state has now said apply to same-sex couples.

So, now we enter the period where the "behaviour changes attitude" platitude in the blog Canadian Steele's hypothesis gets tested in a very special instance. The clock is ticking .... will attitudes change once and for all? Will the exceptionality of 1woman1man marriage die from mind altogether among the great mass of Canadians of all languages? Will Lesbian intimate unions evaporate in the mist of the generic, never to find their own legal particularity in Canadian law anywhere in this vast subcontinent? Will Gay-ideology males exult openly about how they get the best of the whole deal? Stay tuned ... but don't expect anything soon ... remember attitudes are fickle and swing on their pendula to one extreme before they reach their farmost extension, then to halt at a point before beginning the descent of return. Can we reach a balanced state of particularity and difference of recognition? Will 1woman1man wedbond, with the intention of permanence, and to the exlusion of all others, will this form of intimate union every be prioritized again by the Canadian state? Right now, I doubt it. Game over. But I must add a third installment to my essay of reply to Tommy Steele before I can explain, in my terms, why I think not. - Owlb

See my blog entries for

Canadian Steele's Errors: A Syllabus

Wednesday, July 13 [#1] Ethics: Sexual Morals: Do refWrite and Canadian Steele share a kernel of truth in common?

Monday, July 18 [#2] Science: Behaviourism: Behaviour causes attitudes, says blog Canadian Steele, so you'll get over State-imposed gmarriage

Forthcoming [#3]






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Terrorism: UK London counts 1 injured, otherwise survives new bomb attempts

Three Tube stations, as Londoners affectionately call their subway stations, were hit and missed by wannabe bombers in a new terror-scare today. A bus also was hit by a device that popped one of its windows.

Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, comparing today's incidents to the 7 July attacks, said: "These are smaller devices, some of them have not gone off properly. We may have recovered forensic material. It may be important to our investigation."

He said that the situations were under control and nothing indicated any form of chemical attack. He added: "Now is the time to get London moving again."

He said later that he did not want to say too much, adding: "At the end of this process we want to have some trials."

He did say, however, that the forensic material available may represent a significant breakthrough. And he asked Londoners who had photos and images from the scenes to send them to the police to help with the investigation.

From the terrorists point of view, where the 7/7 bombings were a "huge success," today's were a dismal failure, one mite say. Still, one injury is one too many. - Owl

UK's Mean Imam of Murder promises more bombs or whatnot

Economics: USA Employment down, manufacturing up - thumbnail background & forecast

Steve Marr, inspiration behind and founder of Business Reform magazine, on BR Blogs reports the following info, asks the following questions, and invites comments:

In a little noticed report, the Federal Reserve reveals that U.S. manufacturing output increased .9% in June, the biggest improvement in 18 months. That means our total manufacturing output has reached record levels. But at the same time, manufacturing employment is dropping, with 1.5 million fewer manufacturing workers than in November, 2001. First, efficiency has increased dramatically, allowing fewer workers to produce more goods. Part of this is due to the investments made in computer and related technology, fueling a 15.5% increase in computer related output. The second factor driving the paradox is that our economy is migrating toward a service and information base, away from manufacturing. In 2004, manufacturing was only 12.7% of the GNP, down from 13.2% in 2001. Is your business more efficient? Is your business moving toward the information economy? How do you respond to these changes?

Business Reform Magazine, online edition, frontpage.

Toronto Special: Quirks of City Life Toronto, the Universe, & the Bare Nakedies

I looked in Toronto Star for some take on Toronto's scandal of inhospitality to Miss Universe, and tho I search the daily's news index, its 7-day archive, its columnists in the City category, and some others - nada.

I looked in The Globe and Mail - the same.

I looked in Toronto Sun and found Mike Strobel on top of the sorry mess, "It's one sorry bunch: Mayor Miller apolgizes to Miss Universe for snub," his article's headline said, playing on an idiomatic double-meaning of "sorry."

I looked in National Post and found this fact-filled and dismaying report on the city's 7-week delay in even congratulating international award winner Miss Glebova, by James Cowan. "Leave crown at home, Glebova told: Toronto mayor apologizes after Miss Universe snubbed." There's a lovely picture of her, as well.

The first place I went online to see what commentary was coming thru was Canada Free Press. It has John Lawrence on hand in a Guest Column to opine on how and why "Miss Universe given thumbs down" by the city law and its enforcers. CFP's Associate Editor, Arthur Weinreb, goes on at greater length in "Mayor and council snub Miss Universe."

These latter two gentlemen are not gentle. Their joint heavy-handedness supplies some facts, but they are so narrowly humourless and grinding on a topic that could have been more effectively communicative were its tone laced with some women-supporting wryness - since in their hands the topic shifts from one about the new Miss Universe to one about the Toronto Mayor and councillors, as does most of the other verbiage in other news sources - but without the nasty edge of these latter two "gents." At best, the pieces were written too hastily because the Mayor was on TV that very nite apologizing for the discourtesy of no great city welcome, excusing himself due to his all-too-busy schedule. That may be. But seven weeks, without the Tourism Office giving a heads-up to the Mayor and Council, so that at least a friendly phone call went out to the lady of the day - that's too much not enuff.

But, the real story here is simply the calm and charming graciousness of Miss Natalie Glebova, a graduate of Ryerson University in our fair city, and an immigrant from Russia. She is a beauty in many ways, one could easily see and hear from the TV coverage given her in this ... what do they call it? flap? snafu? boorishness? The only critical word she used about the treatment given her by officials of the city she loves, was to mention that the episode made her feel "sour." Me too. - Owlb

Philosophy: Science & Story: The importance of narrative in science, not only compatible, but inseparable

Roald Hoffman, writing in American Scientist, uses the classic example of a 1905 scholarly paper by Albert Einstein regarding the photoelectric cell, to demonstrate his thesis that story has an integral place in the scientific process, contrary to the phobias of great hordes of scientists in denial about the phenomenon.

Science seems to be afraid of storytelling, perhaps because it associates narrative with long, untestable yarns. Stories are perceived as "just" literature. Worse, stories are not reducible to mathematics, so they are unlikely to impress our peers.

This fear is misplaced for two reasons. First, in paradigmatic science, hypotheses have to be crafted. What are alternative hypotheses but competing narratives? Invent them as fancifully as you can. Sure, they ought to avoid explicit violations of reality (such as light acting like a particle when everyone knows it's a wave?), but censor those stories lightly. There is time for experiment—by you or others—to discover which story holds up better.

The second reason not to fear a story is that human beings do science. A person must decide what molecule is made, what instrument built to measure what property. Yes, there are facts to begin with, facts to build on. But facts are mute. They generate neither the desire to understand, nor appeals for the patronage that science requires, nor the judgment to do A instead of B, nor the will to overcome a seemingly insuperable failure. Actions, small or large, are taken at a certain time by human beings—who are living out a story.

I leave the further telling of this particular story, a story about a feature of philosophy, theoretical thawt, and all science - despite the claims to the contrary and the obsession with mathematics - I leave the reading to you. But I do want to alert you that the article is downloadable as a PDF; and that I tip my hat to Jason Kottke, whose blog tells us a bit about himself and his purpose online: "I like play around with hypertext, design, photography, media, text & programming, and this site is the result. Kottke.org is up-dated near-daily and recently became my full-time concern, supported almost entirely by financial support from you, my readers."

You may enjoy his blog entry "I will soon have no memory of this," as well. Scroll down a bit on the page, soon, as he updates daily. And, for this one timeliness is doubly important, as he links to a New York Times article on memnomics (techniques of enhancing memory, accounting for its lapses, and studies of it in generally). If you're interested you may want to know that NYT quickly secrets away its articles in it's pay-for archives - so again, if interested, do get on it. -Owlb

Juridics: Children's Rights: Martin Guggenheim asks, What's wrong with 'children's rights'?

UPDATE

Family: Parent/s, Child/ren, Siblings:

Martin Guggenheim, a professor of clinical law and author of previous books like The Rights of Families, and The Rights of Young People in this new book (May 2005) published by Harvard University Press, asks the question, What’s Wrong With Children’s Rights?, in order to launch a depth-investigation of the rhetoric of the presentday movement of "Child's Rights Advocates." Guggenheim seeks to fathom the ultimate wellsprings of the movement's ideology, agenda, leading figures, and the institutions they build in which to ensconce themselves and pursue both their own internicene battles, and their general unified goal of wedging control of children away from the influence of their parents and the context of family. It tries to clarify the parental responsibility, not granting any blanket "parental right" to do as the closest adults may wish with their offspring and adopted children thru the "under-age" stages of life.

The following abstract is unsigned (and is apparently derived from the following selection of pages in Prof Guggenheim's new book: xii-xiii, 8-17, 38-41, 245-247). I found the matter in an email newsletter Family Update Online!, published by an outfit called World Congress of Families which is very much a mixed-bag for me. It has constructed an ideology of "The Natural Family," and I have not yet been able to discover whether it includes adoptive families within its purview of concern and embrace of support. It seems to be based on the twin notions of consanguinity and congeneticality, a marvellous form of famliy when it works well (but is just as much prone to distortion as any other forms, in my observation).
The problem with any ideology of "the natural family" is that it can be used to demote adoptive families, blended families, homo-parented families, friends-parented families, and even blood-or-inlaw parented families - there's also a race-selective principle in some versions of the natural-family ideology, altho for sure I don't see traces of that in World Congress of Families literature. Having said all this, I do see the possiblity of the state having an interest of its own in providing special support to consanguinous / congenetic forms of famliy where the children are all reproductive-offspring of the parents (whether traditionally married, or traditionally common-law, depending on the jurisdiction's legal definitions). But this practical lattitude of the state where getting the best results for its expenditures may involve encouragement of one form of family over others, does not pertain to the the philosophical and philosohically-informed sociological definition in answer to the question What is a family? The state should be cognizant of that question, but in policy-making it may find jurisdication by jurisdiction that it has an interest in promoting a form of family where it is most possible to hold parents responsible for the behaviours of their children and teenagers, because the tie in the cases of consanguinity/congeneticality are conceived as generally more emotinally binding and multi-dimensional. Yet, for the state to fall back on such a tite outlook and narrow defintion, it must take responsibility for its policy and resultant legislation, as there are consequences to non-recognition. One of them is fewer adoptions of children in desperate need of their own parents.

Also, I add, the consanguinous defintion of family when it depends totally and absolutely on 1woman1man marriages based on a definitional conflation of the two separate institutions, strictly speaking, can not take into account what happens to the consanguinous after a parent dies prematurely, leaving a vulnerable single-parent and the consanguinous offspring. When remarriage occurs, difficulties may be assumed, but the blended family is not consanguinous and for the strict defiintionists here not natural. I have discussed this before; and also my antipathy to any definition of family based on reproductivist doctrine of marriage. Marriage is one institution; family is another. When one kind of marriage (that with consanguinous children) generates a "natural family" by means of reproduction, a particular kind of family emerges - but this is not an ideal, or a norm, or a "superiour family." The moral value of such a family is. along with all other kinds, to be found in the stewardship of the parent/s of their authority of their child/ren in the task of raising responsbile adults, and the response of the child/re - himself, herself, themselves - in relation to their parents, their siblings, the broader family when possible, and the larger society with its myriad of relationships, roles, and institutions for participation in which the child/ren are being readied - no matter what their bio-parentage was and no matter who their quotidian parentage may be.

Here however we are able to get a look at Prof Guggenheim's newest book thru the filter of an abstract, which tho it may be selective with a World Congress of Families bias built-in, still is stimulatingly instructive. With this uncopyrighted "abstract" and with the copyrighted material you'll find on Amazon.com, by clicking the headline to this blog entry, you'll be in a good position to mull the issues at a basic level, and to purchase the Guggenheim volume if you want to read more deeply. - Owlb

--------------------------------

For a quarter of a century, progressive legal theorists have been advocating theories of social justice premised on children’s rights. However, a long-time specialist in children’s rights sees the creation of such rights as a source of great danger and little good. Martin Guggenheim, professor of clinical law at New York University, seriously questions “whether children’s rights serve children’s interests.”

In the first place, Guggenheim challenges the arguments of those pushing to give children the same legal rights enjoyed by adults. These advocates of children’s rights decry society’s denial of full legal rights to children as “oppression” and “subordination,” and in inflammatory rhetoric they compare “the way Americans [once] treated slaves with the way the law limits the freedom of children.” Such rhetoric, Guggenheim asserts, “makes almost no sense” because “children are different from adults in significant ways.” Because of their “immaturity and ... lack of intellectual and experiential capacity,” children invariably “need caring adults to ensure they will live and grow into independent adults. Children, at least for an important period of their lives, are dependent on adults for their very existence.” Consequently, it would be destructive and not emancipatory to enact laws “abandoning children to their rights.”

The arguments of many children’s rights advocates, Guggenheim avers, rest on “a fatally flawed premise,” namely that of “the child’s individual personhood.” This premise, he points out, “falsely suggests the possibility and, even worse, the desirability of isolating children from the larger fabric of the society into which they have been born and are being raised.” It particularly troubles Guggenheim that “a leading characteristic of the children’s rights movement is its propensity to separate children’s interests from their parents’.” Labeling the separation the “most egregious error” of the children’s rights movement, he warns that “in the effort to make children more free vis-à-vis their parents, the government makes children less free in their relations with the state.”

Guggenheim strongly endorses the American legal traditions that “cede to birth parents the right to have the care and custody of their biological children and the primary authority to control the details of a child’s upbringing.” In his view, these traditions serve the “sensible goal of providing children with their best chance to grow and be supported within a family, with an edifice of significant barriers to state control and intervention.” After all, “children benefit when the important decisions concerning them are made by people they know best. Current law allows a freedom within the family for self-regulation. The degree to which children benefit from this freedom is unquantifiable.”

This familial freedom, unfortunately, is now threatened by children’s rights activists seeking “to wrest from parents some of the control they have under current law” and then, typically, give that control to “judges, caseworkers, and children’s lawyers.” When these professionals supplant parents, they typically defend their decisions as necessary to protect “children’s rights” and to secure “the best interests of the child.” Guggenheim is skeptical of such rhetoric. “‘Children’s rights,’ he remarks, “has become a mantra invoked by adults to help them in their fights with other adults in all sorts of contexts.” “Children’s rights” have thus become “a useful subterfuge” for adults seeking to hide their own motives. And though the appeal to “the best interests of the child” seems “alluring and child-friendly,” Guggenheim warns that “it is a formula for unleashing state power, without any meaningful reassurance of advancing children’s interests. It means substituting the state’s preference about some aspect of child-rearing for the parents’. But this hardly ensures the second opinion is better than the first.” Substituting a court’s view of “the best interests of the child” for the parents’ view “only ensures greater intervention through protracted litigation and an almost boundless authority by the judge to regulate the family.”

In such intervention—intervention of the sort that now has “more children ... enmeshed in legal proceedings than would have been imaginable a generation ago”—Guggenheim discerns a grave threat to “the principles upon which a free society rests.” He also perceives a lamentable surrender of more and more of children’s lives to the highly impersonal care of “courts [that] lack the expertise, time, and knowledge of human development ... that decisions involving children unavoidably involve.”

Sports: Baseball: Phillies hold their own, Nats surprise of the season; Jays seek breakthru past triumvirate

The Philadelphia Phillies, into whose fandom I oscillate, are holding their own, after a good start. Key player, Jim Thome, is recovering from a leg fracture, but should be back soon enuff to do some good in the last half of the season. But then there's the head-office dithering about whether to keep that young first baseman, and benefit from his drive down the road, or trade him and benefit from his drive down another road; or, trade him and keep, contretemps, vet player in the same field position on first, Ryan Howard, who is lackluster but steady. I'd go for keeping the now-injured Thome. In any case , out of loyalty to my favourites from childhood, I'm rootin' for the Phillies, and expect some good to come of it. But certainly not the championship, especially after the mid-season All-Stars game between the National Baseball League and that other one ... yeah, the American Baseball League.

But in the NBL, no one can help but stand amazed at what happened to the old refugees from "the former Montreal Expos, neither financially nor athletically successful, transplanted to les Etats-Unis and flourishing in its baseball-starved capital," Washington DC, where they've metamorphosed into the Washington Nationals, and now head the Phillies' own National Baseball League's Eastern division.

Bidding for transfer of ownership from the DC government to private investors is hi; but the real excitement is in the ballpark where enthusiasm is over the top from the crowd, and of course at the box office too.

Just so, it's been amazing too, recently, that the Phillies went to Natland and won 2 out of 3 games. This was not just a surprise, but a cause celebre, according to sportswriter Rich Hoffman who found a Phillies in the event.

Winning 2 out of 3 at a most strategic time, the Phillies also

found their pulse, however faint. And yesterday, their pulse's name was [none other than vet first-baseman] Ryan Howard [replacing the regular Jim Thome, out due to an injury, as said above - Owlb].

"This is huge," Howard said, overstating the facts by several magnitudes, but so what? He had golfed a two-run, game-tying home run over the centerfield fence in the bottom of the eighth inning. He had three RBI on the day, and was in the dugout when teammate Ramon Martinez knocked in the game-winning run with a pinch-hit single in the 12th.

"The players are going to come back relaxed and ready to do our jobs," Howard said, in a clubhouse where most of his teammates had already fled for the airport and their All-Star breaks.

"Everybody gets to go home and relax," he said.

This might not have been huge, but it wasn't nothing, either. The managerial fireworks, they were nothing; Robinson was mad that Manuel was yelling about how long the Nationals' Jose Guillen was taking to pull himself together after nailing himself with a foul tip in the sixth inning, but the two didn't get within 30 feet of each other before the umpires intervened.

As for the rest, though, the bottom-line truth was that the Phils needed to win this series against the first-place Nationals, and they did. They needed to begin the slow, messy climb out of their current predicament, and they did. At the break, they are 7 ½ games out of the division lead, and five games behind in the National League wild-card race.

The way I tell it, and cut-and-snip my quotes from the sportjournos, you'd think this League this year is all about the Phillies vs the Nats. Well, to some of us it is. - Owlb

In the ABL, the Yankees have edged their way to the lead by a nose, after a long frump. Now, the contest rages in ABL East in a triangulated struggle at the top between Yanks (50-41 in the standings), Bosox (50-42), and Orioles (50-42). Now, in baseball that sure is livin' at the edge!

Right now, the Toronto Blue Jays are just beneath the triumvirate in fourth place with a standings stat of 45 wins and 47 losses. Come on, Jays! You can do it! - Owlb

Canada: Politics: 66% of Tories want to keep Harper as leader; 41% of all Canadians (voters?)

The Globe and Mail carried a report some three days ago that blazoned how one-third of Tories rejected Harper's leadership (which I reversed in my headline here) and 59% of all Canadians...was that all Canadians, really? ... or was it 59% of all Canadians who make a practice of voting in Federal Parliamentary elections ... it does make a difference, you know. One has to be careful regarding the terms pollsters use to bring out the particular editorial slant they want their polls to convey when written up in the press. So I must check back on that too. In any case, again my headline reverses the structure of the information that G&M doled out in this case.

After looking around at half-a-dozen blogs of the usual suspects who mite be expected to take note of Harper's current standings in party and nation, according to this poll, I found no coverage, lament, complaint, or cautious optimism. I found nothing but this pix and comment on Harper's sartorials on the GCBH blog by Publius (scroll way down the page). I guess no one's very much interested in the poll. So, I shall not be interested either. - Owlb

Oops! Maybe it's lefties and Liberals who find the poll interesting, and even perhaps ever so important! - Owlb again

Latin America: Guatemala: New info surfaces on rightwing death squads in Guatemala's recent past, some Christians implicated

Guatemala passed thru a very difficult period in its history in which the spread of leftist guerrillas led to the formation of secret righwing death squads, both of which preyed on villagers, each side trying to corral them into support for its cause. Now comes a break in the lack of documentation of an array of abuses, and of information about some of the abused, as reported by Reuters (which bans the use of the word "terrorist" in its reportage).

Some 30,000 police files have been unearthed and confirm that human rights abuses took place in the 1980s at the height of the country's civil war, Guatemala's human rights ombudsman said on Saturday.

The documents, discovered in archives of the now defunct National Police, contain information about disappearances in the 36-year civil war during which rights groups estimate 200,000 people died and 50,000 vanished, ombudsman Sergio Morales said.

I hope the info sheds new lite on the career of a rightwing Pentecostal Christian, General Rios Mott who, I believe, eventually became President of the country, and about whom there is much journalism that makes him indeed hi-ly suspect for the commission of multiple crimes against humanity. No Christian should hesitate to pray he may be cawt and brawt to trial, if evidence leads to his indictment. If guilty of half of what he's accused, he should receive the severest penalty that Guatemalan law allows. If innocent, he should be exponerated. But I doubt that latter will be the case. - Politicarp

I attach a text from another blog, which requires me to be not forget my concern regarding the practice and policy of General Rios Mott.

On September 15, 1981, Rabinal (center of the Maya-Achi world in Guatemala) celebrated its biggest annual town fair. As villagers auctioned their cattle and children climbed into a Ferris wheel, the Guatemalan national army blocked all the exits from the town square and began massacring indiscriminately the fairgoers; even the Ferris wheel operator was killed. Witnesses estimate more than 1,000 people were killed that day and their bodies dumped into mass graves on the edge of town.

This was the largest of dozens of massacres in the municipality of Rabinal that left more than 5,000 Maya-Achi dead, more than a quarter of the total local population at the time. Family members of the victims of the September 15 massacre recently exhumed the remains of some of the victims (with the support of the FAFG exhumation team), and planned to properly bury their loved ones on June 14, 2003. On June 2, ADIVIMA (Association for the Development of the Maya AchiVictims of Violence) began plans for the re-burial. They placed radio announcements and on June 9 got the required permit from the mayor.

What is on-going impunity? This mayor is an active local leader of the FRG political party and a man personally accused of killing hundreds while he served as Military Commissioner during the years of repression and genocide. In spite of the surviving victims plans, on June 12 the FRG announced a political campaign visit to Rabinal for their Presidential candidate in the upcoming November elections, Efrian Rios Mott. Rios Mott was the military dictator of Guatemala during the second half of the scorched earth military campaign whose strategy was to massacre civilian, mostly Mayan villagers, including many whose remains were to be re-buried June 14. Rios Montt has been formally accused of genocide in two separate complaints, one in Guatemalan courts and another in Spain.

His eligibility to run for president is in question because of a constitutional provision preventing those who came into power through a military coup from running for president. Though lower courts have rejected his candidacy, the Constitutional Court will make the final ruling. What is national and global impunity? Whether the courts rule in his favor or not, he remains the president of the ruling party and the most powerful politician in the country, maintaining a whole host of economic, political and military relations with western countries, international financial institutions and global companies and banks.

On the day of the re-burial, more than 500 surviving victims gathered to carry the coffins to the cemetery. Outraged by the presence of Rios Montt in Rabinal they decided to carry the coffins to the FRG rally as a demonstration against the ongoing impunity enjoyed by the authors of genocide in Guatemala. Many accused war criminals, including Rios Montt and Rabinals mayor, form part of the FRG-controlled government, which dominates the executive branch and congress.

I simply do not know how much weight I can put on such accounts of Mott and his subordinates in Guatemala. The sources are almost always leftist. But on the other hand that doesn't mean the reports ipso facto therefore are false. May the new information lead to justice. General Rios Mott will definitely be one, perhaps the chief figure, about whom a thoro inquiry and adjudication must be made. - Politicarp

GUATEMALA: THROWING STONES AT A LEADER OF GENOCIDE by Annie Bird and Grahame Russell (Rights Action)

War: Terrorist Propaganda: StrategyPage's "Dead Children Killing Al-Quaeda," Al-Jazeera progandizes to blame US for dead kids

Rookmaker Club geostrategic analysis

StrategyPage.com has a major article on the what's going wrong for Al-Quaeda in Iraq, a piece in whch it makes the suicide bombing of a US vehicle surrounded by children receiving handouts of free canay from US Marines the all-too-vivid centerpiece, driving home the point that these terrorists couldn't resist blowing up whomever was at hand and transforming them into a bloody dead mess. The article is not limited to its most vivid moment of reporting and analysis, however. It cites a number of developments in the battle situation that bear note from those concerned about "how the war is going."

Yet, of course, the Al-Quaeda-friendly Arab press, especially the near-propaganda-press of Al-Jazeera in its English edition July 18, attempts to generate a story to bear the weight of putting the blame on the US Marines who were handing out the candy.

But the real reason for the desperation of Al-Qaeda's activities and Al-Jazeera's propaganda praising those activities or laying the blame for them on coalition forces, especially Americans, has another driving motive. Right now, the terrorist combine seeks to do everything it can to obstruct, delay, impugn two developments from the democratic Iraqi side: 1.) the formal filing of the first charges against the genocidist Saddam Hussein; and 2.) the veritable "race," as The Christian Science Monitor puts the matter, "to finish the new Constitution" by the deadline of August 15, and in which the Shia-dominated government has bent over backward to include non-extremist Sunni concerns in the drafting proces, such that the Sunnis are now dividing between cooperationists with the democratic process and upcoming referendum on the draft Constitution, as aganst the rejectionists who are starting to look like a forlorn rump group blackmailed by Zarquarwi's Al-Qaeda in Iraq cadres of foreigners tawt to hate and slawter Shia. - Owlb

Politics: Quebec: LeDevoir's Jean-Louis Bourque says only return of Bernard Landry will stave off PQ's disaster

Today refWrite must brazenly attempt to translate a bit of an article from Monday, July 18 eidtion of the Montréal French daily LeDevoir wherein the author, Jean-Louis Bourque, a political scientist no less, lays out his claim at length that former Leader of the provinical separatist party, le Parti Québecois (PQ), Monsieur Bernard Landry, must be recalled to party leadership - if the PQ wants to avoid disaster and ever resume government in the province. The Province of Québec is presently governed by the provinical Liberal Party under the leadership of Jean Charest, who has a multitude of his own difficulties.

Bourque insists that only Landry among the candidates who have announced themselves to replace him after his resignation in early June, has any credibility and competence worth even talking about. Bourque does not so much attack the would-bes, but he does not mince words in describing with alacrity Landry's qualifications. In my translation with the help of Systran via the Sherlock app on my iMac's OSX Panther (3.9) and three years of French on hi school, two years in college, decades ago, here we go:

The PQ matured since the last referendum, it has much more wisdom and perspicacity than it had ten years ago. It must again seize the day, reflect seriously, and choose the best chief in all regards; and this chief is none other than Bernard Landry. He travelled much, he studied abroad, he speaks several languages, he knows history well, he has competences in economy and in finance public, he knows Canada's federal-provincial relations well, along with international relations. He is a man who is ethically and morally aware, being above any suspicion; he can express himself very well, and is capable of persuasively convincing others regarding his viewpoint, he will be able to gain our confidence and to represent us well in the negotiations to come at the time of the next referendum.

Obviously, Bourque is himself a separatist, or as in Québec, such people prefer to call themselves "un souvereinist." a sovereignist. In choosing Landry to return to leadership of the party, Bourque enunciates a political vision charged-almost with religious fervour in its vividness.

The "militant" Bernard Landry, despite each of his defects and his often difficult petty nitpicking, is the right man for the job and certainly the man more qualified, most qualified and more tested to lead Quebec to our independence and to represent us with honor and dignity on the international scene. He must become the next elected chief of the PQ, next the Prime Minister for Quebec and the first Head of the Québécois State. For this, he has the statute, the fabric, the class and the scale necessary. He can and must thus become the first president of the Republic of Quebec: there is his destiny, already fully prepared.

With regard to the other candidates, they should be realistic, show more modesty and reserve, and finally understand that, despite every one of their beautiful qualities and their invaluable experiments, they quite simply do not make quite the weight, they are not at present -- and in any respect -- they have not weathered the vicissitudes of the long wait thru which Landry has seasoned himself and they don't have the requirements of the station, with all that that includes/understands and implies.

Bernard Landry, we necessarily must deeply acknowledge and recognize, is at present the best and probably the only candidate able to lead the Québécois people to our independence and to build with the entire people this new country of Quebec, until we wait with as much enthusiasm (rather than mere impatience), for finally being able to become Masters on our premises and to make the conditions thru which the Québécois people can express the plenitude of our foremost identity and, in all legitimacy, to make that national idenity's voice heard in the concert of the nations.

If you read French, you may want to check out this fine blog of Jacques Hamel, La sphère des idées de J. H. for possible comentary on the Bourque piece or on any subsequent discussion it may stir up. If you don't read French, or if you do, you may want to check out this great bilingual blog of , Blogue de Polyscopique: 100% pur boeuf canadien for its take on the Bourque push for re-installing Landry to lead the nation to the promised land. - Owlb