Island adventure

Today we are on a roundabout journey down the backside of Vancouver Island.  This morning we took the bus from downtown Vancouver to Horseshoe Bay and a ferry to Nanaimo (pix to follow, my device is very twen-cen).  We spent a few hours there, and I ate my very first Nanaimo bar in its native habitat.

Now we are on the VIA Rail Mahalat en route to Victoria, where we will catch a bus back to Vancouver (via Swartz Bay and the ferry to Tsawassen).  We could throw a plane in there for true multimodal goodness, but this way we're maintaining a pretty low carbon footprint for this trip.  The best part is that we get to sleep in our own bed tonight.

Extreme Conservative Makeover

Kudos to the staff of Diane Finley. Somebody in her employ finally noticed that the top Google search results for "diane finley glasses" ranks my loving commentary on her rather highly. Now there is a nice picture of her smiling, with glasses that look considerably more chic.Excellent, folks, now that you've shown that you can use & respond to search engine results, you might want to think again about using a picture with the background stressing English on the front page of the French version of the Ministry website. Sigh. You can take a woman out of Hamilton in a limousine, but you can't take the sense of entitlement out of a politician.

The Carpenters remembered

How will The Carpenters be remembered in fifty years when their contemporaries are mostly gone? My guess is that they will be patron saints of the Scientologists, Raëlians and other UFO religions in eternal gratitude for their cover of the paen to World Contact Day: Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft. (The original groovy recording was by Klaatu featuring the groovy Mellotron.)

As for Karen Carpenter, Todd Haynes' banned masterpiece Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story will forever be considered the definitive account of her life and death, despite of (and because of) her brother's attempts at eradication; in contrast, the E! True Hollywood Story scarcely bears mention. The film is no longer in official circulation, but can be intermittently viewed online or purchased as part of a collection of illegal art (it sits proudly on my shelf).

Atheism as fundamentalism

Author Chris Hedges has been a mideast correspondent for years, and last year wrote a scathing book about religious fundamentalism in the United States (American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America). This year he has a new target: the New Atheists – Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens – who he accuses of being just as dangerous as religious fundamentalists. The book is called I Don't Believe in Atheists.

That Hedges set his sights in this direction is hardly any surprise, as the New Atheists often unleash their most withering criticism on religious moderates who they say provide cover for religious fundamentalists, and who want to have their cake and eat it too. Since Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity and is by his own account a religious moderate, it makes sense that he would want to answer this charge. I am curious to learn more, as from a recent review and interview I was able to grasp neither the logic of the title (I think it fails both as a joke and as a teleological argument) nor the full crux of his thesis. Certainly Christopher Hitchens is a blowhard (on that anyone but Hitchens would agree), but the arguments against Harris and Dawkins are more subtle. It seems to rest on the attitudes of atheist superiority and utopianism.

I am not an atheist, nor an atheist Utopian: I've never thought that atheism will inevitably lead to a better society, and I see atheism as a smug nihilist mirror image of other religions. I must admit to feeling a certain amount of agnostic superiority, in part because agnosticism, like vegetarianism, can be a bitch to maintain: it has the neither the certitude nor the comfort of religion or atheism. I argue most strongly that faith should never be used to form law or public policy, as it is by nature untestable and subjective, and because I usually see faith as a weapon wielded against outsiders such as myself. Although I understand the comfort faith gives, on the balance I tend to focus on the other side: being a target can have that effect.

I'm looking forward to reading this book. The superiority angle is one that I particularly want to examine. Being rather realistic pessimistic about human nature means that I'm no sort of Utopian whatsoever. My gut tells me that the faith impulse is a bug in human cognition: possibly a necessary bug, but a bug nonetheless. Of course, since I can't prove that argument I'll have to ask you to take it on faith.

Rule of Law

Enforcing the consequences for breaking laws is necessary for respect for the law. The Bush administration went to telecoms and asked them to participate in an illegal program to spy on US citizens. Some of them declined; others acquiesced. AT&T turned over its network for spying. Today the Bush administration wants to shield these companies from the legal consequences of breaking the law on its behalf. This should not be allowed to happen: companies should not be rewarded for helping to break the law, they should be punished pour encourager les autres.

Many in Congress want to help Bush indemnify his fellow felons. They are bought and paid for by the telecom industry. Big surprise – they take your money, they let people spy on you, and then they use your money to buy politicians to make the spying retroactively legal. To sit back and allow the government to suborn the rule of law would be unwise. A political action committee has been set up to balance the scales and allow people to make contributions to counterbalance these political bribes: ActBlue holds Democratic politicians responsible for buckling on this issue (we can assume that Republicans are by and large completely corrupted at this point). It is not enough to vote; under our political system we must buy our justice to counteract corrupt corporate contributions. Don't sit back and wait for George Sorors to fix this: this is in our hands.

Given the tenor of the times post-9/11, Bush could easily have passed any bill to destroy civil rights and liberties: as a matter of fact, he did. But he didn't make wholesale spying on Americans, without legal oversight, legal and that sort of behaviour must not be allowed. Join the EFF and get involved in theses issues that effect us all. Contribute to ActBlue to help them hold the politicians to account.

Deadly

The Vatican is rolling out seven more deadly sins, and I think they're pretty interesting choices.

1. "Bioethical" violations such as birth control
I disagree: only forced birth control is wrong. I guess Raëlism is the logical alternative to Catholicism on this count.
2. "Morally dubious" experiments such as stem cell research
Don't they mean embryonic stem cell research? And aren't they being a bit redundant?
3. Drug abuse
Interesting that this makes the cut. Smokers, take note. However, those who like to split hairs will note that use is not contraindicated, just abuse.
4. Polluting the environment
Overpopulation leads to environmental degradation, but birth control is wrong. Run that by me again?
5. Contributing to the widening divide between rich and poor
This rocks. Voting for Republicans and international trade deals are now religious offenses! Unless, of course, Deadly Sin #1 takes precedence.
6. Excessive wealth
Hey, I like this one a lot (redundancy aside). Do large real estate holdings qualify? Probably not, but in any case, the church doesn't seem to turn away contributions from those with "vast wealth".
7. Creating poverty
Redundancy aside, I like this one. However, the UN says birth control is the best way out of the poverty trap. The church works so very hard to restrict birth control. Sucks to be held to your own standards, eh?

Although I'm pleased to see that the church is interested in more than what people do with their dirty bits, I am disappointed that they don't go beyond economy and ecology to speak out against war and torture.

Catching up

On my Air Canada flights traveling to Irvine this week I used the in-flight entertainment system. I was on my usual self-improvement/forcibly francophone kick, so on the way down I picked Le prix à payer, a bedroom farce: amusant, mais pas profond. But on the way back I had a very pleasant surprise. I have greatly enjoyed the films of Denys Arcand – Jésus de Montréal, Le Déclin de l'empire américain, Les invasions barbares – and I picked L'âge des ténèbres, having no idea what I was in for: then Rufus Wainwright strolled onscreen singing in full Turkish drag, heralding the dark ages that come after the decline and fall of empire. A most enjoyable film (although RW only bookended the production). It was released last year and somehow I missed it completely.

Tonight we went to see Brad Fraser's Poor Super Man performed at the Waterfront on Granville Island. It was a good production; I somehow missed the comic-book staging; to me it felt very television instead, and very Speed the Plow. Somehow I had also missed Denys Arcand's film adaptation Leaving Metropolis as well. Have I been living under a rock? I know I missed Love and Human Remains (I always meant to see it) but come on!

TurboTax blows

U.S. citizens are taxed on their worldwide earnings, which means expats are supposed to file their taxes twice. Mostly this isn't an issue unless you live someplace with ridiculously low taxes (Isle of Man, anyone?) since foreign tax paid is usually higher than it would be in the US. Unless they get smacked by the AMT, it is usually just a paperwork headache for expats. But that's just assuming you are using something simple like manual paper filing. If instead you are unlucky enough to choose software by Intuit, you're in for an aneurysm.

TurboTax does such a tremendously lousy job at handling foreign earnings and tax credits that it is unbelievably easy to get it wrong: as a matter of fact, it might not even be possible to get your taxes right while using it. Apparently this is considered just a minor corner case by the geniuses at Intuit, provided they've even tried to accomplish this task at all. I hope the IRS writes its own tax software and puts them out of business. And I hope all of the perpetrators of this software starve, that their entire communities collapse, and that they walk the desert highways, wailing, their cries lost upon the wind.

Asimov really is dead

I've been a subscriber to Asimov's Science Fiction magazine since I was a teenager. I have always loved scifi, from the juvenile wonders of Heinlein to the half-bug orgies of China Miéville. Short stories are the core of scifi, where the new ideas get kicked around, and sometimes they're good reading. Usually I could get at least one good story out of each issue.

Lately my enjoyment of this magazine has ebbed. The quality of the stories seems to be going downhill, and the circulation seems to be pacing that trend. Having subscribed for many years, there are many older stories I've read that I'd like to revisit, but I don't keep stacks of rotting acid pulp around the house anymore. You'd think that these stories would be available on the website, but you'd be wrong – the magazine remains steadfastly rooted in the past century: although they do sell a crappy DRM version through another publisher, the back catalog isn't available to current subscribers.

I really want to encourage people to write this stuff, but this medium's flaws are no longer tolerable. It's not that I'm cheap: I don't even mind the (stupid) surcharge for living outside the USA, and I'll pay for quality. But better stuff is now being published online, both in text and audio, which I really enjoy and which doesn't have embarrassing cover art. It is sad that a vehicle for a genre about the future stays so firmly wedded to the past, but there's a lot of that going around.

Thanks Chuck

Same-sex marriage is old hat in Canada; it is a settled issue that nobody wants to revisit. However, the process was difficult; federal recognition hinged on parliamentary approval, and the waning Liberal minority government was divided and slipping fast. Although there were enough supporters for the bill to pass, the surging Conservative party forced a confidence vote in May 2005 just before the final vote for the Civil Marriage Act, and an election would have meant starting the process over. It was unlikely that the Liberals could win another minority government (they later did not), and the Conservatives certainly wouldn't have reintroduced the bill. By the slimmest margin, the government did not fall, and the bill passed the house on 28 June 2005. (It easily passed in the Liberal-dominated Senate and passed into law with royal assent on 20 July 2005.)

Chuck Cadman was one of the few independent members of the house of commons who were assiduously courted in the run-up to the confidence vote. It was a time of high drama and political skulduggery; rather borderline dealmaking abounded, and in the end the true wildcard was Chuck Cadman. Terminally ill with cancer, Cadman stood to vote (at right) to support the government, and he died fifty-two days later.

Recently it has come to light that the Conservatives had gone a step further in their dealmaking leading up to the vote: party operatives offered Cadman a million-dollar life insurance policy (among other incentives). He refused; although he was understandably concerned for the future welfare of his wife and daughter. Current Prime Minister Stephen Harper not only knew about the offer, he approved it and spoke about it on tape to a journalist who has recently published a book on the subject.

So this is a posthumous thank you to Mr. Cadman. He spent some of the last days of his life away from home in order to bring about full equality for a group of people which, by all accounts, he didn't have any special affection for; he respected the wishes of his constituents, rejected a bribe for personal gain, and helped the government stand long enough for the bill to pass. He did his job, and sometimes that is downright heroic.

Living Coloratura

I had read before about Florence Foster Jenkins ("the worst singer in the world") and when I saw that a play based on her life was being mounted I knew I had to go see it, even if only to maintain my certification (the continuing education requirements can be daunting).

Glorious! by Peter Quilter dramatizes the time leading up to and including her spectacular show at Carnegie Hall. While we all know someone with her category of vocal talent, Ms. Foster Jenkins took what she had to a level that simply must be heard to be believed. To her critics she said, "People may say I can't sing, but no one can ever say I didn't sing." Brava!