[Pic shamelessly poached from Globe & Mail]
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The woman was a divorcee - but even though she was no longer married, her affair was seen as adultery in the eyes of Somalia's extremist interpretation of Sharia law.
Her punishment was therefore to be buried up to her waist in front of a crowd of 200 people and stoned to death.
Her unmarried boyfriend was given 100 lashes for the affair.Sheikh Ibrahim Abdirahman, the judge for the group al-Shabab, says the woman was killed yesterday in front of a crowd of some 200 people near the town of Wajid.
Abdirahman says the 20-year-old woman had an affair with a 29-year-old unmarried man and gave birth to a stillborn child.
The militants that control much of southern Somalia and have links to al Qaeda have implemented an extremist reading of Islam's Sharia law.
The stoning death was at least the fourth for adultery in Somalia over the last year.
It was the second time a female has been killed.
The hypothesized Higgs boson... might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.The pair say their theory explains why the U.S. Congress scrapped the funding necessary to bring a Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) to the United States in 1993, and also why the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had a meltdown in September, 2008. They claim in their updated paper released two weeks ago, that the SSC was so plagued with bad luck that the U.S. congress was forced to shut it down. Neilson calls it an "anti-miracle."
August 8, 2oo9As Bishop of the Diocese, I have publicly apologized to those who have suffered such abuse, and to their families. I want all victims of abuse to know how terribly sorry we are, how wrong this abuse was, and how we are attempting to right those wrongs.
Money can never compensate fully, but we are trying ... most of all, compassionate. If it was your own son or daughter, your brother or sister, your mother or father who was abused, you would expect and demand nothing less. ....
Sexual abuse, indeed any abuse, is wrong. I want assure you that for many years now this Diocese has taken, and continues to take, proactive steps to avoid the repetition of any such abuse.
I would close by asking your cooperation and support, and above all your prayers, ... [so] we can move forward and keep our efforts fully focused on the central mission of Christ’s Church: to preach his Gospel to the people of our time. Now, as always, let us pray for one another.
Yours in the Lord,
Oh, but it gets better! -------------------->
Lahey, who only three months ago oversaw a historic apology and financial settlement for sexual abuses committed by priests in his diocese, was picked up at the Ottawa airport on Sept. 15 when border security agents found images on his laptop computer. Lahey was returning from a trip to Britain at the time.
The Ottawa Police Internet Child Exploitation unit laid charges of possession and importation of child pornography and the warrant was issued last Friday."
RCMP Supt. Wayne Rideout, who was the third Mountie to take the stand Tuesday, denied a key part of his superior officer’s evidence and then told commissioner Thomas Braidwood that, “We are not perceived by the public to be able to investigate ourselves.
“We’re not good at this, we shouldn’t be doing this,” said Rideout.
He said he thinks “it is time” for B.C. to consider an independent body to investigate the RCMP."
NO SHIT!
Could not have said this better myself!
(Thanks Huffington Post.)
Quentin Tarantino sauntered onto celluloid in the mid-1990s as a Natural Born Thriller, the boy-man who was going to stab adrenaline straight into the heart of American cinema. The movies he wrote and directed were highly stylized ballet dances of torture, hemorrhaging internal organs, and rat-a-tat-tat pop culture monologues about Madonna's vagina, the Brady Bunch, and what they call a Big Mac in France. (It's Le Big Mac.) He showed extreme cruelty in extreme close-up and -- somehow -- made the audience laugh with him through the screams. But there were always dark questions underneath the guffaws and applause -- and his new film, Inglorious Basterds, sucks them to the surface.
The story of Tarantino's rise is a film geek's fantasy-screenplay. Born to a single mother in Los Angeles, he dropped out of school at sixteen, got a job at a video store, and marinated himself in the history of film. He absorbed everything from Lucio Fulci's Italian horror-fests to Preston Sturges' one-liners to John Woo's Hong Kong shoot-outs. And as he took them in, they churned inside his brain -- and spilled out, reassembled and regenerated, into a string of his own screenplays.
The first to be made was Reservoir Dogs in 1994. Like all his films, it took an old stock genre premise -- an armed robbery goes wrong, and in the aftermath the gang tries to figure out which of them is an undercover cop -- and made it twitch back to life. He scrambled the chronology, poured hot sauce onto the dialogue, and made the bleeding after a shooting slow and real. Trapped together in a bare warehouse, the characters slowly destroy themselves. In the most famous scene, Mr. Blonde -- played by Michael Madsen -- captures a cop and tortures him to get him to give up the identity of the fink. As he dances to the old cheese-hit "Stuck In The Middle With You," he hacks off the cop's ear, and douses him with petrol, threatening to burn him alive. It's entrancing and repulsive all at once -- and one of the most disturbing scenes in cinema.
At the time, many critics recoiled, saying this was sadism served up as style. The film was even banned on video in Britain for several years. But I was inclined to defend the film: I thought this violence was more real and repulsive than the glib gore-free massacres of an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle. When these characters bleed, they really scream. When they feel pain, you really flinch. Here was a director showing violence as it really is.
But since then, Tarantino has enthusiastically proved his critics right, and his defenders wrong. The moral vision of Reservoir Dogs turns out to have been something well-meaning viewers projected onto it: Tarantino really does think violence is "like, cool." He has been systematically squandering his cinematic talent ever since -- in ways that reflect disturbingly on us, the viewers.
He has turned suffering into a merry joke. From Pulp Fiction to Kill Bill, he encourages the audience to chortle at torture and mutilation and anal rape. A typical punchline is -- whoops! -- a man being shot in the face. Where there should be a gag reflex, he gives us a gag. In Inglorious Basterds, a group of Jews undercover in Germany torture and scalp Nazis, and he gets the viewer to roar with laughter as people are carved up, alive and howling.
"Violence in the movies can be cool," he says. "It's just another color to work with. When Fred Astaire dances, it doesn't mean anything. Violence is the same. It doesn't mean anything. It's a color." He scorns anyone who tries to see simulated violence as having meaning. With a laugh, he says: "John Woo's violence has a very insightful view as to how the Hong Kong mind works because with 1997 approaching and blah blah blah. I don't think that's why he's doing it. He's doing it because he gets a kick out of it." Praising Stanley Kubrik's direction of A Clockwork Orange, he says, "He enjoyed the violence a little too much. I'm all for that."
In the slightly pretentious language of postmodernism, he is trying to separate the sign (movie violence) from the signified (real violence) -- leaving us floating in a sea of meaningless signs that refer to nothing but themselves and the sealed-off history of cinema.
What's wrong with this vision? Why does it make me so queasy? I don't believe works of art should be ennobling. I don't believe the heroes should be virtuous, or that bad characters should get their comeuppance. It can show deeply violent and deeply cruel people, and tell us that -- as in real life -- they can be charismatic and successful and never pay a price for their cruelty. But what it should never do is tell us that human suffering itself is trivial. It should never turn pain into a punch-line.
Violence has particular power on film precisely because it involuntarily activates our powers of empathy. We imagine ourselves, as an unthinking reflex, into the agony. This is the most civilizing instinct we have: to empathize with suffering strangers. (It competes, of course, with all our more base instincts.) Any work of art that denies this sense -- that is based on subverting it -- will ultimately be sullying. No, I'm not saying it makes people violent. But it does leave the viewer just a millimetre more morally corroded. Laughing at simulated torture -- and even cheering it on, as we are encouraged to through all of Tarantino's later films -- leaves a moral muscle just a tiny bit more atrophied.
You can see this in the responses of Tarantino himself. Not long after 9/11, he said: "It didn't affect me because there's, like, a Hong Kong action movie... called Purple Storm and they work in a whole big thing in the plot that they blow up a skyscraper." It's a case-study in atrophy of moral senses: to brag you weren't moved by the murder of two and half thousand actual people, because you'd already seen it simulated in a movie. Only somebody who has never seen violence -- who sees the world as made of celluloid -- can respond like this.
Tarantino's films aren't even sadistic. Sadists take human suffering seriously; that's why they enjoy it. No: Tarantino is morally empty, seeing a shoot-out as akin to dancing cheek-to-cheek. He sees violence as nothing. Compare his oeuvre to the work of a genuine cinematic sadist -- Alfred Hitchcock -- and you see the difference. Precisely because Hitchcock enjoyed inflicting pain, the pain is always authentic, and it is never emptied of its own inner horror.
And yet, and yet... I have to admit that part of me loves Tarantino's films. The scene in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta and Uma Thurman dance the twist in a 1950s-style diner, and later when he has to stab adrenaline into her heart after she ODs, are burned onto my brain, even though I have refused to watch the film for more than a decade. There are scenes in Inglorious Basterds of perfect tension. This man knows how to make a scene work more than almost any director working today. But I can't forget -- it sees the Holocaust as just another spaghetti Western, and one where the suggested solution is more torture, coming from the victims this time.
Can you love a film even while you are repulsed by its moral vision, or lack of it? This is a question that goes right back to the birth of cinema (and beyond). The three greatest silent films are all explicit hymns of praise for totalitarianism. The Birth of a Nation champions the Ku Klux Klan, Battleship Potemkin hymns for Bolshevism, and The Triumph of the Will is a paean to the Nazis. They are ravishing and repellent all at once -- and I defy anyone to watch them and not get swept up in their power, even as your frontal lobes yell: "Stop! Danger!"
But aesthetics and the rest of life are not entirely separable spheres -- and anybody who claims they are is simply posing. We don't leave our moral senses at the door when we go to the movies, or pick up a novel, or go to a gallery. We feel such tension in Tarantino's movies because the good and sane part of us doesn't want the violence to come -- while the debased part of us is cheering it on. That's a moral conflict underpinning the aesthetics; by denying it is there, Tarantino is willfully misunderstanding the effect of his films on their audiences.
The artists who have claimed their work was purely aesthetic were either frivolous, psychopathic, or lying. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov -- who I love -- claimed in the introduction to Bend Sinister that, "Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of 'thaw' in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent." He was writing in the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he and everybody he knew came within a few hours of dying in a nuclear war. How could he be "supremely indifferent" to that prospect? How can you revere aesthetics and not mind if every aesthetic object you love is incinerated? The answer is, of course, he wasn't indifferent. If you read his letters, you find he worried about these issues at great length. Similarly, I suspect Tarantino has deeper instincts beneath his life-is-a-grindhouse-flick pose. He knows what he is saying isn't -- can't -- be true.
The tragedy of Tarantino is that he could have been so much more than the Schlock and Awe merchant that he has devolved into. If he had stopped mistaking his DVD collection for a life, he -- to borrow a phrase from a real film, etched with real pain -- could've been a contender. When I remember the raw force of Reservoir Dogs, I still hope that he will. It's not too late. He could do it. How about it, Quentin? Step out into the big world beyond celluloid, and use your incredible talent to tell stories about it. As Mr. Blonde says, "Are you going to bark all day, little doggie -- or are you going to bite?"From the Huffington Post I found this little gem from American actor (and self-confessed "wise-ass") Steven Weber, I think its got Wings!
Posted: August 27, 2009 12:13 PMI love God.
But I hate government.
I love something that sounds like I wanted my father to be but is really much, much better and lives nowhere near me. I love something that has lots of rules for everyone but ones that I am allowed to break. I love something that requires no logic or facts but which I can profess unyielding faith in.
I hate something that I can touch and that can touch me. I hate something that I must immediately answer to if I screw up. I hate something that can turn against me if I turn against it. I hate that everyone can vote for things I might...hate.
I love money.
I hate people.
I love brute force.
I hate mercy.
I love being a Republican.
I hate you.
These are unfortunate, unnecessary and counterproductive developments. No one, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, should be happy with the current system, which spends too much to cover too few. Insurance is increasingly unaffordable. Even those with coverage are at risk of losing it, being denied needed care or being locked into jobs because of preexisting conditions. Rising health-care costs threaten the economy, while entitlement spending consumes a growing proportion of the federal budget.
The moment is ripe for a responsible fix, which is what makes the current eruption of smackdown politics all the more depressing. Among serious lawmakers of both parties, there is more agreement than during the Clinton health-care battle of 1993-94 about the need for an overhaul. The hard-edged opposition of interest groups that helped kill the Clinton plan has softened; sensing the inevitability of change, insurers, pharmaceutical manufacturers and hospitals have been trying to position themselves to cut the best deal possible rather than to kill reform outright.
If this moment is squandered, it will be a sad indictment of the political system -- and there will be plenty of blame to go around.
Democrats, with polls showing increasing nervousness about health care, have resorted to vilifying the health-insurance industry. No doubt, insurers engage in rational but disturbing practices under the current system: They angle to attract the healthiest customers, refuse coverage to the riskiest and seek to avoid paying claims. But the insurance industry of 2009 is in a far different place than it was 16 years ago; it has agreed to accept all applicants and generally charge the same amount, in exchange for a requirement that all individuals obtain insurance.
So it is disappointing, to say the least, to see Ms. Pelosi and other Democrats revert to round-up-the-usual-suspects demagoguery. President Obama has been more restrained but hardly more accurate; in a news conference last month, he inaccurately complained about insurers making "record profits, right now." In fact, among U.S. industries generally and other parts of the health sector in particular, insurers are not particularly profitable. The latest Fortune 500 ranking of most profitable industries has pharmaceuticals third, medical products and equipment fourth, and health insurers down at No. 35. Drugmakers reported a 19.3 percent profit margin; insurers, 2.2 percent.
More fundamentally, the Obama administration is peddling health reform as an everybody-wins scenario in which no one, except perhaps the wealthiest of the wealthy, has to sacrifice anything. We recognize that selling dessert is easier than selling spinach, especially when the other side is falsely claiming that your food is poisonous. But if health reform passes and starts bringing down costs, it is going to pinch some patients who have become accustomed to getting every test or procedure they want. At that point, Mr. Obama might wish he had done a little more to prepare people for the changes.
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In recent years, however, during speaking tours in the United States before university audiences and business groups, I have often told listeners that I feel Americans need their own change -- a perestroika, not like the one in my country, but an American perestroika -- and the reaction has been markedly different. Halls filled with thousands of people have responded with applause.
Over time, my remark has prompted all kinds of comments. Some have reacted with understanding. Others have objected, sometimes sarcastically, suggesting that I want the United States to experience upheaval, just like the former Soviet Union. In my country, particularly caustic reactions have come from the opponents of perestroika, people with short memories and a deficit of conscience. And although most of my critics surely understand that I am not equating the United States with the Soviet Union in its final years, I would like to explain my position.
Our perestroika signaled the need for change in the Soviet Union, but it was not meant to suggest a capitulation to the U.S. model. Today, the need for a more far-reaching perestroika -- one for America and the world -- has become clearer than ever.
It is true that the need for change in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s was urgent. The country was stifled by a lack of freedom, and the people -- particularly the educated class -- wanted to break the stranglehold of a system that had been built under Stalin. Millions of people were saying: "We can no longer live like this."
We started with glasnost -- giving people a chance to speak out about their worries without fear. I never agreed with my great countryman Alexander Solzhenitsyn when he said that "Gorbachev's glasnost ruined everything." Without glasnost, no changes would have occurred, and Solzhenitsyn would have ended his days in Vermont rather than in Russia.
At first, we labored under the illusion that revamping the existing system -- changes within the "socialist model" -- would suffice. But the pushback from the Communist Party and the government bureaucracy was too strong. Toward the end of 1986, it became clear to me and my supporters that nothing less than the replacement of the system's building blocks was needed.
We opted for free elections, political pluralism, freedom of religion and an economy with competition and private property. We sought to effect these changes in an evolutionary way and without bloodshed. We made mistakes. Important decisions were made too late, and we were unable to complete our perestroika.
Two conspiracies hijacked the changes -- the attempted coup in August 1991, organized by the hard-line opponents of our reforms, which ended up weakening my position as president, and the subsequent agreement among the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus to dissolve the Union. Russia's leaders then rejected the evolutionary path, plunging the country into chaos.
Nevertheless, when I am asked whether perestroika succeeded or was defeated, I reply: Perestroika won, because it brought the country to a point from which there could be no return to the past.
In the West, the breakup of the Soviet Union was viewed as a total victory that proved that the West did not need to change. Western leaders were convinced that they were at the helm of the right system and of a well-functioning, almost perfect economic model. Scholars opined that history had ended. The "Washington Consensus," the dogma of free markets, deregulation and balanced budgets at any cost, was force-fed to the rest of the world.
But then came the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009, and it became clear that the new Western model was an illusion that benefited chiefly the very rich. Statistics show that the poor and the middle class saw little or no benefit from the economic growth of the past decades.
The current global crisis demonstrates that the leaders of major powers, particularly the United States, had missed the signals that called for a perestroika. The result is a crisis that is not just financial and economic. It is political, too.The model that emerged during the final decades of the 20th century has turned out to be unsustainable. It was based on a drive for super-profits and hyper-consumption for a few, on unrestrained exploitation of resources and on social and environmental irresponsibility.
But if all the proposed solutions and action now come down to a mere rebranding of the old system, we are bound to see another, perhaps even greater upheaval down the road. The current model does not need adjusting; it needs replacing. I have no ready-made prescriptions. But I am convinced that a new model will emerge, one that will emphasize public needs and public goods, such as a cleaner environment, well-functioning infrastructure and public transportation, sound education and health systems and affordable housing.
Elements of such a model already exist in some countries. Having rejected the tutorials of the International Monetary Fund, countries such as Malaysia and Brazil have achieved impressive rates of economic growth. China and India have pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. By mobilizing state resources, France has built a system of high-speed railways, while Canada provides free health care. Among the new democracies, Slovenia and Slovakia have been able to mitigate the social consequences of market reforms.
The time has come for "creative construction," for striking the right balance between the government and the market, for integrating social and environmental factors and demilitarizing the economy.
Washington will have to play a special role in this new perestroika, not just because the United States wields great economic, political and military power in today's global world, but because America was the main architect, and America's elite the main beneficiary, of the current world economic model. That model is now cracking and will, sooner or later, be replaced. That will be a complex and painful process for everyone, including the United States.
However different the problems that the Soviet Union confronted during our perestroika and the challenges now facing the United States, the need for new thinking makes these two eras similar. In our time, we faced up to the main tasks of putting an end to the division of the world, winding down the nuclear arms race and defusing conflicts. We will cope with the new global challenges as well, but only if everyone understands the need for real, cardinal change -- for a global perestroika.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, heads the International Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies, a Moscow-based think tank."
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Wouldn't wanna be a retired auto worker today!
The traditional photo of the G20 leaders was reshot after Prime Minister Stephen Harper missed his opportunity Thursday to be in the first snap.
Harper met with his officials following the first working session in London on Thursday morning when the picture — dubbed the family photo — was scheduled to be taken.
Officials said the prime minister was getting a quick briefing on changes to the communiqué that is expected to be released by the G20 at the end of the summit.
The BBC, however, is reporting that Harper was in the bathroom while the photo was being taken.
The other leaders initially waited for Harper but then went ahead with the photo without him.
Harper was scheduled to stand in the right flank of the group next to German Chancellor Angela Merkel for the original photo.
A second attempt to gather the leaders for the photograph was made about an hour later with Harper there.
Some of the other leaders ribbed Harper as they gathered for the second take, reportedly calling out, "Harper, Harper, is Harper here? Harper, this one's for you."
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January's orgy - the Budget -"Okay," I said to self, "No worries, we have an Auditor General and a Parliamentary Budget Officer. What could possibly go wrong?"
THEN I remembered reading this mid-January National Post story:
OTTAWA -- Canada's budget officer Kevin Page says... [he is being 'systematically undermined' in] his work .... Mr. Page pulled no punches in a written plea to party leaders, urging MPs and senators to bring "clarity" to the confusion over his mandate ... [Mr. Page] argues ... interference in the management of his office is preventing him from doing the oversight he believes he was hired to do - at a time of economic upheaval when every dollar counts.... Mr. Page says it's up to parliamentarians to decide what they expect from the post.
"In order for me to fulfill the legislated mandate I require restoration of the PBO budget ... and ongoing and greater clarity from parliamentarians on the independence and operating model of the PBO function."
.... the embattled budget officer says he needs more independence to manage his office. The office deals with potentially politically explosive issues, such as studies into the sale of assets, the auto bailout, and the risks of ongoing deficits, so it needs protection from reprisals if it publishes reports that don't sit well with the government.... Some speculate the hiring delays and budget cut will effectively squeeze Mr. Page out of a job and that it wouldn't be happening without the government's blessing... "
AND now Friggin' Flaherty wants to have carte blanche authority over a new $3 Billion discretionary chequing account??? How do we know it won't be used to fund a Tory re-election campaign? Who is accountable?
To simple Jim's request for a slush fund I say NO! No matter how pressing the recession (you denied existed) gets - no matter how you frame your argument - no matter how you rationalize it - - I say, emphatically ... No Thanks!
