Desi In Toronto

…………this is where I was………so excuse me while I get back into the groove…..

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Prominent liberal groups and gay rights proponents criticized President-elect Barack Obama Wednesday for choosing evangelical pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the presidential inauguration next month.

Prominent liberal groups and gay rights proponents criticized President-elect Barack Obama Wednesday for choosing evangelical pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the presidential inauguration next month.

Oh Obama, Obama, Obama. Why did you have to take such a bullshit step? I know you want to toe the centrist line but come on, Warren. Here is what he said about people of different faiths :

……….I have yet to let Jesus enter my life, but I admire Warren. We once appeared on a panel together along with Harvard’s Peter Gomes at the Aspen Ideas Festival. When it came time for questions, a woman stood up, proclaimed her Judaism, and asked Warren if she was going to burn in hell. He paused before responding — and then answered her question the only way it could be answered. Yes, he said to audible gasps. My reaction was that either you believe that Jesus is the savior or you do not, and I found myself impressed that Warren remained true to his convictions, knowing full well that the audience would not like what he said

Yup. So all you non-Christians, see ya in hell. And he does not believe in evolution. Which in my books is the worst sin ever!!

Oh, and he is a homophobe.

President elect Obama, are you beginning to slide from the “moral” high that you claim you have?

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A head scarf landed a Muslim woman in jail Tuesday after she refused to remove it during a hearing at the Douglasville Municipal Court.

Lisa Valentine, also known by her Islamic name, Miedah, 40, was arrested for ‘violating a court policy of no headgear’, Chris Womack, deputy chief of operations for the Douglasville Police Department said on Wednesday.

Valentine was in court with a nephew who was facing a traffic citation. She was wearing a hijab, the head covering worn by Muslim women.

When she refused to remove it she was handcuffed and taken to Judge Keith Rollins’ chambers. He cited her for contempt and ordered her held in jail for 10 days.

Welcome to the new America. Where paranoia rules and reason and logic and freedom of religion/speech etc. are just words. I wonder what the judge’s reaction to a Sikh or a Jew (wearing a Kippah)? Would he have reacted in the same way?

It’s so easy to hate, isn’t it?

I knew, I knew, I knew there was a reason why I detested romantic moveis.

LONDON: Planning to go for a romantic comedy with your boyfriend this weekend? Well, scrap all your plans, for according to a study, ‘rom-coms’ can ruin love lives.

The study has found that romantic comedies such as Bridget Jones’s Diary and Notting Hill give people unrealistic – and potentially unhealthy – expectations about real-life relationships. Unlikely happy endings, improbable plots and faux philosophy are to blame, they say.

Ladies, I rest my case. And please never insist I have to watch some x, y, z movie because it will make you “believe in love” again.

It’s frightening how this could be so true today. God, I am so glad Bush is leaving.

Wow!! Someone seems to have a lot of guts. So much for US troops being showered with flowers and sweets.

This guy is more than welcome to my shoes!!

Nonsense from MSM

Mr Zaidi shouted “this is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog,” at Mr Bush in a news conference he held with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki during a farewell visit to Baghdad.

The journalist then flung one shoe at Mr Bush, forcing him to duck, followed by another, which sailed over Mr Bush’s head and slammed into the wall behind him.

Throwing shoes at someone is a very serious insult in the Arab world.

As opposed to shoe throwing in USA where it is an expression of your love for the recipient.  What shit.

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observed one of my students with a group of other children gathered around his laptop. Upon looking at his computer, I saw he was giving a demonstration of some sort. The student was showing the ability of the laptop and handing out Linux disks.

After confiscating the disks I called a confrence with the student and that is how I came to discover you and your organization. Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful.

OMFG!! I can understand when ignorant people question a new concept or a new idea and then either see the light or turn a blind eye. But this is sheer stupidity. A teacher, A TEACHER, does not know about Linux!! And she has the temerity to admonish a student, who shows that he is exploring an exciting new world of possibilities.

I hope this is a joke and if not, I hope that this teacher is reprimanded in the strogenst possible way.

Update : This post by Ken explains why it’s not a good idea to jump to conclusions.

my phone buzzed again but it wasn’t with the incoming call ring…it was a text message being received. I cued the caller ID and it returned as “unavailable”.

I pushed “read message” and waited for the text to appear on my screen.

“Can I call you?”

I pulled the truck over into a parking lot and answered:

“I guess. Who r u?”

The inactivity was so long that I started the truck and began to put it into gear and re-enter traffic when the buzz came again. I pushed the read button.

“Karen”.

It was my turn to hesitate. Finally, I toggled Reply and typed in one character.

“k”

She didn’t call right away. It took her about 15 minutes to finally call me. When she did she didn’t say anything for the first 15 seconds. When she finally did speak, it was obvious she was crying.

“Why did you throw me to the wolves like that?”

I didn’t even have to think of the reply.

“I didn’t throw you to the wolves Karen, I threw ignorance to the wolves. Let me ask you something. If I had not emailed you a link to my blog, would you have even known about this?”

Again she hesitated. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that if you didn’t know I had written that blog, would you have known about all these comments? Has anyone called you or bothered you about this? Have your co-workers mentioned it?”

“Well…no.”

“Then the wolves didn’t touch you Karen. If I had included your last name or email address, then yes, you could ask me that question but as it stands, you are just a nameless school teacher that evoked a public response from me.”

She didn’t say anything for several seconds. When she did, it was a quiet and simple:

“Thank you”.

………….

I want to apologize to all the hard-working and honest NEA members. My statements were based on an isolated but nasty experience two years ago, and, while I developed a nasty dislike for the people in that situation, it was both unfair and short-sighted to say the things I did. The teachers that we entrust our kids with on a daily basis do us a service that is under-appreciated, under-paid and over-criticized. My mini tirade didn’t add anything of value to the situation and only served to inflame an already volatile area of debate. You have my sincere apology for slapping you all with such a wide brush.

Karen isn’t alone in her ignorance. I have sat in a PhD’s office…a PhD that happened to be a principal of a school. She told me that according to her “tech staff”, it was illegal to remove Microsoft Windows from their school computers. So who is ignorant here? The “tech staffer” afraid of losing his MCSE position or the Dr. of Education that didn’t bother to check into such a statement. Ignorance isn’t the sole possession of this particular school teacher.

Karen and I have talked on the phone now for a couple of hours, here and there. We’ve come to understand each other more and had she said some of the things in her email that she said during our phone conversations…this black ink on white digital paper probably wouldn’t exist.

…………

The student did get his Linux disks back after the class. The lad was being disruptive, but that wasn’t mentioned. Neither was the obvious fact that when she saw a gaggle of giggling 8th grade boys gathered around a laptop, the last thing she expected to see on that screen was a spinning cube.

She didn’t know what was on those disks he was handing out. It could have been porn, viral .exe’s…any number of things for all she knew. When she heard that an adult had given him some of the disks to hand out, her spidey-senses started tingling. Coupled with the fact that she truly was ignorant of honest-to-goodness free software, and you have some fairly impressive conclusion-jumping.

In a couple of ways, I am guilty of it too.

Karen seems to be a good teacher, and as she stated to me today, she has learned more about the tech world in a few days than she’s learned in five years.

That’s because she’s trapped in a world of Windows. Most people are.

I am trapped in the world of Windows too. I have Linux (red hat distro) on my PC but I rarely use it cause my PC has become wonky off late and ever since I got a laptop with Vista loaded, I have been stuck with it. I am not totally happy with it as it freezes from time to time and god forbid I run more than two CPU hungry applications on it (never run Apache and MySql at the same time). In fact, I would say Vista is the reason why I really am not dabbling in servers anymore.

I have always been fascinated by cosmology.

I am guessing it started with the TV series COSMOS by Carl Sagan, one of the few western programmes deemed by the Desi bureaucrats to be worthy of being beamed to our homes in the 80′s. I know most of what Carl Sagan said went right over my head but I was fascinated by some of the things he said and showed.

I remember one the episodes had an explanation on the speed of light. He explained that if one of the two twins sitting on a bench on a beautiful day went on a ride in a motorcycle (or was it a scooter?) at the speed of light around the block, when he would arrive back, the rider’s age would stay the same, relatively speaking. However, the brother waiting for him would have aged and the camera pans to this old guy seating on the bench waiting for his brother to come back from the motorcycle ride.

Wow! That imagery is probably what sucked me in to cosmology. I had tried to understand, broadly, most of what has been going around in cosmology ever since. I read books by Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, John Wheeler, Brian Greene, Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg etc. I would be the first one to confess that most of the ideas of Cosmology are beyond my understanding. But I persist because every now and then, a line or a paragraph or a page suddenly presents an understanding that is so astounding, so gratifying, so illuminating that the hours spent on reading and re-reading a book are totally worth it. Which is why news like the this one, is so exciting to me.

By watching the motions of 28 stars orbiting the Milky Way’s most central region with admirable patience and amazing precision, astronomers have been able to study the supermassive black hole lurking there. It is known as “Sagittarius A*” (pronounced “Sagittarius A star”). The new research marks the first time that the orbits of so many of these central stars have been calculated precisely and reveals information about the enigmatic formation of these stars — and about the black hole to which they are bound.

The interstellar dust that fills the Galaxy blocks our direct view of the Milky Way’s central region in visible light. So astronomers used infrared wavelengths that can penetrate the dust to probe the region. While this is a technological challenge, it is well worth the effort. “The Galactic Centre harbours the closest supermassive black hole known. Hence, it is the best place to study black holes in detail,” argues the study’s first author, Stefan Gillessen.

Wow!!! I think, this bit of news is now going to kick start the next round of reading on Cosmology.

Here is Russell Peter’s bit about fighting terrorism by not smiling on your passport photograph.

……and here is a fact from the Indiana Government!!

Don’t flash a toothy smile, don’t wear your glasses and don’t wear a hat or head scarf while you’re getting your photo taken for an Indiana driver’s license or identification card.

The Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles last month rolled out a new set of rules governing how people must be photographed on their driver’s license photos.

No, the rules aren’t designed to make driver’s license photos — which already had a reputation for being unflattering — even worse.

Rather, the BMV is making the photographs uniform so their facial recognition software can be its most effective in spotting fraudulent license applications.

Constitutional crisis!!

Coup d’etat!!!

Backroom politics!!!

Separatists!!!

These are some of the common words being flung around Canada in the last few days. For those of you not following Canadian politics here is what’s been happening :

1) Conservatives claim minority win in the October federal election.

2) Stephen Harper elected leader and hence the Prime Minister of Canada, by the elected MPs of the Conservative party.

3) Harper makes conciliatory sounds in his acceptance speech.

4) Weeks later, conciliatory tone of the Conservatives thrown out the window when Jim Flaherty (finance minister) presents an economic map. An utterly vague economic statement from the incumbent minister with no plan to tackle the current economic crisis. Buried in the statement is the proposal to “save” millions of dollars ($30 Million) by revoking the public financing to political parties (the ones that are not in the pocket of big business like the Conservatives) and to make it illegal for federal employees to go on a strike (for better working conditions, more pay, better contracts etc.)

5) Opposition in furor. More than likely, Jack Layton of NDP takes charge and somehow gets all the opposition together.

6) Opposition announces that it is prepared to bring down the government and works a deal within themselves (all three opposition parties) and presents a model to run the country thereby ensuring that there are no elections (with a cost of about $300 million for each election, 10 times the amount that the Conservatives would have “saved” with their proposal).

7) Harper backs down from the offending proposals. Too chicken to play chicken.

8) Opposition has probably had enough of the pushing around and says – no deal.

9) Now Harper’s true colours come out and he starts lashing out at everyone in the opposition especially the Bloc party with whom his party had tried to make deal in 2004 for doing EXCATLY the same thing Liberals/NDP is doing.

10) Harper presents the alternative – Proroguing to save his skin. Proroguing means, the session in the parliament is declared over, before it’s even begun and all parties will wait for a month or so before voting against the government can begin again. In other words, Harper wants a time out. Unfortunately, history is against him and very few people see how the Governor General will allow proroguing.

Harper, at this moment is with the GG and probably requesting proroguing the parliament. There is no idea how the Governor General, Michaëlle Jean, will proceed but I have a feeling that Harper is probably going to ask her to suspend the parliament and go for another election. In which case I agree with CC – bring it on!!

In all this I think most of the people fail to see a crucial element to the episode.

The opposition is COMPLETELY within it’s rights to bring down the governmentt.

It is the democratic right of the opposition to band together and say “we the opposition, representing 63% of the Canadian citizens, oppose your policies”. It’s as simple as that!!!

I do not understand why in the world are people calling this a coup!! I mean, I can understand that you are upset about this but, damn it, it is the right of the opposition parties to bring down the government. These are your elected MPs acting in unison and saying no to the partisan politics being played by a power hungry Harper.

Yes, it’s true that the elections just happened, but boo-fucking-hoo. The Conservatives, instead of governing Canada through a difficult economic period, are playing politics and trying to kill the opposition. If the Conservatives had succeeded in pushing this proposal through, it would have put a big dent on the grassroot politics that we Canadians have come to depend on heavily. Would you really like to live in a country where there is weak opposition?

It was, simply put, the audicious nature of power grab by the conservatives that really banded the opposition and I say, kudos to them. It’s about time the opposition stood up to a bully.

And look at how the bully is reacting – like a cry baby.

Updated : Oh and I almost forgot. Here is a post that you need to read regarding how desperate Stevie has become.

Updated 2 : And this one too.

Updated 3 : Prorouging it is. In other words, Canada and the rest of the world are in midst of a economic crisis and what does his majesty Stephen Harper do? Take a vacation of a month and half. Of course, he and the Conservatives will not be resting. Now begins the PR campaign to demonize democracy in Canada. E.g. this :

The Tories maintained their vigorous attack on the coalition’s decision to seek formal backing from the Bloc Québécois for its survival in the House. One MP went so far as to accuse the Liberals of treason.

“They’ve actually written a deal giving the separatists a veto over every decision of the Canadian government,” Bob Dechert said. “That is as close to treason and sedition as I can imagine.”

Turning my attention to my adopted country, what do I see?

The leaders of the three opposition parties presented their plan to topple Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s minority government at a press conference in Ottawa late Monday afternoon.

The leaders of the Liberal Party, the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Québécois publicly signed a coaltion accord and sent a letter to Governor-General Michaëlle Jean saying the opposition has lost confidence in the Conservatives.

The proposed coalition government between the Liberals and the New Democratic Party would last until June of 2011, but the Bloc is only pledging support for 18 months.

Under the plan, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion would become prime minister until May, when his successor would take over.

Woah!!! Didn’t see that coming. Dion is finally going to be the Prime Minister. I had voted for the Liberal party in the last election and was hoping to see Dion as the Prime Minister of Canada. But there were reasons for me voting for the Liberals. The main motive was The Green Shift. The other was to bring in actual accountability into the government and I saw that in the leadership of Stephen Dion. Unfortunately, not many Canadians agreed with me as Liberals were routed in the election receiving only 77 seats in the house.

But days after the election, I was wondering why the hell is the opposition not banding together against Harper? And I ask again, why exactly could not NDP and the Liberals to band together a few weeks ago? Of course, the latest shit pile from the conservatives is what galvanised the opposition.

The Conservatives are poised to eliminate the public subsidies that Canada’s five major political parties receive, a move that would save $30 million a year but could cripple the opposition.

I don’t really like this new scenario. I mean, Harper’s governance was full of shit, no doubt about it. He called the oppositions’ bluff and they bit him right back. If the current government is bought down, he must resign immediately from the conservative party for this was a shameless act of consolidating his power without giving a thought to the problems of the common man.

I will, of course, support a coalition of the Liberals and NDP. But I would support it only if The Green Shift or it’s variant is included in the mix.

Updated :

Ha ha ha….yes, it’s only the opposition vying for power!!!! These conservatives are so full of BULLSHIT!!!

The prospect of the Prime Minister trying to shut down Parliament to avoid defeat has one constitutional scholar shaking in his boots.

Political scientist Peter Russell said Stephen Harper may have the right to ask Governor General Michaëlle Jean to prorogue Parliament and end the current session but doing so would set a dangerous and undemocratic precedent.

“Of all the things that have happened or have been threatened to be about to happen, this is the most dangerous because it shows the intention of the Prime Minister to govern without Parliament and that is undermining our parliamentary democracy,” said Russell, a University of Toronto professor emeritus.

So much for thinking of the common man. Let’s shut down the parliament and avoid all business until we are firmly in power in Jan. 2009!!!

Now I really want the NDP/Liberals/Bloc to be in power!!