Desi In Toronto

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The federal government is telling the courts to back off when it comes to the Omar Khadr case and leave foreign affairs decisions to the Prime Minister and his cabinet.

In a hearing yesterday, Justice Department lawyer Doreen Mueller urged the Federal Court of Appeal to reject the Federal Court’s April ruling that the government should request Mr. Khadr’s return from the United States.

Ms. Mueller said the Crown rejects the view that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms applies when Canadians face charges outside the country.

“There is clearly no duty to protect citizens under international law,” Ms. Mueller told the court.

“No duty to protect citizens under international law”? Wow!! And then they ask me why I detest conservatives. So, the government is not interested in defending it’s own citizens. This guy may be a monster, but he is our monster and we should deal with him they way our constitution demands. But, oh no, that’s not a-ok by our piss-in-pants conservatives. And here is why:

Ms. Mueller argued that it is constitutionally inappropriate for the courts to interfere in foreign policy, which she said is the exclusive jurisdiction of the executive branch of government. The executive is made up of the Prime Minister and cabinet.

What. The. Fuck.

“Inappropriate for courts to interfere in foreign policy.” May I ask what happened to your cojones when this issue came up last week ?

After weeks of pressure by his supporters, the federal government said yesterday it would comply with a court order to bring Abousfian Abdelrazik back to Canada.

Moreover, newly declassified documents revealed yesterday that the Montreal man, who has been stranded at the Canadian Embassy in Sudan for more than a year, was placed on a United Nations no-fly list at the request of the U.S. government.

A scathing Federal Court ruling ordered the Conservative government on June 4 to repatriate Abdelrazik, a Sudanese-born Canadian citizen, within 30 days, and it gave them until today to come up with a travel plan for his return.

So, in this case, your conservative government acquiesced to a court’s “interference in foreign policy” but when it comes to a similar situation, they say “oh nos. We cannot piss of the US”.

What a bunch of cowards.

Sonic Youth!!!!!! Man, they sound great. Can’t wait to catch them live on the 30th!!

Chocked with work for the past 3 days and my daughter’s flu is not helping me be my “cheery” self. Here are some miscellaneous stuff I found over the net in the past few days :

• Universe exists because we exist. The gist of the article is that in this century, we are going to see a combination of physics (specifically the quantum side of it) with biology. The term coined by the authours is : Biocentrism.

No matter which logic one adopts, one has to come to terms with the fact that we are living in a very peculiar cosmos. Biocentrism fits very neatly into the late physicist John Wheeler’s participatory universe belief in which observers are required to bring the universe into existence. In short, you either have an astonishingly improbable coincidence revolving around the fact that the cosmos could have any properties but happens to have exactly the right ones for life, or else you have exactly what must be seen if indeed the cosmos is biocentric.

The authour then went out to explain in great detail the interaction of quantum science and the philosophy of perceiving an object but he left out how exactly will…….

….aspects of biological and physical science which are currently insensible. Natural areas of biocentric research include the realm of brain-architecture, neuroscience, and the nature of consciousness itself.

affect this new form of science? Maybe he has elaborated in greater detail in his book but I am not very comfortable with this theory. This seems and stinks of a new form of philosophy and not a new science. Anyway, that’s my take. What about you?

• Solid album from Sonic Youth. Am going to their concert on the 30th and I already know it’s going to be awesome!!!

• Gay rights are a big no-no in India. Considering at least 7% of the population is gay, that’s 70 million people in India who have do not have equal rights.

• See this site which has the strangest conversations (email threads) ever. I think half of them are just pranks.

• I know I am not really a geek but most of the items listed on the “Top 10 (More) Ways to Provoke a Geek Argument” would have me fired up!!

• Novel idea.

A Spanish bar is encouraging clients to insult its staff – and offering free drinks for original or hilarious abuse. “When you come in after work, you can say swear at them and call them bastard or imbecile,” said client Antonio Ossa.

I would go to this bar just to watch the patrons try their best to get a free drink!!!!

This is just astonishing. We have seen numerous movies and numerous TV shows that have characters saving the world with his/her guile and cunning ways. But imagine that happening in real life!!!

When Lt Col Stanislav Petrov arrived to work the graveyard shift at the secret command bunker near Moscow from which the Soviet Union’s early warning satellites were monitored, he was anticipating another routine stint of checking screens and communications systems, with a few chess problems to help pass the time.

But shortly after midnight on September 26, 1983, alarms started blaring and a red button on the console in front of Petrov began to flash the single word: “Start”. This signified that an American ballistic missile had been launched and was heading towards the USSR: then the computers linked to the satellites reported that four more missiles were on the way.

As commander of the bunker, Petrov, a 44-year-old rocket specialist, was responsible for deciding whether the horrifying launch data was accurate. If it was, standing orders required immediate notification of the Soviet high command, which would then consult the Kremlin about initiating a swift and massive retaliatory strike against the US. “For 15 seconds we were all in a state of shock,” Petrov recalled years later. “We needed to understand with absolute certainty what came next.”

I think this guy definitely deserves a movie deal!!

Updated : Be sure to read the rest to find out what happened!!

Sometimes there are just no words.

Warrant Officer Roger Perreault trained 20 years for his chance at a combat tour.

The army engineer knew how to blow up walls and bulldoze new roads – important work in a war zone where doors are booby-trapped and old roads are lined with hidden bombs.

Perreault took those critical skills and a good-luck charm aboard a bus full of soldiers departing CFB Petawawa on Aug. 1, 2006. His mission: to build a route for the Canadian infantry in Panjwai district, Afghanistan.

………………

Roger recovered after doctors found that his spinal cord was nicked during surgery, causing a leak of cord fluid. He struggles with nerve pain; he takes blood thinners to help prevent clots in his legs. In February he underwent hip surgery to repair bone damage from the blast. He has a desk job on base. Perhaps the worst of his problems is post-traumatic stress disorder.

“There’s a lot of things involved in it,” Perreault says. “Guilt. One of my best friends (Stachnik) died. That’s what I’m having a hard time with. He lived right down the road from me. Just driving by there friggin’ bothers me. It hurts.”

Interrupted sleep. Nightmares. Flashbacks. Sleep deprived, Perreault has had trouble remembering things told to him just two minutes earlier. For a year he denied he was suffering from the disorder. “It’s kind of something that you’re not really proud of.”

But his hair-trigger anger made the disorder impossible to ignore.

On a summer evening in 2007, Perreault went to pick up his daughters from dance class and parked in the furniture store’s lot next to the studio. He says the store owner came out and told him to move if he wasn’t there to buy furniture.

“I got out of the vehicle. In my mind I was going to kill the guy. That was my mission: to beat the f— out of him. I was boiling.” Perreault kept advancing, barking at the man, until Fran shouted him down.

“It’s not normal. It’s stress. When we’re over there, under contact with the Taliban every second or third day, the enemy shooting at you, it’s like constant go, go, go. The solution there is to shoot. You get back here, you don’t know how to deal with it.

“We come back and we’re just a bag of nails. It’s like, why am I yelling at my kids all the time?

“To me, that’s sinful,” Perreault says, his eyes welling up again, “when your kids can’t even approach you because they’re afraid of you.”

About 16 kilometres southeast of Petawawa, the Phoenix Centre for Children and Families in Pembroke has seen its military family caseload jump from 12 in 2005 to 85 today, with another 20 on the waiting list.

The Perreaults are among those 85. Fifteen-year-old Marissa gets counselling there, and she says her brothers, Mathew, 11, and Derek, 9, sometimes go to group therapy.

“It’s really hard to live with someone who has (post-traumatic stress disorder),” says the teenager. The night Fran called with the news Roger was failing in the hospital, Marissa got so drunk a friend’s mother had to take her to the hospital. She stayed there until morning.

Marissa says that for a short time after her father returned from Afghanistan, she cut herself.

“It was like a razor blade off a (pencil) sharpener. I did it on my wrists and then my sister noticed and told my parents, so then I started doing it on my legs. I haven’t done any of that in a long time.”

She hopes her counsellor can help her build a better relationship with her father.

“I understand what he did was really good and stuff, but some days I just wish he never went there.”

Perreault lives on a steady diet of pills – a blood thinner, an antidepressant, an anti-psychotic, Lyrica for nerve pain and slow-release morphine – and on anger.

…………..

“The only reason why I’m speaking about some of it now is because my career is over,” Perreault says.

“I don’t regret going there. It was my job to go there.

“I trained my whole career to go do something like that. The sad thing of it is the aftermath.”

In Delhi in 1996 to make a long distance phone call, you’d either have to be very rich or use one of the private maintained phone booths. Basically you’d walk to the booth, give the head honcho the number you want to reach and then sit and wait for your turn because, invariably, there were quite a few people waiting to make a call.

The one I used to frequent was a small room that had opened right next to my apartment. The phone was in a small make shift booth in one of the corners of the room. It was a glass booth with curtains to give the caller perceived privacy. Perceived? Because people in the room could clearly hear the entire conversation of the person in the booth even though no one could see in the booth.

So one evening I went to the booth to call my folks for my weekly call and gave the number and waited for my turn amongst 5-6 other people. I knew it would take time so I had taken a book along which proceeded to read. Inside the booth was a woman who, maybe because of a bad connection, was talking fairly loudly. So, even if you did not want to hear her conversation, you had no choice.

And this is how the conversation was going :

“Yes mum. Life is really hard here working all the time.”

…….

“Yes mum he helps out as much as he can but his work sometimes takes him away for a few days and then it becomes very hard to handle the kids and my work”

…….

“Yeah. That’s why I am calling. Please send me some body who will help out with the house.”

Here in North America such help is very expensive but in India, personal help is within the budgets of everyone. Even I as a student had a maid help me (and my flat mates) with cleaning and cooking everyday. Anyway, on with the conversation :

The woman says “can you please send someone from (ed : I forget what city she says here but I remember thinking, boy that’s far off) as soon as you can? But can you make sure that he is not more than 15 years old”

At this point, my head went up. I was mildly shocked. How can she ask her mom to separate a kid from his parents to look after her kids??? And then she said something that made everyone in the room look up from their magazines and books with shock.

“Please make sure that he is not into studying or learning. Or that he is looking into coming to Delhi and think I would be responsible for his well being.  I don’t want to have to deal with that crap.”

She continued with this line of conversation for a good minute or so and the whole time we were all looking at each other in shock and I know what everyone was thinking. Here is an educated woman talking about getting help for her kids from another kid and she wants this help not to be inquisitive or have a education-oriented mind. She just wants a servant. Someone at her beck and call.

And that’s what I hate about India. This subjugation of a population because they are of a different social strata. Of a different caste. Of a different region. This is very common in India and is prevalent among the so called educated class as well. India will forever be mired is bickering amongst it’s population as long as such attitudes exist.

What brought about this rant from me? This :

Sunil and Arvind Parmar, owners of a tea stall in Surendranagar, Gujarat, break
for lunch while their servant Mangal, an 11-year-old Dalit boy is made to sit under the table.

How many times are we going to have to point to globeandmail the obvious? On a personal level I have no idea what kind of person she is but on a professional level, Christie Blatchford is dumb fucking stupid.

Here is her latest shit regarding the controversy surrounding taped conversations of Lisa Raitt (the minister for Natural Resources) :

On the tape, Ms. MacDonnell said the isotope issue is confusing to a lot of people. “But it’s sexy,” Ms. Raitt replied. “Radioactive leaks. Cancer.” It was clear as a bell she wasn’t talking about cancer being sexy. About Ms. Aglukkaq, Ms. Raitt said, “Oh. Leona. I’m so disappointed.” Ms. MacDonnell said, “I wonder if it’s her staff trying to shield her from it or whether she is just terrified.”

Ms. Raitt replied: “I think her staff is trying to shield her. Oh God. She’s such a capable woman, but it’s hard for her to come out of a co-operative government into this rough-and-tumble. She had a question in the House yesterday, or two days ago, that planked. I really hope she never gets anything hot.”

This is irresponsible? Disparaging? Disgusting? This is what prompted Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff and Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe to yesterday invoke the spectre of breast-cancer patients needing tests being told that a cabinet minister called their disease sexy; now, that’s disgusting.

Irresponsible – errrrr, yes.

Disparaging – errrrr, of course.

Disgusting – errrr, yeah.

I don’t think Christie has a clue what the fuck she is talking about. And hearing her use that screeching voice on The Bill Carroll show (another apologist for Lisa Raitt and the conservatives in general) this morning to say over and over again “she did nothing wrong” is  moronic on many levels.

The minister WAS referring to cancer as being a sexy ISSUE for her which, in political jargon means, “lots of public attention for me”. How the hell can anyone be idiotic enough to talk about an issue of life and death for the advancement of her political career in such a cavalier way in front of her aides, driver, etc.? I have listened to the conversations and it was fairly obvious she is trying to say – this is a great issue as it will get a me a lot of publicity as soon as I fix it.

The problem is, a few months later from that conversation, she is nowhere near fixing it. In fact, Canada is ready to bring in private parties and transfer the knowledge of isotopes production to them!! Instead of fixing the problem, she has ended up mucking it further and that’s why we on the progressive side are having this fit of outrage.

And, Christie, please don’t throw her brother’s death by cancer in our face. We are not exactly stupid to immediately say “oooooh her brother died of cancer so she is never going to use any issue with cancer to advance her career”.

From what I understand from your nonsensical piece on the globeandmail.com today, you are saying “oh what the hell. She was just being herself. We are all like that so leave her alone”. And if that really is your defense, then you are more idiotic than I thought.

Because all said and done, there is nothing on that tape that can’t be put to rest with the correct apology. All the minister had to say was, it was a private conversation and she is sorry if some people got hurt because of it. That’s all. But conservatives being blockheads, they had to put on a display of sheer arogance. They went to the court to try and stop the release of the tape!!! Why? Because the public might hear a private conversation??? BTW, it’s not private when you are talking in front of a driver as the judge has confirmed.

This is what is wrong with this whole issue. The conservative government is not trying to govern Canada. Rather they are trying to RULE Canada. They want their agenda, their policies, their opinions thrust on everyone even though 65% of the Canadian population opposes them.

And that’s what you fail to understand, Ms Blatchford. And that’s why you are dumb fucking stupid.

Update : She finally apologised. I think we can now put the matter to rest.

There is a reason why I like reading TheRedneckMommy…..and this post is one of them……

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In India, China and sub-Saharan Africa, millions upon millions of women are missing. They are not lost, but dead: victims of violence, discrimination and neglect.

These are excess deaths: women “missing” above and beyond natural mortality rates, compared to their male counterparts.

Women who are dead because their lives were undervalued.

Around the world boys outnumber girls at birth, but in countries where women and men receive equal care, women have proved hardier and more resistant to disease, and thus live longer. In most of Asia and North Africa, however, Sen found that women die with startlingly higher frequency.

His research began a flutter of activity in academic circles and by 2005, the United Nations produced a much higher estimate for how many women could be “missing”: 200 million.

“Previously, people had thought that they (the missing women) were all at the very early stages of life, prenatal or just after, so before four years old,” Anderson says. “But what we found is that the majority are actually later.” Female infanticide has been endemic in India and China for some time, which she says led researchers to assume that it was the source of all the missing women. But the truth is much more complicated.

Once she and Ray broke down the numbers by age group, they found that the majority of excess female deaths came later in life: 66 per cent in India, 55 per cent in China and 83 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa.

Female infanticide is a huge issue in India. People just do not want girls. The government has tried to step in but what do you do when majority of the population does not desire baby girls.

And this is not a poor-educated issue. My mom is a teacher in a secondary school catering to the well to do families and she sees the gender gap in the classroom. She just does not comprehend why the gap exists. Why would a family opt for a boy to a girl?

And this is just plain sad……

“Why would there be excess mortality of, let’s say, 45-year-old women versus 45-year-old men?” asks economics professor Kevin Milligan. “And what they find is … they have the same set of diseases, they just seem to die more frequently. The explanation that seems most consistent with that is differential access to health care. And so that’s a really striking finding.”

Anderson says that lack of health care is likely a big part of the problem, but that there are numerous cultural and social factors at play that can be difficult to pinpoint.

…..in India, a category called “injuries” yielded ominously high figures: 86,000 excess deaths in the age group 15-29 in 2000 alone. Anderson has done extensive research in India, and says the numbers beg the question of exactly how many deaths were so-called “kitchen fires” – often used to mask dowry-related killings, the result of a new bride being tortured by her new family until her parents pay their debts.

Good to know that security cameras are used to keep the trigger happy police in check too.

Ronnie Holloway’s eyes were still black and blue one week after he was allegedly beaten by a Passaic, N.J., police officer — an attack that was inadvertently caught on a video surveillance camera.

I know the police work under enormous stress conditions and need resources to deal with silly shit like the one above. But to beat the crap out of an obviously deranged man (watch the video) just because you can, is insane. I hope the police officer is throw out of the force.

An article from LA Times is posted on Slashdot :

The LA Times is running a story about Earth Speaks, a companion project to SETI, which focuses on how we would communicate with intelligent extraterrestrial life, should we happen to discover it. Far more effort has been devoted to searching for signals or a means to communicate than the question of what we might say once contact is established, and the folks at SETI have set up a website to gather opinions on what the best questions and statements are. “So far, the messages break down into a few distinct categories. Some people want to throw a block party to welcome the aliens to the neighborhood. Others, less trusting, would warn the aliens that we’ve got guns and know how to use them. Another group, possibly influenced by having seen too many movies, would have us hide under the bed until they go away. ‘If we discover intelligent life beyond Earth, we should not reply — we should freeze and play dead,’ wrote one contributor.” What would you say first to an alien?

The first suggestion?

got any new porn we haven’t seen yet ???

LOL!!!! Great start to the day!!!

A truly fascinating article :

How could bees of little brain come up with anything as complex as a dance language? The answer could lie not in biology but in six-dimensional math and the bizarre world of quantum mechanics.

Honeybees don’t have much in the way of brains. Their inch-long bodies hold at most a few million neurons. Yet with such meager mental machinery honeybees sustain one of the most intricate and explicit languages in the animal kingdom. In the darkness of the hive, bees manage to communicate the precise direction and distance of a newfound food source, and they do it all in the choreography of a dance. Scientists have known of the bee’s dance language for more than 70 years, and they have assembled a remarkably complete dictionary of its terms, but one fundamental question has stubbornly remained unanswered: How do they do it? How do these simple animals encode so much detailed information in such a varied language? Honeybees may not have much brain, by they do have a secret.

This secret has vexed Barbara Shipman, a mathematician at the University of Rochester, ever since she was a child. “I grew up thinking about bees,” she says. “My dad worked for the Department of Agriculture as a bee researcher. My brothers and I would stop at his office, and sometimes he would how show us the bees. I remember my father telling me about the honeybee’s dance when I was about nine years old. And in high school I wrote a paper on the medicinal benefits of honey.”

Shipman’s work concerned a set of geometric problems associated with an esoteric mathematical concept known as a flag manifold………..

Mathematicians like to examine different manifolds the way antiques dealers browse through curio shops–always exploring, always looking for unusual characteristics that expand their understanding of numbers or geometry………..

One day Shipman was busy projecting the six-dimensional residents of the flag manifold onto two dimensions. The particular technique she was using involved first making a two-dimensional outline of the six dimensions of the flag manifold. This is not as strange as it may sound. When you draw a circle, you are in effect making a two-dimensional outline of a three-dimensional sphere. As it turns out, if you make a two-dimensional outline of the six-dimensional flag manifold, you wind up with a hexagon. The bee’s honeycomb, of course, is also made up of hexagons, but that is purely coincidental. However, Shipman soon discovered a more explicit connection. She found a group of objects in the flag manifold that, when projected onto a two-dimensional hexagon, formed curves that reminded her of the bee’s recruitment dance.

Delving more deeply into the flag manifold, Shipman dredged up a variable, which she called alpha, that allowed her to reproduce the entire bee dance in all its parts and variations. Alpha determines the shape of the curves in the 6-D flag manifold, which means it also controls how those curves look when they are projected onto the 2-D hexagon…………..

Shipman is not, however, content to play Kepler. “You can look at this idea and say, `That’s a nice geometric description of the dance, very pretty,’ and leave it like that,” she says. “But there is more to it. When you have a physical phenomenon like the honeybee dance, and it follows a mathematical structure, you have to ask what are the physical laws that are causing it to happen.”

At this point Shipman departs from safely grounded scholarship and enters instead the airy realm of speculation. The flag manifold, she notes, in addition to providing mathematicians with pure joy, also happens to be useful to physicists in solving some of the mathematical problems that arise in dealing with quarks, tiny particles that are the building blocks of protons and neutrons. And she does not believe the manifold’s presence both in the mathematics of quarks and in the dance of honeybees is a coincidence. Rather she suspects that the bees are somehow sensitive to what’s going on in the quantum world of quarks, that quantum mechanics is as important to their perception of the world as sight, sound, and smell.

Isn’t that awesome!!!! Bees, might be sensitive to quantum mechanics!!! I know it’s just a theory at the moment but the mathematics supports the theory so I am hopeful we would learn a lot from our little companions.

Having said that, this is not a good piece of news :

For some time now, honeybees have been disappearing from farmers’ hives without a trace. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and Prof. Joe Cummins on the trail of possible culprits …

The mystery of disappearing honeybees is far from solved. The greatest suspects so far are pesticides and radiation from mobile phone base stations. However, it is likely that sub-lethal effects due to GM crops, mites infestations and other factors which alter the bees’ behaviour, affect their memory and learning process or compromise their health and immunity will all have a role to play.

Now I feel really guilty about the small budding bee hive that I have to knock down in my front porch. But I gotta do it before my 5 year old becomes interested in it and pokes her finger into the hive.

Don’t like the religious connotations to this story but, what the heck, it’s by Clarke!!

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