The life of words

Look at how that once-lofty art and architectural word “rendition” as been pummeled into the muck lately. Once almost exclusively found dancing over the sherry-soaked lips of self-styled connoisseurs, as in “I am most bemused by his extraordinary rendition of the Vienna Secession Building,” (a bad example, since Hitler used to do renditions of buildings in Vienna on blank postcards to sell to passersby on the street), now the word is strongly associated with global CIA torture franchises, and also a certain Coquitlam pig farmer’s disposal of murder victims (at an East Vancouver meat rendition plant). Said plant is also the focus of a neighbourhood mobilization to reduce bad odours in the area.

No one speaks of artful renditions anymore, most especially of extraordinary renditions. Now the leather-elbow set deploy the much more pedestrian “good drawing” and glance wistfully down at their shoes.

Extraordinary rendition for the trouble makers

Jim Chu, the new Vancouver Chief of Police, seems to rather like the erstwhile secret CIA extraordinary rendition program. That’s the program that snared Canadian engineer Maher Arar while he was in transit in a US airport, bound for Canada from abroad. The CIA put the grab on him and sent him direct to Syria, a country the CIA highlights prominently on its terrorist-state watch list. There, Arar was held incommunicado for two years, during which he endured torture. Finally, convinced he wasn’t a threat to US interests, the Syrians released him, and he returned to Canada.

Now Chu is hoping local business leaders fund our very own extraordinary rendition program to return local curbside terrorists to the places from whence they came. We tend to think here, in chronically self-congratulating Vancouver, that everyone who comes here was motivated to come to this place rather than to go away from another place. The truth is Vancouver is a refugee camp for dissociated, abused, and discarded people from all over Canada; home for many would be a form of torture.

Chu also shows a susceptibility to buy the discredited approach of the US toward terrorism. That approach assumes that terrorism is the product of individuals perpetrating it, so that all one needs to do, in this line of thought, is round up all the existing terrorists and terrorism will go away.

Think again. If terrorism is in fact the product of foreign local social and economic conditions aided and abetted by US policies toward local governments perpetuating those conditions, then taking away all existing terrorists will be as useful as standing in the middle of a swimming pool trying to empty it with a bucket you dip and pour out over your shoulder.

Petty crime in Vancouver is equally a product of local conditions. Sending away all existing petty criminals will not change those conditions, and so levels of petty crime will not change. Chu’s policy will lead to exasperation and likely more harsher measures in the future that will only end up producing more torture for the dispossessed, and so even worse conditions that lead to more petty crime.

There is a reason news of international events is worthwhile reading. The global is local and the local is global. Instead of a program to return petty criminals “Home for the Holidays,” as Chu so callously and sarcastically calls his plan, why aren’t we instead talking about “A Home for the Holidays” program wherein we try to get a home, at least, for all the people already living here?

Carlyle again!

You’d think the idea of racial superiority was dead except for residue lingering in the minds of the odd demented old crank. Once again, think again.

James Watson, famous for playing a key role in applying his wife’s ideas to the riddle of DNA and taking the Nobel Prize for proposing the double-helix solution, has long been in charge of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, founded in 1890 and one of that country’s leading biological research institutions. No aging crank at 79 years old, Watson has just released a new book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science. Off to tour in promotion of the book, he did a newspaper interview with the Sunday Times prior to an appearance at the Science Museum in London.

During that interview, he said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really.” He went on to add, “People who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.” In earlier interviews and talks in recent years, he has suggested that if a test could show a fetus was destined to be a homosexual person, a woman should have the right to abort it, and that if genetic engineering could produce beauty, “people say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty [but] I think it would be great.” He has also suggested that genetic engineering should be applied to cure “stupidity.”

The question is not about what this guy is up to, but what his institution is up to. On the board of trustees of Cold Harbour are David M Rubenstein, Managing Director of The Carlyle Group, Stephen M Lessing, Managing Director of Lehman Brothers, and Douglas P Morris, Chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company with over a 25% market share of global music sales.

The board of trustees is responsible for, among other things, hiring and firing the director of the institution. Apparently, Carlyle Group, Lehman Brothers, and Universal find nothing amiss in the research directions Watson has taken Cold Harbour in.

Simon says

It is now okay, if opinions appearing on the op-ed page of the New York Times penned by former US ambassadors, is the arbiter of what’s okay, for the US to not only pursue regime change in political entities aboard but to pursue the complete annihilation of those political entities, period.

It has taken just six years for leading American policy makers and media to move from whole-hearted endorsement of forced regime change to endorsement of forced regime elimination.

Peter W Galbraith, a prominent commentator on American foreign affairs and former US ambassador to Croatia, this week wrote that “There is . . . little alternative to partition” of Iraq. It “cannot be reconstructed as a unitary state.” He went on to say, “Democracy destroyed” Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, “because, as in Iraq, there was never a shared national identity. . . . The good news,” he adds, “is that partition will have the practical effect of limiting Iran’s influence to southern Iraq and Baghdad.” He concludes, “partition is a better outcome.”

So having fully participated in the forced melding of disparate Ottoman provinces into the West-manufactured country of Iraq in the 1920s—strictly to serve Western interests at the sacrifice of local interests—the US now wishes to blow up whatever progress the government of Iraq made over the century to work with what they were dealt, all to serve, again, strictly Western interests at the expense, again, of local interests.

How about just stop messing around in the lives of other people period?

Look at the fun in feeling groovy

Sleep research, dormant for decades, has awakened with new life lately. It turns out that while some parts of the brain and body most active during waking hours shut down, other parts are far more active during sleep than during wakefulness. Researchers now feel that, on a strict comparison of overall brain activity, some stages of sleep should be considered as active as wakefulness, if not more so.

It seems that most of the activity is concerned with sorting out, categorizing, prioritizing, and testing the raw data that flowed in through the senses during the day. So efficient is the testing system, the mind is able to construct wholly convincing holographic environments in which to model scenarios to be played out.

But curiously, the latest research indicates that most of the benefits of sleep in this regard can be duplicated by quiet wakeful contemplation. In any event, there is no doubt that one or the other, and probably both, are critically necessary to effective functioning in life.

Yet our age is characterized by sleeping pills and too-short sleep periods fraught with noise interruptions (like the blasted helicopters buzzing East Vancouver all hours of the night and muffler-less motorcycles roaring up the streets) on the one hand, and ipods, movies, advertisements, always-on TVs and cellphones on the other hand, making both quiet contemplation and deep sleep vestiges of a long-gone past.

Some of us overcompensate with meditation and personal retreats at mental camps. But maybe all we really need is to just hang out a bit and stare off and think a little at some point every day. That is, we need a little more of doing nothing.

Pilgrim’s Progress

That ungainly body of science snowballing down the hill called “Climate Change” has traversed something of an intellectual Pilgrim’s Progress the last twenty odd years. Quite literally so: in the second paragraph of this the single most influential book ever written in English (in 1678), Christian, the pilgrim out to make said progress, says to his skeptical family, “’I am for certain informed, that this our City will be burned with fire from Heaven, in which fearful overthrow, both my self, with thee, my Wife, and you my sweet babes, shall miserably come to ruine; except (the which, yet I see not) some way of escape can be found, whereby we may be delivered.’” Not for the last time would prognosticators of doom prophesy heat hurled down from the skies above.

The author, John Bunyan (not to be confused with the French Canadian tree-chopper Paul), went on, “At this his Relations were sore amazed; not for that they believed that what he had said to them was true, but because they thought that some frenzy distemper had got into his head.” Christian leaves them behind and heads off by himself to his redemption in the Celestial City. By Part II, though, his family comes around to believing him enough to go on their own trip to Celestial City. There is scant information provided by Bunyan regarding how his family went from thinking he was sick in the head to thinking he was worth following, but that is the big question of the day for us: wailing and tearful scientists are daily entreating us, the citizens of the City of Destruction, to change our ways, and while we may no longer think some frenzy distemper has got into their heads, we’re also not about to go cross the River of Death with them, not if it means economic turbulence.

But progress is evident. The American President and the Canadian Prime Minister, formerly famous naysayers, now openly acknowledge that the climate is changing and that mankind’s burning of fossil fuels is playing a key role in that change. What they won’t yet acknowledge is the necessity for a significant government role in trying to alter mankind’s fossil fuel-burning habits. Instead, they cling to bromides about voluntary industrial efforts and vague hopes that citizens will buy low-emission cars and screw in fluorescent light bulbs.