Via saieditor.

I really don’t remember how I ended up in such a conversation – so obviously hotbutton and likely to end in acrimony if not tears – but I can’t exclude the possibility I goaded buddy into it.

What I do remember is that the kid conveyed that the issue had been the topic of discussion in one of his Law and Justice classes and, as I recall, he indicated that more students’ knickers were in a twist than not.

I barked, in the end, to the effect, that the fear of the creep of Shariah was not only misplaced but profoundly stoopid: one more form of mediation to join a whole bunch of others, religious or otherwise, which do not have the power to override existing provincial or federal law, is nobuddy’s concern but that of the victims of a domestic apocalypse.  Where it does intersect with the public interest, it seemed mostly positive to me, shifting more of the grunt work of divorce and custody, for instance, out of Family court, again, without being binding.

Still, pros and amateurs across the country have been losing their shit over this and the like for years.  Premier Dalton McGuinty, lukewarm Roman Catholic, has had the good fortune to be able to swing at softballs, like the plank of John Tory’s 2007 campaign to extend funding to all religious schools (so obviously pandering that I reckoned it made Tory unfit for office and which McGuinty could so easily reject while throwing up his hands on the division of public and seperate education, the Constitution and all that), but more importantly here, like the movement to introduce Islamic arbitration in family law in Ontario to which DM responded with a move to ban all religious-law-based arbitrations which had been permitted under the law – on a voluntary basis – since 1991.  (Did he follow through? I can’t seem to find out.)

No matter … regarding any of the above.

What makes me want to throw heat at hitters of any level in a contest over such things is the obvious focus on Islam that’s entailed.  McGuinty didn’t give a rat’s patootie about extra-judicial arbitration til the Muslims wanted in, nor did my library interlocutor argue in favour of an entirely secular law in general.  The former, well, he’d sell out his kids to be on the right side of any issue; the latter, I’m willing to say, is a garden-variety Islamophobe.

Anyway, an implicit or explicit appeal to secular liberal democratic values here would be laughable if not for the fact of its Islam-baiting/anti-Islam subtext which remains alive and well, and the substance of so much public discourse.

I don’t need to do the litany here, do I?  In any case, don’t worry, I’ll come back to all of it in time.  But for the present, I’m shaking my head by this American manifestation of the phenomenon, Oklahoma’s Measure 755 on which voters will have their say on Tuesday:

 The ballot title that voters will see on their ballot reads:

 This measure amends the State Constitution. It changes a section that deals with the courts of this state. It would amend Article 7, Section 1. It makes courts rely on federal and state law when deciding cases. It forbids courts from considering or using international law. It forbids courts from considering or using Sharia Law.
International law is also known as the law of nations. It deals with the conduct of international organizations and independent nations, such as countries, states and tribes. It deals with their relationship with each other. It also deals with some of their relationships with persons.

The law of nations is formed by the general assent of civilized nations. Sources of international law also include international agreements, as well as treaties.

Sharia Law is Islamic law. It is based on two principal sources, the Koran and the teaching of Mohammed.

Shall the proposal be approved?

For the proposal

Yes: __________

Against the proposal

No: __________

Jeebus, why not throw in that the 9/11 hijackers were Muslims?

Not a Potted Plant, a lawyer, takes apart this measure with respect to its Constitutionality and existing law in Oklahoma to conclude:

But none of that is important. The facts don’t matter and they are, indeed, inconvenient. The point is to make people scared of the toothless shibboleth that is Sharia law and thus drive them to the polls to vote for meaningless-at-best and Constitution-subverting-at-worst wedge issues like Measure 755. Don’t fall for it — keep it in perspective, folks.

 NPP follows up a few days later, looking into the scant evidence of the application of Shariah in arbitrations across the US, and while it’s a bit of a mixed bag so far as the results go (the negatives stemming from American judical error), NPP’s conclusion is:

yes, there are some significant differences between Sharia and U.S. law. But again, there is little here that seems so awful it can’t be tolerated in a private arbitration agreement. And as a practical matter, the only way a U.S. court is going to deal with Sharia is by way of looking for substantial due process violations when it is asked to compel arbitration or confirm an arbitration award, or when it is asked to confirm and enforce a previous award of a foreign court pursuant to a treaty obligation or the Full Faith and Credit clause.

Regardless, let’s stamp out any hint of Shariah, Oklahoma and Ontario, cuz the next thing you know the Muslims will be flocking to small town Quebec, constitutionally guaranteed Shariah in hand, to stone adulteresses and ban Christmas and drinking.

The obscenity of the show trial was reinforced by the testimony of the Prosecution expert Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist who basically said that Khadr is a feral jihadi whose reintegration into life among the civilized and law-abiding is improbable.

However, as the G&M reports:

Under cross-examination by defence lawyers, Dr. Michael Welner said he talked to Nicolai Sennels before coming to the conclusion that the Canadian-born Khadr was “highly dangerous.”

And what’s the bedrock of Dr. Sennels knowledge of Islamic radicals?

Massive inbreeding within the Muslim culture during the last 1,400 years may have done catastrophic damage to their gene pool. The consequences of intermarriage between first cousins often have serious impact on the offspring’s intelligence, sanity, health and on their surroundings.

Sure, the studies cited by Sennels about the fruit of consanguineous unions make one go hmmmm.  Still, cautious sort that I am, I’d like to see a 2nd body of opinion: what do the phrenologists have to say?

If Edward Said had lived into the era of Twitter, he might have said, OFFS theyre radical cuz theyre INBRED? AYFSM!!! deja vu all over again!!!!

In 2010, not only do the endless, um … insights … into the Muslim mind by self-proclaimed experts go unchallenged, but the perennial dig, that the mooslims are a bunch of depraved behnchods, undergirds testimony allowed in what passes for a legal proceeding.

We’ve seen this movie before.  Jews and Gypsies, you know what I’m talking about.

Oh, there’s lots of dark corners into which I could peer to highlight what kind of pathological pseudoscience we’re dealing with here.  But where this – and the essentialism of the New Atheists – takes me is back to a bit of research I abandoned a few years ago,** the meat of which indicts not only the actions of British colonial authorities, but the whole of the intelligensia and activism that served it.

Long-short.  After the British fundamentally altered land tenure in India in the late 18th century, boodles of people were displaced, tons of peasants but also all the formal and informal militia types who’d worked for landlords across North India.  In the next couple of generations crime became rampant, especially highway robbery.  One William Sleeman (who was also a great believer in phrenology) gathered evidence on crime in the territories he oversaw and drew the erroneous conclusion that a criminal cult which sacrificed its victims to the goddess Kali was largely responsible.  Convincing the colonial administration, and the British and Anglo-Indian public, of the grave threat posed by this cult - in no small measure thanks to a media campaign he’d propagated – he was given the authority and resources to hunt down these devotees of thuggee.  Small problem.  There’s not a shred of reliable evidence that such a cult ever existed, as Radhika Singha et al. have firmly established.***

No, I’m not heading towards the thesis, Islamic terrorism does not exist.  Here I’m interested in the precedents in jurisprudence established for the thugee hunt, and the legistlation inacted by the British for its prosecution, which morphed into sweeping powers to confine swathes of Indians identified as belonging to criminal tribes and castes, groups congenitally uncivilized and prone to petty and heinous criminality.  To be convicted of thuggee all that was required was the testimony of an accomplice, driven to rat out someone else by a plea deal that granted him life in prison over the probability of a hanging.  To be sure, this was (probably) insufficient to get you convicted of anything, never mind hanged, at the Old Bailey in the 19th century and, curiously enough, it’s inadmissible in any proceeding under Islamic law, which the British had otherwise bent over backwards to accomodate in the colonies.  Subsequent law, as I’ve indicated, allowed for the rounding up of whole families, detaining them in isolated camps indefinitely, simply because they were born into groups imagined to be genetically predisposed to lives of crime.

Religion doesn’t poison everything, but for the sake of argument I’ll grant that it may posion some things.  But sometimes when experts, amateurs, and a bunch of partisans diagnose religion as the social pathogen behind an array of symptoms, they become far too ready to prescribe a cure at least as harmful as the disease.

So, I’ll play my hand and assert here my biggest claim, though I’m well aware that I’m still a long way from presenting a compelling case.  I assert that the New Atheism, in addition to the myriad of other problems with it, stands in the service of the Neo-conservative agenda which has run rampant since 9/11.****  Far from doing in all religion, it merely casts chaff upon the wind for teabaggers et al. to catch and try to make hay with, while the wheat nourishes only the converted (eeww, that metaphor was a little rich).

But to get back on point, I don’t give a rat’s ass what Omar Khadr’s present state of mind is or what hijinx he and his family might get up to in future, specially once he returns to the bosom of that family.  The law, Canadian, American, and International, has been used and abused to manage a constructed class of accused.  Racial, ethnic, and religious bias have led Canadians to abandon any fundamental sense of justice they might have had.  And Canadians will pay for it.

On the CBC as I write: “Ivan Henry has been acquitted of all 10 sex-related charges that sent him to prison for 26 years,” with the evocation of Donald Marshall, David Milgaard, and William Mullins-Johnson.   I sometimes forget that Canada has a grand tradition of railroading the marginalized.

Sure I’m happy to be considered a bleeding heart ala Rebick and all those others at the public broadcaster.  Nonetheless, Canadian authorities were complicit in Khadr’s illegal interrogation and torture, he has a right to repatriation, he was a child soldier, etc., etc.  And he’ll sue and he’ll win.  This is how the rule of law is manifest in Canada and elsewhere (most of the time).

What alarms me the most is the stuff of the comment threads – it seems that a swath of my countrymen and women are content to see the rights of another citizen shredded, proper consular services denied, return to Canada blocked, and innumerable other international agreements of which Canada is a signatory ignored in such a case (one so wrapped up in long list of American war crimes).

**For want of the conviction that the evidence bore out the thesis.

***And that thesis was that no less than Mark Twain, in Following the Equator, saw thuggee and the construction of other 19th century Indian criminality for what it was.  Dare I revisit this for the 3rd time?  Still, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Deceivers are entertaining camp, no?  Sadly, I know too much to enjoy them fully; Twain, I’d argue, shared a similar hint of gloom.

****In my defense at present, grant me this polemical flourish: remember C. Hitchens early position on the invasion of Iraq?  (I’ll be back soon with some weightier consideration of some of the New Atheists’ 19th century heroes including JS Mill, who died with plenty of Indian blood on his hands.)

“Should the Region of Waterloo fluoridate your municipal water? Yes or No”

The Results?  “The anti-fluoride side won with 50.3 per cent,** beating the pro-fluoride side by fewer than 200 votes out of more than 30,000 cast.”

*Full disclosure: some of my best friends are paranoids.
**Idea for photography project commencing in about 10 years: The Big Book of Waterlooean Smiles.

… but what else would I come back with first but birds.

The wacky weather this Fall surely has made the birds weird.  Over the last couple of days in particular (but even over the last month) there have been unusual things happening.

First things: does anybuddy know what this weed is?  It produces small flat black arrowheadish seeds with two barbs at one end.  Anyway, hate them for sticking to me and the dog, but happy to see that they also serve as bird feed.

And this pic represents the return of the Goldfinches to the yard after an absence of about a month.  Dunno why, but they always disappear as they molt in September, then I start to see ‘em around this time and thru the whole Winter.  Yesterday there were a half dozen of ‘em, on this weed, at the freshly filled Niger feeders and the sunflower feeder too.

And just when I reckoned that all the Sparrows had fled, ‘cept for the American Tree Sparrows which have arrived for the Winter (en masse, it seems), I saw a Fox Sparrow in the yard (two FOUR of ‘em today).

And, as my FB friends know, I was happy to see Rusty Blackbirds pass thru, one, then two, then four; today I have five.  Curiously, no sign of Brown-Headed Cowbirds (Die Cowbirds! Die!).  Grackles and Redwings are still around.

And there’s still plenty of Juncos – a half dozen still appear in the yard.

No surprise that multiple Mourning Doves are hitting the seed I scatter everyday, but since I noticed more than a dozen in the neighbourhood in Summer, it seems I’ll be obliged to care for more than usual over the Winter.

And, of course, throw out bunches of seed and the pigeons appear.  Oh well, whattaya gunna do?

Haven’t seen ‘em in the yard lately, but out to exercise my franchise today, I heard lots of Robins in the area; if this weather keeps up, maybe I’ll count multiples of ‘em in the Xmas bird count.

The resta the usual suspects are around – lots of Chickadees (still hopeful that a stray Boreal C might appear), I’m keeping a few Bluejays happy, and the Woodpeckers are appearing more regularly again  (heard a Pileated, but no sightings yet).

And speakina Woodpeckers, yesterday was the annual empty-the-freezer-to-make-birdfood day – 24 cakes, and a big bucket of ground goods to make more.  A little more perverse this year: beef, chicken, pork (plus a bunch of collected fat), fish, a boodle of boiled eggs, mixed up with seed and peanut butter.

Between my feed and the large amount of fruit on the trees, I’m hopin’ to see lots of good stuff this winter.  Not holdin’ my breath for Crossbills – never seen ‘em here, and the cones on the conifers are few this year.  But once more, with feeling: cummon Snow Buntings!  Still, I’ll be happy to see Grosbeaks and Bohemian Waxwings.

Finally, it’s time to make a plan (and follow thru this year) for Project FeederWatch.

Alright, nuff.

But, again, I plan to be back soon, bitchin’ about my betters (and worsers), bitin’ the hand that feeds, and, acourse, more burdz.  Expect more about:

• Strategic Planning (and other reasons why my employers are DBs)
• The Pitfalls of Curriculum Revision
• The New Atheism (and the DBs for it and against it)
• Love and Hope and Sex and Dreams

And

• Burdz

And because I haven’t done a stoopid pet post in awhile, I submit the following.

Aquaria are, in general, durdy.  Turtles are very durdy.  And the time had come, wherein, I had to do a major cleanup after Mr. Turtle.

Now, I’d seen aquaria in a pet store that had plastic foliage as substrate and that made me want to line my tanks that way, but I couldn’t find the material with which to do that – on the cheap.  Then in the Dollarama last week I found 10″ X 10″ mats of that very thing.  One problem: how to keep the fake plastic plants from floating to the top?

Without a good answer to that question, and with more important things to do, I put off any attempt to clean the turtle tank and employ the mats (whose intended usage is god knows what).  Last night, bored and otherwise avoiding real work, I put my head to the problem. (And ‘sides, the time to put off turtle maintenance was at an end, for a recent algae bloom was so bad my turtle friend couldn’t be seen!) 

Looking through my strange assortment of hardware, there it was, my solution: 10 suction cup wall hooks – also from the dollar store – which had turned out not to work worth a shite really, and had just sat in a drawer for ages and ages.  They turned out to fit nicely into the bottom of the mats which I joined together with zip ties.

Turtle tank freshly cleaned, lined with plastic clover, gear cleaned, new filter and aeration stone in place.

As I said, turtles are durdy.  Not just durdy, but effin stinky, slimy, mucky, chock fulla salmonella durdy.  Now, I hope, oxygen will get through the substrate to kill the pond smell and that I’ll be able to siphon out more of the sediment when I change out the water.

(BTW, when I siphoned out the tank last night, for the first time ever, I got a mouth fulla aquarium water.  Blech!  Raced to the bathroom and swilled a buncha Listerine.)

via UniqueDaily.

The Manchurian Candidate meets South Park—Chuck Palahniuk’s finest novel since the generation-defining Fight Club. [In the humble opinion of Chuck or his webmaster.]

“Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67 on arrival Midwestern American airport greater _____ area. Flight _____. Date _____. Priority mission top success to complete. Code name: Operation Havoc.”

Thus speaks Pygmy, one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the United States, disguised as exchange students, to live with typical American families and blend in, all the while planning an unspecified act of massive terrorism. Palahniuk depicts Midwestern life through the eyes of this thoroughly indoctrinated little killer, who hates us with a passion, in this cunning double-edged satire of an American xenophobia that might, in fact, be completely justified. For Pygmy and his fellow operatives are cooking up something big, something truly awful, that will bring this big dumb country and its fat dumb inhabitants to their knees.

It’s a comedy. And a romance.

And all that I’ve read is in the broken English of the above.  Somewhat puzzling bits subsequently produced from me hysterical laffin’:

For offical record, American education facility devoted humiliation and destroy all self-respect out native youth.  Conspire to degrade all dignity.  Calibrated tasks assigned to destroy all self-esteem.

     For official example, purpose lesson titled “Junior Swing Choir” many potential brilliant youth compelled sing song depicting precipitate remain pummel head of operative me.  Complain how both feet too large size for sleeping mattress.  Idiot nonsense song.  Next sing how past visited arid landscape aboard equine of no title.  All student compelled, no option.

….

     All must sing nonsense or no allowed college, no advanced physics and training.  Forced compelled to sing how yearning for location on top arched spectrum of light wavelengths created by precipitate.  Exact song expressed Judy Garland, woeful martyr, slaughtered pawn of capitalist entertainment machine combined pharmaceutical complex.

….

     Worst wasted time, how idiot song occupy head of operative me.  Song involving how dangle in side-to-side motion from distant solar body, next convey illuminations of lunar body to domicile contained in glass vessel . . . idiot song drive all useful knowledge from head.  “Junior Swing Choir” a conspiracy oppress American youths, create them future slave workforce, singing million idiot song during labor of frying meat burgers.  Dunking fried potato of France deep in bin boiling fat.

The first and the last took me longer to figure out than I’m happy to admit, but once I gottem, each in turn, I cackled.

The next best thing to that is cat vs. dog.

And the next best thing to that is cat vs. cat.  Although today maybe I don’t really feel that way: it’s a veritable law of physics that the cats engage in a genuine drawn out fur-flying donnybrook right after I vacuum.