Category Archives: AP - Blog 2006 - Page 3
Plan B
Posted by Phil Paine
on August 25, 2006
No comments
If you want to know the difference between a free country and a collectivist, sovietized society, where the State directs, manipulates and socially engineers the life of the individual, then one has only to walk into a drugstore in Canada and then into one in the United States. In any Canadian drugstore, any woman can purchase Plan B, the “morning after pill”, without prescription or harassment, as is her right. In the United States, this is not the case. There, the State rules over the most private domain of the individual. As in Communist China, Americans suffer a government which considers their bodies the property of the State. Their most intimate personal choices do not belong to them, but to an all-powerful collectivism, to the Leviathan. It makes me profoundly grateful that I live in a significantly freer, more individualist society, where, as one Canadian Prime Minister once proclaimed, “The State has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.”
There are many things of which I disapprove in my own country, and Lord knows there are plenty of stupid things that happen here. But, at least we are not reduced to such pathetic serfdom that we surrender our sexual organs to the tyranny of squalid bureaucrats and a Supreme Soviet on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Thursday, August 24, 2006 — Moscow Nights on the Subway
Posted by Phil Paine
on August 24, 2006
No comments
One of those little moments of beauty. I was in the Finch subway station. There are musicians who busk in many of the stations. In this case, it was an old man with an accordion. He struck up a few chords, instantly familiar to me. And to someone else. A middle-aged Asian woman, walking by, also recognized what was coming, and immediately began to sing. It was a trained voice, very beautiful. She sang, in Russian, Vasily Soloviev-Sedoi’s popular song, Подмосковные Вечера. Now, most Russian songs are sad and heart-tugging, but “Moscow Nights” is that, squared and cubed. It comes off best with a deep male voice — the most famous version is sung by Vladimir Troshin. But this woman was very effective. By the time she was finished, the whole, bustling mass of commuters in the hall that led from the bus platforms to the trains was transfixed. Teenagers, who would normally turn up their iPods as they trudged obliviously past any busker, were stopping to drop coins into the accordionist’s hat. The woman started to dance as she sang. The crowd was mesmerized. When the song ended, with mothers, children, businessmen, students, and subway workers applauding, the accordionists did not skip a beat, and launched immediately into another song. Some opera tune, vaguely familiar to me, but which I could not identify. The woman jumped into it instantly, singing the full aria in Italian. More applause. Again, only a second’s hiatus, and they were doing Bésame mucho, a song so corny that normally it’s unbearable. But she gave it dignity.
Three songs, and then she obviously had to get to work, or whatever. I spoke to her for a moment as we headed for the trains. Her accent was Korean. Did she speak Russian? No, she said, she had merely memorized the words phonetically. And she disappeared, nameless, with her grocery bags, down a crowded escalator into the silver cars that sped under the earth. Read more »
Tuesday, August 22, 2006 — The Ideology of Qutb
Posted by Phil Paine
on August 22, 2006
No comments
I just finished reading Sayyid Qutb’s Ma’alim fi-l-Tariq [“Milestones”]. This book is not available in my public library system. Since it bears the same relationship to the rise of Islamist totalitarianism as Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto do to European totalitarianism, you would think it would be smart for our libraries to have it. You cannot resist a movement of oppression and aggression by knowing nothing about it. Milestones is the ideological entry-point by which bored, spoilt-brat teenagers in Muslim families are drawn into the movement and converted into zealots for death and destruction. It should be read, grasped, and understood by sane people, so that its insanity can be countered. Read more »
Monday, August 14, 2006 — Good …Not Respectable
Posted by Phil Paine
on August 14, 2006
No comments
When Joseph Milo, an out-of-work conductor and pianist in Montreal, learned that his building’s doorman was an out-of-work cellist, and that his pizza was delivered by an out-of-work bassoonist, he had an inspired idea. Montreal is full of immigrant musicians who have knocked at the doors of the gold-plated and respectable institutions, and gotten nowhere. Are they down-and-out because they are poor musicians? Or just because our society is too dumb to employ their talents? The evidence of my ears points to the latter. Now the Montreal Musicians of the World Symphony Orchestra plays in the basement of Côte St-Luc municipal building. It’s not the Montreal Symphony’s hundred-million-dollar venue, but the music is good, and the blue-collar, blue-jeans audience gets a good show. Surprise, surprise! — if good music is played at a logical price in an atmosphere that isn’t rancid with pomposity, people flock to hear it.
Another small victory in the endless war we must fight against the sclerotic forces of Respectability.
Monday, August 7, 2006 — Things We Can Do to Ensure Canada’s Future
Posted by Phil Paine
on August 7, 2006
No comments
Do everything possible to make it cheap and easy for anyone under 25 to travel in Canada. Our present facilities for backpackers and student travelers are woefully inadequate. Every young Korean, Estonian, or Peruvian who backpacks across Canada at the age of 18, and has a good experience, is a future fountainhead of investment, trade, publicity and goodwill for this country. This is bread cast upon the waters that will come back five-fold after many days.
Equip a large number of high schools across the country to function as youth travel hostels in the summer holidays. The techniques for operating travel hostels are well established. It should be made possible for any high school, university, or community college student to stay overnight at a minimal charge in any such hostel, anywhere in the country. Additional travel hostels should be established in native reserves, national parks, and in remote wilderness areas. Hopefully, the next generation will actually know our country, and outgrow the petty regional squabbling that embarrasses us before the rest of the world.
Make it extremely easy for any student to spend a school term in any other city in the country. Read more »
Thursday, August 3, 2006 — Hardships There the Hardest to Recall
Posted by Phil Paine
on August 3, 2006
No comments
Earlier in the evening (Aug.2), the CBC National News covered the very issues I discussed in my last posting (Aug.1). I am very pleased, especially because the camera work from the venerable ice-breaker Louis Saint-Laurent was of fabulous quality. The political issues are complex. You can’t expect people to care about them unless they can visualize the vast, dangerous, and extraordinarily beautiful land that is at stake.
Someone has a poetic soul at the CBC. Nunavut is one of those places, like outer space, that forces even the most phlegmatic person to turn to poetry. Over a magnificent montage of images from the Passage, they played an old Canadian folk by Stan Rogers:
Tuesday, August 1, 2006 — Defending the Northwest Passage
Posted by Phil Paine
on August 1, 2006
No comments
The Northwest Passage seen from space.
It’s like a pizza oven out there. Extreme heat and humidity, which is thankfully expected to break tomorrow. Hard to find anyone who doubts global warming.
Washington, of course, still pretends it isn’t happening. But it has aggressively renewed its assertions that the Northwest Passage is not Canadian territorial waters. Global warming means the ice-bound passage is opening up, and will soon become economically significant. Canada’s claim to sovereignty over the channel through its arctic archipelago will eventually become the main source of conflict between the United States and Canada. [see my article from last year on the related Hans Island controversy].
So I’m pleased that the CBC National News is being broadcast, this week, from an ice-breaker going through the Passage. It will draw some public attention to this issue. Read more »
Image of the month: Rocher Percé
Posted by Phil Paine
on August 1, 2006
No comments
Rocher Percé or Percé Rock was so named by Samuel de Champlain in 1607. Forming the tip of the Gaspé Peninsula, it marks the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The surrealist poet André Breton described it as “a razor blade rising out of the water… a marvelous iceberg of moon stone”
Thursday, July 20, 2006 — Loyal to Who? Loyal to What?
Posted by Phil Paine
on July 20, 2006
No comments
We continue to swelter in a long heatwave, alternating with fierce thunderstorms and tornados.
The news is dominated by Lebanon. There are, apparently, fifty thousand Canadian citizens in Lebanon, and the Conservative government in Canada seems to be doing an incompetent, chaotic job of evacuating them. It is not the least of the cracks that are starting to appear in Stephen Harper’s administration.
Harper’s election last Christmas was one of the worst turns of events in Canadian history. The changes that are taking place in the world, currently, are precisely those that Harper is the least competent to deal with. Read more »