from Perez, who requests readers to check out this link, in his post yesterday about Dubya's proposed threat to marriage equality. Am keeping a close eye on this, for when the Americans eat a sandwich, it's Harper who ultimately shits it out. He's told us to expect this particular bolus of an initiative in the Fall, which I do hope is, in his case, allegorical.
And Poof! Just like that, a meme dies. Yes, Beautiful Agony is no longer the top post in the raincoaster blog. Let's look at the past 24 hours, shall we?
Going to the Past 24 Hours cam…we can see that yesterday, the top post was The 100 Most Influential People in History, followed by Operation Global Media Domination: The Search for Meaning (talk about going meta with OGMD), and then Beautiful Agony.
So far today it's a half-nekkid Britney Spears with hey y'all! coming in on top (and if you have any doubts she's a top, just ask Timberlake or K-Fed), three lengths ahead of The 100 Most Influential People in History, and then Geoffrey Chaucer's Hottest Pickup Lines of the Fourteenth Century.
Sex and power, power and sex. Plus ça change…
Update! Due to its posting on a British forum with which I am entirely unfamiliar, despite the pic of Viggo in the heading (I thought I knew all of them, dammit) the current most popular post on the blog is 06-06-06 Helpful Questionnaire: Is My Child The Devil’s Son? Because this is a question that has occurred to all parents at one time or another.
Quickie 6*6*6 roundup:
06-06-06 Helpful Questionnaire: Is My Child The Devil’s Son?
Assuming, for the moment and quite against my usual instincts, that all human beings are individuals and act for their own, entirely independent and logical reasons rather than relieve the desperate burden of sentience by subsuming themselves in a larger, and mindless, whole, here is a backgrounder (let us avoid the word "roundup" for obvious taste-related reasons, for lo, we are way PC y'all) of the individual suspects arrested in Mississauga, a suburb which has never, let's face it, had much to recommend it except that it is not Scarborough. Apparently, according to another story in the G&M, the Peace Tower in Ottawa was among the intended targets.
One notes with amusement, one does, the Guardian's breathlessly clueless description of the suspects "ranging [all the incredible way] from college educated to unemployed." That's walking distance 'round these parts, sweetheart.
Not that I'm bitter.
From the Globe and Mail's really very thorough backgrounder.
Saad Khalid, Ahmad Mustafa Ghany [about whom
one notes the Globe and Mail is nearly as clueless as the Guardian; surely we have proof, dating back at least to 9/11, that a life of privilege doesn't deter one from acts of terrorism], Steven Vikash Chand a.k.a. Abdul Shakur, Jahmaal James, Zakaria Amara, Asad Ansari, and [very Bonnie-and-Clyde-sounding] "Kingston Duo" Mohammed Dirie, 22, and Yasim Abdi Mohamed, 24.
For many Muslims in this city, the focus now shifts to preparing for a potential backlash, which some faced in the weeks and months following the attacks on New York in 2001 and London in 2005. When a co-worker jokingly told Mr. Khan this weekend that he expected to see his name on the list of RCMP suspects, it only added to Mr. Khan's suspicion that Canadian Muslims may have to brace for a blow to their reputation.
God help the last two if they're innocent; once you've got a catchy moniker, it's all over but the posing with Spiderman.
This is the anniversary that most of the world appears happy to have forgotten. Indeed, they've been working hard to bury the memory of what happened in Tiananmen Square and here am I, almost two decades later, still boycotting China. Why? Because there has been no advance whatsoever in the acknowledgement of fundamental human rights in China in all this time. None. Children are still being enslaved, free-thinkers are still being executed, rebellions are still being extinguished.
I don't say there have been no changes.
You can make money. Indeed, nowadays in China you must make money, which is like saying mandatory abortion is the same as freedom of choice. There are those to whom the freedom to make money is the only freedom, and those people are thrilled to the core of their being, which is just under the (very) thin skin. The rest of us, however, have seen no meaningful change in China except a creeping shamelessness about their authoritarianism. It's time to admit that capitalism does not make democracy inevitable; in fact, slavery is inherently capitalistic.
Hooking multinational corporations on the cheap (slave) labour, blowing up schoolchildren who are forced to work with explosives instead of taking lessons, poisoning townspeople, hoping to drive them from your rival's restaurant to your own, the New China can in no sense be considered an improvement on the old.
Just ask Taiwan.
As these multinationals, with vast international influence and no human accountability, become dependent on the cheap labour and salivate at the possibility of a billion-customer base, they sing the praises of a nation whose sole achievement is to give them something they want desperately.
Whores always praise their dealers.
I say it's time we all detoxed, came down off the cheap labour high and realized that China, which once enslaved their own people and co-opted local leaders, has now enslaved and co-opted all of us.
From the Guardian today, news of suppression and arrests. Quel suprise.
China Marks Tiananmen Square Anniversary
Sunday June 4, 2006 2:16 PMAP Photo XHG104
By ALEXA OLESEN
Associated Press Writer
BEIJING (AP) – Chinese police tore up a protester's poster and detained at least two people on Beijing's Tiananmen Square on Sunday as the country marked 17 years since local troops crushed a pro-democracy demonstration in the public space.
An elderly woman tried to pull out a poster with apparently political material written on it, but police ripped it up and then took her away in a van.
A farmer tried to stage a protest apparently unrelated to the 1989 crackdown, but he also was taken away in a van.
After dawn, a group of tourists tried to open a banner while posing for a photo, catching the attention of police, who quickly forced them to put the nonpolitical material away. They were not detained.
Discussion of the crackdown is still taboo in China outside of the semiautonomous regions of Hong Kong and Macau. Chinese television news and major newspapers did not mention the anniversary.
In Hong Kong, several hundred people holding candles gathered at Victoria Park, creating a sea of lights covering four soccer fields.
“I hope the Chinese government will recognize this dark history,'' Eric Lau, 14, said.
Retiree Yan San, 74, said he has attended the annual commemoration in Hong Kong since its debut in 1990.
“I have persisted in coming here for 17 years because I love freedom and democracy,'' he said.
China's authoritarian government has stood by the suppression of what it has called “counterrevolutionary'' riots, saying it preserved social stability and paved the way for economic growth.
The events of June 4, 1989, shocked Hong Kongers at a time when the territory was still a British colony but preparing to return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. The bloody suppression fueled fears that Beijing would extend its authoritarian rule to Hong Kong.
Chinese police monitored Tiananmen Square closely Sunday.
About 2,000 police were on guard in and around Beijing's “petitioner's village,'' a cluster of cheap hostels popular with people from the provinces who have come to the capital to complain to the central government.
Wang Dan, a leader in the 1989 protests who was jailed and then exiled to the United States, said in an article published in Hong Kong's Ming Pao newspaper Sunday that he holds out hope China will loosen its political controls.
“Although so far we can't see any loosening, personally I'm confident that day will come,'' he said. “Until the government reverses its position (on the 1989 protests), ordinary people won't easily forget the crackdown.''
Hong Kong leader Donald Tsang, while in China's southwestern Yunnan province to attend a regional cooperation conference, urged his fellow citizens to look at the Tiananmen crackdown practically.
“Mainland China has undergone a level of change that has gained the world's attention in the past 17 years. These changes have brought much prosperity to Hong Kong … so Hong Kong people can make an objective judgment,'' Tsang said.
Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen, a fierce democracy advocate, disagreed with Tsang.
“How can we let it go? Should we just let it slide, forgive, pretend nothing happened? This is irresponsible. The successors of those responsible for the June 4 incident should give an explanation,'' Zen said.
From the Guardian Archives:
People's Army turns against the people
Monday June 5, 1989
The GuardianIt is, for all who watch and wonder about the Communist world, the ultimate obscenity. Worse even than Hungary or Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan for there the tanks and troops were alien invaders, rolling across borders in the fashion through time immemorial of big powers knocking little powers into line.But in China it is the People's Army turned against the people: shooting them indiscriminately in Tiananmen Square, on the streets, on their doorsteps, crushing them beneath tanks. A bankrupt, desperate, geriatric government, an edifice of ideology and aspiration, flaking and toppling before our eyes. We have been confronted, this week-end, by one of the great punctuation marks of 20th-century history.
No-one in the largest nation in the world will ever forget the first week of June in Beijing. A surge of desire for greater freedoms – not democracy as we know it, but an opening of society, a spirit of glasnost – has posed ultimate questions to a group of old men and, ultimately, at whatever cost, they have moved to stamp it out.
There was a chance, only a handful of days ago, that a more liberal strain of thinking within the Chinese Communist Party could, by its success in the backroom struggle for power, have harnessed the yearning for glasnost. But the old men won.
Are the manifest death throes of the Communist monoliths manageable? Can they be predicted and relied on? Could Tiananmen Square come to Red Square and savagely end a period of burgeoning hope?
The point is a starkly simple one. We, sitting comfortably in the West, assume that a spark in the individual human condition – a spark called freedom – must, in the end, make a bonfire of the system that seeks to snuff it out. We assumed, from Nixon on, that China could gradually evolve, that the business culture, the Americans with cheque books, would inevitably bring some form of democracy in their wake. Tell that, this bloody, awful morning, to the marines.
How frail is the Soviet spark? The Soviet people – because glasnost came first – may have acquired a patina of sophistication that the students of Beijing lacked. The Soviet Union is seeking to devolve power, to provoke argument, to manage change. The pensioners of the Chinese establishment had, long since, run out of ideas.
They must not get away with it. In the eyes of the West, because of the spark. And in the eyes of those who watch from Moscow, too, because the nightmare of Deng is theirs as well. We all, at root, know the Chinese march towards liberty must be resumed.
(another from the archives)
Hi Sean!
Sunday, September 29, 2002
You know, the Irish Heather is an odd duck, or, it being a pub I suppose you have to call it an odd pub, but that doesn't have quite the same, though almost, ring to it. Anyway, it's odd. and it's not quite a pub; it's a restaurant. Technically speaking, that is, it is, and this being Canada we prefer to speak technically if at all possible, just to keep the raw enthusiasm down.
They have a private room called the Shebeen which is not, in fact, a shebeen, a shebeen being, in fact and in Irish, a place where one may purchase a dram or even quite a lot of moonshine, which you can't do in this Shebeen at all, not even for takeout and most especially not if you bring your own bottle or jar, a practice that, while traditional in such places as, ferinstance, say, Ireland, is strongly discouraged here.
It's some sort of conspiracy by the bottle manufacturers.
In the main restaurant one can order whiskey, or even whisky, and I wish I could tell you that they use the correct designation for each type but unfortunately I had a couple and now cannot remember. But one, the other, or both: of that I am sure. One can also order cocktails of a traditional cast such as the Black and Tan, though other variants such as the Black Velvet should be ashamed of themselves for calling themselves thus, as a Black Velvet is Guinness and champagne and the Irish Heather Black Velvet is Guinness and cider, not the same thing at all, though it has merit and makes a nice, light lunch, and a vegetarian lunch at that. We used to give Guinness to our racehorses to put meat on their bones, so you just know it's good for you; probably helps your time over six furlongs. Let me know.
But you cannot order whisky, whiskey, or even Black Velvet without also ordering and at least pretending to consume food. That's because of the restaurant license. Now, it's not the kind of policy I normally object to, being, as I may perhaps have mentioned, somewhat pro-food, especially when I am peckish. Yes, nothing stimulates the appetite like being hungry, at least I find it so. And I certainly have no objection to the Irish Heather's food: it is excellent, especially the soup, the drunken mussels and the curry fries, even though when I spill the red curry sauce on my nice white jeans I have to walk home through the Downtown EastSide looking like I have forgotten my tampon. The sauce must be very slippery, as I typically have only one drink. A pint is only half a litre, right?
So it is not that I would even begin to have a problem with a place that pushed good food upon one. But the fact is that the place is kitted out more like an Irish pub than many pubs in Ireland now that the disco ball has landed on the Emerald Isle. It is false advertising or maybe just confusing, althought the possiblility exists that could I afford to order food and booze more often I would not resent the whole setup so much; perhaps they should comp me for a month or so and we can put this theory to a fair test. Sean, you know where the comments button is.
There is a nice glass conservatory in the back looking out on Gaoler's Mews where they used to have the hangings, except you wouldn't have been able to see them from the Heather then, as the place was a jail and did not generally keep the criminals in the glassed-in part; perhaps they grew orchids there, or ran a little tearoom out in back of the prison. How quaint. If you were a criminal and were not taking the featured role in the hanging you might have been able to peek at it from your cell (they still have the barred windows upstairs) but then, why?
One of the waiters was out front having a smoke one night and he was saying to his bud: "I always knew I'd end up in jail but at least I picked one you can get beer in."
The floor is stone flags and brick and other antique-y things, and old, saggy boards upstairs, which used to be the cells and then was the bridal annex when Laura Ashley had the space, and I'm sure there's a metaphor in there somewhere. There's frosted glass windows out front and glossy green woodwork all around and tiny little pubby tables that don't really fit plates all that well though they accomodate glasses perfectly well. So it looks for all the world like a pub. Most particularly when the band is playing, which they do from a sitting position usually at the table next to me and although I am violently allergic to live music they must be good, as I generally really enjoy the whole thing and let them continue. Besides, if I objected they'd poke me with their fiddle bows and that would totally hurt.
I'll tell you about the eavesdropping and the presentation of the Watermelon Turnip next time…
