The Library As Big As The Ritz

I am truly glad that finally UI decides to seriously build the much needed library. I'd be even happier if it turns out to be bigger in size than the Rectorate building.

But, did the UI's deputy director of corporate communication say the largest library in the world? You kid me not.

Justice Done

The trial of Hasibullah Sadiqi, an Afghan-Canadian, is now concluded. He has been found guilty by a jury, after two days of deliberation, of first-degree murder. It would have been extremely difficult, one would hazard, for the jury to find otherwise. The young man, now convicted of planning and executing the murder of his younger sister and her fiance, another Afghan-Canadian, was obviously guilty as charged. The prosecution had no problems in presenting evidence to support the charge.

The defence, on the other hand, while not attempting to deny the undeniable, held fast to claiming that the murders were unplanned, and that the man was provoked into that final act of taking two innocent lives, in what was clearly an 'honour killing' to cleanse the family honour of the blot brought upon it by a daughter's unruly, indecent behaviour in choosing her own life-trajectory.

In the end, her choice, selecting for herself the man with whom she wished to share her life, and shutting her abusive father out of her life, claimed her life.

Khatera Sadiqi had no respect for her father, loathed him, wanted him to have no further part in her life. She fell in love with a young man with the same heritage and tradition as that which she came from. Her error was in not seeking her father's permission to choose. Her error lay in deciding for herself, as a mature woman, how she would comport herself, moving into the family home of the man she loved, before marriage. An unauthorized decision.

Khatera's mother made her own decision when her children were young, to remove herself from the direct influence of an abusive husband. She moved to Vancouver, eventually having her two daughters with her, escaping their abusive father. Her son elected to stay behind in Ottawa, to live with his father; this was his choice, as an obedient son. As an obedient son, incensed at the disrespectful behaviour of his sister toward their father, he telephoned his father directly after he had murdered his sister and her fiance.

In explanation of the fixed tradition of 'honour killing' it was explained by University of Toronto professor Shahrzad Mojab that losing honour could occur through a woman's behaviour and appearance betraying traditional notions of modesty, through refusal of arranged marriage, or through insisting on selecting a partner without the family's permission. The woman's 'misbehaviour' merited a cleansing of dishonour to restore a family's respect.

Although claiming love for the miscreant female, a father, a brother, an uncle lays claim to having meted out socially-mandated tribal justice through "the act of purifying through blood". In yet another instance of 'honour killing' brought to another country where all people are equally protected under the law, and women are entitled to justice and the assurance of equality entitlements, justice has been served.

Arresting Terror

Britain assigned its Intelligence and Security Committee to the task of investigating whether the 7/7 bombings in the transportation system - that so devastated the country killing 52 people and injuring hundreds of others, the work of four dedicated suicide bombers - could have been apprehended. Several of the jihadists were under scrutiny by Britain's intelligence agencies. Those who plotted to successfully carry out the attack were also in communication with other British terrorists and by extension Canada's own now-judged-and-sentenced Momin Khawaja.

There have been other attempted suicide bombings since 7/7, several carried out by medical doctors who had arrived in Britain to study and to practise medicine, while in the country on visitors' visas. And another named Operation Crevice which had been successfully apprehended. The primal fear of other suicide attacks as successful as the 7/7 bombings kept MI5 on its toes, desperate to ensure that Britain would not be as vulnerable to attack as it was then, in July 2005.

The British forensic analysis appears to offer the insight that a) intelligence is not perfect and cannot connect every dot to prevent every attack; b) be careful what you wish for. Democracies don't aspire to become the equivalent of the STASI. Which might seem to be occurring if thousands of intelligence officers were sent off helter-skelter in every direction desperate to prevent terrorist attacks. There have been some embarrassments in commission, there.

Which brings us to Ottawa's Mohamed Harkat, an Algerian living in Canada whom the government would dearly like to deport back to his home country, on suspicion of his being linked to terrorists, as a 'sleeper agent'. CSIS, Canada's spy agency, has been accused by a Federal Court judge of withholding required evidence in this man's case. The agency's credibility has been placed in suspicion of skepticism.

This is another one of those security-certificate cases that has brought an admonishing finger of legal entitlements against Canada's CSIS. The RCMP has not been exempt from criticism in similar matters of attempting to protect the security of the country and its citizens and treading outside the bounds of what is deemed to be just behaviour to do so. Forgotten in the melee of criticism is the environment post-9/11 and the attacks in Spain, Indonesia and Britain, not to speak of the arrest of Canadians aspiring to jihad.

CSIS claims to have credible circumstantial and informant-evidence that Mohamed Harkat is just what they claim him to be. New allegations have been brought to the fore, that despite his denial of having any business dealings with Ahmed Said Khadr, he worked closely with him, in Canada and in Pakistan. That Mr. Harkat trained in Pakistan as a jihadist, that he ran a safe-house for terrorists in training, and that he effected their transit.

Considering the status of the world community in desperately attempting to combat terrorism, and the very real threats emanating from al-Qaeda toward Western targets, inclusive of Canada specifically, along with the emergence of young Canadian men of foreign heritage attracted to the prospect of jihad, there is real reason for concern. The alternative is to sit back, do nothing and hope for the best.

This is not what we tax our lawmakers to do on our behalf, and it does not reflect the trust that we place in those professionals who are trained to act to protect Canadian institutions and the Canadian population. There are times when it is preferable to err on the side of caution, and times when to do so is to invite disaster. Finding one's tenuous way between the two in the spirit of observing human rights is no easy matter.

Cause and Effect? Not Likely!

Mahmoud Abbas pulled out all the stops in his meeting with President Barack Obama, insisting that for peace talks to continue, to prevail toward a mutually beneficial outcome between the Palestinians and Israel, Jewish settlements in the West Bank must be apprehended. In the week previous, when President Obama met with Israel's Benyamin Netanyahu, that issue was made abundantly clear, and the Israeli president promised to eradicate all unauthorized settlements.

Why Palestinian Authority President Abbas feels he has the upper hand in the negotiations to enable him to set down pre-conditions before he will agree to resuming peace talks isn't entirely clear. After all, Israel is the settled state, the internationally and legally-approved national entity, while the Palestinians are bargaining to achieve a like position for themselves. And critical to the peace talks were some fairly elemental issues; first among them that the PA halt terror attacks against Israel.

This critical precondition has never been accomplished, simply because the PA does not see it in their interests to do so. They have, rather, encouraged ongoing attacks against Israel through implicit and devious means. Their 'map' of the region excludes Israel, their children are taught to hate Jews and discredit the existence of the Jewish state. These are critical issues that are never quite addressed by Western negotiating interests.

Instead the focus remains on Israel's 'intransigence' on refusing to dismantle West Bank settlements that resulted from a 1967 aggression against Israel by a determined Arab combined military attack. Israel's resulting victory against its aggressors left it with an expanded territory. Throughout the annals of human history in such events it is seldom that land acquired through such an onslaught of collective determination to extirpate a nation has been returned.

Yet Israel returned every centimeter of land it took from Egypt, when Anwar Sadat travelled to Jerusalem to address the Knesset and make peace with Israel thirty years ago. In those thirty years no other country but Jordan made a like treaty with Israel, and the country has lived with unbridled hostility since then. The Palestinians had ample opportunity time after time to make peace and begin to work toward a nascent state; they declined.

To argue now as Mahmoud Abbas has done that the entire unsettled state of the Middle East owes to the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is arguably disingenuous. Conflicts in Afghanistan with the Taliban, and now in Pakistan, owe nothing to Israel's presence in the Middle East. The hostility between Shia and Sunni in all Arab countries, including Iran and Iraq is a deadly one, and has nothing whatever to do with Israel.

Islamists devoted to jihad direct their fury at their Muslim religious cohorts in vicious sectarian violence more frequently than they do toward the West, the hated and despised Israel and by extension the United States. This will not change one iota if Israel and the Palestinians by some miracle, found common ground for peaceful co-existence.

The stumbling block here is what it has always been; insurmountable hatred of the Arab majority for the Jewish minority. This is a matter that the Palestinians in particular and the Arab population in general, must itself come to grips with before any meaningful and useful change can take place.

Israel is not the problem; it is merely the symbol of symptoms beyond her control.

California's budget problem: Prop. 13

Harold Meyerson: Prop. 13 opened state's road to insolvency
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By Harold Meyerson
Published: Friday, May. 29, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 15A
To understand why the woes of California's economy threaten the nation's economy, we must understand the state's road to insolvency. The Age of Reagan did not commence with the Great Communicator's inauguration in 1981. For its real beginning, we need to go back to June 1978, when Californians went to the polls and enacted Proposition 13.
By passing Howard Jarvis' malign initiative, California voters reduced the Golden State to baser metal. Under Republican Gov. Earl Warren and Democratic Gov. Pat Brown, California epitomized the postwar American dream. Its public schools, from kindergarten through Berkeley and UCLA, were the nation's finest; its roads and aqueducts the most efficient at moving cars and water – the state's lifeblood – to their destinations. All this was funded by some of the nation's highest taxes, which fell in good measure on the state's flourishing banks and corporations.

Amid the inflation of the late 1970s, however, the California model began to crumple. As incomes and property values rose, Sacramento's tax revenue soared – but the parsimonious Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, neither spent those funds nor rebated them. With the state sitting on a $5 billion surplus, frustrated Californians grumped to the polls and passed Proposition 13, which rolled back and limited property taxes – effectively destroying the funding base of local governments and school districts, which thereafter depended largely on Sacramento for their revenue. Ranked fifth among the states in per-pupil spending during the 1950s and '60s, California sank to Mississippi-like levels – the mid-40s in rank – by the 1990s.

Since 1978, state and local government in California has been funded more by taxes on personal income and sales. Bank and corporation taxes have been steadily reduced. In the current recession, with state unemployment at 11 percent, tax revenue has fallen off a cliff.

But the problem with Proposition 13 wasn't merely that it reduced revenue. It also made it very difficult to increase revenue.

Raising taxes now requires a two-thirds vote of the Legislature, though in 47 other states, a simple majority suffices. California has become overwhelmingly Democratic in the past two decades, but Republicans have managed to retain footholds – representing just over one-third of the districts – in both houses of the Legislature.
The conservative backlash of 1978 also swept into the Legislature a proto-Reaganistic generation of Republicans, later dubbed "the Cavemen." Compared with today's GOP state legislators, though, the Cavemen look like Diderot's Encyclopedists. The current Republican crop has refused in good times as well as bad to raise business or other taxes. (Increasing the tobacco tax, for instance, has failed each of the past 14 times it has come up for a vote.)

Abetted by little local Limbaughs who inflame Republican brains, they protest that the state already has the nation's highest taxes. In fact, California ranks 18th among the states in percentage of personal income paid to state government, and its presumably beleaguered wealthiest 1 percent, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, pay just 7.4 percent of their income to the state while the poorest pay 10.2 percent.

But the myth of soak-the-rich high taxation persists among Republicans – so much so that the GOP front-runner to succeed Arnold Schwarzenegger in next year's gubernatorial election, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, is calling for cuts in business tax rates, even though the state is staring at a $24.3 billion deficit that it somehow has to close. In short order, unless the federal government steps in with a bridge loan, the state will throw 940,000 poor children off its health-care rolls and lay off tens of thousands of teachers.

Because California is so much larger than any other state, and its unemployment rate is among the nation's highest, the collapse of its capacity to spend will counteract some of the effect of the federal stimulus and retard the nation's recovery – much as its aerospace slump retarded the recovery of the mid-1990s. The Obama administration ignores California's plight at its own – and the nation's – peril.

The nation's banks are stuck with so much bad paper from California mortgages gone awry that a huge contraction in state spending would make their assets even more toxic. In the short term, the only way to avoid a further downturn may be a federal loan to the state.

A more permanent, homegrown solution to California's woes (and it may take a state constitutional convention to get it) would require the state to eliminate the two-thirds threshold for enacting taxes, to repeal Proposition 13's freeze on the value of commercial properties (some of which are still assessed at their 1978 levels) and to end the process of ballot-box budgeting through the initiative process, which is now more dominated by monied interests than the Legislature ever was.

In Washington, the Age of Reagan may have shuddered to an inglorious end, but we also need action from state governments – and Sacramento in particular – to move us toward a more sustainable economic future.

Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of American Prospect and the L.A. Weekly. This article originally appeared in the Washington Post.

UKIP Party Political Broadcast on Immigration

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GOOD STUFF AND A FANTASTIC OPINION POLL FOR UKIP IN THE TIMES HERE

I am taking the weekend off from blogging....... back on Monday!

Panic indicator still rising.

On 26th April I posted that The Guardian reckoned a good panic indicator was the UK 10 year Gilt Yield which then stood at 3.54%, linked here.

This morning that same paper reported the yield had now reached 3.8 % still heading towards the newspaper's chosen panic point reached at 5%.

Background HERE.

Tattoos for fast food fans

49 Brilliance in Creativity

Creativity in different forms