The Clever Shark

The bomb-maker behind the 7/7 attack may have been arrested. British- and American-educated Magdy El-Nashar is being detained in Egypt in connection with the terrorist attacks. Police are still looking for yet another man who was seen greeting the bombers just before the attack, but who hasn’t yet been identified.

I’m actually quite creeped out by this “Understanding Joshua” project, but it also fascinates me, and since it’s still relatively recent (2002) I figured I’d try and gather as much of the pics in that project as I can find out there, as my previous link only featured 4 of them.

Yes, I’ve been looking for more information on it for a good deal of yesterday… I’ll blame my morbid curiosity for that. It’s a little shocking to see how kinetic the photos are, especially as most of them are centered on a character which, although he looks very alive, is just a puppet. Also the stories which exist implicitly in the pictures are really quite shocking in some cases. I’m a little surprised at how vague White is in describing some of these in interviews.

Anyway, without more ado, a series of 9 pics at ImageShack. I’m not too sure about the actual title of all the photos, so this may get updated later. Interestingly enough “Joshua” isn’t in all pictures.

• Image 1 (“Cocktail Party”)
• Image 2
• Image 3
• Image 4
• Image 5 (“Getting Lindsay Linton”)
• Image 6
• Image 7 (“Ken’s Basement”)
• Image 8 (“Her Place”)
• Image 9 (“Fantasy”)

Let me know if these links disappear…

It’s nice to see that the US Patent Office has solved all its existing problems with bogus software patents. After all, if they hadn’t fixed those problems, why in the world would they now bother to spend time and money objecting to a trademark for a group that calls *itself* “Dykes on Bikes”?

If you think you might be arrested later in the day, be careful what you wear. At least he wasn’t wearing a “I love Karl Rove” t-shirt.

Grand Sex Auto? Americans will never fail to amuse me. This is a game where your character HAS to kill a number of other characters, and where getting away with killing a police officer is as easy as pulling into the nearest Pay’n’Spray, and Senator Clinton wants to investigate… a sex mini-game that can’t be played on the unmodified version of the game. If the game weren’t already rated “M” for Mature (meaning that retailers shouldn’t sell it to minors under 17) I might see the point, but since it is I have to see this brouhaha for what it is — wankery by some US politico in order to secure votes from gullible morons.

Four London terrorists identified, confirmed as suicide bombers. Three of the four were British-born, and the other was from Jamaica. It’s very impressive that British police were able to gather sufficient evidence to make this declaration.

After his failure last week to unseat Paul Martin’s minority Liberal government, Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper had a few words for Québec, mostly about a purported disappointment that of all Québec MPs only the separatists voted against the government. None of this was much of a surprise, even though his attempt to topple Martin was quite obviously the result of much collusion between his Conservatives and Gilles Duceppe’s Bloc Québécois.

After that however, Harper went on to practically apologize for his party not having a strong base in Québec and assure us that he would make greater efforts to grow the PC brand in La Belle Province.

I guffawed a little when I heard this — spoken, incidentally, in surprisingly flawless French. It did serve to tell me and others something tangible, and that’s the fact that Mr. Harper just doesn’t get it. He hasn’t got a clue about Québec politics. It’s not a question of making an effort; he can try as much as he likes, but like it or not Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are very unlikely to ever make much headway here.

We know he’s tried. Earlier this year the Conservative Party held its first policy convention in Montréal, but as surprised no one the French bits of the conference were few and far between. That’s not even the problem, though. The trouble with Harper is that this province doesn’t like his party, and it doesn’t like him. Additionally we “Quebs” (as we are often known in the rest of Canada) have a history of only backing parties led by one of us.

This series of articles will examine those three aspects of the question in more detail.

1 – It’s your party

Québec’s national slogan is “Je me souviens.” “I remember.” While it’s a very small bit taken out of a much larger quote — we seem to have inherited at least part of the legendary verbosity of the French — it’s also an indicator of our long national memory. As such it’s hardly surprising that we just don’t buy into the “Conservative” image of the party. To us, the CP is and has always been the Reform Party, a Western Canadian, anti-multiculturalist, anti-francophone and anti-Québec party. They are well aware of this, and have twice in the past 10 years attempted to shed their rather negative party image, once by just renaming themselves to “Canadian Alliance”, and then less than two years ago by absorbing the smaller Progressive Conservative party, mostly to acquire the “Conservative” label. The decision to ditch “Progressive” astonished no one. They’re not fooling anyone, or in any case they’re not fooling us.

Since its latest inception the CP has struggled to become the Canadian counterpart to the American Republican party. The party’s policies seem to have aligned themselves nicely with the GOP’s, as has its message to the populace. Its public appeals have increasingly been about “moral” issues of concern to the party’s fundamentalist Protestant base. They’re a well-known enemy of legalizing same-sex marriage, and were they to come to power when it has already been legalized they would invoke the infamous “notwithstanding” clause of the Canadian constitution to make it illegal again. And surely we can forget about the decriminalization of marijuana under a Harper government, and instead see the implementation of the ruinous and disastrous policies of the American “War on (some) Drugs”, just as we are sure to see a strong realignment of Canada’s policies on firearms to closely reflect American feelings on the matter — now that we have paid for the horrendously-expensive national firearms registry the Conservative party would just scrap it. That’s actually the first item they list in the “Safe Communities” section of their web site. Incidentally, am I the only one to find this ironic?

There is also a palpable sense that Harper wants to bring Canada back to the old days of subservience to American interests. Harper himself is on record as recommending that Canadian troops be sent to Iraq — he has voted in Parliament against NOT recommending it — and there is a not-unreasonable idea that if he were to come to power our boys in uniform could consider themselves signed up for any future American military adventure overseas. There is also a certainty here that a Harper government would hand George Bush carte blanche over Canadian territory when it comes to testing space-based weapons, something else Quebec voters are strongly against. Harper and the Conservatives have been trying to deny this, but as the saying goes “the proof’s in the pudding” — and they are on record as supporting those two things.

All this adds up to a situation where the Conservative Party’s hopes of progress in Québec are quixotic at best.

For a start, we’re the most liberal people in Canada (and I mean small-l liberal). As a province we’re comfortably to the left of everyone else in the country; while British Columbia might have a reputation as fairly “out there”, the impression stems from the behaviour of a vocal few in the city of Vancouver; the Conservative party has quite a few MPs from BC’s non-urban areas. By contrast, Reform and Conservative strongholds Manitoba and Alberta are the most staunchly morally conservative areas in Canada.

Maybe it’s because we’re overwhelmingly Catholic here, but we’re big into the “love your neighbor” and not so crazy about the more Protestant “thou shalt not”‘s. When the issue of same-sex marriage came up we were the first to say “why not?” I didn’t say were weren’t lapsed Catholics. Our tolerance of marijuana is also pretty legendary, and it’s not uncommon to nose a burning joint while taking a stroll down Saint-Denis street.

So, in retrospect, we’re not the types who’ll go for a socially conservative party.

Now if there’s something we dislike even more than Western moral conservatism, it’s America’s imperial and imperious policies. We don’t want any part of Iraq, Iran, or whatever other militaristic folly has crossed George Bush’s mind, nor are we interested in their “star wars” weapons program. We also don’t care about whatever objections Americans can have over same-sex marriage and the decriminalization of marijuana (and by and large we think Paul Cellucci can f*ck off). In all these areas the Conservatives have allied themselves with Americans, and in all these areas Québec disagrees.

In that sense one could say that we only think there are two things wrong with the Conservative party — their domestic policies and their foreign policies.

That, grosso modo, is why we don’t like the Conservative party. In the next installment of this series we will see how the people of the Conservative Party — including, but not limited to, Mr. Harper himself — present yet another obstacle to their making political gains in Québec.

Understanding Joshua. This is the creepiest art project I’ve ever seen. Have a look and see if you don’t agree with me on that.

Hitler drawings, Xmas wishes to be put on the auction block. Just the thing for the person in your life who has everything except a sense of history.

Rove’s lawyer admits his client was one the one leaked the identity of CIA agent Plame. The perjury rap would seem to be a pretty ‘open-and-close’ case then (the article states he denied having any such conversation), but what about the main charge of disclosing the identity of an undercover CIA agent?