[MUSIC] All things must converge?

Paul McCartney, on his album Back in the U.S.: Live 2002, sounds almost exactly like late-period (which is to say solo) Sting.

[LINK] Thanks, Dubya, for that careful consideration!

The New Republic Online has a wonderfully snarky review the fifteen people who they've identified as the most incompetent hacks working for the Bush Administration. Guess who's number five on that list?

5: David Wilkins
American Ambassador to Canada

An unspoken rule dictates that politically appointed ambassadors should be seen and not heard--or, at the very least, not heard provoking international incidents with close U.S. allies. But David Wilkins--a former South Carolina legislator whose chief contribution to world affairs before this year was raising $200,000 for President Bush's 2004 campaign--is not one to stand on ceremony. Though he'd only been to Canada once (Niagara Falls) prior to his nomination in April, the Bush Ranger assured Congress that "I won't be afraid to talk about the tough issues." A man of his word, Wilkins promptly escalated the two countries' dispute over softwood lumber by accusing Canadians of being overly emotional and by threatening an all-out trade war that would have affected multiple industries, from broadcasting to eggs. The Canadian government fought back, however, and, although generally disinclined toward mea culpas--"You talking about regrets by the United States?" he asked a Canadian reporter with incredulity--Wilkins eventually admitted his approach to the lumber dispute had been flawed. "My attempt to bring the emotion down increased the emotion," he said. To demonstrate his diplomatic sensitivity, he continues to open speeches with a jolly, "Bonjour, y'all!"

We should feel flattered. Wilkins is the only U.S. ambassador on their list.

[ISL] The Corsicans of Puerto Rico

Because of their generally small size and their necessary dependence upon larger economies elsewhere, islands are frequently sources of immigrant diasporas. Puerto Rico and Corsica (at least the native-born segment of the population) are particularly famous for their emigrations. This is why I was surprised to discover that there was large-scale Corsican immigration to Puerto Rico in the mid-19th century, at a time when one of the last Spanish colonies was still doing better than France's insular dependency in the Mediterranean. The Wikipedia article seems to suggest that the Corsicans who did move to Puerto Rico had some technical skills, as evidenced by their influence in the modernization of the island's coffee industry.

[LINK] Satanism? So passé

imomus critiques Satanism on aesthetic grounds.

[LINK] Dobson, his daughter, and S&M

skooshje describes James Dobson's tendency to brutally attack his animal and his children by way of punishment, the latter with worryingly sadomasochistic overtones.

I've said before how American Christianity, or at least a worrying large chunk of said, is becoming an apocalyptic death cult, right? Add to this "sexually obsessed in a most Freudian manner."

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] This is why we don't have space colonies

I've recently borrowed Brian O'Leary's Mars 1999 from the Toronto public library system. This slim 1987 volume advances a plan for Mars exploration that's visibly an ancestor of Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct program, suggesting the establishment of manned bases on the Martian moons of Phobos and Deimos as a precursor to both the manned exploration of the Martian surface and the industrialization of the Solar System using the moons' water supplies, and not incidentally as a way to overcome Cold War Soviet-American rivalries.

While I can't speak for the viability of much of the plan, by the standards and knowledge of the late 1980s it at least sounds reasonably plausible. But then, in the fictional scenario used by O'Leary used to illustrate the plan, he goes off the rails completely. This is him, speaking from the perspective of his Mars-astronaut future self in 2020.

[T]here is the red planet Mars to the east, winking at us from between the satellites. My daughter, son-in-law, and their family became colonists on Mars. Their community in the Cydonia pyramid complex is an extraordinary experiment in living. The inhabitants communicate telepathically, and their consciousnesses can travel out of their bodies at any time. They are learning the mysteries of the universe from their extraterrestrial partners and from inside themselves. The information coming through is extraordinary. now that Earth has calmed down from its twentieth-century crises, many of us here are also becoming privy to realms beyond our wildest imaginations.

My daughter talks with Marla and me telepathically and instantaneously. The speed of light is no longer a limit. We can now see her in our minds' eyes sitting on a reclining couch inside a huge plastic bubble on Mars. Lush green plants surround her. Outside the bubble we can see a dust storm raging with hundred mile-per-hour winds.

"Dad," she said to me, "when you were here, you said you felt strangely connected with everything and everyone, but you haven't said much about it since then. I feel that way all the time!"

"That's good, my dear, because sometimes I forget. I forget that nothing is impossible except what my mind tells me." (138-139)

Not included in this passage are the facts that the United States is recruiting crew for the fusion-drive starships that it will launch the 2020s, and that the world government created by the industrialization of space is a fait accompli.

What is it about proponents of manned space exploration and colonization that tends to make them talk like this, write like this, argue like this? Why did they opt to pick such wildly impossible scenarios as the likely, or even possible, consequences of their goals' fulfillment? Space exploration is firstly a scientific endeavour, secondly a commercial. It's not an eschatological religious experience. This, I think, weighed heavily against its proponents when the time came to decide what to do after the Apollo moon missions.

[NON BLOG] An encounter in multiethnic Toronto

I was chatting with a guy at Starbucks on Church after I gave up struggling to get the nerve to edit a short story of mine, an attractive sort of mature twink. Out of nowhere, he came up with an unexpected question.

- Are you Jewish? he asked.

I blinked. In phrasing my answer, I admit that I seized upon a false binary, one that I'd normally know to be false. But then, he took me by surprise.

- No, I'm from Prince Edward Island. Why do you ask? Are you Jewish?

- Oh, no. I work up in the Jewish area--

- On Dufferin?

- Yes. It's just that you've got dark hair, and a goatee, and you're well-spoken.

After a compliment like that, how could I not give him an E-mail address?

[BRIEF NOTE] The Problem with Polygamy

Yesterday's post in which I referred to E.J. Graff's separation of the rationale for same-sex marriage from that for traditional polygamy prompted an insightful comment from mollpeartree.

My working theory is that it matters a great deal how you legalize gay marriage. If you articulate it as a right, which is what would have to happen if gay marriage were to be legitimated by courts striking down statutes forbidding it (at least in the U.S.), then it becomes very difficult to articulate exactly why poly relationships cannot be legitimized as well. If you can find even a small number of people who manage to fulfill whatever abstract conditions a given court comes up with to define what an articulated right (in this case marriage) is and means, from within a poly relationship--and I imagine you could--then I think prohibition would become quite difficult (again within the U.S. legal system, I have no idea how such things work in Canada). And once any sort of poly relationship is legitimated, then very likely they all will be, including the really bad ones.

The most famous polygamous community in Canada is the Mormon settlement of Bountiful in British Columbia, where polygamy is linked to fairly systematic human rights abuses against young members of the community, not only women but many young men as well.

Benjamin Bistline spent part of his childhood among polygynists in the main FLDS group in what is now called Colorado City, AZ. He has written a book about his experiences. 8 He has observed that in order to maintain a culture in which most men have many wives, it is necessary to persuade most male youths to leave the community at a relatively young age. Teenaged women with restricted education are then matched up with older men, preferably before they develop an interest in boys their own age. After an unregistered marriage, the new wives financially support the family by applying for welfare as single mothers.

The list on conditions and restrictions set by these polygamist Mormons upon their unfortunate female children are fairly stringent.

• Men must have at least three wives and as many children as possible in order to enter the highest level of heaven, and to have the opportunity to evolve into a God.


• A woman's role is to serve a man and be submissive to his needs.


• Women who disobey men will have their souls burn in Hell for eternity.


• Children are usually required to leave school at the age of 13 or 14.


• Their marriage ceremony consists of the woman placing her hand in the man's hand in what is called "the patriarchal grip."


• A man is not permitted to have sexual intercourse with one of his wives if she is pregnant.


• "If...an older man seduces a 13-year old girl....in his own mind he doesn't commit sexual abuse.....he views himself as married." (Comment by Ron Barton, special investigator of "closed societies," at the Utah State Attorney's Office)


• Because all the plural marriages, except perhaps for the first one, are celestial, and not legal unions, FLDS men are not polygamists; they are only adulterers in the eyes of the state. Adultery is not a criminal act. (Comment by former Bishop Winston Blackmore of Bountiful)

What does this mean? It means that the problem isn't with polygamy per se, but rather with the abundant human-rights abuses which are associated with this particular form of polygamy. The young women who are married off aren't given the choice of refusing their older partners, or indeed any choice at all thanks to their subculture's cunning isolation of female children from anything that could make them autonomous individuals with the power to refuse coercive relationships. Polygamy has been banned in France for this very reason: It's associated with a profoundly misogynistic perspective on the role of women in society, and requires the expulsion of a large number of young men from the ranks of the community in the bargain. countess_sophia's suggestion that states should follow the French model in solemnizing marriages, requiring registration by the state, makes a lot of sense in this context. As I've said, a worryingly large and vocal chunk of American Christianity seems to define freedom of religion not as "the right of individuals to their own beliefs" but rather "the right of individuals to terrorize others." Alas, American Christianity's only following established precedents of behaviour by religions, with their arguably innate totalitarian impulse.

What does this imply for polygamy? As I said in the original posting, Graff distinguishes between traditional forms of marriage (including polygamy) where women are assumed to be subordinate actors, and modern forms of marriage where individuals have equal roles and expectations regardless of sex. Traditional polygamy, as the case of Bountiful demonstrates, requires the sustained indoctrination of children in a closed culture from birth, something that fits the definition of child abuse rather closely. This is why we have social services, after all. Is it possible that consenting adults might want to establish a polygamous relationship of equals, not only with a husband and multiple wives but (say) a wife and multiple husbands, or multiple husbands or multiple wives? Certainly. Does Graff's definition exclude these relationships from state re3cognition? No. Can I think, off-hand, of a reason to deny them recognition? No.

[MUSIC] Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, "The Privacy Song!"

My thanks to robertprior for introducing me to Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie and their music, including the song playing right now. Go to their website, browse. If you go via the front page and you're a fan of Firefly and Serenity you'll get a nice surprise ...