CIVITATENSIS

Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis seems to be suggesting that the Canadian Prime Minister interfere with a criminal investigation in a foreign country.

Karygiannis is truly clueless. Mexicans would not take the idea well that a foreign head of government tries to interfere with their justice system anymore than we would. It would not help at all. His colonial attitude is likely to insult Mexicans. It shows a lack of repect for other countries’ sovereignty. Sadly, Karygiannis-like Liberals are the first to scream when Americans display toward Canadians the exact same attitude he is displaying toward Mexico.

“Where is Stephen Harper, what is he waiting for? Why isn’t he not taking personal interest in it?” asked Toronto-area Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis.

“Get on the phone to (Mexican president Vicente) Fox and say, ‘What the hell is going on?”‘ Mr. Karygiannis fumed. “These are Canadian citizens, these are our people. Why is he not stepping up to the plate to protect them?”

Would Canadians like the US president to interfere with any Canadian criminal investigation? Likely not. Someone needs to throw some cold water that Liberal fuming head of his. He is really not helping those two Canadian women.

The last few posts that disappeared from Civitatensis I had posted form Mexico. Two of them had something to do with the murder of the two Canadians in Cancun. I was not slandering Mexico (I have no reasons to), but simply noted that not much was being said here as compared to all the attention that it was receiving in Canadian media. I noted that it was to be expected considering the numbers of murders that Mexican authorities have to deal with on a daily basis.

The last post about the murder, about the investigation to be exact, timed for publishing this morning but posted last night, referred to an article in the Globe, which I can’t find anymore. In any event, that post alone disappeared today but not the other ones showing some of the pictures I have taken in the last couple of days. I though that the disappearances were due to the Internet cafe from which I was blogging. Here are a few links from the G&M about the murders.

If I am right, this post won’t last long. I’ll have to save all of my observations about all of this until I get back home to Alberta.

Crossposted to thePolitic.com

I was working downtown yesterday, not too far away from the central plaza, which Mexicans call El Zocalo. Here is a picture of the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City. The barely visible structure around the main dome in the back is scafolding; the dome is being restored.

Here’s a view of the opposite side of El Zocalo, looking from where the Cathedral is.

Below is the library where I worked yesterday. It’s a former church –churches abound in the downtown area, and it now houses the Miguel Lerdo Tejada Library.

Some of you may have noticed that I am rather fund of chuch architecture. Much like in Lima, this is a city to behold when it comes to churches.
Today I am off to the Historical Archives of the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP). Not much to look at, so I don’t expect to post pictures of that place. The people who work in the archive, though, have been very kind and extremely helpful.

Is Ralph Klein confused about a conversation with the prime minister regarding senate reform, or is he trying to pressure the PM further?

Klein has been saying that Harper committed to senatorial elections for this Fall. But Klein’s press guru has now made corrections to the premier’s statement: the premier overstated the essence of the conversation, it was said. The PM, it seems, simply talked about talking about senatorial elections.

“The premier didn’t mean to say that there would be national elections for senators this fall,” said Marisa Etmanski. “He clarified (to me) that there would be discussions this fall on Senate elections.”

Talking about talking about reform does not seem enough, but it’s a start. By overstating the conversation in the public eye, Klein puts the monkey on Harper’s back –at least as far as Albertans are concerned. That would seem more in keeping with Ralph’s style.
Klein also backtracked a little saying that he does not want to open constitutional negotiations. But that’s not right. There is no need, as the Journal points out, for formal constitutional amendments in order to have elected senators.

Harper could hold out his appointing of Senators until they have either been elected or have been selected previously by the province. As long as the PM remains the one naming the names for the formal appointment at Rideau Hall, there doesn’t have to be formal amendments.

There seems to be less and less clarity about the murder of two Canadians at a Mexican resort last week, and accusations are beginning to fly that the Mexican authorities may be botching the investigation.
Most crimes in Mexico that are not solved within 4 hours of the crime being committed do not get solved, I heard the other day. We’re well passed 4 hours.

Alberta is expected to have a greater economic surplus that previously expected. And Ralph Kein still does not have much a plan about what to do with it.

Today, or rather yesterday, I took the day off and some of my friends took me to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, on the northern edge of the valley where Mexico City is built, and to the pyramids in Teotihuacan, some 50kms North of Mexico City.

Our Lady of Guadalupe is Mexico’s and Latin America’s patron saint, and the shrine is considered Latin America’s holiest. Here are some pictures:

The original image of the Lady of Guadalupe, behind a super bullet and fireproof glass. After the Mexican Revolution, the basilica was bombed and nearly destroyed in an attempt to destroy the image.

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Inside the new basilica, during Sunday Mass.

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La Calzada de los Muertos (the avenue of the dead) in Teotihuacan. To the left, you can see the Pyramid of the Sun. The picture was taken from the smaller Pyramid of the Moon, about a couple of kilometres to the South.

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A closer look at the Pyramid of the Sun from the South

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At the foot of the Pyramid of the Sun.

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Over and above the spiritual nature of both places, they are quite amazing sites. It was a good Sunday.  I couldn’t help to be reminded of the Bamiyan Buddhas. In light of what’s been going on with the Mohammed cartoons and what happened to the Buddha statues in Afgahnistan, both these awe-inspiring places would be destroyed by our friends the Taliban, if they were in charge.

All the posts written since the 21 were erased today, including the post of this morning. I think I’ve been hacked into. I guess that I’ll have to stop using the same ‘Internet Cafe’ that I have been using. Sorry of there were comments on the posts.

This may be the beginning of a new era:

Harper’s initiative will mark the first time a prospective member of the top court has faced public scrutiny by the House of Commons.

One of the typical criticisms to this kind of process, and it has been voiced by the Chief Justice of the Court, is that it will politicise the process. That’s a little bit of a joke, though. The Court is already highly politicised. We might as well acknowledge it, and take measures at least to know what kind politicians we are placing in the Court.

MPs asking questions of a judge should not be a thing to fear. The Libs have traditionally been the opponents of “politicising” the process in this way. We’ll see on Monday if they refrain from the very politics that they fear and decry.

Yeah, the cabinet picks are confusing. They are confusing to those who seek politics as usual. Ethnics ridings get immigration ministers and so on, without taking into account the abilities of the minister, and a geographic representation based on loyalty to the PM: Pierre Dupuis and Dianne Marlau are the prototype examples of that kind of practice. Harper does not operate that way, and the journalistic muses are confused. Poor souls.

Those who are looking for Liberal Party politics from Harper will remain confused for quite a while. There was nothing usual about envelops in brown paper bags either, but if that´s what some people are used to, who am I to judge?

Today is my mother’s birthday. She would have turned 69 or 68, or 67 today, depending on which document one consults, and who she was fibbing to about her age.
Here she is, groovy hair and all, at the tender age of 30.

Well, I made it, I think. The place where I am right now has a snail connection. I`ll have to try this later.

Mexico City is not as dirty and as chaotic as I remember it. Not that there are no chaotic places around. I am sure there are. But the chaos I remember was equal in opportunity and prevalent everywhere. Not anymore. I can say the same about the city`s cleanliness. It`s pretty clean. Awful traffic, though. But what can you expect in a city where 25 million people live´?

Had an interesting conversation with a biologist while I had lunch today. The guy was an expert in reptiles, mostly turtles, and as reptiles go, he is an expert in desert reptiles. And what does an expert in reptilian life want to talk about? That`s right. Politics. I`ll have to report on that conversation later when I find a faster connection. Very interesting stuff.

TTFN

I’ll be away on business for the next couple of weeks.

I Hope that I can find sometime to blog from the City that has almost as many people as our entire country. I cringe just to think about it.

I don’t know that I’ll be able to blog regularly, but I’ll find an internet cafe here and there on occasion, I am sure.

In the meantime, keep me in your prayers, and keep enjoying the Olympic Games.

Bye for now.

The Western Standard publishes the original set of Danish cartoons, and people in Canada come out of the woodwork trying to charge the publisher with hate crimes. A newspaper published the same cartoons in Egypt during Ramadan, and there was hardly a criticism.
The United Church has hinted racism. This poor soul, and like him there are so many, is disturbed. It was bound to happen in Alberta, he figures, in a vintage Buzz-Hargrove social analysis.

If all the Western Standard really wanted to offend Muslims everywhere, or sought nothing but publicity, they would have published the fake cartoons that European and Middle Eastern Muslims willingly circulated in the Middle East in the hope of whipping people up into a frenzy –a task at which they succeeded. No paper I know of in the West has published those cartoons. They are

…as many as 30 graphics that had never appeared, and by their nature would never appear, in a Western mainstream newspaper. For instance, a photo of a man dressed as a pig, over the caption, "This is the real Mohammad."

How long before the disturbed and the disturbing accuse those Muslims, call them racists, and demand apologies of them? A long time…
There really is a whole whack of people out there whom Lenin would not hesitate in calling “useful.”

It would be bad enough if people in the West apologised for printing the Mohammed cartoons. No law has been broken, no tradition transgressed. There is no need for apologies.

Now the United Church of Canada has launched into the debate by offering an apology, which at the same time attacks those who have published them as intolerant and racist:

"We believe that the intention of publishing the cartoons has little to do with freedom of expression and much to do with incitement to racial and religious hatred," senior church representatives said in the letter released to the media on Friday.

"The cartoons suggest that Islam itself teaches, condones and encourages violence, bombings and the mistreatment of women. Furthermore, the implication is that all Muslims believe so as well.

"This we know to be untrue."

There is a significant amount of nonsense there. But even if what the United Church believes to be true were in fact true, the UC does not have a monopoly on truth. Not truth in the Orient or the Occident. The absence of an objective truth has been a standard position for the UC, who often seek to settle questions of moral and theological doctrine by holding votes. They don’t even hold to much Christology in the name of not wishing to affirm any truth. Suddenly, they are appealing to a truth; it seems out of character.

But the point is that what is true to the UC and what is true to Islam does not have to be true to everyone else. That is the basis of a liberal society.

If suddenly, Western media are to be ruled by Islamic legal and religious standard in order to determine what is morally true (offense is really a secondary point), which is that depictions the Prophet (Peace be upon him) is blasphemy, we simply should come out and say it straight. At least then, we could have a debate about that.

If we decide that we should follow the Islamic standard, we should also close every establishment that sells alcohol, shut down all publications deemed pornographic, close down strip clubs, to say nothing of swinger clubs recently annointed by the Supremes and the gay bath houses in urban Canada. Is this what we want?

Denmark, Canada and so forth are not Islamic societies. They are liberal democratic societies with a Moslem population in them. To suggest that these states should conform to standards of Moslem states is ludicrous.

The United Church has not recently known the virtue of intellectual and moral consistency. Their apology should not be a surprise. It’s the sudden claim to a truth that is a shocker; it undermines their own very basis of existence.

Harry Whittington left hospital today.  The moratorium on jokes can now be lifted.

A Pakistani cleric offered a 1.5 million rupee ($25,000 U.S.) reward and a car for anyone who kills the cartoonist who drew Prophet Mohammed, while another Islamist leader was put under house detention, amid fears of more deadly demonstrations Friday, officials said.

[...]

Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi, prayer leader at the historic Mohabat Khan mosque in the northwestern city of Peshawar, announced the mosque and the Jamia Ashrafia religious school that he leads would give the cash reward and a car for killing the cartoonist of the Prophet pictures that appeared first in a Danish newspaper in September.

THE cartoonist? I was under the impression that more than one person was involved? Will Qureshi also issue similar calls against those who drew the even more incediary images in order to whip Moslems like him into a frenzy? I am betting that he won’t do that.

There should be an outrage over this but there won’t be. There was none at the time that Salman Rushdie was sentenced to death and a reward was offered for his killing. Barbarism has become nearly acceptable. Yet, mocking barbarism would be intolerant and racist.

What will the United Church say about this, I wonder?

Of related interest: UCC

Reading this CP piece, I almost get the feeling that they were looking for a way to say that  support for the CPC had dropped and that we should have another election, er, next week.

The Conservatives would win another minority and the NDP would gain at the expense of the Liberals if Canadians had a chance to redo the Jan. 23 election, a new poll suggests.

The Decima Research survey of 1,010 adult Canadians, conducted between Feb. 9 and 13, suggests there has been no significant change in national support for the Tories.

Thirty-five per cent of respondents said they would vote Conservative, compared with 36 per cent who cast ballots on election day.

The poll put support for the Liberals at 25 per cent, down five percentage points from Jan. 23.

Will these results temper the Liberal desire to play obstructionist in the next Parliament? Is that too much to hope?

I could not help noticing the expression that the Liberals are “between leaders,” which is the parallel expression of being saying that one is “between jobs” for fear of saying that one is unemployed. I guess it would be insensitive to call the Liberals “leaderless,” though that might be a much more appropriate expression to use since Jean Chretien stepped down.

The federal government is surely not all that concerned with the Chiefs lobby. The feds have decided to kill the gun registry, and nowhere will these news will be better received than in the West. The ETA to kill the registry is unknown, but if the Conservatices keep their word, it should be sooner rather than later.

The Conservative government has created a committee of two cabinet ministers and a backbencher to figure out how best to kill the long-gun registry as soon as possible.

Registry critic Garry Breitkreuz, who is working with Justice Minister Vic Toews and Public Security Minister Stockwell Day, said he has been given wide leeway to deal swiftly with the registry.

This is good news. Michael Wilson will be Canada’s Ambassador to Washington and John McNee, a career diplomat will be going to New York to represent Canada at the United Nations.
Allan Rock, whose resignation sometime ago I seem to have missed, will remain in Manhattan until the end of June.

Alberta MP Rona Ambrose, the new Minister of the Environment, has made it clear that Canada will not be trading emission credits –the scheme under the Kyoto protocol that has the potential to export billions of dollars from Canada to polluting countries around the world.

One can also obtain credits from countries that have exceeded their targets in lowering emissions under Kyoto. There is one problem there: there is a real shortage of those countries.

Ambrose is essentially saying that Canadian dollars will stay in Canada and will be put to use to produce cleaner air in this country. What a refreshing idea!

Our flag thus honours Canadians of all origins…
[...]
Therefore, I, Jean Chrétien, Prime Minister of Canada, declare that February 15 will be celebrated henceforth as National Flag of Canada Day.

[...]
Let us recognize how privileged we are to live in Canada, this magnificent country that encompasses our history, our hopes, our future.

Jean Chrétien, February 15, 1996

While the destructive mobs supposedly protesting the infamous cartoons in some countries in the Middle East appear to wane, new ones are appearing.

Rampages against KFC, Pizza Hut, City Bank, Holiday Inn, and MacDonald’s in Pakistan seem to be substituting attacks on foreign missions. But the Iranians would not be outdone, and mobs there were directed to attack the British and German Missions.

None of the corporate bodies have any links to the cartoons’ publications. Knowing what we know about the corporate world, ironically, probably none of those corporations would allow being dragged into the political debate over the cartoons. Businesses in the West fear offending people because it’s bad for business. But that doesn’t matter to the attackers. Putting many other Muslims out of work is not important either.

As usual, there are other agendas in the background linked to the hatred of radical Islamists for all things western and against those they perceive as western allies.

At least two people were killed in Lahore, where intelligence officials suspected outlawed Islamic militant groups incited the violence to undermine President Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s U.S.-allied government.

Most of these events were not reported in Canada yesterday. Too busy worrying about gambling and Gretzky; too preoccupied with the excessive number of goals scored by the women’s Olympic hockey team; busier still trying to debunk the myth of the monogamous family.

The Star has a little about it here (source of quotation above). CBC did not even mention it. But bloggers have been busy following the stories unfold. Michelle Malkin has a good summary and links to other sources here.

The introduction to a piece on CBC’s The National last night.

“Tonight, on Valentine’s Day, we tackle infidelity.”
–Peter Mansbridge

Shake up the taboos. Undermine the family. Make normalcy out of the typically scandalous. Bring people into the 21st century.

Thank goodness for the enlightened folks at Mothercorp. Where would the country be without them?

The Americanising party declared that today is Flag Day.

Tue 14 Feb 2006

Tue 14 Feb 2006

Tue 14 Feb 2006

Tue 14 Feb 2006

Mon 13 Feb 2006

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