Administrivia Quebec — Just before he became Quebec premier, Lucien Bouchard invited the Action démocratique du Québec party to merge with the Parti Québécois after the 1995 referendum on sovereignty, ADQ Leader Mario Dumont says in a book released yesterday.
The statement underscores Mr. Bouchard's conflicting views with his party.
In the book, Mr. Dumont, 35, writes that Mr. Bouchard, who became PQ leader in early 1996, offered him a cabinet position -- which "would have meant the disintegration of the ADQ" -- in a bid to transform the PQ into a moderate nationalist party seeking political autonomy rather than independence.
Military sources said the LAV-3 — its inherent tippiness exaggerated by armour plates added recently to protect soldiers from explosions — rolled over after a civilian car with no headlights suddenly appeared out of the dark.
"It was a reaction by a driver who at the last second had to make a move to avoid a collision with an oncoming car that had no headlights on."
Now had this been an American military patrol the civilians would have been crushed.
Our ancestors laughed to relieve stress from continuous hunting and gathering, say Binghamton State University biologists David Sloan Wilson and Matthew Gervais.
A study of cranial evidence found that cavemen communicated through slapstick before language evolved.
Scientists from Binghamton University, New York, have revealed that cavemen invented slapstick humour two million years ago, with their funniest visual gag being something like 'tripping over a rock'.
Nearly four million years ago they turned to humour to relieve stress from all that hunting and gathering - and were grunt-like 'play panting'. It took another two million years before their face muscles developed enough for laughter. They perfected slapstick to communicate feelings before proper language evolved.
"Laughter was used for a number of things including conveying embarrassment," The Sun quoted Professor David Sloan Wilson as saying.
And after that humour became a subversive antinomonialistic activity of humans facing oppression, thus the creation of the carnival, the Saturnalia, and April Fools. To embarass and make fools of self appointed leaders.
Which is why the Marx Brothers are a sheer anarchist delight. Surrealism itself is found in the art of humour and silliness of the Marx brothers, especially in there word play which was based on the very real immigrant experience that they portrayed on screen.I sent the club a wire stating,
Groucho Marx
PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION.
I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB
THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.
"Don't you know what duplicates are?"
Groucho and Chico Marx in A Night at the Opera
"Sure. There's five kids up in Canada."
"Well, I wouldn't know about that.
I haven't been to Canada in years."
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas.
Groucho in Animal crackers (Movie)
How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.
Then we tried to remove the tusks. The tusks.
That's not so easy to say. Tusks.
You try it some time.
As I say, we tried to remove the tusks.
But they were embedded so firmly we couldn't budge them.
Of course, in Alabama the Tuscaloosa,
but that is entirely ir-elephant
to what I was talking about.
Minister: "We need to take up the tax"
Groucho in Duck Soup (movie)
Groucho: "I'd like to take up the carpet."
Minister: "I still insist we take up the tax."
Groucho: "He's right -
you've gotta take up the tacks
before you can take up the carpet."
Coming out of Vaudville onto the Silver Screen the mayhem and disorder of the Marx Brothers with their disrespect for all authority reminds us of the Rennisance Carnivales that Mikhail Bakhtin deconstructed and revealed their lusty subversive nature. Not merely a bazaar or market place, the carnivale was the topsy turvy world of rebellion against the established order.
George Orwell maintained we didn't know when humour began but he identified it as social embarassment, as upsetting the social order. With the discovery of prehistoric humour, we can say that he was right, and it was as true then as it is now.
George OrwellA thing is funny when — in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening — it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution. If you had to define humour in a single phrase, you might define it as dignity sitting on a tin-tack. Whatever destroys dignity, and brings down the mighty from their seats, preferably with a bump, is funny. And the bigger they fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate. With this general principle in mind, one can, I think, begin to see what has been wrong with English comic writing during the present century.
The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to ManLet us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature -- but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.
And, in fact, with every day that passes we are acquiring a better understanding of these laws and getting to perceive both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. In particular, after the mighty advances made by the natural sciences in the present century, we are more than ever in a position to realise, and hence to control, also the more remote natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities. But the more this progresses the more will men not only feel but also know their oneness with nature, and the more impossible will become the senseless and unnatural idea of a contrast between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body, such as arose after the decline of classical antiquity in Europe and obtained its highest elaboration in Christianity.
It required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn a little of how to calculate the more remote natural effects of our actions in the field of production, but it has been still more difficult in regard to the more remote social effects of these actions. We mentioned the potato and the resulting spread of scrofula. But what is scrofula compared to the effects which the reduction of the workers to a potato diet had on the living conditions of the popular masses in whole countries, or compared to the famine the potato blight brought to Ireland in 1847, which consigned to the grave a million Irishmen, nourished solely or almost exclusively on potatoes, and forced the emigration overseas of two million more? When the Arabs learned to distil spirits, it never entered their heads that by so doing they were creating one of the chief weapons for the annihilation of the aborigines of the then still undiscovered American continent. And when afterwards Columbus discovered this America, he did not know that by doing so he was giving a new lease of life to slavery, which in Europe had long ago been done away with, and laying the basis for the Negro slave trade. The men who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries laboured to create the steam-engine had no idea that they were preparing the instrument which more than any other was to revolutionise social relations throughout the world. Especially in Europe, by concentrating wealth in the hands of a minority and dispossessing the huge majority, this instrument was destined at first to give social and political domination to the bourgeoisie, but later, to give rise to a class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat which can end only in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of all class antagonisms. But in this sphere too, by long and often cruel experience and by collecting and analysing historical material, we are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote social effects of our production activity, and so are afforded an opportunity to control and regulate these effects as well.
This regulation, however, requires something more than mere knowledge. It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order.
All hitherto existing modes of production have aimed merely at achieving the most immediately and directly useful effect of labour. The further consequences, which appear only later and become effective through gradual repetition and accumulation, were totally neglected. The original common ownership of land corresponded, on the one hand, to a level of development of human beings in which their horizon was restricted in general to what lay immediately available, and presupposed, on the other hand, a certain superfluity of land that would allow some latitude for correcting the possible bad results of this primeval type of economy. When this surplus land was exhausted, common ownership also declined. All higher forms of production, however, led to the division of the population into different classes and thereby to the antagonism of ruling and oppressed classes. Thus the interests of the ruling class became the driving factor of production, since production was no longer restricted to providing the barest means of subsistence for the oppressed people. This has been put into effect most completely in the capitalist mode of production prevailing today in Western Europe. The individual capitalists, who dominate production and exchange, are able to concern themselves only with the most immediate useful effect of their actions. Indeed, even this useful effect -- inasmuch as it is a question of the usefulness of the article that is produced or exchanged -- retreats far into the background, and the sole incentive becomes the profit to be made on selling.
Classical political economy, the social science of the bourgeoisie, in the main examines only social effects of human actions in the fields of production and exchange that are actually intended. This fully corresponds to the social organisation of which it is the theoretical expression. As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account. As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions. What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees-what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock! In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character; that the harmony of supply and demand is transformed into the very reverse opposite, as shown by the course of each ten years' industrial cycle -- even Germany has had a little preliminary experience of it in the "crash"; that private ownership based on one's own labour must of necessity develop into the expropriation of the workers, while all wealth becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of non-workers; that [... the manuscript breaks off here ...]
BERLIN (Reuters) - Scientists monitoring earth movements in Antarctica believe they have found a singing iceberg.
Sound waves from the iceberg had a frequency of around 0.5 hertz, too low to be heard by humans, but by playing them at higher speed the iceberg sounded like a swarm of bees or an orchestra warming up, the scientists said.
The German Alfred Wegener institute for polar and marine research publish the results of its study, done in 2002, in Science magazine on Friday.
Between July and November 2002 researchers picked up acoustic signals of unprecedented clarity when recording seismic signals to measure earthquakes and tectonic movements on the Ekstroem ice shelf on Antarctica's South Atlantic coast.
Tracking the signal, the scientists found a 50 by 20 kilometer iceberg that had collided with an underwater peninsula and was slowly scraping around it.
"Once the iceberg stuck fast on the seabed it was like a rock in a river," said scientist Vera Schlindwein. "The water pushes through its crevasses and tunnels at high pressure and the iceberg starts singing."
"The tune even goes up and down, just like a real song."
Mice can sing.
Humans can't hear it, but researchers say the ultrasonic songs of male mice trying to woo females are comparable to the musical trills produced by songbirds.
That mice make noise is nothing new to those who have had them in their houses, and scientists have known for decades that male mice will make sounds when they are near females, or exposed to female pheromones. Now they say that those utterances are love songs.
Researchers add mice to list of creatures that sing in the presence of matesThis finding, to be published Nov. 1 online by the journal Public Library of Science Biology, adds mice to the roster of creatures that croon in the presence of the opposite sex, including songbirds, whales and some insects.
"In the literature, there's a hierarchy of different definitions for what qualifies as a song, but there are usually two main properties," says lead author Timothy E. Holy, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy. "One is that there should be some syllabic diversity—recognizably distinct categories of sound, instead of just one sound repeated over and over. And there should be some temporal regularity—motifs and themes that recur from time to time, like the melodic hook in a catchy tune."
The new study shows that mouse song has both qualities, although Holy notes that the ability of lab mice to craft motifs and themes isn't quite on a par with that of master songsmiths like birds.
The genius of Albert Einstein, who added a “cosmological constant” to his equation for the expansion of the universe but later retracted it, may be vindicated by new research.
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| Image from Supernova Legacy Survey, courtesy of Julien Guy, CFHTLS/SNLS/Terapix |
The enigmatic dark energy that drives the accelerating expansion of the universe behaves just like Einstein's famed cosmological constant, according to the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS), an international team of researchers in France and Canada that collaborated with large telescope observers at Oxford, Caltech and Berkeley. Their observations reveal that the dark energy behaves like Einstein’s cosmological constant to a precision of 10 per cent.
“The significance is huge,” said Professor Ray Carlberg of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at U of T. “Our observation is at odds with a number of theoretical ideas about the nature of dark energy that predict that it should change as the universe expands, and as far as we can see, it doesn’t.” The results will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Book Briefs, by Drollene Brown
Most of us are limited by certain conventions of thought. Some of these limitations are as simple as the oft-used phrase: "I can't help it. It's the way I was raised."
Another such phrase said only half in jest: "It's against my religion."
Religion has the capacity to raise us to the heights, but it can also constrain us to keep us on the ground. It can help us be the best we can be, and it can cause us to take beliefs to such an extreme that we commit unspeakable crimes.
A Christian who abhors abortion and kills people who work at abortion clinics is an example of religion gone wrong.
A Muslim who believes the world should be run according to the tenets of Islam and so plants a bomb to rid his corner of the world of infidels is not merely constricted by his religion, he is twisted by it.
Wait! Don't stop reading. You have no idea what is coming next. The book review this week is not for a Muslim book; it is not for a Christian book. It is for all religions and no religion. It is a roadmap for taking one's own religion, whatever it may be, and going beyond the ordinary perceptions of what it teaches.
Expanding the Boundaries of Self: Beyond the limit of traditional thought, discovering the magic within ((c) 2005, Global, 201 pages), by Oliver H. Jobson, will show you what your limitations are. Then it will guide you to overcome them.
Such a book would expose many, for the first time, to the concepts he uses to describe-in his words-a synergy of being that fuses mankind, nature, and the entire universe into a unifying power of One, called monism.
IE SUCKSThe right wing loves to wave the red flag of Law and Order whenever they find themselves challenged on social issues. The Federal Conservatives, the majority from Alberta, and their provincial counterparts, along with the right wing media pundits like Dave Rutherford, love to talk the talk about getting tough on crime. Especially violent crime.
According to a new StatsCan study the motivation behind much violent crime is sexism, racism, and homophobia. Funny that...its the right wing that opposes immigration and aboriginal rights thus feeding racism, they oppose womens rights and of course gay marriage and gay rights. The social intolerace of the right is the source of the social acceptance of violence against women, gays and people of colour.
It is no surprize that in macho born again Alberta these crimes are the highest. After all we have a Premier who attacks the poor, homeless and disabled, who opposed gay marriage, and opposes pubic daycare. His government fails to fully fund womens shelters leaving victims of domestic violence with no place to call home.
The next time some right wing whiner starts beaking off about getting tough on crime not so gently remind them that their ideology of intolerance is criminal. After all they should accept their 'responsibility' for promoting violence against the people they denounce.
Simply put all right wing blather is hate speech looking for victims. Just ask Hitler.
StatsCan Report on Crime in Canada
More often, hate was cited as the motive for violent crimes compared with other offences.
Statscan said about 8 per cent of violent crimes were linked to hate. By comparison, about 2 per cent of household offences were thought to be hate crimes. “The most common motive was the individual's race or ethnicity, which represented two-thirds of hate-motivated incidents,” Statscan said. “About one-quarter of those incidents were believed to be motivated by the victim's sex, followed by religion and sexual orientation. These results were similar to those in 1999.” By region, residents of the Western provinces generally reported higher rates of victimization, with the exception of Nova Scotia. That province's rate of 157 incidents for every 1,000 residents was among the highest for violent crime, ranking near Alberta's rate of 160 incidents for every 1,000 people. Quebec residents reported the fewest incidents of violent crime. The risk of falling victim to a violent crime was higher among people aged 15 to 24, among city dwellers and among those out after dark. The report also suggested that incidents of hate-motivated crimes remained stable, accounting for about 4 per cent of all self-reported occurrences. The agency said that, among the 1 per cent of those identifying themselves as gay or lesbian, the rate of violent victimization was 2.5 times that reported by straight people.
