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We believe in spending your money on departments whose focus is the encouragement of illusion over reality. That is all.
Where to begin with such a malodorous concept? Starting with irony is always good, so… for instance how about the blinding irony of the Conservatives dedication to ‘austerity and smaller government’? How this equates with creating nebulous departments with equally nebulous goals defies rational comprehension.
“It was a Conservative campaign promise meant to promote religious freedom worldwide.
The promise, the Tories said, was to give a Canadian foreign policy focus to oppressed religious minorities in places such as Egypt, Pakistan, China and Iran.”
Well, it sorta sounds good, but how does this mission statement jive with the rest of Canada’s foreign policy?
“Last month, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird called freedom of religion a linchpin of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedom and Bill of Rights. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has also touted the new office, hoping Canada would step forward as a major champion of international religious rights.
At an hour-long interfaith meeting in Toronto on Wednesday, participants Abdul Hai Patel, of the Canadian Council of Imams, and Rev. Bhante Saranpala, of the West-End Buddhist Cultural Centre, said Baird noted the “office doesn’t have any teeth.”
But Baird spokesperson Joseph Lavoie said the minister was referring to the office’s legislative influence around the world.
“At the end of the day, we can’t force another government to do anything,” Baird said in a later interview.”
Oh, so we are going to set up a government bureaucracy to send guilt-inducing notes to other countries tell them about how to run their countries, fantastic. Of course, the amazing rate of failure will be promptly ignored by the Conservative powers that be because as always, ideological concerns always trump science and empirical evidence.
“the new entity — which will cost $5 million, employ five and, Lavoie said, launch in early 2012 — has rankled a number of Canadian religious organizations, human rights groups and academics, who remain unsure of what it hopes to achieve and whose interests it will serve”
Well, with no tangible goals, its impossible to get a bad evaluation. Win!!
““It could be argued that a secular government is well-positioned to (promote religious freedom abroad) because it doesn’t have a vested interested in any particular community,” said Tamas, who attended the October consultation. Baha’is face persecution in a number of Muslim countries, including Iran.”
Just out of the goodness of our hearts. Wowzers! It certainly couldn’t be a sweetheart nod to the deluded Conservative base here in Canada, nope nope nope no irrelevant agency adding mindless persiflage to our foreign policy. The ORF will make a difference.
“MacDonald points to Harper’s trip to China next month. While Harper has criticized China’s commitment to human rights in the past, the country remains one of Canada’s largest trading partners, with $13.2 billion in exports and $44.5 billion in imports in 2010.
MacDonald said it is “absolutely inconceivable” that the Tories will speak out against China’s well-documented persecution of Christians and the Falun Gong. In October, Baird voiced support for China’s Christians and Falun Gong, as well as its oppressed Tibetans and Uyghurs”.
Err…
I’m writing this a week ago, but I’ll watch this again today as it is just that interesting.
Yea us!
*sigh*
In its final form, the work has six movements, grouped into two Parts:
- Kräftig. Entschieden (Strong and decisive) [D minor to F major]
- Tempo di Menuetto (In the tempo of a minuet) [A major]
- Comodo (Scherzando) (Comfortably, like a scherzo) [C minor to C major]
- Sehr langsam—Misterioso (Very slowly, mysteriously)
- Lustig im Tempo und keck im Ausdruck (Cheerful in tempo and cheeky in expression) [F major]
- Langsam—Ruhevoll—Empfunden (Slowly, tranquil, deeply felt) [D major]
The first movement alone, with a normal duration of a little more than thirty minutes, sometimes forty, forms Part One of the symphony. Part Two consists of the other five movements and has a duration of about sixty to seventy minutes.
As with each of his first four symphonies, Mahler originally provided a programme of sorts to explain the narrative of the piece. At different times, he shared evolving versions of a program for the third symphony with various friends, including Natalie Bauer-Lechner, a close friend and confidante, Anna von Mildenburg, the dramatic soprano and Mahler’s lover during the summer of 1896 when he was completing the symphony, and Max Marschalk, a music critic. In its simplest form, the program consists of a title for each of the six movements:
- “Pan Awakes, Summer Marches In”
- “What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me”
- “What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me”
- “What Man Tells Me”
- “What the Angels Tell Me”
- “What Love Tells Me”
Mahler, however, elaborated on this basic scheme in various letters. In an 1896 letter to Max Marschalk, he called the whole “A Summer’s Midday Dream,” and within Part One, distinguished two sections, “Introduction: Pan awakes” and “I. Summer marches in (Bacchic procession.”[1] In a June 1896 letter to Anna von Mildenburg, Mahler reaffirmed that he conceived the first movement in two sections: I. What the stony mountains tell me; II. Summer marches in. [2] In another letter to Mildenburg from Summer 1896, he said that “Pan” seemed to him the best overall title (Gesamttitel) for the symphony, emphasizing that he was intrigued by Pan’s two meanings, a Greek god and a Greek word meaning “all.” [3]
All these titles were dropped before publication in 1898.[4]
Mahler originally envisioned a seventh movement, “Heavenly Life” (alternatively, “What the Child Tells Me”), but he eventually dropped this, using it instead as the last movement of the Symphony No. 4.[5]
The symphony, particularly due to the extensive number of movements and their marked differences in character and construction, is a unique work. The opening movement, colossal in its conception (much like the symphony itself), roughly takes the shape of sonata form, insofar as there is an alternating presentation of two theme groups; however, the themes are varied and developed with each presentation, and the typical harmonic logic of the sonata form movement—particularly the tonic statement of second theme group material in the recapitulation—is changed.[clarification needed] The opening gathers itself slowly into a rousing orchestral march. A solo tenor trombone passage states a bold (secondary) melody that is developed and transformed in its recurrences. At the apparent conclusion of the development, several solo snare drums “in a high gallery” play a rhythmic passage lasting about thirty seconds and the opening passage by eight horns is repeated almost exactly.
As described above, Mahler dedicated the second movement to “the flowers on the meadow”. In contrast to the violent forces of the first movement, it starts as a graceful Menuet, but also features stormier episodes.
The third movement, a scherzo, with alternating sections in 2/4 and 6/8 metre, quotes extensively from Mahler’s early song “Ablösung im Sommer” (Relief in Summer). In the trio section, a complete mood changes from playful to contemplative occurs with an off-stage post horn (or flugelhorn) solo. The reprise of the scherzo music is unusual, as it is interrupted several times by the post-horn melody.
At this point, in the sparsely instrumentated fourth movement, we hear an alto solo singing a setting of Friedrich Nietzsche‘s “Midnight Song” from Also sprach Zarathustra (“O Mensch! Gib acht!” (“O man! Take heed!”)), with thematic material from the first movement woven into it.
The cheerful fifth movement, “Es sungen drei Engel”, is one of Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs, (whose text itself is loosely based on a 17th century church hymn, which Paul Hindemith later used in its original form in his Symphony “Mathis der Maler”) about the redemption of sins and comfort in belief. Here, a children’s choir imitating bells and a female chorus join the alto solo.
Of the great finale, Bruno Walter wrote, “In the last movement, words are stilled—for what language can utter heavenly love more powerfully and forcefully than music itself? The Adagio, with its broad, solemn melodic line, is, as a whole—and despite passages of burning pain—eloquent of comfort and grace. It is a single sound of heartfelt and exalted feelings, in which the whole giant structure finds its culmination.”[cite this quote] The movement begins very softly with a broad D-major chorale melody, which slowly builds to a loud and majestic conclusion culminating on repeated D major chords with bold statements on the timpani.
Facts and science be damned! We have Jebus on our side... (and there was rejoicing).
Well, at least the anti-woman crowd still has icky-graphical signs to wave around because they have lost yet another scientific leg to stand on. Thanks to the Guttmacher institute for advancing the rights of women, but also the rigorous application of the scientific method. What follows is the deconstruction of a poorly constructed study, a small win but the flawed studies destructive effects reach far beyond just bad science. Anti-female forces latch onto any study that will help strip women of their basic bodily autonomy and they ran with this one. Mandatory counselling with dubious medical facts is just one of the downsides, as the article mentions, of this poor science.
“A study purporting to show a causal link between abortion and subsequent mental health problems has fundamental analytical errors that render its conclusions invalid, according to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the Guttmacher Institute. This conclusion has been confirmed by the editor of the journal in which the study appeared. Most egregiously, the study, by Priscilla Coleman and colleagues, did not distinguish between mental health outcomes that occurred before abortions and those that occurred afterward, but still claimed to show a causal link between abortion and mental disorders.
The study by Coleman and colleagues was published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research in 2009. A letter to the editor by UCSF’s Julia Steinberg and Guttmacher’s Lawrence Finer in the March 2012 issue of the same journal details the study’s serious methodological errors. Significantly, the journal’s editor and the director of the data set used in the study conclude in an accompanying commentary that “the Steinberg-Finer critique has considerable merit,” that the Coleman paper utilized a “flawed” methodology and that “the Coleman et al. (2009) analysis does not support [the authors’] assertions.”
Steinberg and Finer initially published an analysis in 2010 in the peer-reviewed journal Social Science and Medicine showing that the findings of the 2009 Coleman study were not replicable. The JPR editor’s commentary now supports that conclusion. (The full sequence of events is detailed below.)
“This is not a scholarly difference of opinion; their facts were flatly wrong. This was an abuse of the scientific process to reach conclusions that are not supported by the data,” says Julia Steinberg, an assistant professor in UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry. “The shifting explanations and misleading statements that they offered over the past two years served to mask their serious methodological errors.”
The errors are especially problematic because Coleman later cited her own study in a meta-analysis of studies looking at abortion and mental health. The meta-analysis, which was populated primarily by Coleman’s own work, has been sharply criticized by the scientific community for not evaluating the quality of the included studies and for violating well-established guidelines for conducting such analyses.
“Studies claiming to find a causal association between abortion and subsequent mental health problems often suffer from serious methodological limitations that invalidate their conclusions,” says Lawrence Finer, director of domestic research at the Guttmacher Institute. “In thorough reviews, the highest-quality studies have found no causal link between abortion and subsequent mental health problems.”
Even when identified, spurious research can have far-reaching consequences. Mandatory counseling laws in a number of states require women seeking an abortion to receive information, purportedly medically accurate, that has no basis in fact. Among other things, mandatory counseling can require that a woman be told that having an abortion increases her risk of breast cancer, infertility and mental illness. In reality, none of these claims are medically accurate. These laws not only represent a gross intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship, they serve to propagate misinformation, intentionally misinforming the patient on important medical matters.”
The title of the video is actually called “Thunderf00t Unmasked” as it deals with some of the nasty things zealots have and continue to do. It is a little slice of youtube drama, but at the same time the argument Thunderf00t makes against religion is remarkably cogent and clear and deserves to be amplified :) Thus it ends up here…
I enjoy breaking my computer on a fairly regular basis. I install something, or upgrade or some variation of the two and then the stuff hits the fan. No biggie, backtrack mess with things and everything is good once again. Printing documents though is different. Printing is High Stakes, High Risk, No Safety rope material. When I see a print error I cringe, all the hope drains from my world. No amount of cancelling a document or deleting it will fix things. With zombie like tenacity the borked print job just petulantly stares back at me. I’ve considered what is going on, but now its confirmed:
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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