Blue Covenant

Maude Barlow, interviewed at The Tyee by Rob Annandale:

If you are ever going to share water from a water-wealthy area of one part of the world to another or even within an area — and you might find one day that Alberta’s going to need help, for instance — it has to be done by the people deciding through their government on a not-for-profit basis. So it’s a really important argument for public control of water, this notion of “should you share from place to place.” Because if it were allowed to be corporately controlled the way energy is controlled, water from Canada would go to Las Vegas. It would go to the golf courses and the automobile and computer industries in the U.S. It would not go to the kids in Latin America and Africa who are dying right now from lack of water. So it would have to be decided on a humanitarian basis and it would have to be decided on a not-for-profit basis.

That’s number one. Number two, we all collectively have to be sure that we can ecologically afford to move massive amounts of water. I believe that mostly, nature put water where it belongs and when we start to play around with this, we are playing God to some very serious extent.   [more]

Barlow’s latest book is Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Global Battle for the Right to Water

Joni

Blue

Joni Mitchell

Blue Met

From the festival website:

Blue Met?
The world’s first multilingual literary festival – and the best five-day literary party there is. In 2008, Blue Met gathered about 350 writers, literary translators, musicians, actors, journalists and publishers from Quebec and from all around the world for five days of literary events in English, French, Spanish and other languages.

Theme 2009: Words that Matter

Words do matter, today more than ever. Times of turmoil are times of danger, as we lose much of what we have valued. These are times of opportunity as well, as we rethink what we have taken for granted, discriminate between what matters more and what matters less, and create anew. The 11th Blue Met brings you words worth writing, works worth reading, writers worth quoting, texts worth teaching – all kinds of words that can make the world a better place. And what are those words? Inclusion and diversity, for a start. Fighting words. Respect, commitment, quality, innovation. And fun! 

The Incomparable

Blue Moon

Billie Holiday

Geigel Book

Book Cover Design by Wilfredo Geigel

A full leather binding in blue Harmatan leather. The cover decoration consists of a blind tooled silhouette of a female figure representing Salammbo covered with a shawl that stretches across the front and back covers and is studded with gilded stars throughout. The inside of the covers are dressed with sunken doublures of deep blue Japanese paper. The end bands are sewn with three silk threads and the top edge is painted with blue water color paint. 8 X 6 inches.

From

Chantal

Blue

Chantal Kreviazuk

My Favourite Cat

Cheshire

John Tenniel

Blind Photography

From a book review by Andy Ilachinsky at Tao of Photography:

Anybody with a decent camera can take a picture of a crack in the sidewalk – and have the image met with blank stares and mutterings of “Yeah, it’s a crack in the sidewalk., so what?” It takes a blind photographer to so effortlessly use a physical symbol – i.e., a photograph of some “thing” – to represent the deeper, inner experience of how “difficult it is to walk to class” on a campus built by people who can see. By not being able to see things, the blind photographer naturally focuses on using the things that the camera is able to capture to show what else things are. And that is what the very best photography has always been about.

[...]

The blind obviously have much to teach us sighted photographers how to really see. They teach us to pay attention to all of the little “invisible cracks” in the world, and to not rely exclusively on our eyes in doing so. There is no better place to begin the first lesson on this journey of illumination – which takes the form of a gentle admonition to just “close your eyes” – than to savor the examples in this magnificent book, Seeing Beyond Sight. Highly recommended.

If the book is as good as the post, it’s really something.  Read the whole thing here

Here’s Seeing Beyond Sight at amazon.ca

Canada in Afghanistan

From Graeme Wood at The National:

Over the last three years, the Canadian military and Afghan security forces have fought the Taliban to a bloody stalemate. The Afghan police and army routinely drive over roadside bombs on Highway One, Zhari’s main road, which is bumpy with filled-in craters. In Zhari’s villages (there is no settlement larger than a cluster of a few war-demolished mud buildings), insurgents mount ambushes nearly every day. The Canadians, for their part, have tried to fight the war cleanly, with at times absurd levels of attention to law and rules of engagement. And despite being a modern and impressive fighting force, with armoured vehicles and innovative counterinsurgency tactics, they have died at a rate alarming even for a war zone – over 100 since 2001, in a force of only 2,500 (many of whom are not in combat roles). That death rate exceeds not only the US death rate in Afghanistan, but also the US death rate in Iraq.   [more]

To say that it is far from clear either what Canadian troops are doing in Afghanistan or whether they are even approaching meeting their goals is obvious.  I’m outraged that Canadians are dying at a greater rate than Americans in Iraq though.  Whose war is this?

Read this whole article – it’s clear that the writer thinks that Canadian troops follow the law in a way that’s not for their own good.  I, for one, am glad that is the perception.  Surely it’s the very least we can do?

But why are Canadian and Afghan soldiers and civilians dying?  Why do we have to wait till 2011 to get out.  Who knows what harm Obama can cause between now and then by revving up the war with fresh American troops, as he seems intent on doing.

via 3 quarks daily

Israel & Self-Righteousness

Tom Segev, quoted at The Magnes Zionist:

The history of Israeli self-righteousness is rich with condemnations and expressions of regret over injuring civilians. Israel’s self-image is based on the assumption that the IDF is better than other armies. “We at least try not to injure civilians.” That wasn’t true even before the destruction and the death that the IDF sowed in Gaza in recent weeks. But this time it seems that many fewer Israelis than in the past feel that what happened there – should not have happened.

This operation stands out not only in its cruelty, but mainly because it did not succeed in drawing Israelis out of their apathy. This apathy is chiling [sic]and is no less shameful than the actions themselves.