Archive for July, 2006
Had a fun day driving around looking at properties for sale in Victoria today. We concentrated on Rock Heights and View Royal. I really like the Gorge waterfront. Can’t afford any of them, but it was fun, and Verity took over the driving for a while…
I would like to draw everyone’s attention to a wonderful music festival being organised by a friend of mine, Christopher Donison. It is call Music by the Sea, and it takes place at Bamfield, BC.
Bamfield is a beautiful little community on the west coast of Vancouver Island. You can get there by water taxi, float plane and logging road. There are several transportation packages available.
If you are looking for something that will change your life, a music festival on the west coast of Vancouver Island is a good start.
Read this if you are able. This blog will now fall silent for a while…
At nearly 2 pm, we received some terrible news. We lost a good friend in the killings. T. was a 26-year-old civil engineer who worked with a group of friends in a consultancy bureau in Jadriya. The last time I saw him was a week ago. He had stopped by the house to tell us his sister was engaged and he’d brought along with him pictures of latest project he was working on- a half-collapsed school building outside of Baghdad.
He usually left the house at 7 am to avoid the morning traffic jams and the heat. Yesterday, he decided to stay at home because he’d promised his mother he would bring Abu Kamal by the house to fix the generator which had suddenly died on them the night before. His parents say that T. was making his way out of the area on foot when the attack occurred and he got two bullets to the head. His brother could only identify him by the blood-stained t-shirt he was wearing.
Here’s two new trax and a remix of the Clinton piece. I changed it from a wierd electronica bit to a monster eurodance brainbuster. Bill is very insistent. Laugh is just to cheer you up. Light and Shadow is one I’m a little proud of. It builds slowly, but stick with it. I think you might like it. I hope to add a vocal track to the first three or four minutes.
I’m very impressed with this apologia by conservative American commentator Doug McIntyre, not because it agrees with my positions in general, but because it is an admission of fact by a Republican. He’s not going Democrat, but he’s no longer a Bush supporter either. It is a simple acknowledgement of reality. A reality that republicans and Democrats can agree on as foundation for political dialogue in the US.
I believe that George W. Bush has taken us down a terrible road. I don’t believe the Democrats are offering an alternative. That means we’re on our own to save this magnificent country. The United States of America is a gift to the world, but it has been badly abused and it’s rightful owners, We the People, had better step up to the plate and reclaim it before the damage becomes irreparable.
So, accept my apology for allowing partisanship to blind me to an obvious truth; our President is incapable of the tasks he is charged with. I almost feel sorry for him. He is clearly in over his head. Yet, he doesn’t generate the sympathy Warren Harding earned. Harding, a spectacular mediocrity, had the self-knowledge to tell any and all he shouldn’t be President. George W. Bush continues to act the part, but at this point whose buying the act?
The Republican movement has for too long now been on that “faith-based” train out of Washington, where the brute details of the outcomes of Bush policy are ignored in favor of the promise of a deferred but rapturous end-game. Yes, those words are carefully chosen. The fundamentalist Christian undercurrents in Republican policy are as frightening to me as any Islamofascism. Remember: there are people in the US who believe Jesus is returning, and that Armageddon will happen in our lifetimes, and they are just one layer of power away from an arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons. Bush has privately acknowledged that to say he has “accepted Jesus Christ as his saviour” is to speak in code. Who among us can tell what level of belief and literalism those around him have?
So cheers to McIntyre for putting his feet back on the ground of the real world. Conservatives in the US do the same, perhaps there can once again be a dialogue that helps America figure out its new role in the world.
