Please Support the New Taxes in Toronto

The city hall is going to decide about adding a very little extra to home and car buying taxes and already the huge and powerful capitalist coalition and lobby is raising rabble about it. Please write letters and emails to your councillor supporting the new taxes. These taxes will save the city from bankruptcy when the federal and provincial governments have downloaded all the expenses to the city. You can find your city councillor's email address here:

http://app.toronto.ca/im/council/councillors.jsp

New Pearl of Wisdom by great philosopher Jin Tao

This one was discovered recently:

If these men of cloth, these great clergy, really believe in god and life after death, then why do they do their best to prolong their life and delay death. From Pope to Khomeini, they cling to their dear lives up to the last day. They don't show any willingness to rush to meet their god. They use the latest medical techniques and inventions and drugs to live one day more. Khomeini loved life after death so much that he had made a rather large hospital in his residence. The sole purpose of that hospital was to take care of his ailing body and prolong his life. The hospital was so advanced and large that after his death it was turned into a general hospital for the public. The former pope also the same, despite all his ailments, he was not willing to leave this world of sin and squalor and join his god in the heavens.

These men, just by their acts, prove that we human beings know instinctively in our bones that there is no life after death. Despite all the teachings, and in their case despite a lifetime of teaching, still they know deep down that it is all a child's story and death if final and full and complete destruction of life.

Break Dance in Harborfront

Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibtion and Women Artists

My friend was visiting the marvellous Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition this weekend. Visiting all those stalls with some very good art work, he noticed one thing: Most women artists were more beautiful than their art work. It was more pleasing watching them than their work, although some of the works were amazingly good.

Is it true what he noticed there? Women artists are more beautiful than the average woman?

This is just a thought that occurred to him. Take it just as a light hearted musing if you want.

َA Warning to Al Gore

Al Gore is veering too much to the left especially with his latest book. He knows it and the corporations know it and the whole American capitalist system knows it. He has turned so much to the left that now his election might be a danger for the inherent capitalist interests in US. On the other hand the pressure is mounting heavily on Gore to be a candidate in the elections.

His son's arrest is the first warning to him, beware, don't even think of standing as a candidate for the 2008 presidential elections. We have much more for you where the arrest came from.

The message sent to him by that arrest is simple and easy: "DON'T FORGET BOB KENNEDY AND MARTIN LUTHER KING."

And he knows it. I am sure he knows it. That is the reason he has steadfastly denied any and all demands for his candidacy. He knows that American capitalism is a no holds barred system. They kill if it is necessary to protect their billions.

Public Accpetance of Evolution in Different Countries

Source: Scince Magazine and the New Scientist. Read the article HERE

Look at the position of US at the bottom of the chart. It is shocking, isn't it? I am often stunned by the public ignorance in the US.

Taxes are necessary for living in a civilized society- Toronto and Torontonias

I am appalled by the indifference of our citizens to tax debates. Anytime there is a tax debate in the city hall, it is taken over by the right wing organizations that send their cronies and supporters en masse to the meeting. There are no supporters of tax for the benefit of public in these meetings. What you hear is moaning by a bunch of millionaires and their supporters that there are already too much taxes and it should be cut especially for high earners(How about a flat rate tax? They love it, don’t they?). But come to think of it, you can’t blame them, after all they are defending their millions and billions. But… where…. Oh where are the average middle and lower class citizens to bring their point of view to the meeting?

Bush, Stem Cells and Iraq

Bush did it again. He vetoed the stem cell research bill for the second time. He is a really great man. He is so much worried for the life of cells, single cells. Who cares if millions and billions of people are going to benefit hugely from this research that needs these cells. Who cares if this research is going to save people from miseries and pains of cancer, Alzheimers and many other diseases.

On the other hand, why on earth should he worry about the death and destruction in Iraq??? The life of a single cell is much more important than the life of millions of Iraqis. On one hand he is protecting these cells, and on the other hand he does not give a damn about more than 100 people being killed each day in Iraq.

That is what I call a consistent humanitarian conscientious policy.

Luminato gala opening in Toronto June 2007

Click on this link to see a clip of the ball runners in the gala opening of the Luminato

What has happened to the modern art and culture

I am reading a book called "OUR CULTURE, WHAT'S LEFT OF IT" by Theodore Dalrymple. I don't agree with all his opinions. Some of them are shot from the right wing of the British classes, but I can't agree more with some of his opinions. I loved the article " A Lost Art" and advise everybody to read it and write their opinion here. In it he writes about the demise of modern art.

Personally I think he is right here. Art is art as long as the artists create it for the people not for each other. When it is created just to impress your peer and the media, and to sell, unfortunately it is distanced from the really great art. It becomes ugly. It becomes "SHOCKING" instead of beautiful. We have forgotten that there is a difference between Shocking and beautiful.

And it seems that the aim of many a modern artist is to be more "SHOCKING" than his fellow artists. If you are not shocking you can't be recognized and known, and you can't sell. And the race continues. So each new artist should be more shocking than the previous one. And then we reach the point when you cut a cow in half and put it in Tate Modern as art, because it is shocking, and the critics praise it because it is shocking, and the public pretend they like it because they don't dare to say what they really feel, which is, "Oh my god, how ugly it is". You create ugly music that is a torture to listen to, but the overly refined art connoisseurs sit through it because the critics have praised it and it is fashion and you have to pretend you like it. You create ugly sculptures. you put a likeness of a guy shitting while stooping with his turd 4 meters long in the middle of the Museum of Modern Arts in New York and everybody gathers around and praises it as art. You put up a completely bland canvass on the wall as painting and critics dare to praise it. Art turns into words. Critics words. Without the words written to give it meaning, it is meaningless because it is ugly in itself. It is not like works of Bach or Michael Angelo that talk for themselves and don't need a word on paper to praise them for people to understand them.

I am an architect and see it quite clearly among architects. Architecture nowadays have turned into a race among architects to impress each other, not the public. They don't design for the public any more, but for each other. So each work should be more shocking than the previous one, otherwise you risk being forgotten and never mentioned in the architectural journals and that means death to an architect. As an architect, I find some of these works impressive(I don't use the word beautiful here), but then I ask common people what they think of it, and I don't get positive remarks. I go inside these buildings and again I am "impressed" but when I think of the poor “end user” who has to live and work in this building, I pity them because I know very well that "function" has been sacrificed for the sake of the "SHOCK" effect. The building shocks, the critics write rave reviews, the architect becomes famous and sells, but nobody thinks twice about getting back to the building one year after it is finished and ask the occupants how they feel about the building.

I believe you should cut the name of the artists from the art piece and then look at it and see if you like it or not, trust your feelings, not what critics tell you. Whenever I go to a museum or gallery, I try to avoid looking at the name of the creator, I just trust my senses, what do they tell me. I don't trust words by others to tell me what is good and what is bad. It reminds me of an experiment done sometime ago by a reality show. They put some paintings by 5 year olds in a big famous museum. The works were signed as Picasso and other famous painter's works. Not even one person there dared to say they are childish. The interviewer was asking the viewers and all of them were praising the works. He even asked a few critics and they were praising the works and then when he revealed that these were done by 5 year olds, many people would not believe it. The funniest part was that even one of the critics was insisting that these are the works by Picasso and other famous painters after he was told about the ploy.

What has happened to art that childish paintings by 5 year olds can’t be recognized as what it is and differentiated with great art? Something has gone horribly wrong in 20th century.

Hillary won't win

It is just a gut feeling, but why do I feel that Hillary won't win the elections in the US? I just write it down here for the posterity and will check it after the 2008 elections.

A City Without the Ads, It can be Done

Sao Paolo Brazil has passed a law to clean up the city from any and all ads anywhere. On the buses, billboards, benches, etc.

Others dare to do this, and do it, why can't we in Toronto be like them? Look at Dundas Square in the heart of Toronto, supposedly the heart of Toronto. Nothing is more garrish and ugly than this square with huge ads and billboards all around it.


READ THE ARTICLE HERE

As I had Expected- Hamas and Fatah

As I had expected Hamas easily won the battle in Gaza. Hamas was elected by the people of Palestine in a free and fare elections that has the approval stamp of all the organizations that observed it. The corrupt Fatah did not like the defeat and unfortunately the dumb US policy supported Fatah. If Americans had not supported Fatah, had not stopped the international aid and tried to get rid of a legal government by all illegal means, Palestine would not have been in this mess now. But, the US government is doing the same dumb thing it always does. Supporting an unpopular group who now has seized power in a coup with total disregard for the people’s aspirations and decision. What will be the result? A long protracted civil war until the group favoured by people seizes power.

And shame on Canada, today they announced they support the coup government. I just don't understand these supposedly western democracies. They say they respect the will of people and rule of law and the election results. But when people vote for groups that these western powers dislike, then they become the sore losers and whine and complain and don't accept the result of the free elections they themselves were insisting on. Then... What do they expect? To be treated respectfully by those people? To be trusted?

They did the same thing with Algeria and condemned it to years of brutal bloody civil war. They support unpopular and corrupt dictatorships in Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia. And yet, they dare to lecture the world about democracy????

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This is from a post by a Palestinian from the occupied Jerusalem. It proves very well what the ordinary man in the street in Palestine thinks about the Fatah government now:

The Palestinian masses know very well what the US symbolize for them, their children and their enduring cause. It symbolizes oppression in its ugliest forms. It symbolizes mass murder, land theft, dispossession, deprivation and ultimate mendacity and hypocrisy. America is the enabler, sustainer and justifier of 40 years of Israeli Nazism whose ultimate goal is the obliteration of Palestinians as a nation, by arrogating their homeland for them and making their future as precarious as possible.

In short, America to the Palestinians is very much like what Nazi Germany was to the Jews. Hence, any government agreeing to throw itself into the American lap will lose its legitimacy if not its very existence. This is probably the reason why Palestinians in the Gaza Strip didn't fight for Muhammed Dahlan and his men.

Hamas and Fatah

Fatah and hamas are fighting it out for the control of Gaza strip. Years ago, when Hamas was just a very small and marginal group, Israel helped it to grow in the vain hope that it will destroy Fatah. Now it is happening. Apparently the Israelis brought a dragon into the wolf’s den(wolf from their viewpoint, not mine) to get rid of it, without thinking twice what will they do when the dragon has won and killed the wolf.

Now what they wished for is happening. But will it help the Israeli occupation? I doubt it. This dragon is 10 times more dangerous than the wolf it has replaced. Living side by side with a dragon is ten times more difficult than living near a wolf’s den. Hamas will win this battle if Fatah is not helped out by the reactionary Arab governments and the Saudi money. Americans and Israelis for the time being will watch the battle from the sides, not taking part, hoping on hope that both organizations will demise. It is a vain hope. Hamas will most probably win in the long term, and that will bring Palestinians one more step closer to freedom from the yoke of the Israeli oppression.

We Are All Parasites, But Wonderful Parasites

Apart from Plants, all other animals on this planet are just parasites; parasites on the body of plants. Plants are the only living things that produce their food directly from inanimate chemical ingredients. All the other animals depend on plants to survive and live. But what wonderful parasites are we! We are much more advanced and complex than the living things we rely upon to survive. Nearly most animals are so much more complex than plants. It seems that because plants, early on on the life of this planet, found out how to turn the sun's energy into food, just were satisfied and happy with this process and did not have the urge to evolve much. But look at any animal, the eyes, the ears, the muscles, the nerves, the brain, how complex did we become, just to survive among other parasites and beat them on our main pursuit, which is to compete to have food from the plants.

Wolves, prey and the human society

I was watching a beautiful National Geographic documentary about wolves. While watching how the wolves hunt their prey, it passed my mind how similar are we, the human society, to a pack of wolves and also their prey. All through the human history, a small pack of cruel Alpha males in the form of armed groups have done unimaginable cruelties to the huge masses of the people, and yet, like the prey, the masses never react. They just escape, are happy to be let to graze in peace from time to time, and when one of them is hunted down, they just watch from distance, breathing a sigh of relief that it was not them and promise themselves to be more submissive to escape the pack. While when you look at the herd, you see and know that this huge herd can easily get rid of the wolves if they unite and fight back instead of running away each for itself. But the sad fact is, the herd always escape instead of fighting back and getting rid of the wolves. Only in rare moments in history, during revolutions and mass uprisings, do the herd fight back, and each time, when they unite and fight, they win. It is just impossible not to win as long as you are united, as the herd is much larger and more powerful united than a small pack of "wolves".

Click Here to see the New ROM's Crystal's photos

ROM's Crystal opened on Sunday 3rd of June. It was open just for one day from 1am Sunday until 6pm. I was among the lucky few who managed to visit this gem of architecture and took photos of inside without the permanent exhibitions. The photos show the raw Crystal, only the spaces inside. It is amazing, I really loved the building. Minus some central spaces which seemed to be wasted, like corridors that end up right into the walls. To see the photos click on the title. Enjoy!

See how Heather Reisman the owner of Chapters/Indigo escapes the meeting with Nader

Parenting needs licensing

Parenting needs training, education and licensing, like anything else in our society, like driving, etc: Even the simplest most basic jobs in our society nowadays needs a license and at least months of coaching and training. Even to drive a car you need a license. And yet, the most difficult, the most delicate of jobs, which is educating and bringing up the young is totally neglected in this respect.

Any addicted alcoholic person with a penis or womb is allowed to have children and bring them up without any knowledge about education. We let millions of children to grow up in households that don't know a word about how to teach and train a young human brain. What a waste! There must be license for parenting, and frequent check-ups. The same way we don't let a drunk or addict to drive in our roads because he will اhurt himself and others, the same way we should not let him/her to upbring a child because it will damage the fabric of our society.

This grey matter inside our skulls is the main capital of any society. If it is wasted, the society will be doomed. And yet, we let anybody, without any training, to bring up the children. Especially the first six years of life, where the whole personality of a human being is formed for the rest of their lives, should not be left in the hands of everybody just because they are the "genetic" parents of the child.

Toronto Star Article about the necessity of Early Years Education

Is domestic capitalist ownership better?

What is the difference between foreign ownership of means of production or domestic ownership. We hear from time to time moans and groans about how the whole Canadian ownership of corporations is being disappeared. Most of the large Canadian companies have already been gobbled up by foreign owned companies from American to even Chinese. But I don’t see why the hype. Capitalists are capitalists. They are there to make as much profit as possible and to exploit the wage earners. Why should we think that a domestic exploiter is better than a foreign one and will exploit us less? They are all alike. The problem is not in who owns our corporations, but the whole system of capitalism.

CAPITALISM

Nothing is changed much since they made this poster early 20th century. Except that now instead of the mostly manual labourers you have to put white collar wage earners and service sector employees at the bottom of the food chain.

The main goal of education in any society

What is more important in education, teaching history and math, or teaching how to be a good citizen, respect other people’s rights, avoid crime and etc? Our educational system sacrifices the main aim of education which is the rearing of a good and responsible citizen for the goal of teaching mainly useless stuff which will never be used in later stages in life.

Shouldn't we worship the human brain instead of god??

My cell phone rings. I answer the call, it is from Iran. I start talking and we talk for a long time. It never stops to amaze me. I am sitting here, half a globe away and I can talk to my mother in Iran as if she is in the same room, or sitting next to me in the bus.

What is a miracle? The story of Lazarous in the bible, or this amazing gadget in my hand? This small miracle of human ingenuity that lets me talk to somebody at the other side of the globe with the click of a button?

If there is a god, it is our brain. Our magnificent and unbelievably complex brain that has made cell phones and cars out of the rocks and oil of the ground. As if with a magic wand, we have turned simple rocks in the ground into these objects. Aren't we, human beings, the real god? Why do we tend to worship other imaginary and childish objects. If it was for me, I would put an effigy of a human brain on a pedestal in any temple and tell people," if you want to pray and worship a god, at least worship the real god", yourselves.

200 killed and scores injured in Baghdad today, the surge is really working

Thanks to Mr. Bush's surge policy, just today 190 people got killed in Baghdad in separate incidents. When is the time to say enough is enough? Who can tell this knucklehead that he is defeated in Iraq. Please, somebody save us from him. UN people, can't you take over and run Iraq for the sake of sanity and its poor people?

Virginia Tech and Americans

NRA will definitely start with: " if all students had each one gun with themselves, the guy could not kill anybody, they would have killed him first" ! Oh, yeah, sweet wild west movie. I am stunned that these people are even allowed to pretend to be reasonable human beings with such crooked reasoning. Constitution giving us the right to carry guns? The fathers of the nation could never imagine a crazy guy in VT in their wildest dreams. Or guys buying automatic guns from every corner store. If they were living now, they would definitely have the guts to cross this items out of the constitution, not like current spineless politicians. These guys, just to keep the campaign donations flowing, don't dare to ban the guns, something that every sane American expects them to do. The gun lobby is much too powerful.

And the people are completely and scientifically brainwashed to the point that they can't see the harm of this policy. The same way they have been brainwashed for a long time to loath the government and the taxes. And, it works unfortunately. Capitalism is strong.

If this guy had just a knife, what could he have done? At most stab one or two and then stopped by the same people that he managed to kill by his "guns". When a crazy guy went into a school in England several years ago and killed innocent children with a handgun the government introduced very strict gun control laws instantly. Why can't American government do the same, after all these tragedies? What is wrong with American democracy? Why is it so paralysed? Why can't it even change their measurement units into metrics, something all the world except US is now abiding by. US is the only country in the world still measuring things by feet and yards and gallons and pounds and miles. Why are politicians in the US so afraid of introducing big radical changes when it is necessary?

But one has to admit there is also something wrong with the culture, with the whole social structure of this society. Even in societies that people carry guns freely, like Somalia, Afghanistan, etc, this sort of killings never happens. This never happenes in Europe, or China, or India, or Japan. What is wrong with American culture?? Why people kill so easily there when they go stark mad, and not in other societies? Americans need to sit down and think about it long and hard.

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This can't happen in this world, but the power of money and greed in US let people act and talk like this, read on:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1611939,00.html

Toronto Star article about gun availability in the US

http://www.thestar.com/article/205619

Why Invade Iraq?

As one wise old man said, the invasion of Iraq is just for these three reasons:

OIL

O: stands for oil. US needs the middle east oil and Iraq has the second largest oil resources in the world



I : stands for Israel. The very powerful Israeli lobby used the American military to get rid of one of its staunchest enemies in the region.



L : US needs "land bases" in the middle east to guard the flow of oil and it will now have it in Iraq.



But the real victor in all this tragedy has been Israel. The long term goal of the Israeli government is to split up the large countries in the middle east into small feuding states. It is better to have three small weak feuding Kurd, Shiite and Sunni state in Iraq instead of one powerful central government that can be a force against Israel.

Israel has the same plan for Iran, and the other larger states in the middle east. Let us hope it can't be as successful in carrying out the plan as it was in case of Iraq.

Innocent Palestinian civilians used as human shields by the fascist Israeli army

I don't know if we can call this army by any other name. Nazi forces used these tactics and now we have Israeli army doing the same:

Boy used as human shield by Israeli Army

Meaning of life

We are born into this world without any purpose, it has just been a roll of dice for us, no goal, no aim, just being born, like any other chemical event, like a fly or dinosaur or bacteria or virus, or any other animal. We try hard to understand the meaning of life, but if we are honest, we have to admit that there has been no aim or higher goal in our birth or existence. But we can give meaning to this meaningless existence by our actions and thoughts. And then after death, nothing remains, exactly like other animals, or bacteria, or viruses. we are just a moment between two eternal darknesses. This is bleak, but this is the reality of our existence in this world.

Atomic Bomb, Islamic Republic? not in your life!

The media were at it again today. Ahmadinejhad has announced today that Iran is beginning to produce enriched uranium, and as if waiting for a signal, the whole western media started the raucous about the Iranian atomic bomb. But Iranians themselves know better. First, we know that the government in Iran is inherently a lier. Because there is no democracy, it is easy for them to lie, and if they can lie, they never tell the truth. That is just the nature of this government, and the social class it is coming from. And second, we know how inefficient this government is. We see it in everyday life, in every aspect of People's lives. So how could they be any different when it comes to enriched uranium? We saw how they botched the war. A country with 60 million population, huge resources, the largest army in the middle east with the most advanced weapons at the beginning of the revolution could not beat a much smaller primitive country after 8 years of war. All because of the enormous inefficiency of the Islamic Republic. With the huge brain drain that is continuing to this day, it is just impossible for this government to have enough brain power to pull it through. Even if they had all the brain power in the world, still they could not do it because of the abhorring management style.

So inside Iran people know that it is just a show put on for the foreign press, but outside Iran, it is taken seriously.

Israel, democracy, Palestinians

1. How could a country call itself democratic when it oppresses millions of people inside its borders. Was South Africa a democracy during the Apartheid era? Was American south a true deomcracy before the civil war and during the slavery period? I don’t think anybody would dare call any of those systems a democracy. I am struck each time I hear Israel being called a beacon of democracy in the middle east. Until such time that Israel leaves the occupied territories according to the UN conventions, and stops building apartheid-style 7 meter tall Berlin Walls complete with checkpoints it can’t be considered a true democracy. No country can be a democracy while oppressing another nation residing in the lands it has occupied by force. A system where only a percentage of the population are entitled to democracy and another group has to live in walled “Bantustan” style communities in abject poverty and are considered less than human and have no civil and human rights can’t be considered a democracy by any measures.

When you drive a cat with its back to the wall, it will attack you with all its force if it thinks you really want to harm it. For him it is a struggle of life or death, it will try to defend its life by all means although it knows it is much weaker than you. You can't blame the cat in such a situation, you have to blame yourself by causing the circumstances that made it so ferocious. You have not left any other option for it. Israel can't blame the Palestinians for what is going on the occupied lands, it has to analyse what it has done wrong to Palestinians to bring them to acts of desperate terror. These Palestinians are not their fathers and grand-fathers, who were illiterate and submissive and could not stand up to a bunch of European and American colonialists invading their lands. They are now educated and can't be subdued like their forefathers. Israel has not yet grasped the immensity of this landslide change in a new Palestinian generation. The mentality of the Israeli rulers is still one of the European colonialists of half a centry ago, they have not accepted the sea change in Palestine population.

2. Jewish people used to be one of the most radical and mostly left-wing groups in western countries during 19th and early 20th century. Because they were oppressed they used to be open and accepting to radical left political ideas and at the vanguard of most revolutionary movements. A rather unproportional number of members of socialist and communist parties in the west always belonged to Jews. Just check the leaders of the German socialism or Russian socialist movement, or any left and unionist movement in North America. Israel brought an end to this proud heritage. Suddenly most jewish people anywhere turned into the most right wing and reactionary groups in their societies. It is sad to see these proud people supporting extra right groups like George Bush in US or Harper in Canada, just because they think it is their duty to support Israel. I ask why? Why you should sacrifice your idealistic and progressive opinions just because you feel obliged to support a government? Just because Israel is a government of the Jews does not oblige you to close your eyes to the tyranny going on there. Following that line of reason any citizen of any democracy should shut up and not utter a word against their own government because it is their national government?

3. Do Bahais demand a country because they are a distinct religion? Do Mormons demand a country of their own? Or Isamilis? Or Buddhists? What is the difference between those religions, or any other religion for that matter, and Judaism which entitles the Jews to claim a country of their own? And can a country established and based on one religion only be democratic at all? There will always be fundamental contradictions and discrepancies between adhering to the tenets of one religion and letting all different opinions and religions have their free say in such a system.