These two stories from the Globe and Mail, the first reporting on the response to the Prime Minister’s “musings” on the death penalty, the other reporting a man who has been acquitted of the murder of his child 19 years ago, a death for which he was convicted, went to prison, having been bullied into a confession, and suffered social disgrace for all that long time, demonstrate the constant battle that must be fought against those who would return us to primitive practices. There are only a few countries in the world who actually have the death penalty, China, Saudi Arabia and the USA among them, even in the latter state after state is repealing it.
In this country we have seen over and over again the demonstration of innocence of the wrongfully accused, who would have been killed by the state had we retained the death penalty. The death penalty does not act as a deterrent; it does not decrease the rate of other violent crime. It serves no purpose but revenge.
When I think about the death penalty, I remember that this act of killing would be done in my name, that I would bear responsibility as a citizen for taking the life, that it was my hand on the trigger or plunger or pulling the switch. I won’t be a party to it, and neither will the Supreme Court, which has ruled against it.
I don’t think we should give Harper and the Conservatives a majority. I think they are constrained from carrying our their deeply fundamentalist agenda only by their minority position.

Prisons

January 16, 2011January 17, 2011 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/article/922295–expanding-prisons-getting-it-right-on-crime

The web address of this editorial in the the Toronto Star this morning is a little misleading. I was as astounded as the editorialist to read of the conversion of Newt Gingrich to the side of those of us who are against the expansion of prisons. It would seem that the Harperites are operating about ten years behind American conservatives. The prisons are full of petty thieves and the drug addicted(many of whom are the same people) and serve as finishing schools for criminals. Amongst the things they do not do are: halt recidivism, especially with dollars going to buildings, not programs; address a soaring crime rate–the evening news notwithstanding, it is lower–; treat the mentally ill within the walls; or decrease the use of illegal drugs. As far as I understand it, the prisons are incapable of keeping drugs out of the buildings themselves.
The amount of money spent is staggering. According to the Star editorial, 68 billion dollars/year in the USA. 68 billion! A fraction of that amount would go a long way towards mental health programs, literacy programs, drug rehabilitation, housing the homeless. According to the Star, the amount of new money here over 5 years will be 5 billion. That’s new money, for new beds, not for refurbishing the old prisons that are a crumbling disgrace.

The list of the root causes of crime goes on and on, but tossing people into a revolving door system that turns out ever more hardened criminals is not, to my mind, the answer. I think that Corrections(and isn’t that a misnomer) needs to look at the hospital system, which has turned from a totally inpatient to a largely outpatient system, trying to care for people in their homes, as opposed to beds in an institution as it was when I started(40 years ago). They could begin by eliminating prison time for petty crime and soft drug offenses, turning to community-based initiatives, saving prison for those so dangerous that there is nothing to do except lock them up.

Freedom of Information

January 9, 2011January 16, 2011 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

Canada ranks last in freedom of information: study – The Globe and Mail.

You knew this, didn’t you? Harper had a lot to say about freedom of information before he was elected. Now that’s it his government’s information, suddenly we have no access compared to other democracies, and we’re the go-to guys on how not to implement freedom of information acts.

It’s embarrassing, that’s what it is. And a little frightening. What is it they don’t want us to know?

Sakineh

January 6, 2011 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani may not face death by stoning, says prosecutor | World news | The Guardian.

The attempts by the Iranian government to “spin” this story become ever more convoluted. This piece in the Guardian brings the news up do date. First of course, she has not been executed, and the prosecutor of her home province has recently suggested that the original sentence of death by stoning may be changed. Change to what, he didn’t say. In recent weeks, she has been taken out of prison, to her home, in order to”confess” on television. The government has arrested two German reporters for trying to interview her son. Now she is said to be suing these two men, a suit that wouldn’t likely be settled until after her execution.

I don’t know if the people of Iran believe these outrageous statements and postures. Certainly I see no reason to believe that anything that is officially allowed is likely to be the truth. The Iranian people have had their revolution subverted, their rights subtracted, and now live in a land of subterfuge. I hope one day they can reclaim their rightful place as heirs to a glorious civilization.

Julian Assange-Author?

January 4, 2011 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

Julian Assange proves some information is still worth paying for – The Globe and Mail.

The Globe and Mail’s editor sees this book deal of Julian Assange as evidence that books still matter, and that people will still pay money for them. It seems to me that this is evidence that notoriety matters, and people are paying for the glimpse into a celebrity’s life, not for the writing.

I write fiction, the daunting task of facing the blank page, whether it’s on the computer or waiting on a desk with accompanying pencil(and eraser), dredging up images and characters from fragments in the brain. Writing non-fiction, or as this book will be, a memoir, requires a different set of skills, but skill it needs, and time, and research, if the facts are to be presented.

Mr. Assange never finished university, studying maths and physics while he was there. I couldn’t find any reference to written work, either fiction or non-fiction although he is called a journalist on Wikipedia.

A 1.7 million book deal for a guy whose claim to fame is cracking computers and releasing information in a lump. The book is supposed to be an autobiography, but perhaps they’re providing him with a ghost-writer. I wonder if the ghost writer’s name will be on the cover, in the spirit of reveal all.

Photographic Gem

December 30, 2010 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

21 Settings, Techniques and Rules All New Camera Owners Should Know.

The Digital Photography School is a terrific resource for photographers, especially those like me who are making the switch from SLR to DSLR. The link above will take you to answers to the many questions I had, everything from white balance to cleaning.

Thanks to Darren Rouse for all the tips and article and links.

It’s been a hectic month with visitors from Florida to Paris to Elora in Ontario. The new year promises to be quieter, except for a visit to the surgeon for a colonoscopy(preventative maintenance).

I have 20,000 words of the new book and hope to finish by Easter.

Happy New Year and best wishes for health and well-being in 2011.

Assange- Hero or Criminal?

December 12, 2010 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

The report today is that Assange, who is fighting extradition and is in a British jail, without bail as he was deemed a flight risk, has been moved to an isolation facility. Why he was moved is not clear-perhaps for his protection from other inmates? The sexual assault charges, even by Swedish standards are a real stretch. Why is he fighting extradition? Keeps him in the public eye, doesn’t it?

Both Mastercard and Visa have “blacked” wikileaks to prevent the organization from getting donations. In response, hackers flooded both organization with data requests in an attempt to shut them down. Assange has denied any involvement with that plan.

I still fail to see the heroism in what this organization is doing. The information that has been leaked is raw data, unconfirmed, quotes alleged to be from one or another government official, whether true or not, whether gossip, innuendo, malicious lies, etc. Who knows? If the stated purpose is to bring down governments and corporations by preventing communication, how is that different from other forms of terrorism? And I for one don’t want the world to have less communication, and that, I think, will be the result. Less communication, more misunderstanding, more bad decisions based on too little information because no one wants to run the risk of being quoted.

I don’t think this guy is a hero; I think he is a fanatic, who has set himself up as the champion of truth and freedom.

Wikileaks

November 27, 2010December 17, 2010 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11847824

Wikileaks is threatening to reveal millions of confidential diplomatic papers, which they hacked from secure government servers, with the express purpose of holding the US government to account.

I think we should remember that the US, during much of the time covered by these documents, was and remains in a state of war, as we do in Afghanistan. Diplomacy between countries, has never, anywhere, included frank disclosure of all details, in a great lump, to all the people of the world. The folks at Wikileaks seem to think that they are capable of deciding what will be safe to reveal, not putting people at personal risk, or countries at risk of war.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11047811

The link above leads to a profile of the charismatic founder Julien Assange, a man who is said to go for weeks while eating little and sleeping less. Apparently we are to believe that a sleep-deprived, malnourished fanatic is the best person to filter through diplomatic cables and e-mails, decide they won’t put people in harm’s way or start wars, and release them to a shocked population. Not to forget that this man is stealing the intellectual property of others.

I agree that governments lie to us, ours certainly does, spin after spin, and perhaps I’m like Diogenes, looking for that one honest man in politics who will tell us the facts, put them in context and lead a party of clarity and honesty, but I don’t want vast quantity of so-called facts, filtered by Assange’s acolytes, and released around the world for their shock value.

By the way, what has happened to the diplomatic pouch? Wikileaks can’t hack what isn’t in cyberspace.

Spain, final thoughts

November 21, 2010November 21, 2010 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

Two weeks is a short visit to another country, barely time enough to get a limited sense of the geography, no time at all to get a sense of the people, no time except to feel the otherness of the place.

“How was your vacation?” people always ask.

“Loved Madrid, didn’t like Sevilla, thought the pueblos blancos and the mountains beautiful and overwhelming,” I would say.

But even a brief two weeks, alters perception, preconceived notions of a country, and creates a desire to know what is going on there, how are the people doing, what is preoccupying the nation. Before October, I didn’t care whether the banks were failing, or what was happening to the mortgage market, or how many were unemployed, and what that would mean for the people we met, and the way of life we observed.

Madrid was happy, the plazas full of families, the museums with Spaniards on vacation, the skyline with cranes. Sevilla was sad, the streets, where we were anyway filled with tourists, the clerks in the stores and hotels and bars glum, the pueblos blancos, photo-ops that they all were, closed in and except for the British, oblivious to the visitor.

The news from Spain economically isn’t good, especially for the immigrants from the Spanish-speaking countries of the new world. An article today in the New York Times, and late in October in the Globe and Mail talked about the draconian banking laws that prevent individual bankruptcy proceedings from including a mortgage. The result: the borrower and the guarantor are tied for life to the bank, paying off a debt even though the house is no longer theirs.The banks say this prevented their failure during the economic crisis. The entire sorry tale is available here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/world/europe/28spain.html?_r=1&scp=6&sq=spain&st=cse

Spain has beautiful cities, ancient villages where Phoenicians and Romans and Berbers walked before we did, and an unexpected, vast landscape. It’s in Europe, yet partly outside it too. I’m glad we went, even it was only two weeks.

My new book, The Facepainter Murders is available at Amazon.com and at http://www.writewordsinc.com

Off to Spain

September 19, 2010 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

I have been watching a lecture series on DVD, produced by The Teaching Company, taught by Professor Brooks Landon of the University of Iowa, entitled Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft. This is my first exposure to a university level course in writing, although I have taken other on-line practical writing courses and attended workshops, and read books on the subject, all practical, none with the in-depth discussion of the sentence as an art form, not considering just its function, but the way in which phrases and clauses, vowels and consonants play against and with each other. I’m enjoying this series, although some of the concepts are so new to me, that I will watch it a second time, take notes, do the exercises and explore at greater length some of the concepts, as well, I might add, as learning the new vocabulary, not included in the language I learned in medical school. It seems a practical course in many ways and it is great fun.

Sakineh: She’s still in that prison. I see that the Iranians have accepted five hundred thousand dollars as the price of an American woman accused of spying and released this week. Some people in Oman arranged it, so we are told. I wonder what it would cost to buy the freedom of Sakineh and the others.

Spain: I’ve spent the last few months trying to learn some Spanish, using the course supplied by RosettaStone, enough to be polite, and not assume that everyone that I meet speaks English. I did the same with Italian several years ago, finding that it took at least two years to gain enough language to communicate a little. It becomes more difficult as I get older, or so it seems. We’re leaving shortly, so this will be my last posting for a while, unless I have access to a computer somewhere along the way.