The Unreasonable Man

So Canon is not in my good books. Cogeco Cable is definitely not in my good books - customer “service”.

But the Mayor of Oakville and myself think the same way about taxes and municipal politics. And I am watching “Kite Runner” as we speak - a great movie of a great book - this is why I like to travel, and why I feel quite passionately that people are people.

All sins are a variety of theft.

My 1Ds MarkIII camera focuses badly. Look here:

http://www.mvwphoto.com/1Ds3-Problem/

You see what I mean? Only picture 2 is sharp. I have been battling this for a while: back to Canon with the camera on Monday morning. I think it is reasonable to expect a $8,000 camera to focus properly.

(Yes it has the latest firmware, yes I know how it works, yes I am using one focus spot, yes I am aiming it only at the projector and not even partly at the background, etc).

As I mentioned here before: I am doing a solo photo exhibit 29 April-10 May in Toronto. Here are the details:

http://www.mvw.net/IV.html

You can order the photo book now: instructions there - and sign up on Facebook if you are local and going to come see this shocking but optimistic exhibit. Not grim - although the subject and much the photography are grim, the tone is one of hope.

Michael

Short tech note: I moved all my domains except this one to 1and1.com and moved my mail to google apps - recommended on both counts.

AIG is today’s scapegoat because of bonuses to traders. This outrage is silly - even dangerous. As Stephen Colbert said:

“Our founding fathers knew that when the rights of the people get trampled, we must become a torch and pitchfork-wielding mob empty of all thoughts. An injured, vengeful animal lashing out blindly at shapes and colors. Let’s go get AIG!

Whenever we see populist outrage we have to be careful. President Obama is doing himself no favour by joining in. Let’s think shall we? I am sure these bonuses were legally agreed and that’s that. And let’s have a look at who gets them. And what they were for: group performance, individual performance, some other measure?

Populism means letting the populace wield pitchforks. And in a society where nineteen out of twenty people cannot tell you how much 1,000 times 1,000 is, I am not sure how wise it is for the president to join in with his own pitchfork.

So my shipment leave Rochester, NY yesterday afternoon. Then it ends up in Buffalo, an hour away.

Then it gets flown to Louisville, Kentucky. A day later it has left Kentucky for Canada (few Louisville to Canada flights I imagine). So with luck I’ll get it tomorrow or the next day.

And that is UPS “expedited”. It was an hour away 24 hour ago and they shipped it to Kentucky.

Incredibly, Gary Goodyear, Canada’s federal Minister for Science and Technology refuses to say whether he believes in evolution. “I am a Christian”, he says, and  “I don’t think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate”. Article in the Globe and Mail today (Google it).

The fact that this man even answers a question about science by mentioning his religion affirms a few of my beliefs. Namely that:

• Religion is a reactionary force, a force for evil, for holding back, for dogma, and for stopping progress. Fundamentally - this cannot be cured, just like you cannot make a fascist a good fascist.
• This man has no place in politics just by that answer. He should go to Tennessee, they’d love him there. Worryingly, they love him here. My God, are we in Tennessee?
• “Chiropractic” is voodoo, just like religion. Mr Goodyear is a Chiropractor. It fits.
• I was right I was to swear I would never vote for the Conservatives. The others may steal my money but at least they do not live in 1350.

Mr Goodyear, and other conservatives without a brain or an education: evolution is a fact, not a “theory” in the sense that you non-educated people think a theory is an unproven statement based on nothing, like religion. Unlike religion, the mechanism of evolution is established fact. You cannot validly have “beliefs” about that any more than you can validly have beliefs about whether there really are an infinite number of primes (we’ve never counted or seen them all,so how can we know?) or whether there are really slightly more than three radii in a circumference.

President Obama is outraged about AIG bonuses. Republican senator Charles Grassley thinks AIG managers should bow, apologise, and commit suicide. Senator Christopher Dodd wants to pass a special tax law to target only those AIG managers who received this bonus.

In the UK, the same about Sir Fred. People want his pension back.

This is astonishing. The people leading the world’s leading democracies engage in populist prattle that shows their apparent lack of understanding of the fundamentals of a democracy. The rule of law, safeguarding of property rights, and enforcement of legal contracts. That is what distinguishes us from a banana republic.

These people at AIG have contracts and agreed bonuses. We don’t have to like it (for the record, I don’t, either), but it is a legal agreement. Calling this an outrage means you do not understand the legal system that underlies our entire western society (Magna Charta, anyone?).

This talk, and talk about the court of public opinion being more powerful than the court of law, as the deputy leader of the British Labour Party held recently, is very worrying. Much more worrying than the wrong people getting a contractually agreed bonus.

I am listening to Tom Waits tonight - boy, does that ever take me back to the 1970s. Julian and Charlotte’s apartment in Victoria (her dad’s actually) and the ragtag band of good friends who gathered there to be children of the 1970s. I am still in touch with many of them. Some did not survive: we think about them sometimes and I dedicate my photo book to two of them.

No, in my circle of friends no-one wore Robert Crumb-reminiscent boots like those above, and no-one confessed to listening to the music I heard all night at the 1970’s theme party I was hired to shoot Saturday where I shot the boots: Abba, Boney M and the Bee Gees.

But in retrospect I feel that the 1970s were a fun time. Disco was harmless fun. Hippie chicks, flower power, and the rest of the 60s were over, but only just. People like me were just a bit too young to have been hippies: Alice’s restaurant, free love, all this passed us by (only just: I remember queuing for an entire night for Bob Dylan tickets in London in the 1970s) - but majorly influenced us. Too young to be boomers and tool old to be Gen-Xers, we were the generation whose world view was formed by the hippies: the Jones generation, a writer in the paper called in the other day. The people who were not disillusioned by the hippie era going south and in whom it lingered for many more years. But it turned serious for us too.

Back to the music - “Alice’s Restaurant”. No, Rory Gallagher. Wait… Ten Years After.  I still have Dave Leapingwell’s “Ten Years After Live” album. Dave died years ago with a needle in his arm, but his memory lives on.

Those of you in or near Toronto are coming to see my photo exhibit next month right?

Google thinks the top keywords in my michaelwillems.ca site are as follows. Only God and Google know whay they come up with that list.

Here goes: