Finished an article

I just finished expanding and revising an article and sent it off to the volume editors. Yay! This is the first strike through on my new Fall to-do list. Unlike the last article I finished over the summer, which came out of a non-diss related conference paper that started off as something just for fun until the opportunity to publish arose, this article was largely based on my diss. In fact, it basically was my entire diss: pared down intro and conclusion with a one paragraph summary in the middle from the intros of each chapter, and voilà, suddenly my 252 pages are only 19! It's rather weird to think that I can compress most of my diss into only 1/10th of the original length! It makes me wonder if I really had anything substantial to say in the first place! On the other hand, in doing this little editing exercise, I went back and re-read parts of my diss that I hadn't looked at since I defended it a year ago, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it's not all as horrible as I thought it was. There just might be fodder in there for a decent book proposal after all! And after those translations are taken care of, that will be my next task...

Montreal college shooting

Here's the latest update:

One person has died in hospital as a result of the shooting rampage at a downtown Montreal college Wednesday that also left the gunman dead and 19 others injured.
Paramedics confirmed 20 people were taken to hospital with injuries ranging from gunshot wounds to emotional shock following the shooting at Dawson College.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/

This is why we need gun control. How Stephen Harper could get rid of the gun registry defies all logic. The U.S. needs gun control too. Most of the handguns used in crimes in Canada come into our country across the U.S. border (all while the U.S. is imposing stricter rules against our lumber and food substances). Guns weren't even invented when the "right to bear arms" was written into the Constitution; arms meant swords, not AK-47s.

9/11 conspiracy theories

"Conspiracy theory" is always a dirty word. It conjures up the image of people who think the CIA are listening to their thoughts through the fillings in their teeth. Just because "conspiracy theory" is a dirty word though doesn't mean that conspiracies--groups of people getting together secretely to cause trouble--don't happen. They do. All the time. Heck, most politics happens behind closed doors or out in the corridors while the legit meeting is going on elsewhere. Not everything gets decided in well-lit rooms around beautiful oak tables. Politics is dirty.

So why don't we give more credibilty to conspiracy theories? Why won't the mainstream media do its job and investigate more fully the leads that are out there? Well, thankfully, CBC Sunday Morning did (and I'm not usually one to praise CBC, but this time I am). Yesterday, they actually discussed Loose Change and the various conspiracy theories about 9/11. Today, I read a Reuters news story that 1 in 5 Canadians do believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy orchestrated by powerful U.S. businessmen and govt officials. That's 20%, but it jumps to 26% for "young Canadians" and a whopping 32% for Québécois (more proof that Québec is a distinct nation with different values and viewpoints than the rest of Canada). I'm part of that 32% who agrees that it's a lot more logical to believe the conspiracy theory (in which many of the facts *do* add up) than to believe the official explanation (in which many of the facts of that day simply *don't* add up).

Everyone should see Loose Change before forming an opinion one way or the other about this affair, and follow the CBC Sunday links to the 9/11 sites out there, including one called Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Can the physicists really be wrong? (One has lost his job even for researching the issue.) Certain facts, like the temperature at which steel melts, just don't change no matter how many times we couch the debate in terms of empty rhetorical terms like "liberty" and "freedom". On September 11th, shouldn't we scholars be celebrating (what's left of) our academic freedom and the liberty to investigate thorny issues to the fullest extent?

Why we fight

When I created this blog and put politics in the description, I thought that it was so obvious that it would be about Québec politics and the sovereignist movement that there was no reason even to state it. Yet, it seems like the political posts on this blog are almost exclusively about the United States these days--surely not because they are the most interesting subject but perhaps because they are the most frustrating.

A few days ago I watched the film Why We Fight and the film Syrianna. Syrianna is a fictional account of the way the oil industry works and the CIA's involvement in it, while Why We Fight is a documentary about what Eisenhower called the "military-industrial-(congressional)-complex", i.e., the arms industry whch is supported partly by Congress. I was shocked to learn that at least 1 piece of every B-52 fighter plane is manufactured in every single one of the 50 states, so when it comes time for congressmen to support military spending, they have to because it means jobs in their home state, which translates into votes which they either keep or lose. The film is filled with facts like this on miltary spending, how Congress is complicit with the miltary industry, and how all the major decisions are being made by think tanks... among many other topics. It's really interesting and scary stuff, but the film is well worth seeing. Seeing both films together is even more of an eye-opener.