Syriana

I saw Syriana tonight. It was an excellent movie, and would recommend it to anyone who wants to see a movie that would challenge them intellectually and make them think. It is a comlicated movie in terms of plot. There are a number of spearate yet interwoven storylines, so pay attention.

I do think it is an important movie in that it challenges current reality in a number of respects: our dependence on oil, the oil industry's vested interest in violence and unrest, the lengths that industrialists or fundamentalists on either side would go to, including assasinations and bombings, to furhter there own interest, are all highlighted during the course of this film.

Watch it with someone you love. Or someone you want to kill. I have no idea what that means.

Klein on torture

Klein's main point in the column I linked to in the repvious post is that the US commission of torure is not a new phenomenon by any means. It has a history, the best example of which is the School of the America's, in which trainees were taught "coercive interrogation techniques" Thus, the claim of shock by many at revelations of torture by the current US government, and shouts of "never again" are problematic in that they deny this history. Nevertheless,

Despite all the talk of outsourced torture, the Bush administration’s real innovation has been its insourcing, with prisoners now being abused by U.S. citizens in U.S.–run prisons and transported to third-party countries in U.S. planes. It is this departure from clandestine etiquette that has so much of the military and intelligence community up in arms: Bush has robbed everyone of plausible deniability.

For those nervously wondering if it is time to start using alarmist words like totalitarianism, this shift is of huge significance. When torture is covertly practised but officially and legally repudiated, there is still the hope that if atrocities are exposed, justice could prevail. When torture is pseudo-legal and when those responsible merely deny that it is torture, what dies is what political philosopher Hannah Arendt called “the juridical person in man”; soon enough, victims no longer bother to search for justice, so sure are they of the futility (and danger) of that quest. This impunity is a mass version of what happens inside the torture chamber, when prisoners are told they can scream all they want because no one can hear them and no one is going to save them.

Gulp. That's makes my blood run cold.

The terrible irony of the anti-historicism of the current torture debate is that in the name of eradicating future abuses, past crimes are being erased from the record. Since the U.S. has never had truth commissions, the memory of its complicity in faraway crimes has always been fragile. Now these memories are fading even further, and the disappeared are being disappeared all over again.

This casual amnesia does a disservice not only to the victims but also to the cause of trying to remove torture from the U.S. policy arsenal once and for all. Already there are signs that the administration will deal with the current uproar by returning to the Cold War model of plausible deniability. The McCain amendment protects every “individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government”; it says nothing about torture training or buying information from the exploding industry of for-profit interrogators.

spontaneous post.

Hi.

Well, I don't have a lot of time. Want to go to bed soon, as I've got an early morning tomorrow. Was going to talk about Naomi Klein and torture, but fuck it. I'll do it tomorrow.

Have a good night.

Bush's friend Stephen Harper

I found out about this while watching the CBc National tonight, even though it happened a vew days ago. Turns out that American conservatives view Stephen Haper as the great hope with respect to the prospect of "steering Canada in a more conservative direction."

This commentary from a contributor to the Washington Times from the Cato Institute is a great example of this:

Why does President Bush hope Christmas comes a little late this year? Because on Jan. 23, Canada may elect the most pro-American leader in the Western world. Free-market economist Stephen Harper, leader of the opposition Conservative Party, is pro-free trade, pro-Iraq war, anti-Kyoto, and socially conservative. Move over Tony Blair: If elected, Mr. Harper will quickly become Mr. Bush's new best friend.

Warnings abound about the continued presence of progressive politics if the Liberals win. Heaven forbid:

If Martin's Liberal Party is re-elected for the fourth consecutive time, Canadian taxpayers will continue footing the bill for an expensive welfare state epitomized by its archaic government-run health-care system. Social policy experimentation on issues such as drugs and homosexual rights will continue in an incremental but decidedly progressive direction.

To be fair, Stephen Harper has attempted to distance himself from American conservatives by writing a retort to the Washington Times

John Lennon 1940-1980

As I listen to Happy XMas (War is Over) right now on the John Lennon Collection, I recall. I must have been almost 13 years old when I heard that John lennon has been murdered. Did it impact me? I don't remember where I was. My political views had not developed by this age. I did know, however, that John was my favourite Beatle.

Since then, especially in my adult years when my progressive views have solidified, I have taken him on as somewhat of a hero. He was a mortal human being with imperfections, but it was he stood for. He stood for love and peace, two ideas which were bouncing around in my head like ping pong balls.

This is for John, and may his (our) dream come true:

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

And for the coming holiday season:

So this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun
Ans so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
And so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong
And so happy Christmas
For black and for white
For yellow and red ones
Let's stop all the fight
A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
And so this is Christmas
And what have we done
Another year over
And a new one just begun
Ans so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young
A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
War is over over
If you want it
War is over
Now...

Vigil for hostages

Candlelight vigil. Tomorrow, 7:00 pm, English Bay beach. For the CPT hostages in Iraq.

Sign this petition, please

Please go to this website and sign the petition there pleaing for the release of the CPT hostages in Iraq. Here is how it reads:

An Urgent Appeal: Please Release Our Friends in Iraq

Four members of Christian Peacemaker Teams were taken this past Saturday, November 26, in Baghdad, Iraq. They are not spies, nor do they work in the service of any government. They are people who have dedicated their lives to fighting against war and have clearly and publicly opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq. They are people of faith, but they are not missionaries. They have deep respect for the Islamic faith and for the right of Iraqis to self-determination.

C.P.T. first came to Iraq in October 2002 to oppose the US invasion, and it has remained in the country throughout the occupation in solidarity with the Iraqi people. The group has been invaluable in alerting the world to many of the horrors facing Iraqis detained in US-run prisons and detention centers. C.P.T. was among the first to document the torture occurring at the Abu Ghraib prison, long before the story broke in the mainstream press. Its members have spent countless hours interviewing Iraqis about abuse and torture suffered at the hands of US forces and have disseminated this information internationally.

Each of the four C.P.T. members being held in Iraq has dedicated his life to resisting the darkness and misery of war and occupation. Convinced that it is not enough to oppose the war from the safety of their homes, they made the difficult decision to go to Iraq, knowing that the climate of mistrust created by foreign occupation meant that they could be mistaken for spies or missionaries. They went there with a simple purpose: to bear witness to injustice and to embody a different kind of relationship between cultures and faiths. Members of C.P.T. willingly undertook the risks of living among Iraqis, in a common neighborhood outside of the infamous Green Zone. They sought no protection from weapons or armed guards, trusting in, and benefiting from, the goodwill of the Iraqi people. Acts of kindness and hospitality from Iraqis were innumerable and ensured the C.P.T. members’ safety and wellbeing. We believe that spirit will prevail in the current situation.

We appeal to those holding these activists to release them unharmed so that they may continue their vital work as witnesses and peacemakers.

Signed,**

# Arundhati Roy, author, The God of Small Things
# Tariq Ali, author, Bush in Babylon
# Denis Halliday, former U.N. Assistant Secretary General and Head of the U.N. Humanitarian Program in Iraq (1997-1998)
# Cindy Sheehan, mother of Casey Sheehan
# Noam Chomsky, Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
# Haifa Zangana, Iraqi novelist
# Kamil Mahdi, Iraqi economist and anti-occupation activist. Lecturer, University of Exeter
# Mahmood Mamdani, "Herbert Lehman Professor of Government," Columbia University
# Rashid Khalidi, "Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies," Middle East Institute, Columbia University
# Cindy and Craig Corrie, parents of Rachel Corrie, killed by Israeli military
# Hasan Abu Nimah, Permanent Representative of Jordan at the United Nations (1995-2000)
# Ralph Nader, former independent presidential candidate
# James Abourezk, former US Senator
# Howard Zinn, historian
# Naseer Aruri, Professor (Emeritus) University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
# Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonviolence/Nobel Peace Prize Nominee
# Naomi Klein, author/journalist
# Michael Ratner, President, Center for Constitutional Rights
# Rev. Daniel Berrigan, poet
# Jeremy Scahill, independent journalist
# Mazin Qumsiyeh, author, Sharing the Land Of Canaan, board member US Campaign to End the Occupation
# Milan Rai, author, War Plan Iraq: Ten Reasons Against War on Iraq
# Sam Husseini, writer
# Dahr Jamail, independent journalist
# Ali Abunimah & Nigel Parry, Co-founders, Electronic Iraq
# Leslie Cagan, National Coordinator, United for Peace and Justice
# Eve Ensler, author
# Jennifer Harbury, Director, Stop Torture Permanently Campaign
# Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton, Auxiliary Bishop, Archdiocese of Detroit
# Anthony Arnove, author, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal
# Medea Benjamin, Global Exchange
# G. Simon Harak, SJ, War Resisters League
# David Hartsough, Co-Founder and Capacity Building Director of Nonviolent Peaceforce and Executive Director of Peaceworkers. Nonviolent Peace Force
# Blase Bonpane, Office of the Americas
# Carol Bragg, Coordinator, Rhode Island Peace Mission
# Rev. Richard Deats, former Executive Secretary and Fellowship Editor, Fellowship of Reconciliation
# Omar Diop, Président de la Coalition Sénégalaise des Défenseurs des Droits humains
# Jim Forest, Secretary, The Orthodox Peace Fellowship
# Thomas C. Cornell, The Catholic Worker
# David Grant, Nonviolent Peaceforce
# Ted Lewis, Global Exchange
# Charles Jenks, Chair of Advisory Board, Traprock Peace Center
# Jeff Leys, Voices for Creative Nonviolence
# Andréa Schmidt, independent journalist
# Michael Albert, ZNet
# Richard McDowell, Senior Fellow for Iraq Policy, Friends Committee on National Legislation
# Dave McReynolds, former Chair, War Resisters International
# Peter Lems, Program Associate for Iraq, American Friends Service Committee
# Kevin Zeese, Director, Democracy Rising
# Sunny Miller, Director, Traprock Peace Center
# Dave Robinson, Director, Pax Christi USA
# Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, National Coordinator, Clergy and Laity Concerned about Iraq
# David Swanson, Co-Founder, After Downing Street, Board Member Progressive Democrats of America, Washington Director Democrats.com
# Mary Trotochaud, Senior Fellow for Iraq Policy, Friends Committee on National Legislation
# Michael Birmingham, activist
# Barbara Wien, Co-Director, Peace Brigades International/USA
# Bishop Gabino Zavala, President, Pax Christi USA

World AIDS Day

Today is world AIDS day. This cruel virus has been ravaging people and communities for about 25 years now. In spite of medial advancements, the onset of AZT, coctails, and so forth, the ravaging continues. Unfortunately, there is still much work to do, in terms of material and emotional support for those aflicted in their families. The vast majority of current AIDS deaths take place in continental Africa, where a lack of education and support resources, with which the West could help greatly. Every day in Africa, 6000 Africans, 1300 of them children, die of AIDS.

On this day, I would ask people to think about those who have passed from AIDS, and to find out more about the disease and related social issues. There are numerous organizations which attempt to address the AIDS pandemic, including the Stephen Lewis Foundation, Debt AIDS Trade Africa, and UNAIDS.

Addendum: Here is a statement give by Stephen Lewis on World AIDS Day.

Canadian hostages

Four hostages, including two Canadians have been taken hostage in Iraq. The Canadian government is apparently seeking the release of the hostages, though their identity has not been released. They are members of the Christian Peacemakers Team.

It's one thing to kidnap those who profit from the misery of the people of Iraq, or those who have pointed guns at Iraqi civilians. I condemn those kidnappings as well as the actions that precipitated them. But to kidnap people of peace, people who are committed to nonviolence, people who seek alternatives to war, people probably all of whom opposed the war and occupation of Iraq in the first place, is disgusting, and I hope the kidnappers see the error of their ways and let these innocent people go.

Gwynne Dyer

I'd like to give a plug for Gwynne Dyer. He is a long time political columnist. He's not a lefty by nature I believe, but his knowledge and pursuit of truth has led him to write many columns in recent years which have been critical of the Bush Administration. In fact, his columns are only available in the US, as they have been banned by Canwest.

In any event, he has a new book out, With Every Mistake, which is a collection of his columns in recent years. I haven't read the book yet, though I flipped through it in a bookstore. I would recommend at least checking him out.

White phosphorous in Fallujah

Fallujah, Fallujah. I want to address this. As you may have heard, as this is news which is a few days old, it seems that a chemical which burns skin to the bone, white phosphorous, may have been used by the US military in it's assault on Fallujah a year ago. Here is a lovely description of the process:

White phosphorus is fat-soluble and burns spontaneously on contact with the air. According to globalsecurity.org: "The burns usually are multiple, deep, and variable in size. The solid in the eye produces severe injury. The particles continue to burn unless deprived of atmospheric oxygen... If service members are hit by pieces of white phosphorus, it could burn right down to the bone." As it oxidises, it produces smoke composed of phosphorus pentoxide. According to the standard US industrial safety sheet, the smoke "releases heat on contact with moisture and will burn mucous surfaces... Contact... can cause severe eye burns and permanent damage."

As the debate around Fallujahs raged, a report in which soldiers bragged about using the brutal unearthly lethal chemical as a weapon was unearthed.

Atrocities had already been revealed though without much attention, prior to the revelations about the white phosphorous. These pictures, which I found through Iraq Dsipatches, I must warn, are very graphic and very disturbing.

The atrocities commited in Fallujah by the US military, if nothing else, must serve to mobilize the anti-war movement. Now, efforts to bring the US military and government officials responsible for war crimes in Fallujah should only intensify.

Firefox

Due to the persistent musings of a certain musician/blogger, I have decided to take the plunge and switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox. Don't know much about it. So far it seems OK. We'll see how it goes.

The Liberal Party of Canada is unprincipled.

The Liberal Party of Canada has no principles. They are about opportunism, pure and simple. Months ago, the made deals with the NDP for budget that were actually quite progressive in many respects. Fast forward many months later, and we see the opposition parties conspiring to topple the Liberals and force an election. There are good reasons for this, including the fact that the Liberals and the NDP failed to arrive at an agreement. In that respect, it will be interesting to see what happens.

What we are seeing now, however, is a mini-budget including proposals in which taxes, including corporate taxes, would be cut. Cutting corporate taxes, while we have people living on the street. While Paul Martin refuses to live up to the Millenium Development Goals. While millions of children continue to live in poverty. While the cost of post-secondary education is prohibitive to many.

Is it better to have a Conservative government with principles, or a Liberal government without principles. I don't know. Nevertheless, I think we can rest assured that, whatever the result of the next election, we will end up with another minority government with the NDP holding the balance of power.

If the late philosopher-king and prime minister Pierre Trudeau is looking on from the great beyond, what must he be thinking has come of the party he led into greatness for so many years.

Another sliver of myself.

Time now for another fun fact about me/ I like to write. The conveying of ideas. Or the telling of stories. I like to move me. My desire to write has largely been in the closet except for those I meet in the blogosphere. I have decided to try my hand a reading poetry at an open mic this week. I have a friend in Victoria who writes poetry, and reads at an open mic there. She's recently published, in fact. I write poetry once in a while, whenever I feel compelled to do so. It's a craft I would like to take more seriously, but I keep procrastinating. Well, no more. This is it. I mean it. OK. Here we go. Are we having fun yet?

Let it never happen again

Today is Remembrance Day in Canada, the day that we remember the fallen solider who "gave their lives for our freedom." To me, it's insane that we need such a day in the first place, except as a reminder of the horrors of war so that it never happens again. Unfortunately, it inevitably does. Nevertheless, that is the lense through which I prefer to view this day.

Rememberance Day, as it is viewed by most, serves to glorify war. "Yes, they died, but it was a noble cause. They died so we could be free." There's no reference to the horror of war. There's no reference to the reality that the death was probably an extremely painful one. And, there's no discussion of the fact that because of these deaths, many children were raised without a father.

I'll bet the warmongers love Remembrance Day, or Memorial Day in the US. I'm talking about Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, whomever. In my opinion, The thriving of the military industrial complex in part arises from the narrative of the glorious war. I refuse to give them any quarter.

So sure, let's remember those who died. But let it remind us that war is not glorious, but in fact horrible, and pray/meditate/whatever that it never happens again.

Also check out this excellent post on Rememberance Day.

pictoral account

Check out Tony Pierce's site for a through pictoral recap of the Matthew Good weekend.

Matthew Good: where from here?

Matthew Good is a rare breed among musicians.

He has achieved some degree of commercial success. It's not something that's important to him, but nevertheless his musical output over the past ten years has resulted in a modest degree of success.

Yet I think, despite his success, he has largely managed to maintain his artistic integrity. He is honest. He wears his heart on his sleeve. He cares about people who are not as fortunate as we are, and detests social injustice. In that respect, I think he's a lot like Bruce Springsteen or has been throughout his musical career, or early Bob Dylan. He's not afraid to make important social and political statements in his music, and that is extremely rare among mainstream musicians.

He has a very important and special gift to share with the world, and that is the gift of a recording artist who can make beautful music, and tie into it an honest reflection of the times and the world that we are living in.

I am very much looking forward to what he will do next artistically. It seems he might do a solo acoustic tour. He is great in that setup, and will sell out all shows if that happens. Whatever he does next, I hope he will always remain true to his gift.

Blogger meetup and Matt Good concert at Commodore Ballroom.

I went to see Matt Good at the Commodore Ballroom last night. Before that there was a Blogger/Buzznet meet up at the Granville Room. I'm not normally one to drop names, and I don't do so to flatter myself, but noteables from the blogworld were there, including Tony Pierce, who hosted it, Chad Ciavarro, and Ben Allbright.

I don't have a digital camera, and the camera I do have doesn't work, so I took no pictures. I'm also too lazy to learn how to use Hello or Buzznet. However, if you're wondering what I look like, you can find out here.

Yes, that's Jen Good to my left. It is hard to have a sense of someone, unless you have some interaction with them. It was good to actually meet her, and find out that she is in fact a very sweet person. Some people might think she is vain, but I think she is in fact very thoughtful.

In any event, here are pictures that Tony took of his trip to Vancouver, including last nights concert.

This was my first time seeing Matt in concert, and he and his band were great. He puts his all into his performance, energetically speaking. It looks like he is really enjoying himself as he sings and plays his heart out.

I thought it was great that he played "Blue Skies Over Bad Lands" even though it wasn't a single, as it is one of my favourite songs out of his whole catalogue. I was disappointed that I could hear a lot of people casually conversing while he was playing some of the quieter songs such as this one, as opposed to appreciating the words he was singing.

It was interesting to see he backing band. Pat Steward is really intense, like moreso than even Matt, when he's playing during the concert. Rich provides a steady groove with his bass. Christian, calm and quiet, dazzles us with his soundscape quitar work. And yes, if anyone's wondering, Matt himself did have one guitar solo, after the first chorus on Near Fantastica.

Anyway, it was a great day to be a Matt Good fan.

Bonus: I get to see Matt again tonight, this time while sitting at the Amnesty table. Hopefully folks at the concert tonight will take a moment out before or after to show that they care about human rights.

Amnesty conference

There was an Amnesty International regional conference in Vancouver last weekend and I went. I met some other folks form here in Vancouver and from around the conference, so it was cool in that respect. There were different workshops, such as Business and Human Rights, which I attended, Fundraising, Introduction to Amnesty, and Fostering Community Activism, which I also attended. This was all on Saturday.

On Sunday, it was split into two six-hour workshops, Business and Human Rights, which I partook in, and Youth activism, which my age I felt disqualified me from.

I don't know much about business, and my learning curve will be really high, but I have decided to partake in a BHR working group they are trying to form here. It might not be as up front as going after governments, but its actually very interesting. There are many innovative and interesting ways that you can approach the business-human rights connection. I look forward to getting more involved.

Stephen Lewis: Massey Lecture #1

I went to to see Stephen Lewis, the UN Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa, give the first of his CBC Massey lectures, at the Chan centre at UBC this week. He is one of my heros. In some ways he reminds me of Martin Luther King -- his combination of intellect, passion, and compassion. I met him when he signed my book afterward -- it was actually the second time I've met him -- and just being in his presence, I feel that the man exudes compassion and kindness. He greets everyone he meets with dignity and respect, even those with whom he sharply disagrees. He is what I aspire to be as a human being.

The title of his lectures is "the race against time," and it is fitting. The plight of Africa, which continues to be ravaged by AIDS and poverty, continues to eat away at him. The solutions are there and they are simple, yet governments and authorities continue to refrain from acting.

Here is a piece from Michael Valpy on the Globe and Mail on him:

The scene is the junior common room of the University of Toronto's Massey College. Stephen Lewis, the United Nations Secretary-General's special envoy to Africa for AIDS, is there to launch his book, Race Against Time, the text of the Massey Lectures he now is delivering in cities across Canada, which subsequently will be broadcast on CBC Radio.

The common room on a mid-October's late afternoon is packed and loud with talk. It is a come-and-be-seen event commensurate with Mr. Lewis's acquired celebrity status, filled with academics, writers, broadcasters, publishers, a thick slice of Toronto intellectual society jammed shoulder-to-shoulder over wine and canapés.

You can't see Stephen Lewis, but you instantly know where he is. He is at the far end of the room behind a wall of students, three, four and five deep, hanging on his every word, all of them holding his book, gazing at him reverentially.

If the bureaucratic establishments of the UN and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. State Department could see this scene -- this man many of them would love to see ousted from his job, being idolized -- it would, as Mr. Lewis might say with his trademark flawless diction, "upset them immensely."

Indeed, there is growing speculation that Mr. Lewis -- African AIDS envoy since 2001 and, before that, deputy executive director of UNICEF, Canada's ambassador to the UN and leader of the Ontario NDP -- has upset too many important people immensely, and is on the edge of being sacked.

He himself alludes to that possibility in his book, speculating that some of the things he has said may lead high-level UN officials and politicians to "exact retribution."

He has strongly criticized the U.S. administration and a number of Western and African governments by name -- the equivalent in UN bureaucratic etiquette to being flatulent at a garden party.

He has baldly trashed the policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

He has verbally lashed some of the UN's top executives (Secretary-General Kofi Annan included, again by name) for being variously duplicitous and do-nothing while the HIV-AIDS pandemic destroys much of sub-Saharan African society.

He may, in fact, deny his critics the pleasure of seeing him fired -- by quitting.

In a conversation three days after his book launch, he talks of feeling emotionally beaten down by the hideousness of the pandemic he has witnessed over the past four years, and he wonders aloud if he is strong enough to remain at his job.

In the comfortably cluttered living room of the house in Toronto's leafy Forest Hill where Mr. Lewis, 67, lives with his wife, journalist and social activist Michele Landsberg, he struggles to make sense of the horror he sees on every visit to the continent.

He whispers statistics: The 40 million people infected worldwide -- 26 million in Africa. The millions, mainly young women, without access to treatment because the world won't pay for it. The 14 million children now orphaned by AIDS. The third of all children in Zambia who soon will be AIDS orphans. The half a million children who die each year, and yet not until a few months ago -- 25 years after the pandemic began in 1981 -- was the first pediatric treatment formulation finally worked out.

"I've often thought to myself that it's possible" -- he pauses for a long time -- "that you need a sturdier emotional psyche than I have. I mean, you know, I just can't take what I see on the ground. I just cannot take it. I am only one person.

"But I defy anybody to be able to take it over the long term. Because, you know, it's all so unnecessary."

His voice drops again to a whisper: "And they're all young women, they're all in their 20s and 30s. You go into a hospice, 25 beds, 23 of them filled by women in their 20s. You can't get the drugs to them in time. You know they're going to die in a matter of months. They all have children. You feel as though everything is out of kilter."

He says the HIV-AIDS assault on women has no parallel in history. "Women are the pillars of family and community -- the mothers, the caregivers, the farmers. The pandemic is preying on them relentlessly, threatening them in a way that the world has never yet witnessed. The virus threatens the very existence of women in some countries. I can barely talk about [the gender inequality] with equanimity."

He talks about the children.

"You go into a little community center for kids . . . and I remember this . . . you have a whole group of kids sitting in a little room. They look as though they're 4 or 5, they're all stunted, and they're really 8, 9, 10 years old, all HIV-positive, and there are no drugs. And you know these kids are measuring their lives in minutes. And you just wonder . . . why is this? How long can it happen? How long does it have to go on incrementally?

"It's just so bad. It's so awful. How do you get people to understand? How do you get things mobilized?"

Thus, Stephen Lewis -- who has established his own charitable foundation to fund AIDS projects in Africa, mainly for infected women, orphans and AIDS sufferers who have created their own support and education programs -- talks now about quitting.

Nothing, he says, is fixed. But he thinks maybe it will be next year after the biennial global AIDS summit is held in Toronto.

He says he is running out of steam -- those are his words. And when he is asked what the indices are of "running out of steam," he has a ready list:

"Crying too easily on public platforms.

"Awake at night with images in my mind.

"Tired." (No one who knows Mr. Lewis likely has heard him before say publicly that he is tired.)

"Apprehensive now about going to Africa and knowing what I'm going to encounter. . . . You meet people with AIDS, you make friendships . . . and then you come back six months later and they're gone."

He says: "I want to be around for the breakthrough. I want to feel this pandemic is going to come to an end at some point and I want to have been a part of that, of subduing it. But I'm not kidding myself. I think eventually" -- and then the words again -- "you run out of steam."

If steam is what Stephen Lewis is running out of, it is not happening quickly. Or even visibly.

His close friend and alter ego of nearly 50 years, Gerald Caplan, says: "It's no secret that the job takes an enormous toll. But for Stephen, it's not acceptable to give up. It's not acceptable to show despair or resignation. It's only acceptable to continue to inspire others to carry on the fight. Other than for his grandkids, that's why he exists. And that's what he does. True, too, though, every day is a test."

In the past few months Mr. Lewis has all but called the U.S. government recklessly negligent for tying its AIDS assistance money to Uganda to a condition that the country's public-health authorities de-emphasize condoms in their AIDS education programs.

When the Americans denied Mr. Lewis's accusations, he came within a hair's breadth of calling them liars -- something UN officials just don't do. There are persistent rumors out of Washington that the U.S. State Department wants Mr. Lewis removed from his post.

He has excoriated the World Bank and the IMF for imposing structural adjustment programs -- dictating how much African governments can allocate to social programs in exchange for loans from the two institutions -- that he says have crippled many countries' health and education resources.

He says the programs have resulted in one of the greatest wrongs in the fragile global South, the imposition of user fees for public education, with a resulting double penalty for the children of AIDS, orphaned by their parents' deaths and left in the darkness of ignorance by their financial inability to afford school.

In his book, Mr. Lewis writes that the World Bank and the IMF should pay the cost associated with abolishing school fees as "reparations" for the damage their policies have caused: "This is not some negotiable item. I am writing and speaking passionately about it because, every time I travel to Africa, I encounter orphan children who are desperate to be in school, who need friends and teachers and attention, who need one meal a day that could come from a school feeding program, who need the sense of self-worth that education could bring, who want so much to learn, and who are denied all of it because the costs of schooling are prohibitive."

He has criticized present and former UN officials -- for example, Carol Bellamy, former executive director of UNICEF and someone close to the U.S. Administration -- for publicly pledging to eradicate education user fees and then doing nothing.

He has accused UN executives, including Mr. Annan, of pledging to right the gender imbalance among UN senior staff, and the gender inequality in many UN programs and, most of all, in the impact of the AIDS pandemic -- but injecting virtually no substance into their promises.

He accuses the Canadian government of inexplicable hypocrisy in pledging to raise the level of its official development assistance to 0.7 per cent of the gross national product (it currently is less than 0.25 per cent), but refusing to declare a timetable for its accomplishment.

"The irony is that on an issue like HIV-AIDS in the developing world, Canada's record is excellent. The reality is that our initiatives on the pandemic are completely eclipsed by our failure on foreign aid."

He declares that there is no chance -- none, not a hope in hell -- that the much-touted Millennium Development Goals (which include reversing the spread of HIV-AIDS by 2015) will be attained unless all the world's wealthy countries raise their levels of official development assistance to 0.7 per cent. Which he increasingly doubts they will do.

He says the Group of Eight countries' pledge of $50-billion in aid to Africa by 2010 simply is not enough -- when the conservative estimate of the cost of sustaining and introducing new AIDS programs in Africa by that year will alone be $30-billion. The result, he says, will be as certain as night follows day: millions of people denied treatment; millions needlessly dying.

Time and time again in his book and in conversation, he returns to the theme of women bearing the brunt of the pandemic -- having no control over the sex they must submit to from "predatory" men, usually their husbands, who are HIV-positive; experiencing the frightfulness not only of becoming infected themselves but of infecting their children; being denied treatment by the hundreds of thousands, and finally dying at a young age and knowing their children will be left motherless.

Only 5 to 8 per cent of pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa have access to PMTCT (Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission) programs, Mr. Lewis says. "This is a terrible deficiency. There is no excuse for this state of affairs" -- except the parsimony of the wealthy world and the empty pledges of its leaders.

"Because of the low access rates," he writes, "thousands upon thousands of babies are born HIV-positive who need not be infected; most of them die -- helplessly, pathetically -- before the age of 2. But for those HIV-positive women who have access to PMTCT, the program is a godsend.

"One tablet of the drug nevirapine during the birthing process, and the liquid equivalent within 72 hours of birth, and the infection rate is cut by 53 per cent."

He writes: "My own view is that the horrendous toll is yet to come. Countries will be fighting for survival 10 and 15 years down the road. It's simply impossible to tear the productive generations out of the heart of a country without facing an incomparable crisis."

He says: "I'm not some sweet innocent. I'm 67 years old. I've learned something about politics, diplomacy and multilateralism. I thought I understood the way the world works. I don't.

"I'll devote every fiber of my body to defeating this viral contagion, but I cannot abide the willful inattention of so much of the international community. I cannot expunge from my mind the heartless indifference, the criminal neglect of the last decade, during which time countless people have gone to their graves -- people who should still be walking the open savannah of Africa."

Will he get fired for his outspokenness?

Kofi Annan is believed to have come to Mr. Lewis's defense against the Americans over Uganda. A Canadian knowledgeable about the workings of the UN but speaking only on condition of anonymity, says the agency would not dare get rid of him.

"Everybody else [in the organization], including the Secretary-General, has criticized the UN recently, and then failed to introduce [Mr. Annan's] reforms. How could they pretend [if they went after Mr. Lewis] that they weren't just getting even because he named some names?

"I also think they know fully well how much personal support Stephen has throughout the world and how much trouble they'd be making for themselves if they turfed him."

As the conversation draws to a close in his living room, Mr. Lewis recalls the Massey College students clustered around him at his book launch. "They were sweet," he says.

Last year, 30 students from University of Toronto's law school approached him with an offer to do research on everything from women's property rights in countries with high AIDS death rates to intellectual-property rights in pharmaceuticals to the impact of user fees for health and education in AIDS-infected countries. Some of the papers were 50 to 80 pages long, Mr. Lewis says, and the quality was "so good, it's startling."

This year, there were many more law students volunteering to help than Mr. Lewis and his staff could use. And he cannot meet the demands from universities and high schools to have him come and speak.

Three weeks ago, he stepped onto an elevator in a Winnipeg hotel to go to the top floor. Halfway up, the elevator stopped, the doors opened, a man got on. The man looked closely at him. He asked: "Are you Stephen Lewis?"

Mr. Lewis nodded, smiled pleasantly. "Yes, I am," he said.

The man snapped at him: "My son is in Ethiopia because of you and I don't like it."

Young Canadians -- and likely young people elsewhere in the world -- have found a hero. Anyone who messes with Stephen Lewis better know that.