Ravishing Light

Moved

2006-02-12T19:08:00.000-05:00

2006-01-24T00:36:00.000-05:00

Vindicated. Finally. I can't actually remember the Mulroney government, or anything about the 1993 election, but for the "What's the difference between the PC Party and a pickup truck" joke, so this is really a new experience. I've been waiting. 1997, 2000, 2004; disappointment after disappointment after huge frigging disappointment. My, but doesn't it feel good to have picked the winner for once, without merely-vicarious interest. The results are currently at 124-103-51-29-1, and while that's not the kind of split I would have liked, it's certainly good enough. It's good enough for at least a year and half or more of relative stability, and a great jumping-off point to try for a majority next time around. I'm satisfied enough, and am heartened to think that it might now be possible to improve from an incumbent position. (And my riding didn't go Liberal, at least. Go to hell, Mahoney.) Finally, on the matter of the Liberal leadership, who'd have ever thought it such a squalid little ending? How did Paul Martin go from the presumptive saviour of Canada, to just the member for LaSalle-Emard? One thing I'll be curious to see at some point in the next five or ten years, and if nobody's written one by then I may just take up the project myself: comparative biography of he and George W. Bush. That would be fascinating - portraits of two men who sought the top job for the sake of avenging Dad's failure, but with very different degrees of success. At least he had the decency - though you'd never have guessed it by this past week's frantic flailing - to concede with some dignity and humility. He's already taken up the invincible mantle of Elder Statesman, though, and we certainly won't have him to kick around for much longer. Now, let's get moving, make zero mistakes, and start working on that record that the CPC is going to be running on circa 2008, what?

2006-01-23T10:36:00.000-05:00

I know what I'd like to happen tonight, but I'm also realistic. Pace a number of ridiculous projections by some with hopes of a landslide Tory majority, I don't see them taking any more than 140 seats at best, and I'm not confident of that. That's fine, really; it'd ensure demonstration of competence and integrity without quite as much risk of hot-button social issues coming up. This has been a great campaign, and I don't think that Tories could have done any better nor Liberals any worse - even if rumours of taking a dive are true - so Harper had better make this count. On that note, I never thought I'd write this, but Warren Kinsella gives me hope for this country. (His post yesterday, specifically.) Not in that he's been bullish on a Conservative victory since the campaign started, out of sheer spite at the Martinite wing of the Liberal Party - though that certainly helps - but this: I don't fear Harper, and neither should you. This is the greatest country in the world, and I believe - I know - he wants to make it better, just like the rest of us. This is a man who bleeds Pantone 186, but he's still capable of understanding and admitting, as too few of his colleagues running the current campaign are, that political competitors are not evil. The act of challenging the Liberal Party is not heresy, nor inherently suspect, and most certainly not unpatriotic. In the event of a Conservative victory, Warren, I expect, will start sniping immediately; as well he should. But he knows that Liberal claims to power are no more or less legitimate, and that's what makes the system work. It's just refreshing to hear that, sometimes. Misinterpretation to the contrary is just poisonous to the polity as a whole. For that matter, I figured I'd have to wait until tomorrow, at least, to see international commentators with only passing understanding of Canadian politics to overstate the case, and put considerably more weight (for good or ill) on the significance of CPC resurgence than it actually has. Fortunately, Adam Daifallah and Andrew Coyne have both had excellent précis published in the New York Times and Sun today. In case of victory, it'll still be fun to see the Kos types and their ilk in the American left wail and moan over the incipient Bush-lackey-led fascist nightmare they no doubt imagine a Canadian Conservative government would mean. Especially Michael Moore; oh, but it would be sweet to see his endorsement make precisely no difference to the outcome of an election, again. I'm still nervous. Nothing, but nothing, is certain. I have hope, though. I believe that the country is finally able to escape from stagnant Liberal hegemony, and with the exception of last week's damaging digressions into speculation on judicial philosophy, this campaign couldn't have gone better for Tories. I hope that's appreciated by the voters. If it's still possible to paint the country blue, it'll happen tonight. I hope.

2006-01-15T10:35:00.000-05:00

CanWest vs. CanWest: Montreal Gazette, January 15: Fresh from negotiating a $5-billion aid deal in Kelowna, B.C. in November with Prime Minister Paul Martin and the premiers, national aboriginal leaders want natives to vote the Liberals back in on Jan. 23, or at least support New Democrats. The Metis believe their ballots could affect as many as 33 close ridings in the western provinces and up north, where natives are as much as one-quarter of some ridings' population. The Conservatives? Forget it - they don't have any real official support. Global National, January 14: OTTAWA -- The Conservative party will today receive an official endorsement from the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, a group that represents off-reserve natives, sources have told CanWest News Service. Bad timing is one thing - if both stories had been published on the same day, say - but how does one justify a blanket statement like that made by the Gazette a day after one native group has, in fact, officially declared their support for the Conservative platform? Perhaps some editor in the print division of CanWest needs to be paying more attention to what their television colleagues are reporting...

2006-01-11T23:30:00.000-05:00

Erg. This is going to sting, by tomorrow's news cycle: The Conservative Party was not aware that their candidate in the B.C. riding of British Columbia Southern Interior is due to go on trial next month on smuggling charges, and if convicted, he could end up in jail. [...] In July 2004, Zeisman was crossing into British Columbia from the United States, when Canada Customs charged him with attempting to smuggle in a Mercedes-Benz vehicle and 112 containers of alcohol. Zeisman is also accused of lying to Canada Customs about the incident. Zeisman did not explain to CTV News why he didn't tell his own party about the charges, and blamed someone in government for leaking the information. [...] The government knew about the charges, but the Conservative Party admits it didn't check his background with his former employer. Conservative Party Leader Stephen Harper, who signed Zeisman's nomination papers, says he relies on others for such checking. "There is a screening process," Harper said. "My understanding is that it is supposed to look into criminal backgrounds and obviously rely on candidates to be forthcoming with information as well." At best, this lets the Liberals point and say "See, they're no better than us;" that'd still be an advantage at the moment. At worst, this has the potential to sink the whole integrity-competence-wholesomeness trifecta the Tory campaign has managed to establish so far. Zeisman isn't an incumbent, but he is running in a Conservative riding; Jim Gouk won British Columbia Southern Interior by a very slim 680-vote margin last time around. That would make it a targeted riding, and one that it would really hurt to lose. However, that's beside the point: it may be a lost cause now anyway, with this revelation. I doubt it'll happen, but I'd like to see Stephen Harper set an example, and publicly cede the riding. I mean, seriously, an immediate withdrawal, with loud denunciation of Zeisman's ethical lapse. Think about it: this is a teachable moment. If, absent this problematic candidate, the numbers were to stay as good as they are right now, a single seat in BC may not make the difference. Conversely, I suspect holding on to a dead weight has a reasonable chance of collapsing that delicious lead in the national polls. Unless Zeisman has compelling, incontrovertible evidence of his innocence to display to the voters, he's a liability at this point. If the seat were to go NDP, would that be terrible? Is it not better to sacrifice a pawn - and make a none-too-subtle point about what a Tory government would do about shady erstwhile associates - rather than throw the whole damn game? This is the first real challenge of the Conservative campaign so far; up until this point, it's mostly been fun and games while watching the Martinites either lie low, or visibly implode. I hope the key figures in the war room make the right decision, and do it soon. They haven't so far: The Conservatives say despite just finding out about the charges, they will stand by their man and won't pull him out of the race. But they do, indeed, have about eight hours to fix things. Fingers crossed. (Caveat Lector, of course. I figured that this past weekend's headlines speculating on a majority would be the first painful stumble of the campaign, and look how that sunk without a trace. Failing swift, decisive action on the Zeisman front from the party machine, I hope this is lost in the swirl of the prevailing Throw-the-Bums-Out mood in the electorate.) UPDATE, 01/11/06: Good enough, I suppose. It's a shame it took until midmorning to make the decision, though.

2006-01-11T14:02:00.000-05:00

I don't have much to say about the debates and attack-ad embarassment that hasn't already been said, and better; Paul Martin & Co. seem increasingly to be at the point of losing their minds. For that matter, Paul Wells also points out something that hadn't even occurred to me, on the "Soldiers. In Our Cities. In Canada" meme - soldiers (and sailors, and airmen too, etc etc) are everywhere in Ottawa. They're on the street, at the bus stop, in the mall, and at your local sub shop; DND facilities dot the city, and the Major-General Pearkes Building, national HQ, is about as close to the centre of the city's infrastructure as is possible. Knowing this, and being well aware of how much of a non-issue it is - Liberals are shamelessly Ottawa-centric, if anything, and should logically be mildly aware of their surroundings - how did the mental calculus behind that ad even make it to approval for the so-called "draft" stage? The backlash from this one is going to be just delicious. Nonetheless, the Liberals can still pull this off. Backing predators into a corner will tend to make them more vicious and unpredictable than usual, after all. But at this point, it's looking like longer and longer odds that we won't have a new PM in two weeks. That said, with Martin's thunder today delightfully being stolen by the Red Book leak, here's something flippant I've wanted to do for a while: analysis of the various parties' campaign design and typography. In the interests of equal time - but mostly because their logos are almost universally hideous - I'll even include the fringe parties. The Contender: Who? The Typeface: Which font dominates? The Colours: Instant subconscious associations, ahoy. The Logo: What do the non-textual parts of their graphic identity say? What It Says: Does the aggregate logo imply anything in itself? Rating: How effective is this as a brand? The Contender: Bloc Québécois The Typeface: Gill Sans Bold for "Bloc," FF Meta Bold for "Québécois." The Colours: Dark red, dark grey-blue, light blue. The Logo: A smoothly incorporated fleur-de-lys makes this one of the more inherently iconic of federal party logos. What It Says: The Bloc's logo is smooth and modern-looking, skillfully blending two grotesques - a typeface created in 1929 with one of the early 90s - with colours that can't possibly be mistaken to represent anywhere but Quebec. The smooth curve of the fleur-de-lys implies movement and progress, while subtly pointing towards the textual portion of the logo. Excellent and clean. Rating: A- The Contender: Canadian Action Party The Typeface: Varies. In the official logo submitted to Elections Canada, seen above, the party name appears to be Handel Gothic; I'm not sure, as it's too low-resolution. "Hope" and "Espoir" seem to be in one of the knock-offs of Albertus designed to mimic the typographical quirks added to that font when used in the titles of cult TV classic The Prisoner. On their website, it varies between Arial, in the logo seen in a Flash intro page, and Interstate Condensed. Can we say schizophrenic? The Colours: Bright red and dark blue, in fitting with their delusion of being a nationalist party capable of knocking off both Liberals and Tories. The Logo: A map of Canada. An entire map of Canada, including all the fiddly bits that reproduce poorly at small sizes. What It Says: We cannot be trusted. Between occasional use of Arial (more on that below), and the use of radically over-complex imagery in a logo (a good rule of thumb is that you should be able to draw a memorable logo from memory), this screams amateurism. Albertus - or whatever knockoff in particular that is - should never be used with any kind of optical distortion, and that the Prisoner variant (the lowercase E is clipped, quite distinctively) is in use here just prompts further questions vis-à-vis the CAP's motives, competence, and sense of irony. Paul Hellyer's loons are still Paul Hellyer's loons whether or not he's still with them. Rating: D The Contender: Christian Heritage Party The Typeface: Custom logotype in the central "C," Arial in the party name. On their website, the party name is in Eurostile Bold Condensed, for no apparent reason. The Colours: Pale maroon, inexplicably. I have no idea what that's in aid of. The Logo:Nice use of negative space with the maple leaf; most party logos aren't so creative with it. The letterform of the C itself, however, is very 60s-70s, à la Eurostile or similar heavily-geometrical gothic faces. What It Says: Some people hate Comic Sans. They're not wrong to, but I hate Arial more. It's not a Microsoft product per se, unlike Comic Sans, but they did popularize it as a crude and cheap-looking alternative to the exquisitely clean-looking and ubiquitous Helvetica. Anyone who knows the difference will usually avoid Arial like the plague, choosing either the former or another face entirely; that it's managed to make it to an official copy submitted to Elections Canada is not a compliment to the CHP's marketing skill or hiring wherewithal. The use of Eurostile in an updated logo is only slightly better, but does nothing to prevent the unconscious admission of being stuck at a particular spot forty years in the past. At least the central logo itself is simple and recognizable. Rating: C The Contender: Communist Party of Canada The Typeface: None. Impact - a face in similar bad company with Arial as one of Microsoft's awful substitutes for a bold sans serif font included with Windows by default - on their website, but none in the official logo itself. The Colours: In actuality, red, yellow and blue; that it it simply converted to a recognizable B&W version is a credit to the designer. The Logo: A highly stylized conjunction of wheat and a gearwheel superimposed on a maple leaf. What It Says: Honestly? I love this. It's clean, it's simple, it's stylized, and the imagery is immediately recognizable. You don't have to understand a word of English to see the imagery of maple leaf + farming + industry = Canadian communism. That it nods to Russian constructivism in its imagery is likely no accident. They may be evil, but communists certainly do tend to end up with great graphic designers. Rating: A The Contender: Conservative Party of Canada The Typeface: None in logo itself; Frutiger Bold Italic elsewhere in literature. The Colours: Blue. Solid Tory blue, with all the parliamentary tradition that implies. The Logo: Mobius strip-looking stencil C, still - in my opinion - a bit too close to the CanJet logo. What It Says: Bland and inoffensive; focus-grouped to death, I'm sure. I see this as presenting quiet competence, with a good, timeless mid-century Swiss-inspired typeface. Not very exciting, but that's not the goal, is it? Rating:B+ The Contender: Green Party The Typeface: None; Century Gothic or Avant Garde in their signs. Either way, it's futurist and gothic. The Colours: Green and yellow, more or less healthy-looking. The Logo: Maybe it's supposed to be a sun or sunflower, but to me it always brings to mind the very similar pattern of the BP logo. What It Says: Not much. It's bland, a bit too complex in the particular flares of the sun/sunflower, and doesn't really thematically connect to the party. Neither, for that matter, do their fonts; both imply a very 30s or 70s style of design. (Well, maybe that is intentional.) Rating: C+ The Contender: Liberal Party of Canada The Typeface: Antitle Bold Italic, which offers some delightful quirks with dropped serifs; look at the lowercase B, for example. The Colours: Red. Pure Red. Canadian Red. (Obviously.) The Logo: It reminds me a bit of the Canwest crescent, but makes a nice stand-in for a horizon. What It Says: Slick. Maybe a bit too slick. It shows definite professional influence, and not a little bit of graphical panache. Pace what Warren Kinsella said a little while ago about this election being Tim Horton's-vs.-Starbuck's in terms of values, it might be too hip for the Liberals' own good. Rating: A The Contender: Libertarian Party The Typeface: Arial. Gah. The Colours: Green. The Logo: Reminds me of an airplane tail's corporate livery, and needless duplication of the maple leaf seems odd. What It Says: Professional graphic designers? Hell, we can do that ourself and save a couple hundred bucks, right? Rating: D The Contender: Marijuana Party The Typeface: Arial. Gah, again. The Colours: Sickly ~~puce~~ ecru and sage, I suppose meant to bring to mind the funk of pot smoke, grease and sweat that trails after proponents. The Logo: Thankfully simple: Marijuana leaf and a checkmark. Not bad. What It Says: Another evident do-it-yourself effort, but single-issue parties can afford such things, no? Rating: C+ The Contender: Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada The Typeface: Arial. Arial Bold, this time, which isn't really an improvement. The Colours: Too many. Red, maroon, pink, grey, and salmon. The Logo: Too many layers, and the symbolism loses meaning when submerged in borders within borders. Surely they could have managed to come up with something using just the hammer and sickle, or socialist rose, no? What It Says: Like the CAP's, this logo is just too busy. The acrostic of the party acronym is fantastically overkill. I guess the splitters didn't manage to attract any of those sharp designers when they left. Rating: C The Contender: NDP The Typeface: Futura Extra Bold. The Colours: Orange and green, in what have become their signature colours for no particular reason. The Logo:A fluttering maple leaf in green; a nice touch to imply movement, progress, and environmentalism, to be sure. What It Says: Blunt and humourless, but certainly earnest. The use of a heavy gothic typeface is nice for a party of technocrats. Rating: B+ The Contender: Progressive Canadian Party The Typeface: Gill Sans, maybe. With an awful embossed effect. Sweet Zombie Jesus, people. The Colours: Pale blue and pale red, as befits former Red Tories too fainthearted for the new CPC. The Logo: An outlined maple leaf in the background. What It Says: We've got a copy of Microsoft Word, and nothing else. Rating: D The Contender: Western Block Party The Typeface: None; sloppy hand-lettering. The Colours: None. The Logo: A map of the west. A badly sketched map of the west. What It Says: We actually scanned the bar napkin we sketched this out on and sent it to Elections Canada; that is, in fact, how useless we are. Rating: D- The Contender: First Peoples National Party of Canada The Typeface: Papyrus, a calligraphic face inspired by Carolingian letterforms in a faux-Egyptian effect, which is a decidedly odd choice. The Colours: Red, white, orange, yellow, black, and grey. The Logo: Appears to be a mystery-meat navigation aid for a GeoCities-hosted website, circa 1998. One that might involve fantasy literature. With dragons. What It Says: You're not going to vote for us anyway, so why not play up the generic imagery of the Exotic Other, despite it not fitting our particular socioethnic group very well? Rating: B- Much like the Devil gets all the best tunes, it appears that the Liberals and assorted socialists collectively have the best logos. Ominous!

2006-01-07T22:07:00.000-05:00

I went out to vote today by special ballot. I had to go to the local returning office anyway - this year, annoyingly out near the Tunney's Pasture area - to fix my registered address, in any event; despite getting it right last time, this year Elections Canada sent the notice of registration to my parents' home address. This would be a problem, what with having lived at my current address for the past three years. (As ever, I'm glad I no longer live in the riding of Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke; at least here, Kobayashi Maru though Ottawa Centre may be, I'm not faced with the distasteful dilemma of Cheryl Gallant.) Being there anyway, I decided that I may as well, rather than have to schedule making it over to my assigned polling station on E-day. Mondays are particularly class-heavy for me this term, and the temptation to skip it after a long day of lectures might well have been overpowering. So, yes, I've cast my vote for Keith Fountain, despite the mildly unsettling prospect of voting for someone who looks about 16. The Conservative campaign, though far too squishy for my taste in many policy aspects has nonetheless been delightfully hyper-competent. Also, one of my fears about policy and strategy has been acceptably assuaged, with the politically tone-deaf segments of the party who wanted to fight an election entirely upon opposition to gay marriage kept firmly under wraps. At least, to this point. There's still plenty of time for some loose cannon (a-hem) or another to blow the whole game. (Don't get cocky, people.) In the local context, I fear Richard Mahoney is going to win, with a lot of the centrist support Ed Broadbent had on the basis of the electorate's warm feelings towards politically-resurrected elder statesmen melting away. Uncomfortable as the prospect was, I would have considered the NDP candidate, Paul Dewar, if he seemed to have a better chance. (Anything to stop a Grade-A Martin crony, and all that.) However, I don't have enough confidence in Dewar or his campaign to prevent being steamrolled by scarily dedicated and well-funded Martinites. Rank-and-file Liberals mildly embarrassed at and honestly trying to overcome the reputation the party leadership et al have established for them over the past decade are one thing; close personal friends of the PM with a jones for winning a trophy seat are quite another. That said, Dewar might still come up the middle if any of the Red Tory votes Mahoney snapped up last time fall to the eminently-moderate Fountain, as several posters at the Election Prediction Project surmise. Since a Conservative win is next-to-impossible here, that'd still be an acceptable outcome; either that, or a Mahoney win that turned out to end up in opposition. (I'll take my schadenfreude where I can get it, thank you very much.) In a way, the election is over for me. Convenient though special ballots and advance polls may be, they do have a way to take some of the fun out of the process. Now all that's left is to watch the race (making comments of varying snark and cheer, depending), and hope that I made a good bet.

2006-01-05T18:05:00.000-05:00

I continue to be fascinated by the photo newswires; my observation last week about the curiously good visual coverage Stephen Harper is getting (and, conversely, the PM's campaign getting stuck with more of the less-photogenic shots) seems to be continuing to hold true. Again looking at the Yahoo News aggregator, which showcases the highlights of the various wire services' photos, what do we see over the past few days? Harper looking vaguely determined, in an indeterminately benevolent way: Check, check and check. He's even caught on film smiling in a way that seems more genuinely cheerful than usual, which is a big bonus. (Well, it's not as though he doesn't have good reasons to be cautiously upbeat today...) On the other hand, there's the Liberal campaign. Martin caught in bizarre, goofy poses: Check, check (Did Liberal observers of the 2004 US election learn nothing from John Kerry's 'Bunny Suit' fiasco, or Gilles Duceppe's hairnet issues last year?) and check. (As for a related subset, Martin caught in midpoint of innocuous nervous habits that only look odd out of context: check.) How about Martin looking mildly dazed or befuddled, upstaged by women seeming to be the most competent-slash-awake person in the shot? Yup; both his wife in one pic, and the Minister for Strategic Self-Promotion in another. Martin as a tiny figure speaking to an unseen audience in a seemingly empty hall? Mmm-hmm. Most unnervingly, Martin engulfed by threateningly amorphous blobs? Oh yes. For what it's worth, what Layton and Duceppe photo ops that make it onto national feeds seem generally positive, except for one that unfortunately makes Jack! look a bit like a retired math teacher, or maybe a dapper insurance salesman. Still, the trend seems clear; this remains a more positive (or at least more restrainedly neutral) coverage of a Conservative campaign in photos that I'd possibly expected, with the Liberals getting the brunt of overly-clever editorializing-by-camera angle. There haven't been any shots of the PM in anything so positive as the decidedly beatific poses of last year so far, anyway...

2006-01-04T00:12:00.000-05:00

In keeping with the lighter vein I've been on lately, let's look at the political ramifications of nepotistic hackery - but via a scene from The Venture Bros., a superlative parody of the Jonny Quest style of heroic adventure animation popular in the 1970s, and itself a further spin on the tropes popularized by the character of Doc Savage and his pulp imitators in the 30s and 40s. A finer series, so pitch-perfect in both its satiric and earnestly thematic elements, is probably not to be found in Cartoon Network's lineup. In this episode, the incompetent Dr. Venture has been sought out by reclusive, disabled and not at all similar to Walt Disney, oh my, no theme park magnate Roy Brisby, with an offer to buy the entire research work of his Doc Savage-like super-scientist father on cloning: Dr. Venture: Well, I don't know if I've kept any of Dad's old notes. Mr. Brisby: Don't play coy with me; of course you kept them! You've been riding his corpse's coattails your entire adult life! Dr. Venture: Hey! Where do you get off? You don't know me! Mr. Brisby: Oh, I know you, Dr. Venture. My researchers are very thorough. For instance, you're not actually a doctor of anything. You never finished school. I also know that since you took over Venture Industries, profits have gone... Zip-a-dee-doo-dah. (On the fictional side of things, as long as I'm making topical viewing suggestions, see also: Development, Arrested.) Dynasties - especially the political or corporate varieties - are tricky things, aren't they? Name recognition may get you in the door, but you'd better be able to perform once sitting in the big chair. George Bush used to get a lot of flack for being "Junior," imagined by opponents to be a lesser clone of his father - at least, considerably more than now, on that particular angle of attack. Likewise the current Mayor Daley of Chicago, who lost his first bid for Daley Senior's old job, only to later start a similar streak; tying dear old Dad's 21-year record will take only until 2010, at this point. On the other hand, you can also have scions that screw up the whole family gig with pervasive mediocrity, like Ohio Governor Bob Taft, who's probably retroactively damaged the reputation of his great-grandfather. Or, in the Canadian context, Paul Martin. Some pundits - Warren Kinsella immediately comes to mind, but there are others - seem to take perverse glee in naming the PM as "Paul Martin Junior" when they really want to twist the knife vis-à-vis the scandal of the day. I can't; not only is it untrue - his father's middle names differ - but calling attention to his father's career and reputation is a needlessly petty way to casually belittle the man. At least, it is when he does such a good job of riding that corpse's coattails all by himself: "What if decades ago, Tommy Douglas and my father and Lester Pearson had considered the idea of medicare and then said, 'Forget it, let's just give people 25 bucks a week?"' Martin asked. Well, I daresay we'd have a less neurotic country today, sans the myth of increasingly-inefficient socialized medicine justifying an undeserved self-image of Canada the Good, but that's neither here nor there. No, my issue with random accusation of Stephen Harper will destroy Canada! #253 is the name-dropping of his father's reputation: Why? Why does he do this? The senior Martin, whatever the popular legend of his being his generation's Saviour of the Liberal Party, never actually managed that feat, and his son's done a pretty thoroughly mediocre job of pulling it off himself. As Kinsella, for one, is delighted to remind anyone and everyone at any opportunity, Paul Martin's major accomplishment as leader has been the palace coup that put him in power and forced the Chretienite wing of the Liberals into exile. It's not as if he's even run a particularly competent campaign so far; as Bob Tarantino notes today, he's now seeming so politically tone-deaf (invoking the name of Mike Harris, which, while it might fire up the die-hard Liberal base with loyal baying for right-wing blood, has a reasonable chance of backfiring with the undecided Ontario middle who re-elected Harris in 1999 for law-and-order reasons in a climate not far off from today's) it's astounding. One has to wonder, at this point, about where the fabled Martin reputation for political brilliance was even born; the Hidden Agenda trope that won last time was the rhetorical equivalent of a baseball bat. Without benefit of Harper or loudmouth Tory backbenchers shooting the CPC in the foot, and subsequently being forced to improve his game, it now seems that wildly swinging such blunt instruments might actually be the limit of the PM's tactical finesse. Between the seemingly improving-and-stabilizing poll numbers, and poor Liberal performance so far, I think I'm prepared to say that this election is now Stephen Harper's to lose - and while there's still probably a better-than-even chance of that, if so, it certainly won't be because of Martin's vaunted political acumen or crack campaign team. A dynasty is a terrible thing to waste, no?

2006-01-03T00:36:00.000-05:00

The polls are worrying me. These kind of numbers might be peaking just a bit too soon, and the gut-wrenching awfulness of panicky backlash, like last year's, is a frightening prospect. Though it does, thankfully, appear that such backlash may be muted, it's not much helping that nervous twitch in my neck I get every time I see a TORIES GAINING headline. The solution, as ever, is simple: write at length on a heartily frivolous topic to take my mind off the problem. It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that I watch a lot of Teletoon, Canada's pale imitation of animation-focused American cable station Cartoon Network. It's my default channel, the one that I tend to rest on when nothing else is on and the repeated loops of the news networks are getting on my nerves. (CTV Newsnet in particular - and I could swear I made comments to the CRTC at their request that helped to successfully lift that annoying little requirement from their broadcast license. Oh well; I guess old habits die hard.) Sure, I've seen every episode of Futurama, Family Guy and Home Movies dozens of times over, now - often muted - but that kind of repetition is still better than most of what the broadcast networks have to offer. What this does mean, however, is that I'm particularly sensitive (so used to the usual patterns of them as I am) to any change in programming, promos, bumpers, station identification, etc. Promos for the newest block of special programming only showed up today or yesterday, and no information, unfortunately, is yet available on the Teletoon website. Let it not be said that the enforced incompetence of Cancon rules imposed upon Corus in determining the station's programming is somehow made up for with marketing savvy in 'New Media' areas. Hell, look at the extent of what they've accomplished, under their late-night program block brand name of "The Detour," to promote marquee series Bromwell High - and what British co-producer Channel 4 has. (Both links highly NSFW.) The latter is an excellent example of interactive Flash with original animation; the former is...somewhat less so. In any event, the special block is horror-themed, titled "The Dead of Winter" - and interestingly enough, seems to feature all the same wonderfully 80s series that were picked up for a temporary run for Halloween-themed blocks last October: The Real Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice, and rare permutations of Scooby-Doo. That's nothing short of brilliant, and I don't just say that because I love at least two of those. Indeed, it's a joy to see The Real Ghostbusters again; not only is it a show featuring many excellent scripts by later Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski, but it also has the power to engender soft pink feelings of nostalgia for that circa-1990 point in my childhood when I was absolutely obsessed with the entire Ghostbusters franchise, and those are probably qualities of equal merit. (Seriously. Obsessed. I picked my first pair of glasses based on the premise of wanting to look like Egon - and not with Harold Ramis' prissy little wire-rims from the movie, either, but the perceptually thicker frames of the animated Egon's character design. Yikes, huh?) Beetlejuice, likewise, is another blast of nostalgia, yet manages (by virtue of the actual production being contracted out to Canadian animation house Nelvana) to fulfill part of the daily schedule's Cancon quota. More interestingly, it's probably the most Tim Burtonesque of all subsidiary works based on Tim Burton's increasingly bizarre oeuvre, with direct thematic links to The Nightmare Before Christmas, Sleepy Hollow and Corpse Bride; it's the full extension of the expanded universe from which all Burton's Gothic meandering is drawn. Even more interestingly, the writers somehow managed, by sheer force of will, to paper over the whole statutory rape-based premise of Beetlejuice and Lydia's relationship established in the original film. That's some accomplishment for an animated spinoff that's still pretty dark, even if it does occasionally drift into clumsily rendered Relevant Childrens' Themes of the period. (I sometimes wonder how anyone growing up in the early 90s managed to avoid a neurotic complex over the persistent unwillingness of the entire planet to embrace vaguely-justified, simplistic environmentalism, of the kind that was for a time ubiquitous on Saturday morning TV.) For these, then, I can most definitely applaud a weird kludge of a programming theme; kudos to whatever Teletoon executive sold their boss on reusing the entire Halloween block in situ. Now, if only the same persuasion could be applied to arranging for more than sixty minutes per week of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim original series, perhaps in lieu of an episode or two of Family Guy on the non-Canadian side of the programming ledger...

2006-01-01T17:55:00.000-05:00

It almost seems as though someone is trying to communicate something about the credibility of disgraced professional athletes in this story's layout, but I just can't tell what...

2005-12-31T13:38:00.000-05:00

I had the opportunity last week to read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, an entertaining little piece of pop sociology with a simple premise: Massive changes happen due to marginal changes. When a certain threshold is reached - not necessarily one that can be predicted beforehand, or even realized in retrospect - further change progresses rapidly and exponentially. Gladwell's analysis is a bit irritating in that it's mostly isolated (though impressive) examples offered in support of generalized 'laws,' without a useful, transferable conclusion, but the theory of the tipping point in itself is an interesting one to explore. While I think it's long been evident that the Canadian media as a whole tends to skew left, or at least anti-conservative - often expressed in support, with varying grades of subtlety, for Liberal policies and personalities - such an institutional bias remains a guarantee of nothing. Indeed, for whatever reason, the media as a whole - led by the Globe & Mail , Toronto Star and others - seems to be turning against Paul Martin at an ever-increasing rate, and giving uncannily positive or neutral coverage to the Conservative campaign. I'm inclined to think this might be rooted in some degree of cynical marketing groupthink, to be honest; attempting to demonstrate to the rubes, provincial and dull, that there are newspapers besides Quebecor's Sun chain that aren't entirely in the Liberals' back pocket. The evidence for this isn't much, I'll admit, but it's growing - and a good example is in the daily trickle of photojournalism. Yahoo! News' photo feed is a good example, collecting the most iconic of CP and others' work. The interesting thing here is that most shots of Martin are amazingly unflattering, making him seem old, tired, dazed, or choleric, and often including that charmless little grimace he seems to believe is similar to a genuine smile. Even that one shot of the PM looking unnervingly like a cornered, depressive skeleton that surfaced yesterday, in reporting the income trust probe and concurrent Liberal slippage in the polls, was dug up from AFP's archives of this past May. It's been hard to find a still photo of Paul Martin looking appealing lately, and it's not as though making him look Prime Ministerial is particularly difficult, with the right camera angle. Conversely, photos of Stephen Harper seem much more likely to be neutral or blandly flattering. I and many other have noted how he's suffered photogenically in the past, looking somewhere between unconvincingly cheerful and just plain creepy, but he's improved considerably of late; either that, or what unappealing photo ops he's had lately have been largely ignored. For instance, the Globe & Mail's story about the pre-emptive Tory strategy to deflect negative Liberal ads with an inoculatory one of their own is accompanied by a shot of...Harper climbing into a minivan. One might make the case that this was chosen to imply, with his reflection visible in the foreground window, some sort of two-faced personality, but I think that's a stretch; more than anything, it's just dull. I'm sure it wouldn't have been hard to find a photo of him in a vaguely sinister pose, if that was what the editor in question wanted. So do we have a case of selection bias here, in the choice of photos that make it out on the wires, and are subsequently run by a number of media outlets? I have no idea. Maybe it is just the old horse-race mentality, with no further calculation or connivances required. But I hope it's a real sea change, and a harbinger of popular opinion - and if that's true, maybe we can count on exponentially growing movement in the polls as we near E-Day.

2005-12-29T12:46:00.000-05:00

One of the things I dislike about the post-Christmas period is that I can never get anything useful done. The advertising business, while due to pick up in January, is still semi-comatose until after New Year's Day. I have plenty of time to finish designs right now, but unfortunately, not much of a backlog to occupy me, and no classes until about the same point. So, how can I best kill time? Inane statistical analysis based on impractical fantasy, of course! Here's John Ibbitson in a Q&A session on the Globe & Mail's site, in a semi-humourous aside on the matter of Canadian-American relations: It has been said that the greatest gift Canada could bestow on humankind would be to voluntarily accept annexation by the United States, thus ensuring Democrat administrations in perpetuity. That said, I do believe this goes beyond simply a clash of administrations. Both countries need to openly assess shared and differing values, working to accentuate the former and minimize the consequences of the latter. (Really? Who's said that, exactly?) On his point, though...well, you'd think so, wouldn't you? I mean, of course a Greater United States including Canada would produce an overwhelming and perpetual liberal majority that would ensure Republicans to be unelectable for all time, right? But that got me thinking, and after doing some calculations*, in fact, the central premise of the joke turns out to be considerably less accurate than one might imagine. After 2000 and 2004 I'm sure everyone understands the Electoral College, and its indirect relationship to population weight. Each state receives a number of electoral votes equal to the sum of its representatives in the House, plus two Senators. However, the size of the House is currently fixed at 435**, and has been since 1913, after reapportionment conducted on the basis of the 1910 census. So, let's say for the sake of argument that Canadians were to suddenly rise as one tomorrow, and demand annexation by the United States. The size of the House might well be changed entirely, but let's say the proportionate weight of representation remained the same, with something like one representative per 645,000 people. (This is a slightly fudged average, as reapportionment is manually tweaked by Congress, but it's close enough.) If the size of the House were to remain the same in the enlarged United States, that ratio would drop to 1:725,000 or thereabouts. Remember, too, that this isn't a constant; each state, no matter the population, receives at least one representative in the House, as does DC. All of this means that existing states would see their share of the Electoral College's votes decrease, whether in absolute numbers or merely in proportion to the whole. Let's also assume that, of the former provinces, most would mimic voting patterns of their nearby counterparts, with Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes falling neatly into the Northeastern Democratic voting bloc, and the prairies and territories into the Midwestern Democrat-leaning group that includes Wisconsin and Minnesota. (Assuming Quebec to be still a part of the former Canada-slash-greater US at this point, something of a counterfactual quandary.) Only Alberta might be considered a conservative stronghold to the effect that presidential elections would semi-reliably trend Republican. BC is a remote possibility, I think, but would probably be safely Democratic. So, what do we have, then? This projection of electoral votes and probable affiliations: (The number of electoral votes I've allocated are based on, again, a slightly fudged formula for representation in the House, which means that this is necessarily even more of a blue-sky projection than the premise necessitates.) If we assume 2004-like voting patterns - probably the best conceivable showing for Republicans in the present context - this adds up to a 294-270 Democratic victory. That's a healthy margin, but not quite an Electoral College landslide à la 486-52 for LBJ in 1964, 520-17 for Nixon in 1972, or 489-49 for Reagan in 1980. In fact, it looks like nothing so much as a slightly skewed version of the status quo. If BC flipped, it'd be only 286-278. If the territories weren't given full representation as states, but only a single token representative (and possibly Senators) between the three of them, something akin to DC or Puerto Rico's oddball arrangements, that edges the math even further towards a complete tossup. Moreso, if Quebec is taken out of the equation. In short, Ibbitson's glib rejoinder falls prey to that all-too-Canadian delusion of significance that confuses geography with population; true, the State of Ontario would be ranked fifth in size behind California, Texas, New York, and Florida, but most of Canada would be in the bottom twenty. So, who's up for annexation now, then, after the myth of a permanently enshrined Democratic Party turns out to be only a statistically minor boost? A two or three-state gap wouldn't be so wide it couldn't be swung, y'know... * All population numbers from Wikipedia, because I'm too lazy to delve through the godawful layouts of StatsCan and the Census Bureau's respective sites. I did enough of that last term, thank you very much. ** There's a minor exception, I know, on the admission of Hawaii and Alaska. But only a minor one, designed to maintain the ~435 standard, which I think supports my point.

2005-12-28T22:58:00.000-05:00

I'm a creature of habit. (To say the least.) Unfortunately, that means being forced out of my sleepwalk of comfortable routines, even for a few days, is very nearly traumatic. I spent Christmas through Boxing Day with family outside of Toronto, and I'm still in a semi-dazed state of recovery. That wouldn't be a problem, except that it tends to lead to lapses in awareness and judgment, such as managing to misplace bus tickets, celery, or ATM receipts, all of which I managed in a span of ten minutes while out grocery shopping today. Or, for instance, failing to notice amusing quasi-Engrish until the third time leafing through the manual for my new fuzzy logic rice cooker: Honestly, the third thing hadn't really occurred to me. All of which is to say, this probably isn't the best time to lay out my perceptions of the beta phase of Campaign 2006, but it's not as though they've changed much for the past few weeks. On the subject of the election, indeed, I'm afraid I'm not holding out much hope. To be sure, I can't endorse fits of cynicism like Jay Currie's, predicting a massive Tory collapse nationwide, but I'm afraid another Liberal minority (decreased, perhaps, to a true state of deadlock) seems all too probable. It would be wonderful to end up with a Conservative minority - which I think might be necessary, at this point, to demonstrate to the more easily-frightened parts of the country that the party is mostly centrist - even if that centrism is starting to look a bit like soft-socialism. (Especially when it looks that way to Toronto Star reporters.) Yes, I know that as a tough-on-crime hawkish-foreign-policy free-market mostly-socially-liberal weakly-agnostic Anglo misanthrope (whew), I'm never going to be completely satisfied with the policies of any party, but I'm feeling less upbeat about Tory campaign policies (skillfully triangulated works of domestic realpolitik though they may be) than usual right now. Still, if it takes squishy nationalism and hard-line federalism to win votes, I can put up with ~~a little~~ ideological discomfort. Half a loaf is better than none, and a PM forced to the centre by polling numbers only some of the time would be an improvement on a complete weathervane.

2005-12-27T22:45:00.000-05:00

So, I'm back. Sort of. At least for the duration of the election - but that can wait. It's not as though I've felt I had nothing to say for most of the past term - to that audience such as I have - but more that I've felt I haven't had enough to say. To that end, I'm going to try waxing Lileksian for a while, with regular, multifaceted updates; it might, I imagine, take some of the edge off of having to come up with a fully elaborated thesis (brief though it may be) in separate posts. That, and it'd become a pain to match appropriate lyrics for titles to blog content, so that what started as an innocent - if overly twee - gimmick eventually became an obstacle to casual expression. All that's neither here nor there, however; it's not what's been bothering me over Christmas. The first thing that has is a 1939 MGM animated short, which I caught on Turner Classic Movies on Saturday morning; this was first of all a surprise, because I didn't realize the channel was even available in Canada. I'd also never seen this particular short before, so I was also surprised by its stunning...well...something, be it amorality or naïveté. I'm speaking of "Peace on Earth," which seems to be uncannily well-regarded despite its very specific context. In a nutshell, a strangely secularized (and annoyingly repetitious) chorus of "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" is a leitmotif for depicting a charmingly crusty grandfather squirrel explaining to his grandchildren who the mysterious "men" of the lyric "Peace on Earth, goodwill to men" are. This is a post-apocalyptic world, you see, inherited by the innocent woodland creatures after the last humans destroyed each other in a massive (and strangely looking to be fought with arms of WWI vintage) war. Among other scenes hanging a lampshade on the simplistic message is one where the younger grandfather squirrel, in flashback, discovers a bible open to the Sixth Commandment, and by gum, not fixin' to cause no harm to other critters what one meets in this big ol' world seems like a jim-dandy idea to him. (I paraphrase, of course, but not much.) To be fair, there is a logical and excusable context for this kind of thinking - or would have been, about a decade prior. It was 1928, after all, that saw the exquisite diplomatic fantasy that was the Kellogg-Briand Pact, espousing the notion that it was, in fact, possible to end the practice of war by legal fiat. After the horrors of the Great War, and without the spectre of German militarism yet visibly back on the horizon, I don't think this was an unreasonable position to take, idealistic though it may have been. By "Peace on Earth's" release on the 9th of December 1939, however, and even by its time of production throughout 1939, well...let's just note that it was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, with all that implies after the invasions of Poland and Finland. The best that can be said about "Peace on Earth" is that it was an idealistic call to pacifism as a realistic foreign policy strategy, one which simply happened, in retrospect, to be very badly timed. I'm more inclined to call it an ugly little piece of deluded, head-in-the-sand isolationism - the steadfast belief, too common in Americans before Pearl Harbor, that what happens over there is none of our business. While technically superb, especially in effect animation and rotoscoping techniques, it's a sad artifact of the period. The whole thing is a reminder of the smug sense of superiority felt by a certain type of person, on the possibility of simply opting out of dealing with unreasonable men - the same sort who would embrace such vapid statements as "War is over, if you want it," two generations later - and how terribly misplaced that belief must necessarily be. The second thing is Doctor Who, and specifically the Christmas special-cum-stealth Season 28 premiere that aired last night on CBC. The Doctor has just regenerated from a painful death in last season's finale, leaving him more or less helplessly comatose (and considerably more David Tennant-shaped) for most of the episode - and inconveniently so, given an invasion of Earth by the barbaric Sycorax, who threaten from their huge city-ship to variously kill or enslave all of humanity merely because they can. Prime Minister Harriet Marsh (who won in a landslide majority after the Doctor's last significant visit to contemporary Earth, where he removed a number of alien conspirators from Number Ten, leaving backbencher Marsh the political heroine of the day) is teleported to the Sycorax vessel, along with her advisors from the government command centre attempting countermeasures against the incipient invasion, and given an ultimatum: Surrender. Fortunately, the Doctor wakes up in time to handily beat the invading leader in a duel and entreat the remaining Sycorax to leave, demanding in their travels that they speak of Earth not as a target ripe for pillage - but as a planet ably defended. As the ship leaves, Marsh orders her aide to initiate the countermeasures they'd been preparing, which turn out to be a Death Star-like convergent energy beam weapon that vaporizes the Sycorax. The Doctor is outraged, of course, as any pacifist of convenience might be. How could humanity be so cruel, he demands? Should he instead be warning the rest of the galaxy of the monsters coming from Earth? Marsh coolly points out that the Doctor, while always the saviour of Earth (and particularly Britain) when around, often isn't, and that she has a duty to protect her constituents from vicious alien invaders of unproven reliability. In retaliation, the Doctor initiates a whispering campaign which is implied to end her political career shortly thereafter. Doctor Who has never been particularly subtle in its politics. The projected future of the late 1970s imagined, in the Doctor's universe, the first female British PM being Labourite Shirley Williams. The Seventh Doctor story "The Happiness Patrol", though brilliantly absurdist at points, was largely a juvenile fit of Thatcher-bashing. However, by comparison, that was a masterpiece of restraint and good taste. What I see in this is another instance of isolationism, but in that oddly post-9/11 European passive-aggressive manner: We liked you better as victims. Come wallow in self-pity with us, and we might help. The French felt "We are all Americans now" when the United States was wounded and laid low; the Doctor can only allow sympathy for helpless primitives he can rely on to require his help. When the hurt or threatened dare to proactively defend themselves - as the Doctor himself could not or would not when his own race was all but exterminated by the Daleks - well, that's beyond the pale. But - and this is key - the destruction of the Sycorax is obviously meant to echo the destruction of the General Belgrano during the Falklands War, as a purported instance of vindictiveness on the part of victorious Britain. I think Wikipedia's analysis thereof is fairly balanced in explaining just what kind of petty moral equivocation this belief is. The other political allusions therein are so inane I shouldn't even try to reply, but for offering a sentiment I hope should be self-evident: Naked pyramids of prisoners, however reprehensible, != summary execution by painful disintegration. I am pretty sure there's some kind of gap between those two concepts. What is my point, then? I'm not sure. But I do know I'm disappointed by the short-sighted petty politics that the BBC sees fit to endorse today, no less than that selfish and cowardly endorsement of pacifism by the Hollywood of 1939. Not only are the inferable accusations of "The Christmas Invasion" unfair and ridiculous, they're not all that consistent with the character of the Doctor, as malleable as that concept is. I came to love Doctor Who after being introduced to it last season, and I'd hate to have to give up on new episodes for the sake of pervasive ideological foolishness.

Workin' so hard that you don't even know you're alive

2005-10-16T17:45:00.000-04:00

Even more agonizingly dull and repetitive than you'd probably think: Poring over want ads running in the April 1961 New York Times, collating and tabulating all conceivably relevant data on positions and salaries offered in the "Help Wanted - Female" category, as qualitative research for a lengthy ~~womens'~~ ~~gender~~ womens' and gender history term paper. Still, it is enlightening, to some degree. I was aware of the jocularly condescending term 'Gal Friday' for female clerical workers - used by 1940, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, and most certainly popularized in common usage by the Howard Hawks film - but not the extent to which it was considered a legitimate job title. An astounding number of listings I've been tabulating so far either give no other title, or else use the term to describe something officially called a stenographic or secretarial position. I can certainly sympathize with the dissatisfaction of early feminists on the count of demanding respect some modicum of basic dignity and respect in the workplace, anyway. (And on that note, let's not even go near the 'Typist/Receptionist' positions that have optimal bra size listed in the job requirements, shall we?) Now, slightly less agonizing: doing the same thing for the counterpart issues of the Globe & Mail. Mainly because they're shorter, and the layout is slightly less eye-wateringly dense. (What? I'm just saying. The Sulzberger family certainly knew how to get their money's worth in paper expenses, way back when.)

Obligatory irregular update #5

2005-10-08T20:54:00.000-04:00

The long and the short of things is, I'm still not dead. Beyond that, though... For the first time in a month, I have nothing imminently due or necessary to prepare for in the foreseeable future (read: "two to three days"). I finished the marathon that was studying for and writing the LSAT last week, and am cautiously confident of a respectable score in the upper range of the scale; I'm done every piece of course-related writing due for another three weeks; and both jobs have calmed down for a bit. I'm in the rather odd position, then, of having forgotten what I usually do for fun beyond multitasking-friendly distractions like music or TV. I'm sure I'll figure it out again just soon enough to be overtaken by a whole new set of suddenly-defined deadlines. On the other hand, I've also created a whole new set of neuroses to cope with, in finally convincing parts of the advertising business to switch. (Y'know, Switch.) Yes, I've finally made my first converts as a Mac evangelist. I should be happy, after selling the virtues of OS X on a semi-ubiquitous basis for the past six months, but I'm kind of terrified, being that I'll be the one ending up providing tech support. Which is to say, I don't remember: have I said anything in an offhand manner about the spiffiness of Tiger recently that's going to come back and bite me? Still, that's a much lesser evil than having to provide the same level of support for a wonky Windows box with unreliable hardware. I've passed on the copy of Brian Tiemann's excellent OS X Panther in a Snap that I no longer need, in hopes that it might forestall some questions, but I think putting in a purchase request for an updated reference work or two on Tiger, as well as a copy of Remote Desktop - just in case - might not be a bad investment either. But now, if you'll excuse me, there's a copy of the Age of Empires III demo that's been sitting on my desktop uninstalled - or even copied to the PC capable of running it - for far too long, and the changes to the resource and trade systems look just plain neat.

To seek revenge may lead to Hell, but everyone does it, and seldom as well

2005-10-02T10:36:00.000-04:00

Even for the NYT, this is a remarkably tone-deaf headline: "To More Inmates, Life Term Means Dying Behind Bars." Just a few decades ago, a life sentence was often a misnomer, a way to suggest harsh punishment but deliver only 10 to 20 years. But now, driven by tougher laws and political pressure on governors and parole boards, thousands of lifers are going into prisons each year, and in many states only a few are ever coming out, even in cases where judges and prosecutors did not intend to put them away forever. Indeed, in just the last 30 years, the United States has created something never before seen in its history and unheard of around the globe: a booming population of prisoners whose only way out of prison is likely to be inside a coffin. A survey by The New York Times found that about 132,000 of the nation's prisoners, or almost 1 in 10, are serving life sentences. The number of lifers has almost doubled in the last decade, far outpacing the overall growth in the prison population. Of those lifers sentenced between 1988 and 2001, about a third are serving time for sentences other than murder, including burglary and drug crimes. Growth has been especially sharp among lifers with the words "without parole" appended to their sentences. In 1993, the Times survey found, about 20 percent of all lifers had no chance of parole. Last year, the number rose to 28 percent. The phenomenon is in some ways an artifact of the death penalty. Opponents of capital punishment have promoted life sentences as an alternative to execution. And as the nation's enthusiasm for the death penalty wanes amid restrictive Supreme Court rulings and a spate of death row exonerations, more states are turning to life sentences. Defendants facing a potential death sentence often plead to life; those who go to trial and are convicted are sentenced to life about half the time by juries that are sometimes swayed by the lingering possibility of innocence. As a result the United States is now housing a large and permanent population of prisoners who will die of old age behind bars. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, for instance, more than 3,000 of the 5,100 prisoners are serving life without parole, and most of the rest are serving sentences so long that they cannot be completed in a typical lifetime. About 150 inmates have died there in the last five years, and the prison recently opened a second cemetery, where simple white crosses are adorned with only the inmate's name and prisoner ID number. Wonder of wonders, it seems that life sentences once are again living up to their name, and are as permanent a punishment as the death sentences they often replace. This is supposed to be a bad thing? At the very least, it's nice to see the hypocrisy of early parole for "life" sentences minimized. Of course, the Times seems to think such practices are unusually cruel, because - wait for it - the Western European view is that twelve years is a long sentence. Fascinatingly, they seem to leave out the fact that several Western European countries, including Britain and Italy, hand down life sentences (whether de facto or de jure) regardless of public opinion: In much of the rest of the world, sentences of natural life are all but unknown. "Western Europeans regard 10 or 12 years as an extremely long term, even for offenders sentenced in theory to life," said James Q. Whitman, a law professor at Yale and the author of "Harsh Justice," which compares criminal punishment in the United States and Europe. Michael H. Tonry, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota and an expert on comparative punishment, said life without parole was a legal impossibility in much of the world. Mexico will not extradite defendants who face sentences of life without parole. And when Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981, was pardoned in 2000, an Italian judge remarked, "No one stays 20 years in prison." Some developing and Islamic nations mete out brutal sanctions, including corporal punishment and mutilation. But if the discussion is limited to very long prison sentences, Professor Tonry said, "we are vastly more punitive than anybody else." Uh-huh. Implications of the moral superiority of Mexican justice (!), and outright equivocation with hand-chopping sharia-spouting madmen - to say nothing of some selective, context-free quotations that could leave the reader with the mistaken impression that the US is the only civilized, modern nation still sentencing the convicted to life without parole. Is it any wonder that legislators, parole board members, and the general public at large might seem increasingly disinclined - if the survey in the lede is accurate - to pay attention to those desperately concerned for the quality of life of aging murderers?

As supernice (nice) a person like you

2005-09-26T22:17:00.000-04:00

Classy. Apple's actually going about refunding the unjustly-collected copyright levy revenues iPods sold in Canada were subjected to, prior to this year - which means I could pocket a surprise $25 for the cost of a stamp; not a bad deal. On the other hand, unclaimed funds will be donated to the Red Cross - and I don't have a problem with that at all. (Come on, you guys; stop being so lovably benevolent. I'm trying not to buy a nano until, at the very least, John Quincy iPod won't hold even a two-hour charge, and things like this could really wear down my resistance. Even taking into account plausible horror stories regarding the former.) (Via TUAW.)

Keep your castles in the air; by building them down there, you'll never learn to fly

2005-09-25T10:19:00.000-04:00

While enjoyable, the animation festival hasn't served up enough this year so fantastically impressive that I feel like doing item-by-item reviews. The one exception to that is The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (inadequate official site here), which I saw last night in one of the short competitions - and it more than makes up for the godawful abstract shorts (if it looks like it could be a 3D screensaver set to randomly render crystalline objects for six and a half minutes, I'm not interested) or the unsubtle skew of all political subjects (I swear, it's just too easy to pander to a Canadian audience) and then some. No, Jasper Morello is absolutely exquisite, a high-Victorian steampunk tale of gothic horror, animated in a haunting CG-assisted cutout style. The official site above, while sorely lacking in content, offers a brief taste of that style: lanky silhouettes on a background of elaborately-detailed, sepia-toned ironworks. That there's an actual story, and quite a compellingly human one, at that, is no less appreciated; the art of the narrative is often ignored in short animated subjects. Add that to a new and gorgeous way of rendering the increasingly-tired clockwork-computers-and-cast-iron-airships milieu, and the result is a joy to behold. My only complaint is that I wish it had been last in the program, instead of Don Hertzfeld's sometimes-amusing but ultimately overambitious and tedious The Meaning of Life. The former was twenty-six minutes long, but felt like ten; the latter ran only twelve minutes, but seemed to stretch on for an eternity. (There's a lesson there, I think.)

All are tales of human failing

2005-09-23T11:00:00.000-04:00

It's that time again - late September - which means that the Ottawa International Animation Festival is on; and, as usual, I've done the volunteer thing in order to get a free screening pass. I've tried in recent years to pick volunteer positions that get me places otherwise not accessible to the public, and the addition of the Television Animation Conference to the program is perfect, in that regard; yesterday, I managed to catch part of a new format of pitch session while manning a sticky door in the Château Laurier. The pitch I saw - Gumnutz - encapsulates, more or less, everything that could possibly be wrong with television animation. First, it was derivative. The concept of anthropomorphic animals operating a secret magical juice factory in the woods seemed a bit less strained twenty years ago with The Gummi Bears, but, hey, this pitch set the whole thing in Australia, and that could potentially overcome the copycat vibe. More problematic, however - and I was happy to see the entire panel of programming directors from Cartoon Network, Teletoon, Kids WB and Nickelodeon call them on this - was the substitution of multiethnicity (or, to be less kind, what used to be called "comic accents") for genuine characterization, in some sort of bizarre affirmative-action 'casting' policy. Yes, Australia has large Greek and Lebanese populations. So? What does it add to the character of the goofy lizard mechanic to say that he's Lebanese, or to make the mad-scientist henchman of the chief villain a turban-wearing Indian snake? I don't think the characterizations quite veered into genuinely offensive territory, though the Yiddish and aggressively fey bodybuilder characters (as Nickelodeon's Peter Gal pointed out) came awfully close. I don't blame the producers for falling so far into the trap of writing for a PC audience. After all, it's just being Tolerant and Inclusive, right? Even if it ends up being a series set in the Australian Outback with exactly four characters out of a large ensemble cast who aren't defined in terms of what kind of hyphenated-Australian they are? That, while annoying, may be a necessary evil; I know Australia has a domestic film and TV-subsidizing bureaucracy much like Canada's, and pandering to those bureaucrats for grant money may entail some degree of kowtowing to Goodthink. That's only the most significant problem, however, among an unfocused and overambitious plot arc, some surprisingly dark subject matter, and a blandly traditional design style. I'd be surprised if Gumnutz is ever produced - at least, in any form resembling the current pitch.

The rats on the street all dance 'round my feet

2005-09-19T10:33:00.000-04:00

Curse you, Lileks. I'll never again be able to think of the Stratford Festival without mentally transposing the phrase "St. Ratfood" into a Southern Ontarian theatrical context.

Time is getting on, there's still so much to do

2005-09-17T19:09:00.000-04:00

So, here's the thing: I'm still busy. Really busy. That's not necessarily a problem in itself, but it's caused me to realize I have to more or less give up resisting something I'd hoped to avoid: the prospect of more often buying prepared foods or (shudder) eating out. Yes, I'm still a student, but I've always taken a certain degree of pride in not having the stereotypically wasteful, ignorant, and economically unsound eating habits of one. I buy in bulk and cook from scratch; I always have some kind of soup or stew made and on hand for quick meals; I roast, sauté, double-boil, steam, and bake. I keep a regular stock of all-purpose garnishes like balsamic vinegar, fresh limes, and cilantro, for pity's sake. In short, I take it as a personal failing to not eat well, reasonably nutritiously, and cheaply. That's why it hurts so much, between classes and work, to not have the time to do little things like bake bread or make a brown stock: I feel guilty about it. I'm now making enough (well, to be fair, an amount I'd have called 'crazy stupid improbable' for my age and experience, not too long ago) money from my various jobs that I can certainly afford to eat out daily, or have frozen dinners morning, noon and night, but, crikey, the guilt. It just gnaws away at me. I can't stop myself from analyzing every dish, and calculating exactly how much the restaurant or manufacturer's markup is. Obviously I can't argue with that markup involved in labour and capital expenditures, but it's painful nonetheless, to know that (barring exceptionally complex recipes) if I had a little time and the ingredients on hand, I could cook something just as good for half to a quarter of the price. Curséd be the man who knows the worth of every onion and olive! I know it's silly, and that my time is right now often worth considerably more than potential savings on staples. Yet, somehow, that's not really a comfort. At least I can take the necessity as an opportunity to explore restaurants near campus...

Fortune favors the free

2005-09-12T09:06:00.000-04:00

The hell? Toronto — Seeking to end months of debate, Premier Dalton McGuinty now says "there will be no sharia law in Ontario" -- an announcement that should quell a growing public-relations crisis concerning the use of Islamic law, but which also exposes Queen's Park to attacks from other religions. Following widespread condemnation of a plan that would formally allow the tenets of sharia to be used in resolving family disputes, the Premier said he'll make the boundaries between church and state clearer by banning faith-based arbitrations. [...] "I'm so happy today. It's a victory for the women's rights movement," said Homa Arjomand, an Iranian immigrant who has launched a campaign to stop sharia in Ontario. "Women's rights are not protected by any religion," she said. But fundamentalist Islam, in particular, can be harsh, she said. "Divorces are happening behind closed doors and the woman is banned from having custody of her children," Ms. Arjomand said. "She is being sent back to her home country to live with her relatives." She went so far as to say that proposed new laws ought to allow for the prosecution of religious leaders involved in faith-based arbitrations. While it's unlikely that amendments to the Arbitration Act will go that far, Mr. McGuinty told The Canadian Press yesterday that "I've come to the conclusion that the debate has gone on long enough. There will be no sharia law in Ontario." "There will be no religious arbitration in Ontario," he said. "There will be one law for all Ontarians." Make no mistake, this is fantastic news - the very idea of enacting a right to misogynistic, homophobic, and xenophobic private law (or even, in passing, allowing it in lieu of promoting the exercise of genuine and completely secular legal rights) in Ontario was abominable. It's unfortunate that others will pay the price for having to disallow sharia-based arbitration: Ontario explicitly gave the green light to such practices in its 1991 Arbitration Act. But as early as this fall, new Ontario laws may put a stop to religion-based settlements in matters such as child-custody disputes or inheritances. This means that orthodox Jews and some Christian leaders may soon make a common cause with fundamentalist Muslims in seeking to limit the scope of the new proposals. "Our reaction is we're disappointed, we're very disappointed," said Joel Richler, chairman of the Ontario wing of the Canadian Jewish Congress. "It's what we consider to be a knee-jerk reaction against the sharia issue." He said orthodox Jews have used tribunals to settle family disputes for centuries, but the future of these tribunals is no longer clear in Ontario. As I say, unfortunate. But it's surely better to enact strict equality before the law than to let a minority of well-meaning exceptions turn into nightmarish abrogations of justice. That said, isn't this a 180-degree turnaround? I could have sworn that up until very recently - last week, even - the premier was singing quite a different tune on the threat sharia poses: TORONTO -- The rights of women "will not be compromised" if Ontario becomes the first Western jurisdiction to allow Muslims to use a set of religious rules known as Shariah law to settle civil and marital disputes, Premier Dalton McGuinty said yesterday. At least he came to the right conclusion in the end, which is something, for a constantly-triangulating Liberal leader. Finally, I'm happy that the provincial Tories aren't seizing this as a socially conservative wedge issue: "By letting it go on, and suddenly ending it mysteriously on a Sunday afternoon, is not probably the best kind of leadership that one could show," Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory told The Canadian Press. I think, anyway - Tory's comment seems to be one of disparaging McGuinty's timing, trying to bury it on the weekend to soften the blow in the national media, which is fair. Just so long as the Ontario PC Party doesn't come up with the bright idea to court the sharia-supporting vote, next election, I'm satisfied...

Don't you know, everyone wants to laugh

2005-09-12T08:12:00.000-04:00

Interesting discovery of the day, found while Googling the phrase "Faulknerian idiot man-child": The Onion has reopened their archives - for the past several years, behind a subscription wall, in a not particularly well-thought-out business model - and they now go all the way back to 1996. Thus, it's kind of interesting to see again those headlines from the fabled End of History - especially prescient ones like this, or a pitch-perfect imitation of, say, natural disaster-related blame-and-ignorance panic here. Sure, The Onion isn't very amusing now - but it certainly had the potential to be, and that's a shame.

Four

2005-09-11T10:04:00.000-04:00

This isn't what I'd expected, four years on. I don't really know what I did expect, for that matter, at any point since. Terrorism thoroughly suppressed by a combination of well-meaning strategic interventionism and intimidating shows of overwhelming force? Of course not. This is a long game that won't end for decades, if ever. But I expected, just maybe, a little bit more maintenance of general concern. Acknowledgment that, no matter what political games are played at home or in the capitals of Europe, or even between the two, that there's still a vitally important war going on out there. It may not seem as urgent right at the moment - but it didn't seem very urgent before, either. Lileks made a brief aside last week that I've been thinking about ever since: The cluttered office is one of those things that always plagued me in the past – the reams of clips and handouts, the kitsch atop the monitor, bales of letters and sheaves of curling faxes, the grotesque amount of stuff generated simply by sitting a cubicle in a substantial corporation. What I like and need and want to keep goes home. At work from now on it’s just Gnat picts and plastic Pixar statuary. I was putting up the WW2 propaganda posters, the stuff I put up after 9/11, but I thought better of it. That was back when I thought we were all in this together. Back before 9/11 was supplanted by 9/12. But that’s another essay. Failing that general sense of community - the idea that left or right, we're all targets for a certain kind of barbaric medieval mind - I'd settle for the admission that it would be a Good Thing not to lose, or even be seen to back down. That seems to be harder to find nowadays, and understandably so; the rapid pace of events (and the unfortunate necessity of politics throughout, having to wage a rhetorical battle royale over every little thing, just to keep from losing ground to the unknown and potentially unreliable domestic opposition) is definitely fatiguing. Something like this, for instance, fills me with dread and disgust; if intentional, the choice of imagery is despicable. If accidental - which I'd be quite willing to believe, but for unconvincing invocations of pure chance on the part of the architects - it's still inappropriate. But I don't know that I have the will to be upset about it for very long. Is it too minor? Or is ignoring symbolism, provoking domestic adversaries or foreign enemies with visible weakness, a day-by-day path of slow surrender? Normality is pervasive. It's sometimes hard to keep up the willpower to remember what's actually going on, let alone be steadfast and resolute and uncompromising, when real life continues apace. There's still bills to pay and classes to attend and a job to do, and losing the drive to keep all those plates spinning while staring into the abyss is no less concession than head-in-the-sand isolationism. But I do remember, and I do act, and my response, my contribution, remains the same: I want to be a prosecuting attorney. I remember, and I owe - as we all do - a debt to the bulwark of civilization. I want to combat even the smallest threats, because doing so is just as necessary and important in the larger sense. Never forget. Never forgive.

If it mattered less, I'd treat them with derision

2005-09-10T19:54:00.000-04:00

Snopes, regrettably, has had to deliver on debunking one of the sillier criticisms of the past weeks. Did I call it, or what?

The pious, hateful and devout

2005-09-10T09:49:00.000-04:00

Well, this isn't an obnoxious harassment campaign bound to cause even more animosity over the issue, at all: BOSTON --Two gay activists are promising to post on the Internet the names and addresses of anyone who signs a petition that could lead to a statewide ban on gay marriage. The move by Thomas Lang and Alexander Westerhoff, one of the first gay couples married in the state, came after state Attorney General Thomas Reilly on Wednesday certified a ballot question that bans gay marriage and civil unions. Now, the question's supporters must collect 65,825 signatures from registered voters, and approval from 25 percent of state lawmakers to get the question on the 2008 ballot. Lang, 42, said the name, street address, hometown and ZIP code of everyone who signs the petition will be posted on the Web site KnowThyNeighbor.org. "Everyone's scrambling to know who in their town would sign this," Lang told the Boston Herald. "And this Web site will give gay people the tools to know, to defend themselves and their families, to let them go neighbor-to-neighbor and say, 'I don't appreciate your signing this.'" "I'm going to be aggressive personally," he said. "I want to know that the people I do business with are not against (gay marriage). This is going to be won by economics." Sometimes I really hate having to be on either side, viz gay marriage. Between hidebound express-a-mildly-disagreeable-opinion-and-we'll-persecute-you activists on the left, and fire-and-brimstone moralists on the right, there seems to be an appallingly absolutist jackass available to cause a degree of regret and embarrassment for anyone. Ideologically-based crusades to vilify wholesale anyone on the other side of an issue like this are no less awful coming from the self-righteous on the pro side. (Via BoingBoing.)

Hunt me down, smear my name

2005-09-07T01:11:00.000-04:00

On the ongoing Katrina blame game: How long, I wonder, until this oh-so-clever photoshoppery starts to circulate as a perceptually-true meme of its own accord? How long, that is, until Snopes has to go to the trouble of debunking it? It's a technically proficient piece of work, all right, and the subject matter certainly has the ring of truth for inveterate Bush-haters. "Fake but accurate," and all that...

We moved into uncharted lands

2005-09-02T00:27:00.000-04:00

Today was probably a bit too early to broach the subject, but it's not as if Denny Hastert and others questioning the wisdom of rebuilding New Orleans exactly as before are essentially wrong: WASHINGTON - House Speaker Dennis Hastert dropped a bombshell on flood-ravaged New Orleans on Thursday by suggesting that it isn’t sensible to rebuild the city. "It doesn't make sense to me," Hastert told the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago in editions published today. "And it's a question that certainly we should ask." Hastert's comments came as Congress cut short its summer recess and raced back to Washington to take up an emergency aid package expected to be $10 billion or more. Details of the legislation are still emerging, but it is expected to target critical items such as buses to evacuate the city, reinforcing existing flood protection and providing food and shelter for a growing population of refugees. The Illinois Republican’s comments drew an immediate rebuke from Louisiana officials. “That’s like saying we should shut down Los Angeles because it’s built in an earthquake zone,” former Sen. John Breaux, D-La., said. “Or like saying that after the Great Chicago fire of 1871, the U.S. government should have just abandoned the city.” If - God Forbid - Southern California ever suffers an earthquake causing comparable devastation, and is left by changing faultlines even more prone to subsequent seismic activitiy, then yes, it might make sense to hold back on full-scale rebuilding in the most-affected areas. If Chicago was, for some reason, exceptionally and inherently flammable - say, if it was atop a large natural gas deposit or coal seam - then, yes, it might make sense not to rebuild. There's defying the vagaries of nature with the wondrous works of man, and then there's just plain tempting fate. Considering its location and geography, reports would seem to indicate New Orleans has been fairly lucky for the nearly 300 years it's existed as a city, and spectacularly fortunate for the century or so that's seen drainage-pump-facilitated expansion into lower-lying areas of town. Is it worth throwing the dice, and betting that future hurricanes won't cause as much damage? By the time the city can be fully drained, cleared, disinfected, etc., how many of the now-refugee citizens of New Orleans will have moved on, re-establishing their lives as best they can in Houston, or Baton Rouge, or Pensacola? Will residential construction to replace all homes destroyed or made unliveable by the storm even be necessary? Ten or fifteen years from now, will New Orleans' population numbers recover? It's too soon to tell right now, but might it not make more sense to rebuild the city as a theme park-cum-industrial port - a Reedy Creek Improvement District with better shipping facilities and refinery infrastructure - than to insist, for no reason better than sheer (admirable, if a bit thick) defiance, that more than a million people ought to return to living on one particularly vulnerable plot of land below sea level? (Via Drudge.)

A city that the damned call home

2005-08-31T20:58:00.000-04:00

Okay, here's the thing: Inappropriate politicization of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, left (and left and left and left) and right (and, to a lesser extent, right) has got to stop. It's a natural disaster, and manipulating events as they unfold to score cheap points - and often completely ludicrous and illogical ones, at that - is just adding to the hideously Hobbesian state-of-nature vibe currently emanating from the Gulf Coast. It's bad enough to be confronted with the stock-character spectres of looters rampaging through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Those trying to apportion blame while New Orleans is still consumed by fire and flood - thinking of their electoral chances in 2006, be it January or October - are just plain ghoulish, and way, way out of line. That said - and despite the fact that the city looks to be months if not years away from full recovery, if ever - probably the most counterproductive commentary is that which sinks into over-emotional despair. It's not unexpected, but neither is it helpful. NRO's The Corner (along with a number of network news anchors and reporters) have been preoccupied with this theme today. From editor Rich Lowry: Here's why Bush's reaction (so far) has been inadequate. I watched the CBS Evening News just now. They broadcast a jaw-dropping report from refugee encampments atop the interstates in New Orleans. Folks, it was one of the most heart-wrenching thing I've ever seen. I can hardly believe this is our country. There were plenty of desperate people stuck there under the boiling sun, with no food, no water, no nothing -- including mothers with babies. There was an elderly woman sitting on the curb next to the covered body of her husband, who died waiting to be rescued. She said that she'd flagged down a passing cop to ask for help, and all he could tell her was to move the body of her husband of 53 years out of the way, so the smell of his decomposition didn't bother people. CBS showed the covered corpse of a man the refugees said jumped from the interstate to his death in despair. These people have NOTHING, and they're growing desperate. The human drama playing out in Louisiana now beggars description. We don't need mere emoting -- the hapless Gov. Blanco shows how useless that is. But we do need our president to make an emotional connection of some sort with his suffering countrymen. You can be tough, competent AND emotional. It's called Giuliani 101. And a reader letter, endorsed thereby: A lot of Bush fans are frankly aghast at how tone-deaf the president is at this moment. They just showed clips of New Orleans prisoners sitting in a huge group, some of them handcuffed together with plastic cuffs with flood water lapping at their feet. They have been there for two days. Prisoners have their shirts pulled over their noses because the stench is too overwhelming. Fox News is the only news crew along a particular stretch of highway downtown. Hundreds of people are standing around, wanting to know where they should go to get water and food. They have not had either for days. Shep Smith showed a 3-year-old boy who was sitting in his mother's lap. He was sick and barely conscious. Dehydrated. Hungry. Not a single authority figure was anywhere around. Shep had to turn his interview with a state police spokeswoman into a plea to her to send help to his location for those poor people. The scenes I'm seeing on Fox are things you'd think you'd only see in Somalia or Bangladesh. This is the United States of America. We can't get a single truck full of water to these people? We can't get a single helicopter to fly over and drop supplies? A cop car and a military truck roll up from the distance, giving the suffering people hope. Do they stop as the desperate wave? No. They drive through. They can't even stop to tell them where they should go to get any life-saving water or food. The problem is that it's not about getting a single water truck to one particular group of people on one telegenic highway overpass - it's about triage, attempting to allocate resources where they'll be most useful immediately. In the same way that I don't imagine myself a military strategist, second-guessing ongoing operations in Iraq, neither am I a civil engineer experienced in logistics. Neither is Lowry. Nor, I'm willing to bet, are most of those demanding Something Be Done in a way that's immediately and substantially visible to us gawkers comfortably watching the horror from hundreds or thousands of miles away, on cable. (Of course, you'd have to be watching half a dozen channels at once just to catch everything, anyway; one reader e-mail posted on BoingBoing asked "Where are the military helicopters? Perhaps I missed seeing them on TV. Surely not every single one is in Iraq?" Interesting; Fox News was certainly covering Navy helicopters performing search-and-rescue operations, whether or not others were...) The point is, I'm willing to give the authorities - civil and military - the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they're doing everything they can with an eye to solving the overall problem. Becoming distraught at a heartbreaking scene, and lashing out at the inability of government to fix everything immediately, is not only futile; it's sure to spread the negativity around, too. Assuaging our collective survivors' guilt with high-profile feel-good efforts for those particular victims caught on camera - as opposed to the whole of those affected - is among the least essential things to be done at the moment. This is disaster on a nearly-incomprehensible scale, and no matter what any person or agency says or does in the short term, the loss of life (and property damage) will be mind-boggling. But a bit more stoicism, and less panicking, couldn't hurt anything right about now. UPDATE: On the other hand, maybe faith is better put in a well-armed populace re-establishing order for themselves, in the short term: Looters also chased down a state police truck full of food. The New Orleans police chief ran off looters while city officials themselves were commandeering equipment from a looted Office Depot. During a state of emergency, authorities have broad powers to take private supplies and buildings for their use. Managers at a nursing home were prepared to cope with the power outages and had enough food for days, but then the looting began. The home's bus driver was forced to surrender the vehicle to carjackers. Bands of people drove by the nursing home, shouting to residents, "Get out!" Eighty residents, most of them in wheelchairs, were being evacuated to other nursing homes in the state. "We had enough food for 10 days," said Peggy Hoffman, the home's executive director. "Now we'll have to equip our department heads with guns and teach them how to shoot." Every minute, it gets a little bit more Night of the Living Dead out there. (Via LGF, Damian Penny, and others.)

You're on the air, I'm underground; signal's fading, can't be found

2005-08-28T21:04:00.000-04:00

61% of Canadians haven't missed the CBC at all since the strike began - seemingly a fairly damning non-endorsement of the Mother Corp - and yet a Canadian Media Guild spokesman can't help improbably painting those numbers in some kind of class warfare model, where the opinions of the rich bastards who choose to spend $40 a month on widening their viewing options don't really count: OTTAWA — Most people didn't notice the on-air disruption caused when 5,500 CBC workers were locked out of studios across Canada, a new poll indicates. Ten per cent of respondents to the Decima survey said the labour dispute at the public broadcaster is "a major inconvenience" while 27 per cent called it "a minor inconvenience.'" Sixty-one per cent reported no impact at all. [...] Those who said they were most inconvenienced by the lockout tended to be Liberal and NDP voters or older people, the poll found. Most other respondents said they had not been affected. Union spokesman Arnold Amber, CBC branch president of the Canadian Media Guild, helped frame and analyse political polls years ago when the public broadcaster did its own surveys. He dismissed the Decima results as premature and "totally meaningless.'" "They're polling the entire population rather than the population that actually cares and listens (consistently) to the CBC," he said in an interview. "It's the equivalent of asking a bunch of people who only drive cars whether or not the bus service in their area is better or worse.'" I'll give Amber credit for making a somewhat apt comparison; the CBC is a lot like mass transit in some ways - namely, in being public infrastructure, not necessarily intended to be profitable, funded (theoretically) out of a sense of public duty, with funding appropriated from all through tax revenues whether one uses the service or not. But it's not that apt. I present to you the top ten ways bus service would differ if operating on the CBC model. Drumroll, please: If public transit were run like the CBC... 10. There'd be no nominal user fees in the form of tickets, tokens or passes; the threat of being crushed by privately-owned American bus companies would be deemed so dire that enacting the slightest barrier to free and easily-available use of the service would be heresy. 9. The transit authority's headquarters wouldn't be in an ugly industrial part of town near where the main routes actually run, but fashionably close to nice shopping and upscale cafés. 8. Rick Mercer would occasionally be sent on a bus to the suburbs to condescendingly quiz residents about details of local routes on the other side of the city, for the amusement of those "in the know." 7. All routes would pass through one of two large terminals in the far southeast corner of town, no matter where they started or ended, local or express. 6. Liberals and the NDP would incessantly wail that only public transit "keeps us together" despite a large majority never using it, choosing instead to exercise the choice to purchase (on the free market) transportation more to their liking. 5. Bus drivers, rather than following their routes directly, would make frequent and unnecessary detours in order to show passengers buildings and locations imagined to be evidence of American perfidy. (Corollary: Lazier drivers could just point to selfish single-occupant-vehicle drivers in the street, and make dark implications about Halliburton, Enron, and oiiiiil.) 4. All buses, trains, and other rolling stock owned by the transit authority would by law be required to be of Canadian manufacture, regardless of whether or not such vehicles were the most efficient, comfortable, desirable, or economical options on the market. (Corollary: used British-made vehicles might occasionally be allowed, so long as the purchase price was cheap enough. Likewise flashy American vehicles, but only on very special occasions, when it should become important to raise transit's public profile.) 3. Some bus routes would be considered to be "above" the degrading practice of subsidization through advertising. 2. The transit authority would openly and shamelessly support the Liberal Party of Canada. (Oh, wait...) And, finally, the number one way public transit would be different if it was more like the CBC... 1. Being a bus driver of average skill from a sufficiently interesting ethnic background and with sufficiently left-leaning politics - rather than merely paying a decent wage commensurate with experience - would put one on the fast track to being named Governor-General of Canada. (Via NealeNews.)

Seems a downright shame, seems an awful waste

2005-08-28T11:23:00.000-04:00

Some problems are the same throughout the Commonwealth: Plug in "Canada" and the many instances of needlessly federally subsidized Canadian television and film for "Australia" and their domestic production counterparts in this article, and you'd never notice the change. (Via Tim Blair.)

Don't let me stop your great self-destruction

2005-08-28T10:22:00.000-04:00

I do believe this may be, hands down, the most appalling thing ever said by a CBC personality, on the job or off - and that's no mean feat: Take the surreal podcast that emerged from the Vancouver pickets earlier this week. It rings with the sound of producers who know what they're doing, and familiar voices we've gone without. Listening, it's like getting the CBC back for a moment. And then you notice that those voices have all become partisan and tinged with anger. It feels like going through the looking glass. If you've ever wanted to hear the chronically gentle Bill Richardson get mad, here's your chance. Ian Hanomansing speaks thoughtfully about having his slot co-opted by BBC newscasts, but national reporter Curt Petrovich's closing rant against management (which cut off all employee cellphones) is nothing short of disheartening. "Why isn't someone trying to take back the controls from a bunch of box cutter-wielding ideologues who are ready to smash this organization into the pillars of public trust that took decades to build?" Petrovich asks. "On that note, at least the other guys let the passengers use their cellphones." Who knew? Management of a state broadcaster refusing to immediately capitulate to union demands = terrorism! Not only that, but management having the gall to shut down work-issued cellphones while employees are on strike is, of course, exactly equal to Islamist madmen murdering three thousand people. It's a shame beacons of wisdom like Petrovich are walking a picket line, instead of sharing such insights on the public dime, no? (Via The Shotgun.)

Instead of government we had a stage

2005-08-25T23:11:00.000-04:00

This (more here) is most certainly not helpful, except maybe to the Liberals: I'm struggling with what to call Michaelle Jean, if only because there are so many shades of meaning: defector, traitor, spy, double agent. It might be one of those things where we won't really know until well after the damage is done. I see. I am by no means a fan of the GG-designate; the Prime Minister's decision was and remains a blatant display of tokenism and political point-scoring. Michaelle Jean probably won't be the most eloquent, thoughtful or dignified person to hold the position, true, but to suggest that her motivations for accepting the appointment are downright sinister definitely crosses a line. There's no evidence she's anything but a left-leaning nationalist (and even sovereigntist) Quebecois with the ambitions and know-how to game the political system for professional advancement. Yes, parts of that are rightly objectionable to various people for various different reasons, but the whole is well within acceptable limits of behaviour. Imagining complex scenarios where she might be a French catspaw, or could use her position to enable an otherwise wholly-preventable secession (If the Governor-General's recognition thereof is the single last thing preventing an independent Quebec, it's already a done deal, for crying out loud) is delving deep into the fever swamps of conspiracy theory, and I fear will serve only to further paint conservatives as recalcitrant whiners. Even worse is counterfactually playing with facts and definitions, to demonstrate possible justifications for using the word "traitor" et al; it's intellectually dishonest, and more than a bit desperate. As scandal goes, that the Governor-General may be a sovereigntist - given the utterly immaterial and purely ceremonial role of the office - isn't that impressive. I sincerely doubt, once the summer recess is over and the House is back in session, that Michaelle Jean's life, career or qualifications will still be useful or interesting enough to attack Paul Martin with. Throwing around loaded terms like the above may feel good; righteous indignation always does. But I would urge Angry and any others still raging about Ms. Jean's appointment to let it go, soon. Wallowing in blunt, bombastic hyperbole has a way of making one look petty and delusional.

I hacked my way through the thicket; a maze of fragmented ramblings

2005-08-22T19:29:00.000-04:00

I did something not particularly bright today: I gave a bureaucrat a choice between solving a problem with a couple of minutes of extra work on their part, or solving it by throwing money at it. Guess which option won out? I've been having this recurring problem, you see, with the HM's parliamentary assistant. I receive the raw content for publications - Ten Percenters and Householders - and format it in InDesign. We go through several rounds of revisions, some pointless and some not, and end up with Microsoft Publisher files to send off to Printing Services. If that was the entirety of the workflow, I'd be happy, but it's not; without variation, there seems to be a pattern of massive painful editing between the first and second step, because what they're sending me is just too long. There's a limit to how small body text can go, and even at 9 or 10 point, the first draft I receive is always overlong by about 30%. With Ten Percenters, I can put my foot down, because we're dealing with very narrowly-defined limits of available space, and one or two stories end up getting dropped. (This, despite repeated assurances that next time we'll stick to 1200 words maximum, we promise, etc etc.) The fall Householder, however, was even worse than usual: too long by about 60%. I may be able to cheat margins and point sizes by fractions to solve minimal overreach, but that's getting into miracle-worker territory. This was where I made my fatal mistake: I pointed out that, should the office not wish to move up to one of the larger (and 30% more impactful of the budget) Householder format sizes offered by Printing Services, the parliamentary assistant and riding office manager would have to go through another round of editing to cut the whole thing down. I expected, understanding the cost, that the choice would be to snip a few of the more inconsequential pieces. "Oh, there's bigger sizes?" In short, I seem to be partially responsible for causing about $1600 of non-essential discretionary spending out of the office budget, compared to how things stood yesterday. With the congenital editing problem we seem to have, too, I'm afraid the staffers in question will never be able to downsize back to the previous format, so long as the HM is in office. And, of course, that's ultimately coming out of the general House budget, derived from general revenues. Sure, $1600 isn't much compared to envelopes stuffed with hundreds of thousands mysteriously being handed off to Liberal operatives, but that's still a significant amount of money that may or may not have been otherwise spent, and certainly didn't need to be. The growth of the bureaucratic machine is due largely to unthinking and rash decisions like this, made because it's easier than deciding whether or not constituents really need to hear about one pet issue or another yet again. And I'm part of the problem, now. I'm so sorry.

Let man's petty nations tear themselves apart

2005-08-22T13:24:00.000-04:00

The Telegraph manages to put the Hans Island dispute in the proper context with a wonderfully dismissive headline: "Canada flexes its muscles in dispute over Arctic wastes." Canadian warships were sailing towards the Arctic yesterday in the latest act of gunboat diplomacy over control of the frozen wastes there. Ottawa has launched a series of Arctic sovereignty patrols to assert its territorial claims and fend off rivals, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States. Its scramble for the Arctic is a consequence of global warming and the retreat of the polar ice. This has raised the prospect of once-inaccessible areas becoming available for oil and mineral extraction. It has also revived the dream of a "North-West Passage" for shipping, linking the Atlantic and Pacific. Amid diplomatic arguments over territorial rights, Canada's defence minister recently clambered on to a frozen rock, tiny Hans Island, triggering protests from Denmark. Even members of the British press are snickering behind their keyboards at feeble Canadian attempts at maintaining Arctic sovereignty; I think that really says something. This is the kind of military reputation I'd expect of, say, Monaco, not Canada. As long as "peacekeeping" is the ideal, however, can we expect any better?

There's a man gone mad in the town tonight

2005-08-20T10:26:00.000-04:00

Oy. U of O, my alma mater: apparently as much an employer of anti-Semitic professorial moonbats as anti-American ones. A Jewish group has filed a complaint to the University of Ottawa against one of its professors after the discovery of content on his website that blames Jews for the terrorist attacks on the United States, and claims the numbers who died at Auschwitz are exaggerated. The website, www.globalresearch.ca, also reprints articles from other writers that accuse Jews of controlling the U.S. media and masterminding the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Other postings suggest Israel, the U.S. and Britain are the real perpetrators of the recent attacks on London. The site, which is not hosted by the university, is run by Michel Chossudovsky, a controversial left-leaning economist, and came to the attention of B'nai Brith Canada after public complaints to the advocacy group and the Citizen. "The material on the site is full of wild conspiracy theories that go so far as to accuse Israel, America and Britain of being behind the recent terrorist bombings in London," said Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B'nai Brith Canada. "They echo the age-old anti-Semitic expressions that abound in the Arab world, which blame the Jews for everything from 9/11 to the more recent tsunami disaster." He does try the 'not anti-Semitic, just anti-Israel' rhetorical backflip: Mr. Chossudovsky described himself as being of Jewish descent, and said he has relatives who were Holocaust victims. "I'm the first person to withdraw any kind of hate material directed against the Jewish people." He went on to defend the reprinted articles that have also sparked complaints, saying they are legitimate commentary representing views that are "anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic." But that's not very convincing, when he apparently does teach conspiracy theories in his courses, instead of, y'know, accepted economic models. From a student review of a graduate studies course at RateMyProfessors.com: He rocks. The conspiracy theories, the personal stories about his experience observing developing countries under SAP, his passion for the subject matter... No, it's not a very technical / theoretical course, but a lot of what happens in the real world isn't easily explained by traditional models. Is it really fair to call the Global Jewish Conspiracy theory a non-traditional model? An awful lot of European cognoscenti certainly were outspokenly enthusiastic about it seventy or eighty years ago, after all...

Apologiae

2005-08-18T23:40:00.000-04:00

Real life takes precedence. I know that it's sure (ha) to disappoint the literal dozens of regular readers I have, but that's a large part of why I haven't been posting much lately. I've got enough work on my plate, between my real job (graphic design for a local ad company) and the other thing (graphic design, proofreading, and database maintenance for the HM), that there have been days recently when I've forgotten to eat, let alone make entirely-on-autopilot attempts at wit or insight via blog. Coupled with that, of course, is that it's late August; there isn't much going on at the immediate and personal level to talk about. Sure, I have opinions about recent topics of note (Cindy Sheehan? Creepy and kind of despicable, if justified in venting her grief, no matter how inappropriately. The Gaza pullout? Not necessarily a bad strategic move, but it does seem to be in this case. The continued federalist-separatist dichotomy embodied in the person of Michaëlle Jean? A great big solid meh; she's an overt political choice, and certainly a potentially damaging one, but that isn't a good enough Gotcha to stay obsessed over for long.) - but I just don't have the energy to be anything but dazedly concessionary about them. Is it worth getting worked up over? I have to say that nothing really is in the short term, at the moment. This, too, shall pass. You'll forgive me, then, if I continue to be largely indifferent for the time being. At least until classes start, most likely; I'm sure I'll have plenty to vent about while enduring fourth-year seminar courses in Women's and Canadian History.

But they won't hear a word of a doubt, or see signs of weakness

2005-08-17T09:40:00.000-04:00

This is not a surprise. Despite fiery rhetoric from Canada's top soldier that the Forces' main job is to kill people and rid the world of "scumbag" terrorists, Canadians prefer an old-fashioned image of their soldiers as benevolent peacekeepers, says a newly released poll. Canadians support their troops and think there should be more of them, that they should be better funded and have better equipment. But the public's support is not deep, and still follows a traditional pattern that remains disturbing for the Forces: They don't think they deserve more money at the expense of health care and education. [...] About 57 per cent said they want the Forces to have a "traditional peacekeeping role" compared with 41 per cent that favoured "a peacemaking role, which might involve fighting alongside other UN troops to force peace in a disputed area." Quebecers, at 62 per cent, and university-educated Canadians, at 61 per cent, most favoured the traditional role. It's still disheartening, because it's just another peace of evidence that Canadians (and especially the most-educated) are still desperately clinging to the peacekeeping fantasy. It's not so much pride in the Pearson vision, I think, as much as cognitive dissonance: The imagined premise of "nice" Canada, moral giant among petty geopolitical squabblers, doesn't jibe with that of maintaining modern and capable armed forces - unless those forces can be justified with feather-light arguments for the further moral authority that their missions grant. That a pathological attachment to peacekeeping before proactive defence means Canada may not have the international influence (or even durability of national defence) many imagine is irrelevant, in this line of reasoning; Canadian troops don't have to be capable of protecting Canada, to be props in a certain type of feel-good post-modern daydream. As long as the self-image of the country as an innocent on the world stage is maintained, that's enough for 57%, apparently. (Also questionable: Since when is peacekeeping the "traditional" role of the Canadian military? I sense shades of Carolyn Parrish-style historical ignorance. Participation in two world wars and several regional ones prior to the Liberal-redefined Year Zero of the nation surely counts for more than the forty-odd years of international irrelevance since, doesn't it?)

"If you do, you are sure to be branded as a lunatic, however warmly you may protest."

2005-08-15T14:06:00.000-04:00

Interesting historical artifact of the day: Japanese WWII propaganda, which included not just amusingly delusional Soviet-style Smiling-Children-Of-All-Nations scenes, but some downright creepy psy-ops leaflets. Tokyo Rose had nothing on the writer of the bottom-most work. (Via BoingBoing.)

Anything but catastrophe

2005-08-15T10:01:00.000-04:00

It's so unfortunate when facts don't jibe with a manufactured panic, isn't it? As Canadian politicians express alarm about a rising tide of guns smuggled from the United States, statistics obtained by The Globe and Mail show that federal border guards are seizing fewer firearms and Toronto police are pulling no more guns off the streets than they ordinarily do. The Canada Border Services Agency says it has intercepted 318 guns so far in 2005, below the more than 1,000 seized guns that border guards have averaged annually during the past five years, and far fewer than the 1,500 seized annually in the 1990s. And while Toronto Police Service Chief Bill Blair was widely quoted last week as saying his officers have seized more than 2,000 guns so far in 2005, civilians in his statistics department say the chief inadvertently "misspoke." Their official tally is only 1,151, consistent with the pace of seizures in recent years. [...] But if a glut of guns exists on Canadians streets, the weapons have not materialized overnight. The border agency says its lower seizure numbers stem from anti-smuggling efforts. Meanwhile, the union representing border guards disagrees, saying a lack of resources leaves its members intercepting, at the most, one out of every 20 guns coming north. No one really knows how many guns are crossing the border, but experts say plenty of problems lie in Canada's backyard and the Americans are not about to solve them. "Guns from the U.S. are an issue, but a small part of the bigger picture," said Paul Culver, a senior Toronto Crown Attorney. However, that doesn't mean that some specific cases of smuggling aren't worrisome. CNN) -- Two men tried to re-enter Canada from the United States early Saturday with handguns and ammunition strapped to their bodies, Canadian police said. Ali Dirie, 22, and Yasin Mohamed, 23 -- both Canadians from the Toronto area -- face weapons-related charges and are in police custody in Niagara Falls, Ontario, according to a police statement. Ontario's Provincial Weapons Enforcement Team and the Niagara Regional Police Service are investigating. Forbid most private firearm ownership, and is it any wonder that there's a smuggling problem, unattributable to the American market as it may be? Or that the law-abiding, left unarmed, will get caught in the crossfire between gangs and who-knows-what else?

I've got no future, but oh, what a past

2005-08-15T09:41:00.000-04:00

Heavens. Let's hope this doesn't go on for weeks...or months...or indefinitely... The CBC has locked out the 5,500 members of the Canadian Media Guild after last-minute bargaining went nowhere. "We are now officially locked out," said a message posted at 12:05 a.m. EDT Monday on the union's hotline. "There are no plans at this time for any further talks with the corporation." While the bargaining committee will stay in Toronto for a few days to see if negotiations can be restarted, "given the aggressive position management has taken at the table, however, we think it's unlikely we'll hear from them," it said. "This is not a good day for Canadian broadcasting," said Lise Lareau, president of the union, which represents producers, newsroom staff and technicians at the public broadcaster. Bravo, Ms. Lareau! Keep on speaking truth to power! Cripple their operations until your union gets the guaranteed impossible-to-fire European-style sinecure positions you so rightly deserve! Why, without the CBC, how would we know that Americans are evil and stupid? Without CBC News, who would tell Canadians that our health care system is the best in the world? Without the CBC's extensive subsidization of Canadian comics, where would we turn for subtle and understated dry wit in the Royal Canadian Air Farce mould, or gentle good-natured ribbing à la Rick Mercer? Without the CBC, who'd fill the void of self-consciously condescending non-commercial radio? Without the CBC, who'd be the most enthusiastic media boosters of federal Liberals? And, most importantly, where would I watch new episodes of Doctor Who? (Alas, I think I can make the sacrifice, if we're lucky enough to see employees and management still at each others' throats, stretching into January.)

Let innocence reign

2005-08-12T22:01:00.000-04:00

Not that there's any way it'll repair the damage done by now, but I see the RCMP have decided Gurmant Grewal and the great secret taping saga of 2005 aren't worth a formal criminal investigation, let alone charges: The RCMP have decided not to launch a criminal investigation after reviewing audio recordings made by Conservative MP Gurmant Grewal, who accused the Liberals of trying to buy his vote and that of his wife, also a Tory MP. An RCMP spokesperson, Natalie Deschenes, said Friday that investigators listened to the recordings and interviewed the people who were involved before concluding that no criminal investigation was warranted. Still, Grewal is bound to continue to be a liability, should he visibly resurface on the national stage. All the Liberals will have to do is deal in their usual innuendoes and vague intimations - all the while admitting that yes, maybe there was no crime committed, but - and that damning but will give license for CBC et al to rehash the entire story. Much as was done in this particular item, in fact, happening to make up a greater amount of the total word count than the actual news. I still don't believe Grewal did anything wrong initially, or intended to; gathering evidence of genuine executive malfeasance is no vice. But odd behaviour in the ensuing days and weeks has led to the point where, even if cleared of even the possibility of accusations of criminality, he can still be demonized for the Liberal and NDP bases as an rabble-rousing example of Why We Hate Them - a bumbling Canadian reflection of Karl Rove's eerie lock on the minds of the obsessive American left. Nothing succeeds like success, however, and while iconic demonization can be brushed off when the object of vilification is a valuable asset to the party, it's much harder to justify maintaining confidence in a member of the team without such a track record. I hope Grewal keeps a low profile next election; if not, I have a feeling that countless hours and gallons of ink will be spent further rehashing the whole sorry affair.

There's nothing calculated, nothing planned

2005-08-10T19:50:00.000-04:00

I know it's easy to pick on some of the sillier causes found online, in a rather melodramatic lament for the state of democracy, but a laundry list of absurd comparisons is missing the point: For example: When crowds took to San Francisco streets last month to support the Giants anti-mascot Crazy Crab -- ditched in 1985 in part because fans were hurling bottles at it -- it made for a few humorous stories on a slow news day. But when the same fight was taken to the Web, it seemed kind of twisted. Can citizens really be more concerned for fictitious animals ("Bring Back the Crazy Crab!": 776 signatures) than real ones ("Put an End to Fox Hunting": 395 signatures)? [...] Here's proof: In the last year, petitions have surfaced supporting "Drivers Against Females Driving" (46 signatures), "Nude pictures of Dick Cheney" (50 signatures) and something called "We Like Big Butts" (610 signatures) -- which appears to be aimed at turning a Sir Mix-A-Lot rap into a legislative mandate. Here's more proof: "Save the Puppies" has compiled 21 signatures, while a petition demanding a " 'Saved by the Bell' 10-year Reunion Special" has gathered 6,241. [...] But it's still hard to get past the fact that "Please, Lindsay, Eat" (41, 135 signatures), requesting that actress Lindsay Lohan eat a sandwich, is beating out a petition that denounces the slaying of gay teens in Iran (19,607 signatures). Here's the thing: Rational people genuinely committed to a cause don't usually sign online petitions. They're self-evidently worthless, lacking even the evidence of effort to physically canvass for the opinions of one's fellow citizens. Even signing a physical petition is next to worthless, when it comes to effecting some kind of political change or action; it becomes all too obvious that the signers don't care enough to express an opinion of their own volition. (Or, interestingly, happen to have names like "J. Godzilla" and the like.) Is this a secret? Of course not - and that's why I'm neither surprised nor upset that so many have so little regard for the supposed sanctity of petitions. When the informed citizens of western civilization choose to express their opinions exclusively via pleas to bring back Saved by the Bell, then I'll worry as much as the author of this piece, and not before. (Via TV Tattle.)

Can you use any money today?

2005-08-09T20:01:00.000-04:00

Spiffy: Canadians who bought an MP3 player last year could be eligible for a refund of up to $25. Apple, Sony, and Hewlett-Packard announced this week that they would refund the "piracy" levy customers paid on their MP3 players, including the iPod, between December, 2003 and December, 2004, after the Supreme Court of Canada refused last month to overturn a Federal Court of Appeal decision that rendered the levy invalid. "Apple is pleased that the Supreme Court of Canada let stand a lower court ruling that blank media levies on iPods are invalid, and will shortly announce a claims process so consumers can request a refund for the levies they paid," the company said in a press release late Monday. I couldn't get anything out of the class-action suit filed against Apple for inadequate battery life in 3G models, it applying only to US customers, but I can certainly collect on this; I bought John Quincy iPod on May 6, 2004, and actually (unusually) managed to not lose the receipt. Kudos to Apple (and others, but, well, I can't care too much about Sony's slew of idiotic ATRAC-only devices of the past few years) for doing the right thing, and refunding the levy. I was starting to get a bit passive-aggressively bitter about post-December 17 buyers getting a nice Christmas discount, without any concessions to existing owners.

Sometimes I think that sanity is just a passing fad

2005-08-08T11:35:00.000-04:00

You know, the first thing I thought when reading this was that it's a pity Saturday Night Live is still on summer hiatus. They did a great job with Harry Belafonte's bizarre ramblings last time they made the news. Atlanta (CNSNews.com) - Celebrity activist Harry Belafonte referred to prominent African-American officials in the Bush administration as "black tyrants" at a weekend march, and he also compared the administration to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany. [...] "[If] a black is a tyrant, he is first and foremost a tyrant, then he incidentally is black. Bush is a tyrant and if he gathers around him black tyrants, they all have to be treated as they are being treated," he added. When asked specifically who was a "black tyrant" in the Bush administration, Belafonte responded to this reporter, "You." When this reporter noted that he was a Caucasian and attempted to ask another question, Belafonte abruptly ended the interview by saying, "That's it." To quote Darrell Hammond-as-Chris Matthews: Good God, I can't even figure out who that's offensive to. (Via NealeNews.)

Third-rate propaganda

2005-08-08T11:20:00.000-04:00

From page A1 of today's Citizen: "How the thirst for oil imperils an ancient land." The Gwitch'in people have depended on the Porcupine caribou herd for 27,000 years. Now, that way of life is in jeopardy, writes Paul McKay. Paul McKay The Ottawa Citizen OLD CROW, Yukon - There is no geological fault line that connects Washington and this isolated, Arctic Circle aboriginal village, but the 300 Gwitch'in residents here are bracing for what may be biggest change in their 20,000-year history. The epicentre of the change that looms over the Gwitch'in will be the U.S. Congress. The trigger will be the stroke of a presidential pen that will pass into law a bill that will accelerate oil, gas and coal production on federal lands in nearby Alaska. At the top of that wanted list is a strip of coastal flat near the Yukon border, called the "1002 lands" after a 1980 Congressional provision that vetoed federal drill leases there. [...] This age-old bond between the [Porcupine caribou herd] and the Gwitch'in has existed since the last ice age. What is at issue now is whether new Alaska drill rigs and pipelines in the Porcupine herd's preferred nursery will cause a catastrophic collapse in breeding, and whether there are better ways to satiate oil-addicted America. Let's see: Patronizing depiction of hunter-gatherer noble savages? Check. Implications ("stroke of a presidential pen") of overt callousness, and It's All George Bush's Fault? Check. "Oil-addicted America" is to blame for "[imperiling] an ancient land?" Check. Casual dismissal of the fact that any upcoming action only increases the reach and output of existing drilling apparatus, and isn't some cartoonish re-enaction of enviro-agitprop? Check. What liberal media? Oh, right.

We take our job with pride

2005-08-08T11:04:00.000-04:00

Avant Garde is almost never an appropriate choice of typeface. It's a 70s bastardization of clean geometric designs of the 20s and 30s, and gives off the relentlessly skeevy vibe of its era when used for anything but minimalist headlines. Yes, indeed, I know where Lileks is coming from to say "'Slightly irritated by a typeface.' Put that on my tombstone." I mention this because I've been spending a lot of time lately amending the work of another designer, a gentleman who - skilled as he may be at the art of large-scale murals - doesn't have a particularly good grasp of small-scale advertising layout. The pathological reliance upon Avant Garde in every single piece he's done was one thing; I know how tempting it can be to favour one particular font family to the exclusion of others, and, to be fair, even its creators regret releasing it: Lubalin’s assistants drew only 26 capital letters, because lowercase was not going to be used in the headlines. Tom Carnase, one of Lubalin’s partners, designed additional fitted character combinations (ligatures) as the work progressed. These cap character pairs made Avant Garde one of the most unique typefaces of the 20th century. The first time Avant Garde ligatures were used was perhaps the only time they were used correctly, and it may be the most abused typeface in the world. Type designer Ed Benguiat said, “The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words ‘Avant Garde.’ Everybody ruins it. They lean the letters the wrong way.” He was so right: unless you have the same words Lubalin had in the same sentence, Avant Garde ligatures never look quite right. Ginzburg quoted Lubalin as saying that he was sorry he ever created the font because it was so universally misused. Now, that's one issue. There are between twelve and eighteen separate ads on each finished flyer the company puts out, and before I'd use Avant Garde twice on one side for sans serif body copy (let alone once), I'd make a more authentic (and legible) choice such as Gill Sans, Futura, Franklin Gothic, or Century Gothic - to say nothing of beautifully clean mid-century designs like Helvetica or Univers, or more skilled reinterpretations such as Avenir or Vectora. (Yes, I do worship the works of Adrian Frutiger; why do you ask?) But that's only half the problem, as far as text goes; the other is that he has no sense of font discipline whatsoever. In one ad for a denturist - 4" by 1.75" - I counted no less than five separate faces – Flareserif for the title, Agency FB for the name, a brush script for the slogan, a generic grotesque (perhaps Arial? I couldn't tell from the three letters) for part of an industry certification logo, and Avant Garde for the rest. That’s far too many, especially for such a small space; the eye is bound to be confused by the chaos. I like the choice of Flareserif; it’s a nice quirky Humanist take on gothic letterforms, and is admittedly better for a title than its lighter-weight inspiration of Albertus (best known from the titles of The Prisoner). But Agency FB is an entirely different direction to go within the broader gothic typeface family, and the contrast – between rounded, brush-like hybrid serifs, and a hard-edged quasi-serif – could only be more jarring if the name had been set in something like Bank Gothic. The visual language of Agency FB doesn’t mesh well with the graphic identity a denturist wants, i.e. professional, neat, and comfortable. The brush script is acceptable for a slogan, if hackneyed, but there's no need for two separate sans serif fonts when one could do. I ended up reducing the ad to using Flareserif, and several different weights of the delightfully clean Frutiger Condensed. I can appreciate the travails of being a self-taught designer, being just that, myself - but one can only get away with so many gaffes and so much half-assery. (Don't even get me started on this guy's misunderstanding of resolution, printable margins, bleeds, colour depth, or copyright.) Competence is not negotiable; at least, not in the free market. I explained all this to the regional manager, who'd handed the job of fixing and assembling her territory's ads off to me when this designer initially became flustered. She agreed; his work required too many corrections to be worthwhile, to the point where his last completed flyer so irritated our printers that they refused to ever accept again one of his solo efforts. Luckily, as it turns out, he's a better salesman than a designer, and is now working for the company in that capacity. I'm thankful for that, at least; I didn't relish the thought of getting him fired, not even for sheer bloody-minded incompetence. I'm not quite that heartless. (All the same, I'm glad that I didn't have to be the one to tell him that, in fact, his work required more than just fixing colour profiles, as he'd assumed. There's something distinctly unappealing about having to savagely criticize the work of a professional twice one's own age to his face.)

It's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed

2005-08-05T12:56:00.000-04:00

And, lo, it came to pass that I was again castigated for cynicism over the GG pick, on the grounds that Paul Martin couldn't possibly be so coldly calculating as to choose someone likely to improve any particular group or constituency's perception of the Liberal Party: I found the first points you were making to be an extremely cynical stance that brought partisan politics into play over a non-partisan position. Voters do not think of the Governor-General and who appointed her when going into the ballot box, and not even I think that Paul Martin is that callous to put that into a pick - particularly when everyone was caught off guard with this choice. Yet, interestingly, prominent pollster Jean-Marc Leger is parsing the likely effects in precisely the same way. Funny, huh? OTTAWA -- The appointment of Michaëlle Jean as governor-general is a political "home run" for the Liberals that could ease the anger of ethnic Quebeckers over the sponsorship scandal, predicts Jean-Marc Léger, a leading Montreal-based pollster. Naming a Haitian-born, black Quebec woman as the governor-general will be of particular significance in the northern Montreal ridings that have a large percentage of ethnic voters who could switch to the Bloc Québécois in the next election, he said, citing Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew's riding as an example. "Strategically, it's really a good move. I think it's a home run for the federal Liberals in Quebec," he said. Mr. Léger said that the percentage of ethnic voters who say they support sovereignty has grown significantly since the 1995 referendum and stands at about 24 per cent, but that number could be a short-term reaction to the sponsorship scandal. "It's not solid. It's like Jell-O," he said. As for the Haitian population, Mr. Léger said, polling has shown the community to consist of strong Liberal supporters, but voter turnout is on the decline. The appointment of Ms. Jean could inspire more ethnic Liberal supporters to vote rather than stay home in protest over the scandal. According to the 2001 census, most of Canada's 82,405 Haitians live in Quebec, particularly in Montreal. The community is largest in the riding of Bourrassa, which Liberal MP Denis Coderre won by 5,133 votes in 2004, followed by Saint-Léonard-Saint-Michel, the Liberal stronghold of Massimo Pacetti. The riding with the third-largest Haitian community is Honoré-Mercier, which Grit MP Pablo Rodriguez won by a slim 2,762 votes. With support for sovereignty on the rise, Quebec's ethnic voters have become a key battleground between federalists and separatists. [...] While they still overwhelmingly vote Liberal, Haitians, along with Latinos, are considered among the groups that have traditionally been more friendly to Quebec sovereigntists. So Ms. Jean's appointment could also address a potential problem for the Liberals, said Jean Dorion, head of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste. "It could be a way to prevent a shrinkage in the ethnic electorate. It's not a marked one, but the Liberals are skilled at spotting trends far ahead of time," he said. Memo to Liberals (and liberals): When I criticize the government, it's not just because I feel the need to "moan" or "whinge" - it's because, quite often, their actions are worthy of criticism, such as when blatantly using a supposedly nonpolitical appointment to shore up support in marginal ridings.

An' the front bit, is what's called a façade

2005-08-04T10:42:00.000-04:00

The Globe & Mail's John Ibbitson, not surprisingly, is very much up on our Governor-General-to-be. Although equipped with a potent résumé -- arriving from Haiti as a child, she has mastered five languages, taught Italian literature and earned high praise for her talents as a television host -- Ms. Jean is far from nationally prominent. Some will question whether a person with such a relatively modest profile should be asked to serve as head of state in Canada. Others will howl at what they see as the incestuous nature of the appointment. After all, Adrienne Clarkson was a female, visible-minority CBC broadcaster from Toronto. Ms. Jean is a female, visible-minority CBC broadcaster from Montreal. The only crucial difference between the two is that Ms. Clarkson was far better known outside Quebec than is Ms. Jean. Ms. Clarkson had to withstand her share of brickbats from pundits, politicians and writers of letters to the editor who complained that she personified the Central Canadian cultural elite: too left leaning and too high brow to speak on behalf of the vast majority of Canadians who live outside Toronto or Montreal's better postal codes. Since Ms. Jean is the second consecutive choice from that pool, the criticism this time around will be even more intense. It's not as if such criticisms aren't justified. Substituting a new aristocracy of vapid lefty pundit-types for the old one of inbred and indolent gentry is no improvement. To clarify my position, because I think I've been taken to task for too-quick negativity: I have absolutely no problem with Michaelle Jean as GG on her merits, inasmuch as viceregal duties aren't that terribly complex, or even important, as the summer's events have shown; the country managed to sleepwalk through a constitutional crisis without so much as a peep from the representative of the head of state supposedly meant to exercise reserve powers in such events. I'm sure Ms. Jean would just as meekly defer to the PMO and associated cronies as Adrienne Clarkson. The office is currently largely a sinecure for the right kind of walking billboard of Liberal-defined "Canadian Values," and she'll no doubt perform as adequately in that role as Clarkson has, but ultimately, it's not that important. (And outright bigotry from some, on the grounds that a black female immigrant isn't a "real Canadian," is both inexcusable and inexplicable.) I will say, however, that it's still amusing to see how many Liberal constituencies are cynically represented in the person of Ms. Jean, (unwitting?) pawn that she seems to be in good old-fashioned party marketing strategies.

Don't deny the obvious

2005-08-03T23:32:00.000-04:00

Not that it really changes anything substantially, besides whose name is on the invitations to those lavish parties thrown for all the right sort of people in the Queen's name and on the public dime, but... OTTAWA (Reuters) - A Haitian-born female journalist from Quebec will become Canada's new governor general -- the representative of head of state Queen Elizabeth -- CBC television said on Wednesday. The public broadcaster said Prime Minister Paul Martin would formally unveil CBC television journalist Michaelle Jean, 48, at 11 a.m. (1500 GMT) on Thursday. Jean, who will become Canada's first black governor general, will take up her new position on Oct 1. ...Is there any way this could be more of a pandering laundry-list affirmative-action pick? She's meant to be appealing to Quebeckers, immigrants, women, urban professionals, and the black community - a new record. It's like someone said, "Can we get another Adrienne Clarkson, but in French?" Oh, wait: that's exactly what seems to have happened. Ms. Jean will replace the outgoing Adrienne Clarkson after an exhaustive search that focused almost exclusively on candidates from Quebec. She will become Canada's first black governor-general and the third journalist (broadcaster) in a row to be selected after Romeo Leblanc and Ms. Clarkson. She also follows in the steps of Ms. Clarkson in that she is an immigrant and a non-politician. I'm curious; did the PMO consider their strategic handiwork might be a bit too blatant if they'd picked someone also gay and wheelchair-bound? (Also interestingly worrisome: GG-designate Jean will be, as the Globe notes above, the third journalist in a row to hold the office. The CBC is probably the only media outlet in the world to offer - unofficially, of course - promotion opportunities going all the way up to viceroy...)

Keep them yelling their devotion

2005-08-02T19:10:00.000-04:00

I usually don't have a problem with a bit of red meat for the base in party politics; everyone needs something to be excited about. But there's a delicate balance involved in satisfying the activists while not carelessly offending the centre, and endorsing the teaching of intelligent design in schools alongside evolution, as President Bush did recently, is the point at which I get offended. Q I wanted to ask you about the -- what seems to be a growing debate over evolution versus intelligent design. What are your personal views on that, and do you think both should be taught in public schools? THE PRESIDENT: I think -- as I said, harking back to my days as my governor -- both you and Herman are doing a fine job of dragging me back to the past. (Laughter.) Then, I said that, first of all, that decision should be made to local school districts, but I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught. Q Both sides should be properly taught? THE PRESIDENT: Yes, people -- so people can understand what the debate is about. Q So the answer accepts the validity of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution? THE PRESIDENT: I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought, and I'm not suggesting -- you're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes. People can be exposed to the gamut of ideas on Life, the Universe, and Everything on their own time, and of their own free will; in public school, I'd prefer sticking to non-sectarian science. Positing that intelligent design is of equal merit with evolutionary theory, and ought to be taught as such, is outright pandering to hardline social conservatives. There's a free market of ideas; no one is preventing you from teaching your children whatever you believe to be true about the nature of creation. But I worry about enshrining one particular set of faith-inspired beliefs in the public arena as equal counterparts to (if not provable, then at the very least eminently reasonable) scientific theory, because that opens a door. Did I say worry? What I mean to say is that it absolutely terrifies me. This would be a manifestation of the same exasperation with the Conservative Party, seemingly unable to grasp the idea that there do exist multiple groups utterly assured of their own singular accuracy in deducing the nature of the divine, and possessed of the conviction that public policy ought to be created out of whatever ideas they deem holy. If you don't want Zoroastrianism (or, to be a bit less niche and more contemporaneously new-agey, Wicca) officially treated as equivalent in influence, worth and tradtion to mainline Protestantism, then keep both private, and not endorsed by the state; if you don't want to create the possibility of sharia-inspired civil law, then don't justify your opposition to gay marriage in explicit terms of how it contravenes your particular version of Christianity. Neither, I should add, am I a fan of the opposite approach, treating any admission of faith in public (excepting, of course, the left's favoured non-Western, non-Christian mascot religion of the moment) as verboten and mildly shameful - but I'd prefer neither meta-belief about the nature of religion be permanently enshrined in law. The difference between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, justice and injustice - they can be determined in the public arena without stating it in a way that favours one faith or another. And - unfortunately - the truth is that intelligent design is a stalking horse for creationism, dressed up with the appearance of reason though it may be. The only way to maintain freedom of religion is to promote freedom from religion in the common public sphere. Otherwise, that majority that makes your favoured interpretation of truth law today - justified by your faith - may well be replaced in twenty years by another majority with another faith, with spectacularly different ideas about what should constitute the official, state-taught truth of existence. Maintain some division between the secular and divine in the first place, and that scenario becomes less problematic in the long run. It's a good thing for the GOP that Democrats continue to be so feckless on the greater matter of the current war (or, as many do, deny that we're even at war, let alone a war that should probably be won, for the sake of the continued survival of modern civilization) - because I predict this kind of thing is going to be poison in the centre, or would be, failing that one issue far more important than unfortunate pandering. From the Canadian angle, the CPC ought to take a lesson from Bush here: A conservative party can (probably) get away with playing to the social conservative base in a fairly polarized population, if other policies are thought more immediately important and enjoy sufficiently broad support, for electoral purposes. Otherwise, it's a deal-killer for building majorities...and might just be anyway, if the numbers decrying federal support for intelligent design on the right are any indication. (Much more at Instapundit.)

'Twas said by someone wise, it pays to advertise

2005-08-02T10:26:00.000-04:00

It's almost as if government shouldn't be engaged in pointless, expensive, and ripe-for-kickbacks advertising, or something: "Ad campaign for obscure federal agency flops." OTTAWA — A federal agency spent $300,000 on advertising this year in order to raise its profile, only to find that fewer Canadians recognized it after the campaign than before. Polls commissioned by the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada suggest the national ad campaign flopped in a big way. Consider, also, the further effects of such wasted advertising: [FCAC Spokesman Bruno] Levesque said the agency, which is funded by a levy on the banks, is reviewing its advertising strategy. Banks are being charged fees to finance the federal agency, thus increasing their operating costs - costs, in some indirect way, eventually passed down to consumers, whether by user fees or unappealing interest rates. Bank customers are, thus, being penalized for the current low profile of the FCAC. I love the twists and turns of federal bureaucracy; don't you?

Clang clang clang went the trolley

2005-08-02T10:04:00.000-04:00

Getting better: A Conservative government would offer tax rebates to Canadians who use public transportation, party leader Stephen Harper will announce at a national caucus meeting in Toronto this week. Details of the plan have not been made public, but Mr. Harper is expected to lay out a plan allowing those who use buses, trains and other public transportation to claim the expense on their taxes, party insiders say. The party's finance critic, Alberta MP Monte Solberg, met with Toronto Mayor David Miller recently to discuss the proposal, which Conservatives hope will increase their popularity in the Greater Toronto Area. The GTA isn't the only urban area in the country that could stand to have its public transit system promoted by means of a tax rebate, but leaving unfortunate Toronto-centrism aside, bingo. This is the kind of thing that will actually win votes in Ontario, having as it would some broad appeal with urban workers, blue-collar or white-collar, and especially younger urban workers. I certainly wouldn't mind being able to write off the OC Transpo pass I buy every month during the school term, anyway. Better yet - and I hope this was part of Tory strategists' reasoning - there is absolutely no way for the Liberals or media to spin promoting public transit as "scary." The proof of that is in the PMO's lack of pre-emptive talking points: Scott Reid, communications chief for Prime Minister Paul Martin, said he would not discuss the idea of transit rebates until it was officially unveiled by the Conservatives. I wonder if this strategy of conspicuously failing to push those policies most easily demonized will continue...

There's such a thing as ethics, over which you ride rough-shod

2005-07-30T10:17:00.000-04:00

NRO's The Corner notices something that's been annoying me for some time: Randy Cohen, "The Ethicist" (read: Dear Abby, with an inflated sense of self-importance) of the New York Times Magazine, frequently offers advice not so much ethical as much as satisfying to a particular Upper West Side brand of liberalism. Perhaps only a parochial Catholic (but not a "devout" one?) would see a married woman having sex with a married man who is not her husband as mere "dicey territory," as the NYTimes Mag's "The Ethicist" views it--but...yeah...I don't think so. Is there no one at the NYTimes who looks and says: Hey, wait a second--most Americans don't actually agree with what this guy is saying. Most people actually believe in right and wrong. Coincidentally, I wrote to him on the subject of another rather questionable column a few weeks ago, and received a mildly dismissive brush-off response. Original column and Cohen's reply in italics, below, interspersed with my comments:

I have always believed that an elected official's private life is not a part of the public record. Before and after the Mayor Jim West episode, I have heard colleagues discuss outing legislators who oppose gay rights but are rumored to be gay. What are the ethics in this case? State Senator Ken Jacobsen, Seattle Your colleagues may ethically out an official only if that official's being gay is germane to his policy-making. A person who seeks elected office, voluntarily entering the public arena, does surrender some claims to privacy. (Financial disclosure comes to mind.) Some, but not all. An official's private life should remain private unless he or she makes it relevant to a public position freely taken. A cross-dressing secretary of agriculture who voiced no opinion on the sexual high jinks of soybeans -- do legumes engage in high jinks? -- would not meet this standard; a gay state senator who opposed gay civil rights would. Similarly, the assault weapons stockpiled by a gun-control advocate would be pertinent; his nude trout-fishing would not be. Identifying when this ambiguous standard has been met is admittedly difficult. Is a single vote on a single bill enough? My guideline is this: the more aggressively, the more centrally, an official participates in a policy struggle, the more reasonable it is to out him. A counterargument could be made in defense of hypocrisy, or at least for its irrelevance: a policy should stand on its merits, not on its advocates' behavior. That may be so in the dispassionate discourse of academe (at least idealized academe), but in the hurly-burly of political life, the human factor is meaningful and often invoked by politicians themselves -- their military service, their religious observance. Neither of these positions permits the spreading of rumors; the obligation to be truthful remains. And it should be noted that Spokane's mayor, James E. West, is in hot water over accusations of favoritism and of having molested two boys (which he denies), not for being gay per se (which is, of course, not remotely discreditable). One last thought. My outing protocol would also apply when an official unhypocritically supports a policy. It would be worth mentioning if a senator who champions, say, tax breaks for cattle ranchers is himself a rancher (or a cow). Self-interest is noteworthy in public debate. But it is hypocrisy that more often inspires the urge to out; it is denying others the right to do what we ourselves do that provokes disdain. I think your take on outing rumoured-to-be-closeted officials is misguided, if not actively malicious. It presumes too much, too vaguely. Let's take that example of a gay state senator nebulously "[opposing] gay civil rights" - what does that mean? Is it presumed to be prima facie hypocritical for that closeted state senator to sincerely be opposed to the notion of, for instance, same-sex marriage, on philosophical or legal grounds? If our hypothetical senator were endorsing institutional mistreatment - opposing decriminalization of "unnatural acts" in a district where such laws are still on the books, or actively supporting re-criminalization of homosexuality where such laws have been struck down - then hypocrisy would be clearly evident. Anything short of that, however, is enough of a grey area to merit caution for those who imagine themselves ethical. Indeed, your position seems unclear on whose private lives should get a pass on the basis of irrelevance. Say that closeted state senator strenuously avoided taking a public position at all on gay issues, but quietly voted in a way that you imagine to be hypocritical in a less than dramatic (as above) way, voting against something as dull as civil partnership benefits or other such non-glamourous (if important) legalisms? What if he has, in his mind, a perfectly good reason for voting in that way, such as the wishes of his constituents? What you recommend seems to be nothing less than the mob-based enforcement of identity politics via blackmail, even on the unwilling: vote for the interests of the most activist members of the gay community, and you can stay in the closet, but vote against them, and your private life is fair game. Moreover, what happens if we extend the metaphor? Consider a (straight) senator elected on a reputation of social conservatism and traditional morality. That you may have it on good authority he enjoys - with his wife, in the privacy of his own home - the most elaborate sexual fetishes is irrelevant; it's still his private life, and not yours to judge, unless he, as above, very specifically and vocally argues against the legality or propriety of his particular kink. Not actively endorsing in public whatever such private behaviour may entail is altogether different from arguing against it, which is, I suspect, the point from which your muddled ethical advice stems. Finally, you seem not to have considered the ethical implications of the outers' behaviour. What if it's blatantly self-serving to publicize that closeted senator's sexual identity - say, if he's a Republican from a conservative district, and the outers are Democrats salivating at the thought of repelling some of his core supporters? Not only would outing him in that premise be unethical, seeking to play on perceived bigotry of his constituents, but can backfire; remember the vice-presidential debates, and John Edwards' bizarrely introducing Dick Cheney's daughter, "who is a lesbian," into the argument? That came off as a supremely cynical attempt to pander to the imagined biases of Republican voters, and seems not to have worked very well. (Caveat: I realize Mary Cheney's life is and was no secret, merely not very well publicized. Same principle.) As long as a politician's sex life is not predicated on illegal or abusive acts, or on abuses of his office, it's no business of yours or anyone else - least of all his rivals, or the public at large. The comparison to financial disclosure is, frankly, ludicrous; voters have a right to know if a candidate happens to be in the back pocket of a particular industry or interest group. There is no right to know exactly, in private and as a consenting adult, with whom the candidate shares a bed. To pretend otherwise is to assume supreme arrogance, and more than a bit of repellent self-righteousness. Thanks for the interesting note (only a litle longer than the column to which it replies). Let me just say this: I think it was not only permissable but admirable that the spokesman for Sen. Rick Santorum was recently outed. And if you can't enjoy the irony of Sen. Santorum bloviating about how inappropriate it is to mention someone's private life, after he built a career out of legislating restrictions on just that, then I feel just terrible for you. I could enjoy the irony if it was some embarrassing indiscretion of Santorum himself that had been revealed, and one which he's specifically made a reputation of misguidedly crusading against. But a staffer? A communications director without an evident hand in policy? And one, reports indicate, whose sexual identity was well known to the senator and his office? While I disagree with the socially conservative Christian belief of "hate the sin, love the sinner," that seems to be Santorum's attitude, and it's not one terribly ripe for mocking - nor does it contradict any of his political positions, seen through that prism. Presumably Traynham has reasons for continuing to serve in the position he does that are logical to him, and Santorum logical reasons for continuing to employ him, as well as endorse the policy objectives he does; to assume hypocrisy on the part of either is rather shallow. Now, hypothetically catching Santorum in bed with Traynham, that would more convincingly validate your position. Insist on the public right to invade the privacy of the man whose name is actually on the ballot, if you must. But to take joy in engaging in those sorts of tactics with staffers, justified with the premise that most anything is fair to "get" political opponents whom you have decided to be hypocritical...well, I think, likewise, I feel sorry for you.

Endorsing invading the privacy of political rivals, equivocating on extramarital affairs...for the Times, it seems, ethics are just the continuation of politics by other means.

Words of contempt

2005-07-29T09:55:00.000-04:00

Gah. It's too soon to celebrate over the Blank Media Levy being effectively declawed, according to U of O copyright law professor Michael Geist: Of all the reactions to today's SCC decision to skip the appeal of the private copying decision, I thought the Canadian Recording Industry Association's was the most remarkable. I’ve obviously commented regularly on its high risk strategy of suing individual file sharers. I think this is a bad strategy for many reasons. Suing your customers (and we should be clear, file sharers are the industry’s best customers) is never a good idea. Further, the immense energy devoted to fighting file sharing, despite ample evidence that any industry woes have little do with the practice, is wasted time that could be spent actually responding to the market. Today's response represents an even higher risk strategy. CRIA is now going to war not only with its customers, but now also with its artists. There have been several indications of this in the past year, namely CRIA's opposition to artists on ringtone compensation and on satellite radio. [...] Further, today's decision represents a serious blow to the iPod, which has been an incredible boon to the music industry. Simply put, copying store bought CDs onto iPods, as CRIA’s own Graham Henderson has supported, may now be unlawful in Canada since it is difficult to find an exception within the Copyright Act that would permit that form of copying. While perhaps some in the industry may think this is a good thing as it transitions users to re-purchase the same music yet again as MP3 files from services such as iTunes, I think it will ultimately lower the value that consumers associate with music to the detriment of everyone in the industry. I can't believe any of the parties involved here - music labels, either industry association (CRIA or CPCC), or artists - would be so disdainful of customers as to bring a challenge to the premise of ripping store-bought CDs for the purpose of playing on an iPod. But, then, I couldn't believe that they'd be so disdainful of customers as to demand extortionate blanket levies on blank media, regardless of such media's many non-copyright-infringing uses. The beatings will continue until morale improves, and all that... (Via BoingBoing.)

Whistle a happy tune

2005-07-28T17:25:00.000-04:00

Burn, hated Blank Media Levy. Burn. TORONTO (CP) - The fight over a levy on IPods and other digital music devices ended Thursday when the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear any further arguments on the matter. That means there will be no levy applied to digital audio recorders such as Apple's popular IPod and IPod Shuffle as well as other MP3 players like IRiver. "Obviously we're disappointed. We felt it was self-evident that those products are sold for the purpose of copying music," said David Basskin, of the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC), the non-profit agency which collects tariffs on behalf of musicians and record companies. The group had wanted the high court to overturn last year's Federal Court of Appeal decision which quashed the levy on the popular gadgets. The non-profit agency had been collecting the tariff - $2 for non-removable memory capacity of up to one GB, $15 for one to 10 GBs, $25 for more than 10 GB - since December 2003 through a tax built into the price of the devices. It stopped in December 2004 when the Federal Court overturned the policy at the urging of retailers and manufacturers such as Future Shop, Apple Canada and Dell Computer Corporation of Canada. Now, there's that. There's also the fact that DVD-Rs aren't covered under the levy, while prices have been falling dramatically, to the point where blank DVDs often offer a better capacity-for-value solution than CDs, especially for volume data backup. The levy, then, now only covers blank CDs, MiniDiscs, Digital Audio Tapes, analog audiocassettes, and other more-or-less dead-end or niche technologies - and has probably served in no small way to spur the rapid adoption of products not so doubly taxed. Brilliant job, CPCC!

And never see eye-to-eye

2005-07-28T10:25:00.000-04:00

Unsurprising: With terrorism and talk of beefed-up security dominating the news, it may come as a surprise Ottawa spends up to $2 million a year on electronic security devices -- yet most cameras at city buildings are never monitored. I can deal with the justification that round-the-clock monitoring of the city's existing security infrastructure would be prohibitively expensive for comparatively little benefit, but I'm liking this explanation a lot less: It's not that uncommon for security cameras generally to be left unmonitored, according to Martin Rudner, director of the Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies at Carleton University. Even if staff were watching the cameras all day, it may not make much difference, and could increase fear and anxiety among citizens. "I think we want to have a society which is not driven by fear," Mr. Rudner said. "It increases the terrorism in society. It gives them what they want." So are the cameras meant as a deterrent or not, then? We've seen, in the July 7 bombings, that terrorists aren't deterred by the threat of being caught on camera; giant panopticon that London is, it didn't seem to bother them. If the cameras are installed and recording, regardless, how would it "increase fear and anxiety" to actually be paying attention to what they might be catching on screen? You can't have the deterrence argument both ways.

You got your tricks, good for you; but there's no gambit I don't see through

2005-07-28T10:07:00.000-04:00

Even though it is Carolyn Parrish, a champion of idiotic bluster if ever there was one, I'm having a hard time believing anyone could be this mind-bogglingly obtuse. Independent MP Carolyn Parrish lashed out again at the Liberal government yesterday-- this time criticizing Defence Minister Bill Graham for sending combat troops to Afghanistan and Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan for making "taunting" remarks about Canadians being potential terrorist targets. Ms. Parrish is furious that Canadians and their politicians have not been consulted about what she calls the new role Canadian soldiers are being asked to carry out in Afghanistan, a role that includes killing, which is not the traditional job of peacekeeping. She warns there will be outrage when Canadians in uniform return home "in body bags." Ms. Parrish, who was booted out of the Liberal caucus last year after she criticized the government of U.S. President George W. Bush as "bastards" and "idiots," also said she is interested in returning to the Liberal fold, but only if she receives a personal invitation from the prime minister that has no strings attached. Meanwhile, the opinionated MP spoke harshly about Canada's new role in Afghanistan. "We're sending in armed troops to kill people (in Afghanistan). This is a drastic change in direction. I don't think anybody has consulted with the Canadian public. The first time Canadian soldiers come back in body bags, you just wait for the outcry," said Ms. Parrish, who was elected as a Liberal in 1993 but has been sitting in the backbenches as an independent MP since last year. "If this thing gets any deeper in (Afghanistan) and we get a couple of dead Canadians back, I'll vote to bring the government down the first opportunity I got." Perhaps the member for Mississauga-Erindale didn't receive the memo, but direction of the Canadian military is not performed on the basis of popular referenda. (If it was, who knows where we'd have troops committed at the moment?) I'm also wondering what she thought Canadian forces have been doing in Afghanistan for the past several years, because it certainly hasn't been peacekeeping in the 'hide in camp and let genocide happen outside the gates' mould. (Also, if "the first time Canadian soldiers come back in body bags" is her litmus test for voting against the government, why didn't Parrish leave caucus over the friendly-fire incident?) No, there's no way even she could be so incredibly stupid, not unless recently suffering some kind of heretofore-unreported massive head injury. This is sounding more and more like pandering to the riding, with Parrish setting herself up for the possibility (regardless of recent indications she's been invited back into caucus) of running as an independent on the time-honoured vapid populist rabble-rouser platform. That doesn't excuse such bizarre accusations (Calling Rick Hillier "barbaric," while simultaneously being upset that he might not have kind words and hugs for terrorists?), though - and, in fact, if this entire line of argument is cynical political maneuvering, that's probably even more repulsive.

I snarl, I hiss; how can ignorance be compared to bliss?

2005-07-26T09:30:00.000-04:00

I don't think anyone's surprised that obnoxious ex-Liberal Carolyn Parrish is being entreated to return to the fold. But, as usual, she manages to comment on the news with jaw-dropping ignorance: True to form, Ms. Parrish couldn't resist a little demonstration of her outspokenness in yesterday's interview, criticizing Canada's new Chief of the Defence Staff, General Rick Hillier, for some of his recent comments. She called him "dangerous" and a "testosterone-filled general," and added that "somebody should put a clamp on his mouth." Ms. Parrish, a self-described "peacenik," said she was particularly offended by Gen. Hillier's aggressive comments this month that the job of Canadian soldiers is "to be able to kill people." He had been speaking to reporters about the Canadian troop deployment to Kandahar, where the troops will target terrorist "murderers and scumbags." "They talk about me being outspoken," she said. "I'm speaking on my own behalf. This man is purporting to speak on behalf of the government, and I think he's dangerous. "I'm totally offended by him. . . . We are also not a country that is going to easily throw away 100 years of peacekeeping reputation and noble reputation in the world by a testosterone-filled general, and I think somebody should put a clamp on his mouth." I realize that for some Liberals, Canada sprang fully formed from Trudeau's godlike brow, but Jeebus. "100 years of peacekeeping?" Canadian troops were operating under UN auspices in 1905, hmmm? In actual fact, a little over a hundred years ago, Canadian soldiers were full participants in the maintenance of the British Empire, fighting in the Boer War, hardly a mission that could be called one of peacekeeping. (Not that that's a bad thing.) And if Parrish thinks that Rick Hillier is "dangerous" and "testosterone-filled," well, let's hope no one alerts her to the behaviour or demeanour of Canadian officers (or, at least, the perceptions thereof held by clueless Torontonian upper-middle-class professionals) prior to the era of the cuddly social-worker military. If the Liberal Party is still willing to embrace her after such patent idiocy on the very notion of national defence, I think it'll be clear that recent praise of Hillier's tough talk really was nothing but bluster.

Like a plague, how it spreads

2005-07-25T13:17:00.000-04:00

I was just dying to know what Jane Fonda thinks about Iraq; weren't you? I mean, I wasn't entirely sure she'd condemn it, compare it to Vietnam, and pointedly imply the exciting and not-at-all ludicrous 'War for Oil' meme. How delightful it is, then, to have confirmation! Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy: SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) - Actress and activist Jane Fonda says she intends to take a cross-country bus tour to call for an end to U.S. military operations in Iraq. "I can't go into any detail except to say that it's going to be pretty exciting," she said. Fonda said her anti-war tour in March will use a bus that runs on "vegetable oil." She will be joined by families of Iraq war veterans and her daughter. They plan to return to the Santa Fe area, where she was promoting her book, "My Life So Far" on Saturday. Prompted by a question from the audience, Fonda said war veterans that she has met on a nationwide book tour have encouraged her to break her silence on the Iraq war. "I've decided I'm coming out," she said. Hundreds of people in the audience cheered loudly when Fonda announced her intentions to join the anti-Iraq war movement. "I have not taken a stand on any war since Vietnam," she said. "I carry a lot of baggage from that." Oh, right...that. I wonder why. (Via Drudge.)

A most disgusting exhibition

2005-07-25T12:51:00.000-04:00

How low can petty political sniping go in the pro-war/anti-war divide? Pretty repellently low. But, hey, as long as you're against that eeeeevil George Bush, any action you take is automatically rendered appropriate and noble, right? The family of a Marine who was killed in Iraq is furious with [Pennsylvania] Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll for showing up uninvited at his funeral this week, handing out her business card and then saying "our government" is against the war. Rhonda Goodrich of Indiana, Pa., said yesterday that a funeral was held Tuesday at a church in Carnegie for her brother-in-law, Staff Sgt. Joseph Goodrich, 32. She said he "died bravely and courageously in Iraq on July 10, serving his country." In a phone interview, Goodrich said the funeral service was packed with people "who wanted to tell his family how Joe had impacted their lives." Then, suddenly, "one uninvited guest made an appearance, Catherine Baker Knoll." She sat down next to a Goodrich family member and, during the distribution of communion, said, "Who are you?" Then she handed the family member one of her business cards, which Goodrich said she still has. "Knoll felt this was an appropriate time to campaign and impose her will on us," Goodrich said. "I am amazed and disgusted Knoll finds a Marine funeral a prime place to campaign." [...] What really upset the family, Goodrich said, is that Knoll said, 'I want you to know our government is against this war,' " Goodrich said. I can't think of anything more ghoulish, and that it's from an elected official is worst of all. The Lieutenant-Governor is no better than the vile Fred Phelps and his "God Hates Fags" crowd for sheer depraved gall, who have similarly been known to crash a private funeral in order to spread their narrow, obnoxious agenda. At least you can say of the abominable Rev. Phelps, however, that he isn't doing what he does on the public dime. Michelle Malkin has much more. (Via LGF.)

Mere folk who give distraction

2005-07-25T11:21:00.000-04:00

On priorities: This is the front page of today's Ottawa Citizen. See way below the fold, at the bottom there, just above the index? The story I've marked "A" is "Your cat's a finicky meat-eater because it has no sweet tooth." See the one marked "B?" That's a short headline for the results of a poll of Canadians saying "Invasion left Iraq better off," a new and welcome change of attitude. (Free version in the National Post here, headlined with "Canadians support US in Iraq.") A majority of Canadians and Britons say Iraq is better off for the U.S.-led invasion of the country, but most Canadians say peace and security in Iraq will be more than five years away, according to a new Gallup poll obtained by the Association for Canadian Studies. In what seems to be a shift in Canadian opinion toward the war, 59% of Canadians said Iraq is either "much better" or "somewhat better" off now than before the U.S.-led invasion. Sixty-one per cent of Britons said the same. The editor who decided that this was such a non-story it needed to be buried below the fold, and sidelined for a fluff piece about how most housecats don't have "sweet receptors" on their tongues? He needs to be fired, and now.

We come in peace and shoot to kill

2005-07-25T10:58:00.000-04:00

So it seems that the man shot in London on Friday on suspicion of being yet another suicide bomber was innocent, if not exactly acting that way: London — London's police commissioner expressed regret Sunday for the slaying of a Brazilian electrician by officers who mistook him for a suspect in the recent terror bombings, but he defended a police shoot-to-kill policy as "the only way" to stop would-be suicide bombers. [...] The man shot Friday at the Stockwell subway station was identified as Jean Charles de Menezes, 27. Witnesses said he was wearing a heavy, padded coat when plainclothes police chased him into a subway car, pinned him to the ground and shot him five times in the head and torso in front of horrified passengers. Mr. Blair initially said Mr. Menezes was "directly linked" to the investigation of Thursday's attacks, but police then said Saturday he had no connection to the bomb attempts. It's a shame, yes - but that doesn't invalidate the actions of the police. They certainly had reasonable justification to shoot: When Mr. Menezes began to enter the station, witnesses said, he was surrounded by plainclothes officers who shouted at him to stop. According to the police accounts, the officers identified themselves and were suspicious partly because he was wearing a bulky jacket in the summer weather, suggesting that he was concealing something. Mr. Menezes ran. He jumped over the turnstile, ran down an escalator and stumbled into a train, where he fell face down. Witnesses said the police then shot him five times in the head and neck, killing him. If was ever to be in the situation where armed police were shouting at me to surrender, and I was, in fact, completely innocent of anything they might suppose of me, I think that jumping a turnstile and running would logically be the best way to get killed. It's unfortunate that Mr. Menezes considered this a sound course of action, a day after a second abortive bombing attempt, when he had to have known that police would still be on edge and suspicious of bizarre activity on anyone's part, but that's what happened. Thankfully, it's not causing either the British government or police services to be thrown into fits of self-doubt or recrimination, as some might wish: "This is a tragedy," [Tony Blair] said Sunday of the shooting. "The Metropolitan Police accepts full responsibility for this. To the family I can only express my deep regrets." He also defended the shoot-to-kill policy, saying such action only applied when lives were believed to be at risk. "I am very aware that minority communities are talking about a shoot-to-kill policy," he said. "It's only a shoot-to-kill-in-order-to-protect policy." Mr. Blair said British police have drawn from the experiences of other countries, including Sri Lanka, that have dealt with suicide attackers. "The only way to deal with this is to shoot to the head," Mr. Blair said. "There is no point in shooting at someone's chest because that is where the bomb is likely to be." Let Red Ken Livingstone bow and scrape to those to would slaughter all Britons in a heartbeat, had they the opportunity; the right people are actually in charge of those offices more significant than the Mayor of London's.

Pouring your threats in my ear

2005-07-25T10:29:00.000-04:00

I don't care for Anne McLellan, but I do wish she'd have taken this threat more seriously, in retrospect: A controversial Toronto imam warned Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan at a closed-door meeting to stop "terrorizing" Canadian Muslims. "If you try to cross the line I can't guarantee what is going to happen. Our young people, we can't control," Aly Hindy, the head of Scarborough's Salaheddin Islamic Centre, recalls telling the minister at the May meeting she held in Toronto with dozens of Muslim leaders. Can't, or won't? In either case, that is why it increasingly seems we'll have to do it for those in the passive-aggressive fifth column. The shrill cries of victimization (wholly, it seems, as yet without merit in Canada, except in the fever dreams of fools and madmen) from some of those of the Muslim community are becoming tiresome, and aren't inclining me to think the best of their intentions. That might have something to do with this: The imam said six or seven young men have approached him to discuss "fighting overseas" in place such as Iraq and Afghanistan. He said he told them "people fighting in Iraq, they don't need more people." I'm not hearing condemnation here. Or even disapproval. Acknowledgment that it's not a strategically practical thing for Canadian Muslims to do, yes, but that is something less than comforting. Nor, for that matter, is the acknowledgment that six or seven members of his congregation (of how many? 1000? 500? Fewer?) are so stoked up to kill we in the infidel-North American community that they're actively thinking about buying a plane ticket and AK-47. Instead, Canadian Muslims can wage non-violent jihads (holy struggles) at home. "You have a very good chance to serve Islam here," he said he told them. I think that even Canadians are starting to realize that multiculturalism has its limits. If it's too much to ask that Canadian Muslims not wage any sort of jihad - "non-violent" or not - then maybe it'll become clearer where the line is of what we will and will not collectively tolerate. This kind of preacher of paranoia and intolerance, we can't. Mr. Hindy, who has long complained that CSIS is spying on him, his family and his mosque, told Ms. McLellan that a young Muslim woman complained to him she was roughed up by Canadian spies while her husband was away at prayers. This allegation could spur reprisals because "our women are the most valuable thing to us" and "for a Muslim, honour is more important than his life," Mr. Hindy said in a recent interview. He made the point to the minister. Several people who attended shrugged off the imam's remarks, but some Muslims and government agents later approached Mr. Hindy asking him to explain himself. "The police came to me and said, 'This is a kind of threat,' and I said yes," he said. "But it's for the good of this country." [...] "We believe CSIS should stop terrorizing us," he says in a flyer he is circulating to mosques. "CSIS is powerless. CSIS has no authority over you. If CSIS agents come to your door, do not open [it] for them." By all means, don't cooperate with ongoing federal terrorism investigations. Don't admit that their suspicions are very reasonable, given ambiguous non-condemnation of terror coming from certain mosques. It does tend to make crystal clear which side you're on... (Via NealeNews.)

Please remember that I want us to live

2005-07-21T12:27:00.000-04:00

On the matter of Conservative policy and same-sex marriage in relation to its final assent, I have two words: somewhat better. For the first time, Mr. Toews signalled the Conservative party is set to modify its strategy now [C-38] has passed. Contrary to earlier statements by leader Stephen Harper, who said he would introduce legislation to re-establish traditional marriage if he becomes prime minister, Mr. Toews said a Conservative government should first introduce a simple motion asking MPs if they would support a law once again limiting civil marriage to only one and one woman. Following that, should the motion pass, the new Conservative government should then introduce legislation repealing the same-sex marriage law and send it directly to the Supreme Court of Canada for a ruling on its constitutionality, Mr. Toews said. This still isn't perfect - I'd be happier, and I think Tory electoral prospects would increase substantially, if not a single word was spoken on the subject during the next campaign, in favour of expending the capital of media attention on more popular policies - but it's a start; it defuses the automatic trigger of the promise somewhat, implying another preliminary round (grueling though it might be) of MPs consulting directly with constituents before making any real decisions. Promise that it'll be a free vote, with no whipping, even for the cabinet (I know that's likely, but emphasizing the fact wouldn't hurt) and showcase that the party does have some internal differences of opinion on the matter, and this modified policy premise might actually be a net benefit. Or, at least, not the sucking chest wound of a self-inflicted injury that flat-out promises of immediate repeal would likely amount to. (Interestingly buried lede via The Shotgun.)

Someone who's stalwart and steady

2005-07-21T11:27:00.000-04:00

Erg. Another day, another threat. A number of Tube stations have been evacuated and lines closed after minor blasts in what Met Police chief Sir Ian Blair says is a "serious incident". Sir Ian said only three Tube lines were still suspended and said it was time London started to return to normal. At least there seem to be no serious casualties, this time. It never ends, but that never justifies giving up, or collapsing into paroxysms of self-loathing. In that vein, I'm watching the press conference with Tony Blair and John Howard right now, and I'm reminded how much I envy Australians. Howard is a cool-headed, hard-nosed SOB, and seems considerably less flustered by reporters asking inane "Admit you caused this by invading Iraq" questions. He's like a high school teacher patiently explaining cause and effect to a rather dull-witted remedial history class, and isn't at all apologetic about reminding them of Bali and incidents prior. If only our own Liberals were as competent and steadfast against terror as Howard's similarly-named party.

Hello to the modern world, the breathtaking modern world; there's nothing today that you can't do

2005-07-20T19:06:00.000-04:00

There's unnerving yet fascinating movement on the Asian front: China is Coming (still), and their plans seem to be crossing the line between everyday villainy and cartoonish supervillainy. In 1998, an official People's Liberation Army publishing house brought out a treatise called "Unrestricted Warfare," written by two senior army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. This book, which is available in English translation, is well known to the U.S. national security establishment but remains practically unheard of among the general public. "Unrestricted Warfare" recognizes that it is practically impossible to challenge the U.S. on its own terms. No one else can afford to build mega-expensive weapons systems like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost more than $200 billion to develop. "The way to extricate oneself from this predicament," the authors write, "is to develop a different approach." Their different approaches include financial warfare (subverting banking systems and stock markets), drug warfare (attacking the fabric of society by flooding it with illicit drugs), psychological and media warfare (manipulating perceptions to break down enemy will), international law warfare (blocking enemy actions using multinational organizations), resource warfare (seizing control of vital natural resources), even ecological warfare (creating man-made earthquakes or other natural disasters). [...] This isn't just loose talk. There are signs of this strategy being implemented. The anti-Japanese riots that swept China in April? That would be psychological warfare against a major Asian rival. The stage-managed protests in 1999, after the U.S. accidentally bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, fall into the same category. The bid by the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Co., to acquire Unocal? Resource warfare. Attempts by China's spy apparatus to infiltrate U.S. high-tech firms and defense contractors? Technological warfare. China siding against the U.S. in the U.N. Security Council over the invasion of Iraq? International law warfare. Gen. Zhu's threat to nuke the U.S.? Media warfare. So, basically, the PRC plans to mount nearly every improbably intricate secret plan ever devised by a James Bond supervillain or comic book Big Bad, but on concerted enough a national level (and performed not just by a couple of dozen uniformed henchmen, but millions) that a number of those attempts are bound to succeed. And many already have, looking at the pattern in retrospect. I'm really starting to miss not living in interesting times; aren't you? (I wonder when opinion leaders in the domestic business sector - like the Globe & Mail, which put out a shamefully obsequious month-long series on the subject earlier this year- are going to regret all the cheerleading they've done for promoting Chinese state investment in Canadian industry, and vice versa, as alternatives to scaaaary American investors and investment opportunities?) (Via Instapundit.)

There's a face that we hide, 'til the nighttime appears

2005-07-20T10:24:00.000-04:00

What a surprise: It didn't take long (despite a brief trip to the land of resolute defiance) for London Mayor "Red Ken" Livingstone to return to form. Ken Livingstone yesterday blamed western policies for contributing to the spread of the extremist beliefs that inspired the London bombers. The mayor of London highlighted the West's role in the creation of al-Qa'eda by saying: "We created these people. We built them up. We funded them." His comments coincided with remarks from Muslim extremists that went much further, claiming that ministers were "the real terrorists" and that voters were to blame for the attacks because they returned Tony Blair to power. Mr Livingstone has condemned the London bombings in the strongest terms, and immediately after the attack he was widely praised for the way he spoke up on behalf of all Londoners. But yesterday he abandoned his consensual approach when he claimed that western policies in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Iraq may have influenced the bombers. Mr Livingstone said: "This particular strand of extremism was funded by the West in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden was just another businessman until he was recruited by the CIA. "I suspect the real problem was that we funded these people, as long as they were killing Russians. We gave no thought to the fact that when they stopped killing Russians they might start killing us." Mr Livingstone also defended Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the controversial cleric who visited London at his invitation last year and who had been scheduled to attend a conference in Manchester next month. He and Michael Moore would get along like a house on fire. (Rather, I should say, like a city on fire.) It's been less than two weeks, and already Livingstone is telling Britons that this is their fault. The bombers, the planners, the funders, the sympathizers? Meaningless, in his world; their innocence is guaranteed, apparently, by being mindless automatons incapable of self-control, liable to grab a sack of explosives and blow up a few dozen commuters at the slightest imagined offense. Moreover, it's the fault of Blair voters specifically; if only there'd been no war in Iraq, or Afghanistan, he imagines, there'd be no terrorism today. Gah. Britain is doomed, if this is the best the nation has to offer.

Of dishonest endeavour, and being so clever

2005-07-19T17:08:00.000-04:00

This is awful, but I still don't think it's vindication for those against same-sex marriage in the general sense. After tying the knot for more than 3,400 people, Orville Nichols expects to become the first person in Canada to be fired for refusing to marry a gay couple. Mr. Nichols, a 69-year-old marriage commissioner from Regina, says performing same-sex marriages does not accord with his religious and personal beliefs. And Saskatchewan Justice Minister Frank Quennell made it clear late last year that refusal is not an option for civic officials in his province. What's clear here is that, yes, the supposed protections for free exercise of conscience by marriage commissioners in C-38 are meaningless. That's not news; that seemed probable all along, and was my main objection to enacting same-sex marriage in this particular form. But it doesn't appear to be the federal law that can be squarely blamed here; the Saskatchewan government's choice to be ruthless in refusing opt-out provisions is more directly at fault. Justice Minister Irwin Cotler, who spearheaded the bill through the Commons, has repeatedly promised that religious rights would not be trumped by the equality provisions of the Charter that have made same-sex marriage a legal reality. But the transition to a nation that embraces the legal homosexual unions has not gone as smoothly as he had hoped. In Newfoundland, at least one in 10 marriage commissioners resigned after the province said they must perform the ceremonies. In Manitoba, where a similar edict is in effect, at least 12 commissioners have resigned. And in Saskatchewan, at least eight of the commissioners have quit, but Mr. Nichols refused to join them. [...] Because the solemnization of marriage is within provincial jurisdiction, he has appealed to his counterparts in the provinces and territories to make provisions for civic officials who don't want to perform a same-sex marriage. Saskatchewan, as the socialist fiefdom it unfortunately currently is, has a government directing its ministers and employees to take a hard line in favour of left-leaning social engineering, punishing those unwilling to endorse such policies. Let's take a deep breath and remember, here, that Mr. Nichols probably would have been railroaded no matter how the federal vote on C-38 had turned out; it probably would have happened even if the federal government fell in May. The problem here isn't the phenomenon of gay marriage - it's a leftist government unwilling to compromise on demanding all officials swear loyalty not only to the province, but the provincial government's social policies, which can reasonably be separated from one another. If there can be protection of conscience, allowing those who oppose it to opt out (whether formally or informally) then it'll have to come at the provincial level, because it does seem painfully clear that the Ministry of Justice wishes to wash their hands of victimization when it occurs. That doesn't refute the merits of extending the privileges of marriage to all, equally, but it certainly does sully them.

Let me draw the latest score to your attention

2005-07-19T13:34:00.000-04:00

This very cool Russian-made smart keyboard prototype - with embedded OLED screens in each key capable of changing on-the-fly, depending on OS, language, and program - has been making the rounds of the gadget news sites lately. Even more fascinating, though, is the designer, one Artemy Lebedev, and his numerous essays on design. For instance, the Russian visual experience, as it pertains to industrial designers, is interestingly different from that of the west. Lebedev details the development of the Russian typewriter layout and telephone system, both parallel but slightly askew to the interfaces of both as we know them. But there's also some more general, universal musings, like on set design and presidential addresses, neat particularly in demonstrating how much more sinister Putin has made the visual language of the Russian presidency. (Also amusing: "The President’s hands move so as to get across a message of something in between 'it’s an honest-to-goodness truth, folks' and 'I’ll strangle ye all.'" Hey, you say it like it's a bad thing...) And then, there's the most entertainingly detailed April Fools' hoax I've seen in a while, on the purported Cyrillic original copy of the Declaration of Independence. (!) Gently satiric but seemingly-earnest affection for that most significant of documents, and a brilliant sense of design? Someone get this man a visa and VC funding, now.

You're a spineless, pale, pathetic lot, and you haven't got a clue

2005-07-19T13:12:00.000-04:00

Sigh. Same pig-headed, morally equivocating, craven and cowardly old CBC: 'Terrorist' and 'terrorism': Exercise extreme caution before using either word. Avoid labelling any specific bombing or other assault as a "terrorist act" unless it's attributed (in a TV or Radio clip, or in a direct quote on the Web). For instance, we should refer to the deadly blast at that nightclub in Bali in October 2002 as an "attack," not as a "terrorist attack." The same applies to the Madrid train attacks in March 2004, the London bombings in July 2005 and the attacks against the United States in 2001, which the CBC prefers to call "the Sept. 11 attacks" or some similar expression. (The BBC, Reuters and many others follow similar policies.) Terrorism generally implies attacks against unarmed civilians for political, religious or some other ideological reason. But it's a highly controversial term that can leave journalists taking sides in a conflict. By restricting ourselves to neutral language, we aren't faced with the problem of calling one incident a "terrorist act" (e.g., the destruction of the World Trade Center) while classifying another as, say, a mere "bombing" (e.g., the destruction of a crowded shopping mall in the Middle East). Here's the thing, jackass: they're both terrorist acts. That it's harder for you to openly cheer for those who murder 3,000 of your fellow upper-middle-class professionals than those who murder fifty or a hundred Israeli shoppers is not germane to the subject; both are vicious attacks on civilians, performed by megalomaniacal madmen. I realize that even the worst offenders for the 'one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter' trope, the BBC, managed to even top themselves in that appalling little rhetorical game recently, but that doesn't excuse our very own state-funded terror sympathizers. In an ideal world, the CBC would get as much federal funding as Al-Jazeera, if they wanted to keep on playing the we-deserved-it game, refusing to honestly call terrorism for what it is. Spout whatever amoral idiocies you like, but to demand to do it on the public dime? Now that's arrogance. UPDATE: Oh, look; Zerb is citing me as among those "raging" at this policy, whom she imagines to be sharply rebutted by Skippy: What the perfidious CBC is suggesting that reporters describe events factually, and let viewers make up their own minds. Kudos, then, to the wise folks at CBC watch, who have once again laid bare the CBC's bias. The last thing we'd want would be for viewers to make up their own minds. This bias in favor of objectivity must stop right now. I mean it. We cannot afford neutral words in these dark times. What the Irrational Post has omitted is the fact that the CBC is not alone in this policy. My books are still packed for the move, which prevents me from quoting the relevant section, but the CP style guide contains a similar warning against the use of the word "terrorist." It's a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance, but the admonition (and the rationale) is the same. And I'm pretty sure that someone at the National Post knows that, because I'm pretty sure that they have at least one CP style guide somewhere in their news room, propping up the wobbly desk that they can't afford to replace until the day they make a profit, or the day of the rapture - whichever comes first. OMG he made up a funny name for the National Post!!11!!! Whose writers are all greedy fanatical fundamentalist Christians!!! 0wNz0R'd!! LOL ROTFL!1!! Mocking unfortunate juvenilia aside: so what? I don't care if the CP style guide suggests a similar policy of neutrality. Neutrality towards evil is no virtue. Omitting relevant facts isn't simply bias, it's dishonesty, but we're talking about the National Post here. While I'm at it, then, let me point out that water is really, really wet, and that it's a damn good thing we have CBC Watch to protect civilization. In practice, there's wide agreement in Canada that people who fly airplanes into buildings are one man's terrorists, not another man's freedom fighters, which makes the argument moot. A spade is a spade unless a lot of people want to call it a shovel; only then do you have to start calling it a long-handled digging implement of indeterminate type. The problem, unfortunately, is that a lot of people do want to call it a shovel. (Or, at the very least, a spade whose actions are understandable given a sense of persecution by wicked American imperialists and Zionist colonizers.) If we actually were all in agreement about the depravity of terrorism in the broad sense, true, there'd (obviously) be no need for the state broadcaster to take a side, but it's not evident that we are. The idea that using neutral language somehow promotes a point of view is clearly false. Nobody is going to decide that the 9/11 hijackers were actually on the side of the angels, just because the television calls them "hijackers" instead of "terrorists." And it's also hard to argue that the CBC, being publicly funded and all, should avoid the use of neutral language in favour of, um, slant. Nobody is going to decide that those particular terrorists were heroes because of the CBC's neutral language. But what of those who are pleased that the official voice of Canada refuses to condemn them? What of those wannabe jihadis who are just gleeful that their actions won't be censured in the west, at the very least, by the CBC (or BBC)? In this context, failing to take a side is genuinely as good as being on the other side, because it reflects a basic and insidious sense of amorality. There are things worth fighting for; for the CBC to stand back and refuse to favour, with simple terminology, the side whose civilians are randomly murdered by roving groups of megalomanial madmen, is something akin to the notion that CBC broadcasts had a duty to be strictly neutral on the world stage in 1939. I would refer Skippy to words generally (if apocryphally) attributed to Edmund Burke: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." For good men to refuse to deign to even say a word against the barbaric acts of terrorists is even more spineless, and similarly enabling of the spread of evil. Is Canada, with all the freedoms and rights we enjoy as citizens, preferable to the totalitarian dictatorships or murderous theocracies seen in those states - subtly or openly - supporting our enemies? If so, it doesn't hurt a bit for the CBC to admit as such by openly calling terrorism, and those who support it, for what it is and what they are. If not - if, perhaps, you're not actually certain that modern western civilization presents a superior way of life compared to the alternatives - then maybe Skippy's line of reasoning makes sense, I suppose. I know which side I'm on. The CBC, Skippy, and Zerb might be a little confused - but that's their collective cross to bear, not mine.

And plenty of security

2005-07-19T12:49:00.000-04:00

Sounds okay, but there's room for improvement: WASHINGTON -- A Conservative government in Canada would move aggressively to step up efforts in the war on international terrorism and create a single office to oversee Canada's spy and security forces, Opposition Leader Stephen Harper promised yesterday in a speech to right-wing fellow travellers gathered in Washington. "In particular, Canada can play a stronger role in the war on terrorism," Mr. Harper told a receptive audience of representatives of centrist and conservative parties from more than 60 nations attending the triennial International Democrat Union meeting. A Tory government would also create "an office of the commissioner of national security whose job it will be to begin co-ordination of Canada's security agencies." Not to quibble, but we already have one of those, sort of. And I'm not sure that creating a larger bureaucratic clusterfarg by moving CSIS and CSE under that department, or vice versa, would necessarily be in aid of anything. Growing the size of the federal government and its attendant bureaucracy is an awfully Canadian solution, though, so I suppose it might get a thumbs-up from PSAC. The still-evolving plan echoes the U.S. decision to consolidate all security agencies under a single czar. Mr. Harper also said his party is continuing to look at the issue of a national identity card, although he said no policy decision had been made. Want me to start seriously considering the Libertarians as something beyond a one-off protest vote? Do that. I dare you. Instituting a national ID card will have little to no effect on those seeking to circumvent it, while at the same time adding another layer of arbitrary government control to the everyday lives of law-abiding citizens, ripe for abuse. Has the gun registry debacle not taught us that, at least? Mr. Harper vowed that a Conservative government would boost military spending in Canada. "We will reverse the record of successive Liberal governments under which Canada's military, peacekeeping and foreign-aid contributions have long been shrinking." Sigh. This is what tends to disappoint me; even abroad, talking to foreign policy hawks from around the world, Harper can't stop reciting the same old platitudes about peacekeeping. Although he made no specific commitment to adopt a policy of reversing the Liberal government's rejection of ballistic missile defence -- a cornerstone of the Bush administration's defence strategy -- Mr. Harper made it clear that if he were prime minister, Canada would shoulder a greater share of continental defence. Better, but still vague. Take a stand, damn it; say that missile defence is a good thing, and explain why. Take the argument to the people. That's a worthy issue to go down fighting on. "A new Conservative government will do significantly more to contribute to [Canada's] own national security, to continental security in alliance with the United States and to global security in concert with all free nations," Mr. Harper said. That will gladden Republicans in the United States, many of whom regard the Canadian government as soft on terrorism, and an unreliable ally that deserted Americans in Iraq and over missile defence. Tougher Canadian domestic efforts to combat terrorism would also please Americans on both sides of the partisan divide, some of whom regard Canada's immigration and domestic-security policies as inadequate to stop terrorists from infiltrating the United States across the border. Like the Bush administration, which has vowed to help spread democracy throughout the world and reverse the decades-long pattern of supporting authoritarian regimes if they backed Washington, Mr. Harper called fighting terrorism a battle of ideas. And, of course, here's the pièce de résistance: The Globe & Mail's standard booga-booga-booga line about Republicans, coupled with stirring up anti-American resentment on as many points as possible. Shameless, but expected. But what does this do to the actual policy intent? I don't think it hurts it as much as they think. Even for all my complaints, this is a strong and decisive plan, comparatively, which I could (mostly) support. I know "American-style" is assumed by the Canadian media to be the most damning of epithets, but we could certainly do worse than to improve security to American levels, and it's not clear - recent display of backbone aside - that the Liberals are even capable of such a feat, let alone willing to try it.

There are those who love regretting, there are those who like extremes

2005-07-18T11:48:00.000-04:00

I knew there was a reason why War of the Worlds seemed eminently worthy of ignoring, besides being a pointless lumbering behemoth of a purpose-made blockbuster, or merely insultingly political on its own merits. It's a sign of a trend, perhaps: David Koepp, who wrote the screenplay for War of the Worlds, says the Martian attackers in the film represent the American military, while the Americans being slaughtered at random represent Iraqi civilians. I see it differently. I think the Martians symbolize normal Americans, while those being attacked are the numbskulls who run Hollywood. Perhaps the normals went a bit too far in this easy-to-understand allegory, but think of the provocation. It's relevant to remember that H.G. Wells was, in fact, an unrepentant and particularly unpleasant socialist, who fancied Lenin "creative" and Italian Fascists "brave and well-meaning." An insulting and facile political metaphor made out of an H.G. Wells novel? That's not a surprise. The bigger surprise is that so many adaptations of his works have been able to ignore his politics, and focus instead only on the well-told stories therein. If only latter-day sci-fi writers were afforded the same favour when necessary... (Via Libertas via/and Kaus via Instapundit.)

All I ask is that you listen to me

2005-07-18T11:18:00.000-04:00

Parse poll numbers however you want, but I think this seems to continue to imply that a platform of repealing same-sex marriage isn't exactly going to be a huge vote-winner for Tories. Canadians do not want their political leaders to undo historic legislation allowing gays to legally marry in the wake of a pledge from the Conservatives that they would do just that if elected. In a new poll conducted for The Globe and Mail/CTV, 55 per cent of Canadians surveyed say the next government should let same-sex legislation stand, while 39 per cent would like to see an attempt made to repeal it. A further 6 per cent said they did not know. The results appear to bolster Prime Minister Paul Martin's remarks two weeks ago that Canadians do not want to revisit the issue, despite a promise by Conservative Leader Stephen Harper that he would rescind the law if he becomes prime minister in an election expected next winter. "The Liberals have been successful in defining same-sex as an issue of rights, not as a moral issue" said Tim Woolstencroft, managing partner of polling firm the Strategic Counsel. "And that prevails. Rights will also win over other issues." Part of that perception is due to skilful Liberal framing of the issue, true, but at this point, it doesn't really matter; support is widespread and at least indifferent to mildly positive, at a level substantial enough that it can't be explained away entirely as the product of leading polls, a cheerleading media, and suspiciously expedited, sub rosa debate and passage. How does that seem even more evident than in the raw numbers for the central question? Think about what this means: In a related question, 51 per cent of those surveyed said they do not support the idea of allowing gay couples to legally adopt, while 46 per cent said they do. That's a difference within shouting distance of the 3.1% margin of error. If nearly half the country is okay or indifferent towards gay couples adopting, it seems remarkably improbable that a solid majority would actively vote to repeal the impending official redefinition of marriage, and make that their single important election issue to boot. I realize it may come as bitter medicine to some, but if Conservatives are to form a government again in the foreseeable future, this doesn't look to be the hot-button issue vehicle upon which that feat can be accomplished. The sooner that albatross is thrown off for issues with genuinely promising electoral prospects, the better.

Still, I'm sure that you can rock the cynics if you try

2005-07-18T10:36:00.000-04:00

Much ado was made on the weekend over this: OTTAWA -- Canada's blunt-talking top soldier won praise yesterday for his clear and sometimes brutal description of the coming military effort against terrorist "scumbags" in Afghanistan. Defence analysts and politicians from the NDP and the Conservative Party said it is time for a military leader like General Rick Hillier, who speaks from the heart about the role of the Canadian Forces in the war on terror. "Controlled anger, given what's happened, is an appropriate response," NDP Leader Jack Layton said. "We have a very committed, level-headed head of our armed forces, who isn't afraid to express the passion that underlies the mission that front-line personnel are going to be taking on. "A bit of strong language in the circumstances, I don't find that to be wrong." Bravo, of course, for Hillier; it's refreshing to see a chief of defence staff who understands that the purpose of military forces is, well, to kill certain people as ruthlessly and efficiently as possible, not to do social work. But I'm not entirely sold on the tripartisan-support angle. I suppose it's taken for granted that Conservatives support a strong military capable of projecting force in the defence of the nation, however that may be defined, and the Liberals similarly so, albeit in a form somewhat more corrupted by the pernicious influence of the Peacekeeping fantasy. But the NDP? I'm having trouble believing that this isn't going to cost Layton some support (or at the very least, goodwill; hippies do so hate sellouts) at the grassroots level. Hillier's remarks so don't jibe with NDP attitudes, it's not funny. Jack Layton responded to the London bombings themselves by, after rotely condemning the terrorism itself, urging the G8 conference to immediately direct itself "[addressing] global climate change and meeting our commitments to fight global poverty." In the NDP's world, yes, terrorism is a nuisance, but not nearly as important as the pressing concern of redistributing wealth on the basis of claimed victimhood, whether by direct no-strings-attached aid, or Byzantine schemes like the Kyoto Protocol, currently on-track to fine tiny and green New Zealand into a financial crisis for the crime of being, comparatively, too industrially successful. As for the Liberals, of course, they know which way the wind is blowing, and are famously adept at playing to poll results. Right now, with 7/7 fresh in the minds of Canadians, it won't hurt a bit to appear tough on terror and those who perpetrate it. I wonder if the PM's newfound backbone will remain once the first casualties from this mission appear? Should terrorism again temporarily appear to be only something from which Americans and Israelis are victimized, what then? Will Hillier be quietly told to clam up, or else suffer an unusally early opportunity to spend more time with his family? There is something that would convince me of both Layton and Martin's sincerity, though. If both are willing to endorse the notion that terrorists are "scumbags," and may (nay, must) be taken out by our armed forces wherever they may find them, as a matter of doing the right thing against a barbaric and merciless enemy...a token contribution of fifty or a hundred Canadian troops to ongoing operations in Iraq would, I'm sure, be welcomed. But that would be asking both men to admit that doing the right thing can converge with American policy - and that would engender some strong language on someone's part, likely not Hillier's.

Lots of madmen have had their say, but only for a day

2005-07-15T10:37:00.000-04:00

I have to say, I never thought I'd see an editorial this honest and straightforward about the unpleasant facts of terrorism in a Canwest-owned Vancouver newspaper: "A religion of peace vs. apologists for terrorism." Hours after the terror attacks on the London subway and a bus last week, the Canadian Islamic Congress issued a brief statement that condemned the bombing. It offered no condolences, expressed no grief, displayed no shock; it was instead a directive to the public not to blame Islam. "We hope Canadian Muslims are not found guilty by association," said its national president, Mohamed Elmasry. Criticism forced him to subsequently toss in some disingenuous sympathy, but he'd shown his true colours. That Elmasry should be speaking as the head of any Islamic organization is an affront to what its followers call a religion of peace. Last year, he suggested all Israelis over the age of 18 should be murdered, arguing that because Israel has a civilian army they are legitimate targets for Palestinian suicide bombers. There were calls for his resignation, which Muslim leaders refused. Later, on a CBC radio program, he defended Islamic terrorism, saying the colonial powers committed worse atrocities and deserved what they got. Earlier this year, Elmasry defended the Syrian occupation of Lebanon as a peacekeeping mission and described Iraq under Saddam Hussein as some sort of paradise with full employment, a stable public service infrastructure, and one of the leading Middle East states in administration, education and health care before the intervention of the international coalition plunged it into chaos. No mention of the gassing of the Kurds, the torture chambers and rape rooms, the attack on Kuwait, war with Iran or the Scud missiles fired at Israel. As long as apologists for terrorism like Elmasry are allowed to be spokesmen for Islam, all Muslims are vulnerable to being found guilty by association. Bingo. It goes on, too, cataloguing all those facts - the appalling numbers of British Muslims positively gleeful at the 7/7 attack, the ideology of hate taught by Saudi-funded madrassas, the megalomaniacal intentions of militant Islamists to re-establish a far-reaching empire where all nonbelievers can be killed, suppressed, or forcibly converted, and the complete disconnect between Iraq, Afghanistan, and any purported justification for terrorism - surely familiar to most blog readers, but only now osmosing out to the non-news-junkie general public. In a Vancouver newspaper. There's hope for Canada yet, if we're finally getting to the point where honest debate about uncomfortable truths - damaging as they may be to the multiculti myth - can be aired. (Via NealeNews.)

The Lady's Got Potential

2005-07-14T18:22:00.000-04:00

Canadian-born Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm seems to have internalized the unfortunately-typical Canadian political dialogue pretty well: Last month the state legislature buried the Democratic Governor's top legislative priority, a grandiose proposal to raise taxes on insurance companies, banks and thousands of small businesses that private studies said would have cost up to 20,000 jobs. Ms. Granholm's plan was widely criticized, including in these columns in March and in an op-ed article on the opposite page last Thursday by state legislator Rick Baxter, a Republican, and Hillsdale College Professor Gary Wolfram. Ms. Granholm was not pleased, going so far as to denounce the op-ed as "treasonous for the state of Michigan." The authors' high crime? Exposing Michigan as a high tax state and criticizing Ms. Granholm for wanting to raise taxes. Her choice of words was no inadvertent slip of the tongue, by the way--a Howard Dean-like temporary loss of sanity. The Governor has used the "t" word repeatedly and has even suggested that Mr. Baxter "should be removed from office." As improbable self-righteous hyperbole goes, that doesn't seem too far away from "Private health care will destroy Canada" or similar lines of attack. Governing is so much easier in a one-party state, without opponents willing to argue against your grandiose schemes, isn't it? And, surely, it follows that anyone opposed to the will of the executive - benevolent and right-minded as it is - is not only wrong, but a traitor. (Funny how dissent is imagined to be brave and patriotic when disagreeing with Republicans, but literally treasonous when disagreeing with Democrats, huh?) This kind of political philosophy, the casual delegitimization and vilification of all political enemies, is one Canadian export I'm sure no one wants. In any event, when eventually turfed by Michiganders (and, oh, will that be sweet when it happens), I'm sure she'd be welcomed back to Canada as some variety of high-profile Liberal candidate. Demanding that conservatives be charged with treason merely for the sake of their political opinions would certainly be a winning platform in some parts of Ontario... (Via Instapundit.)

A little word, but oh, the difference it makes

2005-07-14T12:17:00.000-04:00

It's now a thoughtcrime, apparently, to even imply that not all cultures and societies are equal in their attitudes and values - like, say, determining what's an appropriate male-female relationship: An Ottawa police detective who gives sexual harassment sensitivity training to taxi drivers could use some lessons herself, according to a chorus of voices yesterday who say the officer made remarks that were culturally insensitive. In an interview published yesterday in the Citizen, Det. Theresa Kelm said part of the function of the training course was to explain to drivers what constituted acceptable behaviour toward women in Canada and what types of actions or remarks crossed the line into harassment or assault. "Some of this behaviour may be acceptable in the countries they are from," Det. Kelm said. "Our message to them is that it's not acceptable here, and it won't be tolerated." The comment was made in a story about a cab driver who was convicted of sexually assaulting a female passenger, the third of its kind in the Ottawa area in the past year. Yousef Al Mezel, president of the union that represents Ottawa taxi drivers, said the detective's remark was unfair to drivers. "It's a racist comment from the detective," he said. The comment implied Canadian culture was superior to that of other countries in terms of attitude toward women, said Mr. Al Mezel. You know what? It bloody well is. Canada doesn't suffer from the repressive medieval phenomena of honour killings or female "circumcision," nor does this country endorse societal norms that consider women property of their husbands, fathers, or brothers. Not now, anyway, except in the unnervingly unassimilated. To pretend that there's no difference between Canada (or the western world at large) and some of the most repressive and misogynistic societies left over from the middle ages is dishonest, and doesn't speak well of the accusers. At least the federal government, uncharacteristically, has its head on straight, recognizing that the cult of multiculturalism is only so much smoke and mirrors once you leave the country. Meanwhile, when Canada's Foreign Affairs website offers advice to female travellers, it warns Middle Eastern countries can be a particular hazard. "Unescorted women are vulnerable to sexual harassment and verbal abuse," the website says in the travel report on Egypt. "Physical and verbal harassment of women is a problem," the report adds about Kuwait. Foreign affairs also publishes a travel guide for women, called Her Own Way, which explains "female travellers are directly affected by the religious and societal beliefs of the countries they visit." It says that in some countries -- although it does not spell out which -- a differentiation is made by men between women who dress or behave conservatively and those who don't. "Understand that, in some parts of the world, 'respectable' women don't go out alone in the evening. In these places, a flagrant rejection of this custom could very well put you in jeopardy." Andre Lemay, a spokesman for Foreign Affairs, said the department isn't looking to offend anyone, but sometimes there is a "reality" that needs to be explained. "Our job is to protect Canadians," he said. We need more police officers like Detective Kelm, who recognize that some people are unwilling to leave the old country, with its attendant attitudes and behavioural norms, behind. That's not racist. It may be unfortunate, but it's true.

Something expensive, something offensive

2005-07-14T10:45:00.000-04:00

Interesting choice of subject matter, this, in an ad on the San Francisco Chronicle's site: Now, I'm of the opinion that the subject matter of this show - perpetuating the stereotype of Americans abroad as somehow spectacularly more boorish and ignorant than tourists of any other nationality - is a pretty lazy way to garner applause from the theatrical community, especially in Berkeley, the We Suck capital of America. But right now, that particular image isn't just sloppy anti-Americanism; it's nearly hateful. Who's squandering international goodwill, here? (Of course, I'd also wager that the creators likely think it's even more appropriate now, what with how Evil Amerikkkan Imperialism has caused brave rebel militants to rise up and justly strike Britain for going along with the Global War for Oil. Or something to that effect.)

Compromise and be wise

2005-07-13T11:36:00.000-04:00

This is closer to what I wanted to see from the federal Tories on same-sex marriage legislation: Tolerate, but ameliorate the obvious and immediate flaws. CALGARY -- The Alberta government has backed off its plan to fight tooth and nail against federal same-sex marriage legislation, announcing yesterday that it has no choice but to issue marriage licences to gays and lesbians. [...] The Alberta government had previously mused about getting out of the marriage business altogether, by pledging to only issue marriage licences to those unions sanctioned by religious organizations. During the province's election campaign last November, Mr. Klein, who has called same-sex marriage "morally wrong," vowed that his government would use "whatever legal means are at our disposal" to make sure marriage remains between a man and a woman. "We will proceed to issue marriage licences to same-sex couples much to our chagrin following the proclamation of the federal Civil Marriage Act, which was passed by the Parliament of Canada," Mr. Klein said. In the meantime, Alberta's cabinet approved moving forward with its own legislation that would ensure that religious organizations and others will be able to express their opposition to the change in the definition of marriage based on their "social or cultural beliefs," and that they will not be forced to "advocate, promote or teach about marriage in a way that conflicts with their beliefs." I appreciate that, while I don't see it as a threat to society, moral danger, or indeed any other kind of hazard commensurate with some of the slightly less temperate rhetoric, that others will. The best solution, then, is to give serious protection for differences in individual conscience, with as much legal force as possible shielding those with honest and considered beliefs from frivolous attention-seeking lawsuits or sheer punitive revenge-fantasy tactics from the militant on the Pro side. Provincial legislation bolstering the half-hearted provisions for freedom of conscience in the federal bill is a start, anyway, though I have to admit challenges on the basis of constitutionality do seem inevitable. Angry in the Great White North, conversely, thinks this approach is doomed: This is significant. A basic legal principle is that a law that is not enforced is no law at all. By essentially making the enforcement of the civil marriage legislation optional, the province is saying it is not really a law. What does the future hold? Well, expect some law suits directly challenging the law protecting marriage commissioners. Boring! No TV coverage for that. Here's what I think is going to happen. Never satisfied until everyone agrees with them, and unhappy that those who are going unpunished for having doubleplusungood thoughts and opinions, gay activists will identify a small community in Alberta with only one marriage commissioner who is known to refuse to officiate over a same sex marriage (based on statements, not that anyone has ever asked him to), and who is supported by the community's tiny rural population of traditionalists. Expect a busload of gay couples, licenses in hand, to descend on the community, demanding to have the commissioner to perform the marriages, arguing that requiring them to find another commissioner somewhere else in Alberta, or in another province, is unconstitutional. I think it is possible to enforce the law without requiring adherence on the part of every single marriage commissioner - if, indeed, only by the device of maintaining universal access to "neutral" commissioners. If it's the case that there's what could be deemed reasonable access throughout the province to marriage - i.e., if it's not a particularly different experience, requiring any more extensive preparation for a couple to be married whether straight or gay - then the law is honoured, and no inequality before the state is suffered by any. This could mean that, for instance, small towns with resident marriage commissioners strongly in favour of the traditional definition might have to share an itinerant "neutral" commissioner. Yes, it'd be an inconvenience - but it could be done. I believe it is possible to have one's cake and eat it too, in this case - and, furthermore, that the majority can be satisfied with compromise, notwithstanding the immovable positions of sign-waving protestors on either side.

Deception, Disgrace

2005-07-12T11:40:00.000-04:00

David Ahenakew has been officially stripped of the Order of Canada. Good. I'm no fan of the Order of Canada on its own merits - it smacks of an elitist quasi-knighthood granted (perhaps like the practical exercise of that venerable British institution in more recent years, but certainly not in its intent) not for genuine service to the country or general merit, but on the basis of pure whim. (Well, whim, plus adherence to a rather Trudeaupian set of values, which is unsurprising given the makeup of the Advisory Council that makes the official recommendations of nominees to the GG.) It's still for the best that it not be lowered by willing association with an authentic hatemonger like Ahenakew. But, there's a catch: Mr. Ahenakew, who has already vowed he won't return the award, is only the second person ever to be terminated from the honour roll, which celebrates public service and achievement. [...] While the advisory council has clear procedures on how to revoke the award, it has no formal rules on what to do if an expelled recipient doesn't want to co-operate and return it. There has been no time limit imposed about when the council expects Mr. Ahenakew, a war veteran, to send it back to Ottawa. The Order of Canada is a civilian honour bestowed by the state, officially in the person of the Governor-General, yes? The state, not the government? If that's the case, then explain to me what would be improper with charging the RCMP, as Canada's sole state police force, with sending an officer or two around to (politely) confiscate Ahenakew's medal, lapel pin, certificate, etc.? It'd be a less questionable use of the heavy hand of the state than the ongoing harassment of the government's political enemies, at the very least.

At words poetic

2005-07-12T10:30:00.000-04:00

What's with Bourque's unusually descriptive front page today? Embattled Conservative leader Stephen Harper is making a "surprise" visit to Gravenhurst and Huntsville on July 15th. Tory sources tell Bourque he's going with his hands wide open for defeated leadership candidate and designated federal standard-bearer Tony Clement, who is said to be trying to raise $250,000 for his campaign. It remains unclear what kind of media attention Harper will attract when he does a little mainstreeting in downtown Gravenhurst around 12:30pm (will Duff doff his seersucker for the occasion ?), before attending a secretive Clement "Investors Circle" schmoozer at a local bigwig's home where straw-hat'd supporters will fork over $3K for the opportunity to munch pickled gherkins, crunch rippled potato chips, gum polish cocktail weenies, slurp freshly-squeezed lemonade, listen to a local barbershop quartet, and bend Harper's ear. "Munch?" "Crunch?" "Slurp?" Onomatopoeize much? (And that's to say nothing of "the aptly-named Jester's Restaurant," or the nearly-Shakespearean modification of "straw-hatted.") Really, would it have hurt to have written this straight, rather than indulging in screwy banter? It's a distraction from the actual news: "Harper meeting with Clement and allies on BBQ circuit." Methinks someone needs to read up on the propriety of flowery prose in professional journalism...

Every now and then, a madman's bound to come along

2005-07-11T19:50:00.000-04:00

Wacky former Law & Order star Michael Moriarty: Still basically correct (at least in political analysis); still apparently in possession of the uncanny ability to sound like a raving lunatic, nonetheless. In an earlier editorial, I discussed the "black hole" of Socialism. It dawned on me that such a description is obviously incomplete. What life-affirming being would willingly throw its financial life, liberties, rights and freedom of thought into such an all-engulfing dark quicksand? Socialism is not a black hole. It's a black sun. The endlessly voracious maw of its greed is veiled in light, a luminescence that draws us to it. The light, like the moon, is a reflection of our very own light, our infinite capacity to love. The lunar-like sheen is really a mirror to ourselves, but hardly the essence of what we really are, which is love. That is why Liberal good intentions sugarcoat the black hole with our own reflection, and why the U.S. Democratic Party has grown so powerful. Lucifer is not called the Bearer of Light for nothing. He basks in the light of reality's love. I say reality because the name of my political party is the Realists 2008. Yes, indeed, "reality" is as close a synonym for our Christian God, as the enemy will be obliged to accept. The opposing parties will say, "Obviously, Mr. Moriarty, your image of reality and ours differ greatly." ...Ooookay. I'm not in disagreement with his comments on Trudeau, socialism, the UN, or the unfortunate hard-left direction taken by the Democratic Party; but, wow, that's some nice crazy, in his tone and bizarre hyperbole. However entertaining Moriarty may be, he's no asset to the side of anyone vying for electability. (Via The Shotgun.)

The more we find, the less we see

2005-07-11T12:07:00.000-04:00

It's sad, really, to see this kind of heavy-handed overreach in the exceptionally petty cause of preventing spoilers. Vancouver — Harry Potter's Canadian publisher has obtained a court injunction barring anyone from leaking the plot of the latest chapter in the mega best-selling book series on the eve of its publication. Raincoast Books of Vancouver, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC of Britain and author J.K. Rowling were granted a so-called “John and Jane Dow” injunction Saturday in B.C. Supreme Court. It restrains anyone who has directly or indirectly received a copy or any other form of disclosure of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from disclosing all or any information from the book before 12:01 a.m. next Saturday. The book's authorized publicity machine is, of course, exempted. The court order also calls for anyone who's received unauthorized material from the book, sixth in the series, to turn it in to the publishers and delete any electronic copies. One word: Ha. I predict that details will be leaked regardless, and likely in a distributed or anonymous fashion that'll make it nigh-impossible for the publishers to press for damages. In fact, I hope that leaks happen purely to frustrate such inane PR micromanagement; I don't really care, myself. Sure, I'll read the new one, but I haven't been sitting on my hands just waiting for its release. But that's beside the point. The significant thing is, if there's information to be had, the hard-core fans will find out; it's only those in the general public, who might not care unless hearing interesting pre-release buzz in non-niche media, that'll be affected. What contempt, for both loyal and casual customers of the franchise alike.

You cannot choose but to lose control

2005-07-11T11:54:00.000-04:00

What a terrible thing it is to lose one's mind, or to not have a mind at all: A BBC roundup of various European press opinions on Luxembourg voting yes to the EU Constitution over the weekend. Germany's Frankfurter Rundschau says those who declared the constitution dead after the French and Dutch "no" votes have been proved wrong. "Although the European Constitutional Treaty has not been saved yet by Luxembourg's 'yes' it has been granted a breathing space and a new chance," the paper says. [...] Germany's Berliner Zeitung emphasizes the "symbolic value" of the result. The paper suggests that the Luxembourg vote may signal a shift in Europe's mood, which may enable Denmark, Poland, Ireland and "even Britain" to put their referendums back on the agenda. "Apparently the French and the Dutch 'no', which some regarded as the beginning of the end of the EU, was a snapshot of the situation rather than the last word," it says. [...] The Madrid daily El Pais agrees the constitution's future is still, as it puts it, "extremely uncertain". With Luxembourg a great beneficiary of integration - home to key institutions and enjoying the EU's highest per capita income - it is surprising as many as 40 per cent voted against the treaty, it says. I understand the contempt many of the EU's political elites feel for their supposed constituents, and the prevailing feeling that some things are just too important to be left to those horrid ignoramuses of the public in a free vote, but...wow. Claiming some kind of victory over Luxembourg, after France and the Netherlands rejected it? 2500 square kilometres and less than 500,000 people? 55% disapproval from one of the largest EU members is balanced by 55% approval from one of the smallest? I suppose some democracy is felt to be acceptable by sneering EUrocrats, so long as it's exercised by a sufficiently small number of the Goodthinkful, as an example to the rest of us dullards.

Let our worth define our roles

2005-07-10T23:10:00.000-04:00

This isn't a great headline, considering the circumstances: "Diverse shuttle crew is poised to put US back in space." JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, TEXAS – There's an Air Force test pilot, a triathlete, a Japanese engineer, a lead guitarist in a rock band, an Aussie named Andy, and a scientist from Queens who holds seven patents. And wrangling them all together is the commander they call "mom." These are the astronauts of shuttle Discovery - America's "return to space" crew. Most of them have been working together on this mission for years, becoming one of the best-prepared shuttle crews in history. They've also had longer than most to bond. That's because the majority of the group was one month away from liftoff when their ride to the International Space Station, the shuttle Columbia, disintegrated over east Texas Feb. 1, 2003. Since then, NASA has been studied from the inside out, its purpose questioned, and its mission restructured. I can't find it now, but I recall - during coverage of the Columbia disaster - some talking head or another (I want to say Katie Couric, but Google's giving me nothing) seeming to be most upset not at what the accident itself meant in terms of NASA's long-term plans, national morale, or the like, but instead the fact that the lost crew were a "United Nations in space," being appropriately Officially Diverse for her taste. It would be unfortunate to see echoes of that attitude still, the premise that American space policy should be a PR exercise in demonstrating just how Diverse a crew can be picked. The only question NASA should ask is if each crewmember is best in their field; nothing else matters. If that ends up making a crew that could be the wackily mismatched cast of a bad reality show, fine; if they're all thirtysomething white guys with crewcuts, that's fine too. Indeed, reading further into the article, it's clear that NASA's policy is to compose a team to accomplish specific tasks with specific skills. The headline is something of a misnomer, then, because it uses the term "diverse" properly, in a way that newspaperspeak rarely does. Instead of being used as a code word for "employing as many women and visible minorities as possible without regard for other qualifications," as usually employed in description of a team or group, it actually speaks to the diversity of skills required for Discovery's upcoming mission. I'm not sure whether to fault the CSM for using a word easily misinterpreted, due to decades of subtly massaging definitions, or the code word-users themselves, for causing this kind of second-guessing. (Or myself, for being led into accepting that definition.)

You may look the other way; we can try to understand

2005-07-10T16:56:00.000-04:00

This seems to stand out, in an article on DND Chief Rick Hillier re-emphasizing that Canada is as likely as any other western nation to be targeted by terrorists: Right after news of the London terrorist attacks reached Canada, the country's 24-hour emergency preparedness system kicked in, said officials. But government officials were just as quick to reassure Canadians that Ottawa had not received information about threat of an attack on Canadian soil. "Let's be clear, Canada is not actively the object of any terrorist threats," Prime Minister Paul Martin said Thursday from Gleneagles, Scotland where he was when the attacks occurred. Well, that's not quite true. What the PM meant to say (I hope) is that there are no immediate and credible threats in the offing; Canada is an active target, just as much as the US, Britain, France, Spain, Germany, et al, for the heresy of not immediately submitting to the barbaric and medieval death cult that is militant Islam. Canada may be a Lesser Satan, only a junior (and often intransigent) associate of the putative Zionist-Crusader Conspiracy our collective enemies imagine, but the fact that we are - relatively - a free and open society, in itself, makes us a target. That being the case, and any policy decisions he actually makes aside, I fear Martin's off-the-cuff remarks are a reflexive product of (and will only serve to generally reinforce) the belief that Canada isn't important enough to be targeted, that the national equivalent of keeping one's head down and pulling a Sergeant Schultz-esque "I see nothing!" is a viable option. It's a shame that that isn't true, because an awful lot of Canadians are going to go on believing it regardless.

Be wary of who you accuse

2005-07-08T15:41:00.000-04:00

"I didn't mean to hurt people's feelings." And yet, convicted of hate speech, David Ahenakew doesn't seem very sorry. On having his Order of Canada membership tentatively revoked: "This, of course, was the direct result of the pressure put on the (Governor General's) advisory committee by some of the Jewish community, including a letter-writing campaign and the lobbying by the Canadian Jewish Congress," he said at a news conference. Sigh. For some people, The Joooooos are always out to get them. Moreover, that's such a pathological thing, I still don't see how no one ever saw any inkling of this coming from Ahenakew before recently. He received the Order of Canada in 1978 for being a "member of a United Nations committee and of the World Indigenous Peoples Council." Is it possible, perhaps, that either or both bodies were aware of his antisemitic tendencies, and didn't care...or, worse, saw nothing objectionable about his irrational blame-fantasies? (Turtle Bay, I'm looking at you...)

Blow by blow, we defy you

2005-07-08T10:09:00.000-04:00

It is, of course, not news that Canada remains another potential terrorist target. Yesterday's bombings in London, coupled with the attacks on the United States, Spain and Australia (through the Bali nightclub bombings), may increase the likelihood of Canada becoming a target for terror. Although it is not yet proved that an al-Qaeda group was responsible for yesterday's destruction, Canada is now one of a dwindling number of nations named as a target by Osama bin Laden that has not been directly hit. "Human targets sorted by level of importance," reads a list in the al-Battar Military Manual, a training manual masterminded by Saif al-Adel, one of al-Qaeda's most senior leaders, and distributed to supporters over the Internet. Jewish targets top the list. Then, in a separate category called "the Christians," the manual states: "The grades of importance are as follows: 1. Americans, 2. British, 3. Spaniards, 4. Australians, 5. Canadians, 6. Italians." With yesterday's attack, the first four countries on the list have all been targeted. Canada was also directly named by bin Laden in an audio address warning the U.S.'s allies. Canada - like every other nation on that list - would be a target for Islamist terrorists regardless of any current geopolitical machinations. The tipoff to that should be in exactly what the list is called: "The Christians." (And as a corollary, the higher-priority list of targets for mass murder being entirely Jewish.) No one content to plot killing hundreds or thousands based upon mere religion cares that Canada is perpetually in opposition to US foreign policy; frankly, we all look the same to them, as nations composed largely of infidel Christians or infidel secularists. I believe, contrary to what the expert interviewed maintains, that Canada will eventually be a target. Terrorism isn't conducted as a worldwide zero-sum game; there isn't a single Al-Qaeda, Inc. that has a finite amount of resources to use in different countries, but a huge number of plotters, sympathizers, and killers sharing common cause. Regardless of whether or not it can make major news, some in Canada will, at some point, manage to pull something off. It may not be spectacular, involving complex timing and cable-news-friendly graphic imagery, but it'll happen. When it does, we'll face the same test that Britain faces now, that Australia has already passed and Spain failed: What is important to us? Freedom and liberty, no matter what the cost? Or supplication to a host of madmen, in order to not too greatly further enrage those who already de facto despise everything about us?

Everything that really counts, to be popular

2005-07-08T09:39:00.000-04:00

Not to burst Cancon-boosters' bubbles, but this isn't really that impressive. More extreme makeovers, gory crime dramas and sex on reality TV -- for better or worse, Canadians are inundated with American programming. Americans, on the other hand, have been living relatively free of Canadian TV and therefore without the clever sense of irony and signature production style that makes our shows so recognizable. That's continuing to change as a recent batch of made-in-Canada television series have begun showing up on screens down south, leading people to wonder if our TV is getting better or if U.S. networks are simply getting desperate. [...] Among the recent successes south of the border: - CTV's Comedy Inc. is airing on Spike TV; - Degrassi: The Next Generation and Instant Star can be found on The N, a digital cable channel; - Naturally, Sadie was recently added to Disney Channel's weekend series lineup; - My Fabulous Gay Wedding will air as First Comes Love on Logo, a new American network for gays and lesbians; - Trailer Park Boys is airing on BBC America; - Whistler, CTV's upcoming hour-long drama, has a presold to The N; - CBC's Da Vinci's Inquest has been syndicated to run in more than 90 per cent of the U.S.; - Movie Central's Slings and Arrows has been picked up by the Sundance Channel; - Global TV's Falcon Beach, now filming its first season, has been pre-sold to ABC Family for 2006 summer programming. As the article notes but disingenuously fails to fully explain, these acquisitions still aren't even in the same league as previous Canadian shows aired in the US; Kids in the Hall and SCTV aired nationally on NBC, and Due South did likewise on CBS. The one debatable accomplishment of the above list is the wide syndication of Da Vinci's Inquest, and that puts it in only the same category as other more-or-less made-for-syndication dreck like most of the post-70s oeuvres of Donald Bellisario or Stephen J. Cannell. "Roughly on par with Navy NCIS or Renegade for the preferences of local stations' daytime filler programming" is hardly high praise. Beyond the syndication market, the rest of that list is pathetic; four are digital cable channels (as in, just about as impressive as random American dramas being shown as cheap filler on their thematic counterparts here) and three are analog cable. Real US networks won't touch Cancon, only niche-targeted specialty channels. (And as long as we're talking about barely-peripherally-Cancon productions being sold to niche-targeted specialty channels...where's the magnificent remake of Battlestar Galactica, as filmed in Vancouver and seen on Sci-Fi Channel, on this list? And for past performance, what of the several good seasons of The X-Files, before it collapsed into an impenetrably dense mass of self-referential Arc episodes? That was also shot in Vancouver, and a cornerstorne of Fox's schedule for much longer. The Canadian television industry could at least try to claim credit for good shows, not just those ones officially considered to be Canadian content for tax purposes.)

Tell the rabble to be quiet

2005-07-07T11:15:00.000-04:00

This strikes me as being a better solution to deal with high-profile racists like David Ahenakew than hate-speech prosecution, if indeed one only applicable in limited circumstances: The process to remove disgraced aboriginal leader David Ahenakew as a member of the Order of Canada has been put in motion, days before a verdict is expected in his high-profile hate crime trial, sources say. Mr. Ahenakew, 71, is fighting a criminal charge that he was willfully promoting hate against an identifiable group when he told a Saskatoon reporter on Dec. 13, 2002, that the Jews were a "disease" and Adolf Hitler was trying to "clean up the world" when he "fried six million of those guys" during the Second World War. The verdict is expected tomorrow. Since Mr. Ahenakew, who is a former chief of the Assembly of First Nations, made his comments, there have been calls that his Order of Canada membership be revoked. Those calls become louder after he testified during his four-day trial last April that he stood by his remarks, despite a teary apology shortly after they were published. Rideau Hall officials have publicly maintained -- even as late as this week -- that Mr. Ahenakew's case wouldn't be dealt with until his trial concluded. However, on June 29, the advisory committee that administers the Order of Canada, met privately. Later that day, according to sources, a letter was drafted to Mr. Ahenakew that began the process of expelling an Order of Canada recipient. Mr. Ahenakew is being asked to give up the honour voluntarily or submit reasons he should be able to keep it. He couldn't be reached for comment last night. Hate speech laws only mean that those disgusting bigots like Ahenakew will keep their mouths shut, and revelations of their true feelings will be accidental. Better that we should know what he really thinks - and, of course, that he absolutely shouldn't be able to keep a national honour when those thoughts are made clear. Public shaming by expulsion from the Order of Canada, yes; criminalization of speech, no.

Enemies and adversaries, they try and tear me down

2005-07-07T10:59:00.000-04:00

Even London Mayor Ken Livingstone is decent, speaking on the attacks: ``I want to say one thing: This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty or the powerful, it is not aimed at presidents or prime ministers, it was aimed at ordinary working-class Londoners,'' Livingstone told reporters. ``That isn't an ideology, it isn't even a perverted faith, it's mass murder,'' Livingstone said. ``We know what the objective is. They seek to divide London.'' [...] Livingstone said the attack was aimed at ordinary Londoners. ``Black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindus and Jews, young and old,'' he said. It was an ``indiscriminate attempt to slaughter irrespective of any considerations for age, class, religion - whatever.'' And that's the thing: They don't care. West is west is west to them, and whatever collateral damage done in the process of attacks is A-OK, so long as it causes us to be seized with panic and self-doubt. (Really, too, I doubt the terrorists shed a tear for killed co-religionists or fellow-countrymen they think too westernized, living and working in London without actively joining in the overall terror campaign.) (Via Virtual Scratchpad.) UPDATE: Conversly, longtime pro-terror asshat and MP George Galloway is, as usual, appalling. Respect MP George Galloway says: "We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the Government ignoring such warnings." There's socialists with asinine social engineering schemes like Livingstone, otherwise reasonable in the face of attack...and then there's utter scum like the Saddam-supporting Galloway, who seem to want us to collectively curl into a ball and beg the terrorists not to kick too hard, if they'd be so good. Idiot. (Via Instapundit.)

Either blind, or completely deranged

2005-07-07T10:46:00.000-04:00

No one else seemed to be doing it yet, so let's take a good long look at what noted nest of moonbats and assorted crazies at Democratic Underground think about today's terror attacks in London. (More, also, in a second) and third thread). There's a number of generic expressions of goodwill towards the victims, but immediately the knives come out, and this early comment seems to set the tone: "Ask yourself 'who benefits?' and you know who did it." CrazyForKunich says: Bad news for the UK but then look who's their leader. Anyone see the connection? Countries with crappy leaders get bombed. America will be the next target once again soon enough. The Brits should throw out Blair today. Although I'm sure they'll have to rally around him like we did Bush after 9/11. Mr.Green93 is delusional: We must have peace talks Someone needs to show some leadership and open a peace dialog with Islamic leaders. DoYouEverWonder can't resist hideously inappropriate politicization: Blair looked and acted like a normal human being in contrast to Bu$h on 9-11 who acted like a cold hearted twit who didn't have a clue. There are occasional voices of reason chastising other posters: In a time of tragic crisis, let's make DU look as unfeeling and paranoid as we possibly can. So this is Blair's fault AND it was probably BUSH that planted the bombs? With folks like you two, who needs enemies? Ditto blondeatlast, who seems not to realize how frequent The Crazy occurs around DU: Lord knows I love DU, but sometimes it needs therapy--desperately. But, of course, the prospect of labyrinthine conspiracy theories is just too appealing for some, like Sterling: This is not Vietnam in the sense that failure will not be an option to the people who started this war. If these attacks are indeed ME Extremists and not some sort of false flag op and they continue and escalate it's a safe bet that the death machine will be ratcheted up by the western powers. At some point it will be a life and death struggle and we will all be forced into taking sides or be victims of the situation. It is my belief that 9-11 was an inside job and that many of the attacks since then have been false flag ops. SInce no one is actually looking into these possibilities it looks like the war of the worlds will continue and at a certain point it will no longer matter who started it it will just be a matter of who will prevail. Symbolman, however, probably takes the best prize for most incoherent blame-rant. So Al-Qaida and their allies hate us because of global warming, now? God bless those poor bastards who suffer and die there thanks to the policies of Bush and Blair. I wish only the best for the Brits and our hearts go out to them in their time of need. BUT, the chickens have come home to roost. I find it interesting that they keep repeating on CNN that all these leaders were there meeting to help the Starving in AFRICA, and to fix GLOBAL WARMING. Guess who STIFFED Africa RIGHT IN FRONT OF BLAIR on National TV, yep - you guessed it, HERR BUSH. So there he is standing with the Leaders of the world while Blair gets his turn in the limelight to LIE to the world again. Global warming? Bush REFUSES to do a THING about it. So here we are in the middle of a catastrophe with CNN USING it to make it Appear that Bush is helping the world, feeding Africa and solving the global warming problem.. there's instant sickening spin folks. NOW, if they are so INTENT on helping the folks starving, etc.. why not start with IRAQ? Kids will die in untold numbers this summer due to Cholera, lack of sanitation, getting blown up, being orphaned, shot, etc. BOTH Bush and Blair have not only condoned that, but BOTH LIED US INTO IT. Like I said, the chickens have come home to roost. We are ALL TARGETS NOW thanks to these assholes, ALL of us - no matter where we live, and the group of leaders admitted that tonight/today with Chimpy looking on, constipated, confused, waiting for someone to tell him what to say - where is his top liar ROVE? Why isn't Bush IMMEDIATELY giving a speech? Why isn't the terror alert raised HERE - CNN even mentioned that people no longer trust the Color Coded terror game, so now the GOvt has decided to NOT BOTHER WITH IT. What the FUCK? Spin, spin, spin. Remember what Bush said not more than a week ago in front of all those deathly silent troops. "We are fighting the war over there so that we don't have to fight it HERE." Well, guess what Blair and Bush? You are pathetic, psychopathic, greedy liars and should both be frog marched to the Hague, NOW. Oops, here comes the person that can't even RIDE A BIKE to tell us that everything is under control. Fuck you Bush, you goddam criminal, moron. You've killed us all, just a matter of time, while YOU sit behind concrete bunkers and 16 inches of glass in your cars. Well, that was a quick speech by Bush, waiting for him to end with, "Now watch this drive.." Damn you to hell, both of you. Most tasteless, however, is probably UKCynic, who's more or less bragging about it: Being 'tasteful' is not a priority As a Brit I am not in the least offended by someone pointing out that terrorism is a result not a cause. This is a very bad thing, a disaster for those who have lost people, but if we don't understand why it has happened we are lost. Terrorism is caused by deprivation, social discrimination, and hopelesness. A helicopter gunship murdering the guests at your sister's wedding will do it every time. We create terrorists by bombing and killing innocent civilians, and the US permits the Israelis to do the same. The problem is not only in Iraq, the problem that was caused by the artificial creation of the state of Israel (by us, I admit) has also to be solved. Latest deaths confirmed in London - 33 It's Bush's fault, it's Blair's fault, it's Israel's fault, the Israelis knew, Halliburton knew, anyone who voted for Blair deserved it, etc etc etc. I think I need a shower.

Don't care where (We think that's fair)

2005-07-07T10:07:00.000-04:00

Holy Crap. The other shoe drops, again. LONDON, England (CNN) -- A previously unknown group calling itself the "Secret Organization Group of al Qaeda of Jihad in Europe" has released a statement claiming responsibility for the subway and bus bombings in London. CNN could not confirm the authenticity of the statement, which was posted Thursday on a Web site connected to Islamic radicals. The statement said Islam and "Arabism" could "rejoice for it is time to take revenge from the British Zionist Crusader government in retaliation for the massacres Britain is committing in Iraq and Afghanistan." I wonder: How long until the first prominent lefty commentators unabashedly endorse that bottom-line justification, and claim that this never would have happened but for British participation in the war on terror? There can be no quarter given to the terrorists, no negotiation; they must be crushed. To hesitate or yield is to pre-emptively surrender. This is just another demonstration of how vicious and barbaric they remain.

Charity's fine, subscribe to mine; get out and pick a pocket or two

2005-07-06T23:39:00.000-04:00

Here's something neat: A remarkably reasonable Kenyan economist stands athwart the pointless juggernaut of feel-good western aid to Africa, and yells "Stop!" Really, a great read; he gives example after example of how destructive no-strings-attached cash, food and durable goods are to Africa as a whole to a stunned interviewer from Germany's Der Spiegel, but I think this one sums up the problem best: SPIEGEL: In the West, there are many compassionate citizens wanting to help Africa. Each year, they donate money and pack their old clothes into collection bags ... Shikwati: ... and they flood our markets with that stuff. We can buy these donated clothes cheaply at our so-called Mitumba markets. There are Germans who spend a few dollars to get used Bayern Munich or Werder Bremen jerseys, in other words, clothes that that some German kids sent to Africa for a good cause. After buying these jerseys, they auction them off at Ebay and send them back to Germany -- for three times the price. That's insanity ... SPIEGEL: ... and hopefully an exception. Shikwati: Why do we get these mountains of clothes? No one is freezing here. Instead, our tailors lose their livlihoods [sic]. They're in the same position as our farmers. No one in the low-wage world of Africa can be cost-efficient enough to keep pace with donated products. In 1997, 137,000 workers were employed in Nigeria's textile industry. By 2003, the figure had dropped to 57,000. The results are the same in all other areas where overwhelming helpfulness and fragile African markets collide. Every appeal to charitable intent I've seen lately seems to be predicated on the immediate day-to-day costs faced by the poorest Africans, in sums purposely highlighted to seem trivial to we in the affluent industrialized world; one article in the Ottawa Citizen (can't find it online, unfortunately) yesterday or the day before spent half a page on the price of drinkable (not clean, but clean enough not to harbour dysentery, anyway) water in a village...well, somewhere. Potable water bought from vendors costs, apparently, something like $2 per day, per person, in an area where daily wages average out to the equivalent of $5 - the implication being, of course, that one or all of "those eight men" at the G8 summit have the moral responsibility to hand over the pittance, because it is, after all, only a pittance. But that's not how markets work; introduce goods or services with little real value, and local producers will never be able to compete, leaving all involved dependent upon future handouts. Honestly, I don't see how the aggressively simplistic proponents of aid (almost entirely on the left) don't understand this. It's the same principle that leads some (largely, but not all of the same kidney) to resist the coming of Wal-Mart to their communities: they fear that Mom-and-Pop stores will be driven out of business by lower prices. Main Street can compete, though, by offering better service, or specialized goods; they can cope with being undercut on price alone. Wal-Mart, in turn, can afford to undercut, by buying inventory at lower wholesale prices. But how could those stores cope if Wal-Mart wasn't even paying that much? What if Wal-Mart was selling goods they'd received for free from well-meaning idiots halfway across the world, completely unaware of the havoc such charity would wreak? That's what it comes down to: which part of whose economy do you want to ruin today? Do you really want to pervert the natural growth of commerce and industry in desperately poor countries with perpetual handouts? Do you want to send cold, hard cash - a measly $2 for every person in that nameless, symbolic village - and cause significant inflation...assuming that any were actually to find its way into the hands of those on the ground, once corrupt local bureaucrats and UN apparatchiks take their cuts? Do you want to send grain, and bankrupt African farmers? Do you want to send clothes, and force African tailors out of work? That's what I'd like to ask the vacuous celebrities and entitlement-complex-enabling bureaucrats whining the loudest: Where in Africa do you want to, metaphorically, build a Wal-Mart? (Via Brian Tiemann.)

For all people who cry out to be free

2005-07-06T16:47:00.000-04:00

In Manitoba, it seems, you're not as much the citizen you think you are, so much as the plaything of government agencies. The Blue Maple Leaf points to a fairly horrifying case of lost liberty at the whims of unaccountable provincial bureaucrats: A doctor, any medical doctor -- it doesn't have to be a psychiatrist -- can examine a patient and deem them incompetent. The doctor doesn't have to tell the patient or the family that the assessment may lead to the government taking over their lives. The doctor fills out a one-page, Manitoba Health certificate of incapacity and sends it to the province's director of psychiatric services. The director reviews it and asks for a social history of the person in question, which may come from health care workers who have interacted with the patient, including home care staff. The director sends a letter to the person named in the certificate and to the family, informing them of his intent to have the Public Trustee take over. The family can make arguments in writing objecting to the proposed take-over. But here's the crux: The director does not interview the person or the family and makes no home visit. If there are allegations of abuse against family members, the director does not try to verify them independently. This may be the best argument for limited government I've ever seen. What's to stop the Office of the Public Trustee, or the province, from defining down the precise bounds of legal incompetence? Having seized this power to control the lives of those deemed necessary, what guarantees are there ever going to be that it won't be spectacularly mishandled, as in the current case, or outright abused? Consider the justification given for forcibly making Thomas Hanaway a ward of the state, from the latter article: The psychiatrist who did the assessment of Hanaway in April wrote two lines in his certificate of incapacity: "Cognitive impairment, with poor calculation and comprehension. He is unable to understand his finances or implications of poor financial decisions. He does not appreciate risks of poor financial decisions." That would be a terrifyingly vague statement to base the Public Trustee's actions on, even if it wasn't in a province with an NDP government. What personal financial decisions not involving voluntary abasement before the altar of the public good do socialists not consider "poor" or "risky?" (Via SDA.)

Vital powers wither

2005-07-06T16:31:00.000-04:00

Ontario 1, union goons 0: Striking Hydro One workers cannot block entrances to any of Ontario's generating plants, ruled a judge Wednesday. Justice Colin Campbell ruled this morning that pickets by the Society of Energy Professionals were stopping generating plant staff from getting to work and putting Ontario's power system at risk. But the society said the power grid is already at risk while its workers are off the job, and they say the judge's ruling doesn't mean they can't picket the plants. If the province should suffer any significant blackouts this summer because of their irresponsible behaviour, I'll wager even the more union-friendly parts of Ontario will be hard-pressed to do anything but publicly crucify them. It's not like they wouldn't deserve it; the utility grid - especially during times of peak use - is far too important to let the petty demands of any union bugger it up. Why couldn't we see some strong leadership on that count from Hydro One?

Lost in the darkness

2005-07-05T12:54:00.000-04:00

Zanzibar is sinking. ZANZIBAR, Tanzania - Zanzibar's mosques are fuller on Fridays, more women are wearing head scarves and more Muslim men are showing calluses created by frequently touching their foreheads to the ground in prayer. A growing number of Zanzibaris are turning toward a stricter form of Islam and possibly away from democracy ahead of this fall's elections, expected to be a volatile affair. Multiparty politics "has brought nothing but tragedy," said Abdallah Mohammed Suleiman, 42, who sells imported clothes. "The best solution (is) to uphold our religious values, that is Islamic values, or revert to single party rule. "After all, Islam is the sole unifying factor in Zanzibar." Fundamentalist clerics see an opportunity, offering Islamic law as an alternative to democracy, arguing that would bring discipline and moral values to political leadership. "We clearly see a vacuum that could be filled by the Islamist system that could show people that democracy — which they hoped would enable them to elect leaders they want, people with integrity — has failed," said Abdallah Said Ali, secretary of Society for Islamic Awareness and Preaching in Zanzibar. I wonder if the Guardian will still encourage boycotting tourism there, as they were last year, now that it's becoming more identifiably part of greater body of fundamentalist authoritarian hellholes so beloved by the contrarian left? It's certainly even more dangerous for decadent westerners now than then: Islamists in Zanzibar can be forceful when enforcing their brand of the faith. "These days you cannot see tourists who are half-naked walking on our streets," Said Ali said, referring to attacks on women wearing short dresses in Zanzibar. Early this year four Islamic clerics attacked a Zanzibari man who had reportedly planned a same-sex commitment ceremony similar to a wedding. The preachers were charged with abduction, a price they said they were willing to pay to show their commitment to their faith. Not to still be beating a dead horse on the matter of SSM, but...anything that so enrages fundamentalist Islamists - coequal for them, apparently, with the heresy of democracy - is certainly worth doing on those grounds alone. (Via LGF.)