.

I do care that "truly marginal and deeply resentful fools" get caught in the HRC web as much as I do the unsuspecting restaurant owner wanting to keep his doorway free of pot smoking loiterers.

I don't need to share their marginal views or resentment to defend their right not to be harrassed by a bureaucracy that defaults to "guilty until proven innocent".

Why? Because, it's the truly resentful who are most likely to carry their frustrations beyond verbal release into murderous violence when backed into a corner, and doubly so when those doing the backing trade in provocateurism and injustice. When the unbalanced finally snap, it's rarely the bureaucrat behind the machinery who endures their wrath — it's the innocent at their workplace, or the police officer who pulls them over for speeding who finds themselves in the crosshairs.

It's a tricky enough business dealing with these individuals within the justice system proper. The last thing we need are the thumbscrews of the human rights racket being applied to such cases.

Hate speech is a form of aggression, but it is not the same as physical assault. We have laws against the kind of behaviour that causes physical harm, but attempting to quantify certain forms of speech for the (potential, perceived) harm they may cause is the wrong way to produce a more tolerant, peaceful society.

As Mark Steyn has noted, it's one thing to attempt to muzzle neo-Nazi/KKK/holocaust deniers, but there is no legal reason why the muzzle can only be applied to far right/anti-semitic whackjobs. As our society becomes more multicultural, there are plenty of ways to offend lots of different groups of people. Just noting the facts can be enough to "harm", and the HRC model is tailored to allow perpetual offence-takers free rein.

All I'd need to say is that people from the country of Absurda commit a certain crime out of proportion to their representation in the general population, and I could be accused of hate speech against the Absurdian-Canadian community. If offence can be taken, offence will be taken . . . and with the various HRCs around to provide both a stick for beating on the "offenders" and a financial carrot for the "offendees", there'll be more folks looking for things to get offended about.

If you're a glass-half-full kind of person, you could see it as a strong positive for our culture that we haven't already been overwhelmed with bogus human rights cases. But the incentives are all stacked to create a less-free society through the enforcement of our expanding definitions of what hate speech actually is.

We tease Le Devoir because we love it. You had to read that paper's Alec Castonguay this morning to begin to understand the true extent of the Harper government's clapped-together, carefully-obscured, clumsily-exercised plan to rebuild the Roman legions on Canadian soil. I refer, of course, to the 20-year, $30-billion defence plan, which the Globe is calling a $50-billion defence plan and which Le Devoir explains — I believe credibly — is actually a $96-billion defence plan.

"The 'Canada First' strategy of the Department of National Defence calls for new spending of $96 billion over 20 years, which is three times what Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced on Monday in Halifax. The five largest military procurement projects alone will incur costs reaching $45 to $50 billion," Alec writes.

Note the Globe's peculiar choice this morning to total only capital costs in their accounting of a plan that will also include increases to operating budgets. It's like reporting that your housing costs for the next 20 years will include kitchen renovations but not mortgage payments or rent. But then, I wasn't at the briefing yesterday and I'm willing to believe it was simply incomprehensible. Because as far as anyone can tell, that's the Harper government's strategy.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the nice folks in Toryland all keen to address the many failings of previous Liberal governments, especially the multi-decade neglect to which the Canadian Forces had been subjected? Why, then, after two years in office, has the current Conservative government not come up with something a bit more finished than a verbal outline of a spending plan?

Is it me? Am I expecting too much, too soon?

[. . .] off-air the chit-chat went rather more pleasantly, and, in the course of it, Mr. Awan observed that Jews had availed themselves of the "human rights" commissions for years but it was only when the Muzzies decided they wanted a piece of the thought-police action that all these bigwigs started agitating for reining in the commissions and scrapping the relevant provisions of Canada's "human rights" code.

He has a kind of point. Which is why some of us consistently opposed the use of these commissions even when it was liberal Jews using them to hunt down the last three neo-Nazis in Saskatchewan. Yet, accepting that the principle is identical, there is a difference. For the most part, the Canadian Jewish Congress, B'nai Brith and the other beneficiaries of the "human rights" regime went after freaks and misfits on the fringes of society, folks too poor (in the majority of federal cases) even to afford legal representation. These prosecutions were unfair and reflected badly on Canada's justice system, but liberal proponents of an illiberal law justified it on the assumption that it would be confined to these peripheral figures nobody cared about. You can't blame Muslim groups for figuring that what's sauce for the infidel is sauce for the believer — and that, having bigger fish to fry, they're gonna need a lot more sauce.

Mark Steyn, "I'm starring in one of those movies", Macleans, 2008-05-14

I've asked Jon to upload the template directly, rather than through the web interface. I hope that fixes the worst of the issues.

It occurs to me that America could wind up with a Democratic president. This scares me. Not because I hate Democrats — although I do, come to think of it — but because a strong Democratic president and a strong Democratic Congress could put an end to partisan bickering in Washington and result in politicians from both parties working together to solve America's problems. And then we're really screwed.

I have been covering politics for 38 years. Trust me: we don't want politics to quit. That's why we need a Republican president — not because Republicans are good but because we need gridlock. I love gridlock. Gridlock means government can't do things.

The two most frightening words in Washington are "bipartisan consensus." Bipartisan consensus is when my doctor and my lawyer agree with my wife that I need help.

Bipartisan consensus — like the stimulus package that has been delivered to us courtesy of Congress and the president. A $168 billion stimulus package that is supposed to change the trajectory of a $13 trillion economy.

Now, even somebody who flunked high school physics — and I did — can tell you that the energy of $168 billion is not sufficient to budge $13 trillion worth of inertia. It's like trying to use Dennis Kucinich to push Hillary Clinton off the Democratic campaign platform.

Much more here (PDF document).

How Hysterical Do You Have to Be for Newsweek to Suggest That You're Overreacting to a Drug Menace?

This doesn't quite make up for Newsweek's anti-crack hysteria circa 1986 or its anti-meth hysteria circa 2005, but the magazine's latest issue includes a careful, balanced story about Salvia divinorum that could serve as a model for how the press should handle controversies involving psychoactive substances. Noting salvia's longstanding use as a Mazatec folk remedy, its modern use as an aid to introspection, and its medical potential, author Brian Braiker says media attention attracted by YouTube videos of teenagers smoking salvia "is spooking legislators and law enforcement" into banning the plant and arresting people for possession.

Lawyers and scientists have completely different ways of discovering truth. The lawyers’ way is dueling witnesses. This is as good as any in determining which of two people is lying about a police shootout. It is no good in determining whether a hair sample matches that of the murder defendant or whether Vioxx caused a heart attack. Do heavy objects fall faster than light ones? Scientists answer with an experiment. A court would answer by having the jury hear from two experts, one saying yes, the other saying no. It would make as much sense to have the jury watch a medieval jousting contest between the two witnesses.

William Baldwin, "An Expert? Prove It", Forbes, 2008-06-02

I'm not sure how Rogers figures that reducing our service by up to 80% is an improvement. Perhaps it's some weird form of new math. It goes without saying that there would be no price decrease for this "improvement", right?

Elizabeth called to try to get to the bottom of the issue. Supposedly, the email accounts aren't actually going away . . . they just won't have access to the Rogers portal. It's not clear whether this means only one email address per account will be able to use the Rogers webmail (since that's accessed through their portal) or if they'll still allow webmail access for each email account.

Confused yet?

Update: I originally posted a version of this on my Facebook page, to which Brendan responded:

"New math you say — it's nice to see a creative side coming through on their end . . . INNOVATION!!! It might be a new take on the 80-20 rule — perhaps they've been taking notes from the master-crafted Customer Satisfaction attack plan over at Bell? You see — as a Sympatico customer, leaving me only 20% of my services would mean that they have, in fact, freed me of 80% of my hassles and irritations. Perhaps they'll only be interested in collecting 20% of your payments?"

Great. My backup plan was to switch to Sympatico. That doesn't sound like it'd be much of an improvement after all.

Ouch. That truth hurts.

But while taking away much of the teacher's union's power is definitely not sufficient, it does seem to be necessary. They resist changes to their work practices that the best evidence [. . .] seems to show works with disadvantaged kids: rote memorization, and phonics. These replace the tools that upper middle class give their kids earlier — even if you went to a whole language school, if you're reading this blog it's a safe bet you had phonics, too, when your parents taught you to "sound it out".

Instead, they agitate for things like smaller class sizes. It is true that schools with smaller class sizes tend to do better — but this is not surprising, since they tend to be more affluent. Pilot programs with disadvantaged kids also seem to show a benefit, but these suffer from the same problem that I discussed in a previous post about the Perry Pre-School: who's staffing your smaller class sizes? If smaller class sizes means employing more marginal teachers, it's far from obvious that this is a net boon. To the kids, I mean. It's an obvious win for the union.

This is why almost all educational ideas fail: they don't scale when you take the highly motivated grad students and gifted teachers out of the equation. That's why I'm tepidly gung ho about Direct Instruction: it has been proven to work with ordinary teachers using ordinary resources.

I don't care if the teachers have unions to negotiate over salary and benefits. But I think the power to block terminations and set work rules should be entirely stripped from them.

Would you find it odd to walk into a place that billed itself variously as an "internet café" and a "cybercafé" in the year 2008, only to be told "Sorry, [we] don't have wireless [internet]?" This happened to me on Sunday and I am still trying to figure out whether I am the crazy one.

Colby Cosh, "This is a sincere question", ColbyCosh.com, 2008-05-13

With a river of federal money flowing in, Louisiana, which used to be stuck at the bottom of state corruption indices, could have gone back to business as usual while the politicians and the powers that be diverted a few rivulets to their own use. Instead, Jindal and the legislature passed anti-corruption laws that in a surprising turn of events actually seem to have done something about corruption — suddenly the state is getting the best scores in the country. They pushed through disclosure rules for all government officials — state and local, appointed and elected. He got a law passed that forbid legislators from doing business with the state. And he took on a tax and regulatory structure that had been built around the notion that companies couldn't go anywhere, and could hence be bled dry.

Huey Long deliberately built a bridge lower than standard so that boat traffic couldn't go upriver. The days when New Orleans could enforce that kind of dominance are long gone, but the old institutional structures remained. For example, Louisiana had special taxes on utilities, on new equipment purchases, on businesses that borrowed money. The unsurprising result was that companies deferred maintenance and refused to buy new equipment, making them uncompetitive unless they paid low wages. It's classic rent seeking behavior by the legislature, and Jindal actually got rid of it; new businesses are now locating there, and others are upgrading.