Damian Brooks sent along the URL to this Globe and Mail editorial:
Of course the Canadian Red Ensign should fly at the April 9 commemorations of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, alongside the Royal Standard of Canada, the Maple Leaf, the Union Jack and the French tricouleur. And of course the Red Ensign should fly in perpetuity at the Canadian National Vimy Memorial. The Maple Leaf is not the battle flag of a Canadian revolution. When Canada adopted the 1965 flag, Canadians did not abrogate their history.
The Red Ensign, along with the Union Jack, was the flag Canadians fought under during the First World War, and indeed the Second World War, and it deserves a place of continuing honour in this country and on its historic battlefields. To do otherwise would serve only, as the Dominion Institute's Rudyard Griffiths aptly put it, to "airbrush our history." The 1965 flag is in a sense a product of the heroic Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917, since the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers during the Great War were integral to the full achievement of Canadian independence, codified in the Statute of Westminster, 1931.
Is it a bad sign that I automatically assumed that the G&M would be against flying the Red Ensign?
Knock me down with a feather.
By way of Castle Argghhh, comes this amusing story of Marine Corps Drill Instructor humour.
Any departure from environmental orthodoxy is marked by ad hominem attack, vigorous spread of false information, claims of criminality and mental derangement, and general nastiness. Apparently this is one area where reasonable people cannot disagree.
It's interesting that any entity as complex, changing and difficult to comprehend as the environment should be guarded by organizations that allow no deviation from a single point of view toward what needs to be done. One might have predicted a rather broad range of environmental viewpoints, promoted by an equally broad range of institutions and activist organizations. There is some variation among organizations, of course. But on the subject of global warming, no deviation. That is to say, I am aware of no environmental organization that does not claim global warming is a major threat that must be dealt with now.
Michael Crichton, interviewed by Scott Burgess in "Seven Answers From . . .", The Daily Ablution, 2007-03/28
Coffee tastes like ass.
No, not like real ass; it's just an expression (although I suspect there has been coffee that literally does taste like ass, and I'm glad never to have sampled it). But, look, it tastes bad. Anyone who says, "well, that's just because you haven't had really good coffee" is merely saying "well, that's because you've never tasted really good ass" as far as I am concerned. No matter how good ass tastes, it's still ass. Coffee tastes so much like ass that Starbucks has managed to install itself on every street corner in America by dispensing variations of coffee whose main recommendations are that they taste less like ass than actual coffee. Mochas and lattes are to the modern era what a gravy was to the 1600s; a concerted effort to mask the rancid taste of what lies underneath. When you have to invent things not to taste a drink, the simple solution is not to drink the drink in the first place.
I'll note that coffee's not alone in this; there are lots of drinks that taste like ass, but which people drink anyway, usually to get to whatever drug is suspended in the liquid. Coffee tastes like ass, but people drink it for the caffeine. Beer tastes like ass but people drink it for the alcohol. All those energy drinks taste like ass coated in cough syrup, but people drink them for, what? Taurine? You people are all high.
And it's not just drink, of course — people are willing to put up with a lot of things that taste like ass just to get at a drug. For God's sake, cigarettes are just pouring smoke over your tongue. And as for pot — well, that stuff actually smells like vegan farts, doesn't it? Seriously: Room of pot smokers, room of hacky-sackers a half hour after a cruelty-free Thanksgiving. They both smell the same. And you suck it into your mouth just for a little THC kick. It's like I don't know you people anymore.
John Scalzi, "Reader request Week 2007 #2: Coffee, or Lack Thereof", Whatever, 2007-03-27
Afghanistan, for example, is officially a NATO mission to which most NATO members are contributing. But they're not contributing troops, not if by troops you mean fellows with guns who are prepared to fire them at the other side. The Continentals mostly have very circumscribed rules of engagement, which prevent them from participating in combat operations, or going out in the snow, or even after dark. So they're confined to "securing" a handful of selected sites — i.e., they're glorified night watchmen in fancier livery. When it comes to hunting down and killing the enemy, it's pretty much down to the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia (which isn't even in NATO). So much for multiculturalism. That quartet's about as unicultural as you can get, not to say, given that three of them share the same head of state, uniregal.
Mark Steyn, "Harmed Forces: In the homefront battle between militant pacifists in the East and passive militants in the West, Canada is the big loser", Western Standard, 2007-03-26
I am no more anti- or pro-war than I am anti- or pro-knife. It rather depends what it is used for. There are justified wars and there are unjustified wars and in this imperfect world in which we live there are wars which are shades of both.
I am not a neo-con who supports anything the US or UK state does overseas because it is the US or UK state doing it. I spent a considerable time in Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990's observing the war there at very close quarters indeed. That experience well and truly cured me of any residual pacifism or squeamishness about the fact there are many truly evil people in this world who need to be confronted with violence. In fact there are some people with whom the only reasonable form of interaction is to put 8 grams of copper jacketed metal through their skulls at 710 metres per second.
Perry de Havilland, "Murray Rothbard has his uses", Samizdata, 2007-03-22
Theodore Lowi's "Three Laws of the Presidency" is one of the handier pseudepigrapha of politics, a tip-sheet that dusts off the industry's clichés and repackages them as for-the-ages wisdom. And the truest of Lowi's laws is the third:
Every president contributes to the upgrading of his predecessors.
If anyone's carving a tombstone for the Bush era, quick: chisel that at the top. The bumbling of the present administration has transformed Ronald Reagan from a flawed-but-fun conservative (amnesty! Gas tax! The Beirut cut-and-run!) into a fixture on Mount Olympus. It has resurrected the reputation of Bill Clinton so thoroughly, so blindingly, that his once-loathed wife now holds 1:1 odds of replacing Bush II in the White House.
David Weigel, "No Newts: Don't get too excited about a Gingrich '08 run", Reason, 2007-03-20
His go-it-alone moralism sometimes results in pro-growth policies, as is the case in his anti-pork crusades. However, this moralism often manifests itself in the form of more government, less freedom, and a distrust of the individual and the free market system. This is dramatically the case in his opposition to the Bush tax cuts, his class-warfare rhetoric, his occasional support for large-scale increased government regulation, his willingness to raise Social Security taxes, and of course, his abysmal record on political free speech.
Matt Welch, "Be Afraid of President McCain: The frightening mind of an authoritarian maverick", Reason, 2007-04
The flawed assumption behind equalization is that wealth is generated somewhat at random and that complex transfer payment formulas merely correct for this "maldistribution" of wealth.
"Publius", "From the Mind of Sheila Copps", Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2007-03-19
By way of SDA comes this devastating exchange in the Commons, reported in Macleans:
If you're going to mock a veteran, you might as well do it with the language of war. But O'Connor shrugged off these remarks and stuck to his script. Even when Dion demanded his resignation, he seemed thoroughly unmoved. Perhaps he's seen worse than the likes of Her Majesty's Official Opposition.
Inevitably, Dion repeated his demand. And with that, he pushed the Prime Minister to the precipice of his increasingly infamous temper.
"I can understand the passion that the Leader of the Opposition and members of his party feel for Taliban prisoners," Harper shot back, the House falling silent. "I just wish occasionally they would show the same passion for Canadian soldiers."
Well then.
As Conservative members stood long and cheered, the Liberal front bench was frantic. Party whip Karen Redman tried desperately to quiet her backbench. Defence critic Denis Coderre jabbed his finger in the air, egging Dion to seek retribution. The leader looked positively besmirched. One minute you're making headlines with the demand that a high-profile minister resign, the next you're being branded a Taliban-sympathizer. Somewhere, Jack Layton empathized.
From a story in The Register, the Imperial War Museum is opening a new exhibition on the story of military camouflage:
The expo website is full of references to the Cubist artists behind the French camouflage efforts of World War One, Vorticist dazzle-camo used by the Royal Navy to confuse Boche U-boat skippers, and so on. What with all the poetry that was also going on at the time, apparently World War One was quite culturally uplifting. Assuming you managed to avoid getting killed, crippled, or sent insane (and then possibly accused of cowardice and shot).
World War Two, in addition to being an even bigger global slaughterhouse, was another big opportunity for arty types. More craftily, psychological colour schemes were developed by "a large community of creative people including the architect Hugh Casson, advertising designer Ashley Havinden and Surrealist painter Roland Penrose".
Jonathan Rauch's latest column is now online at Reason:
Climate change, then, is a reason to do more of what makes sense anyway: reduce coastal vulnerability and strengthen homes to minimize hurricane damage, improve public health and develop drugs to fight malaria, and so on. There is nothing radical about any of this. No rethinking of capitalism is required.
Given how neatly adaptation dovetails with the sustainability agenda, and given its immense potential to relieve whatever human suffering that global warming causes, one might think environmentalists would tout it to the skies. Some do, but many seem to believe that reducing harm distracts from the real job, which is to reduce emissions. In a blog post last year (at gristmill.org), an environmentalist named David Roberts made the point with startling candor. "In an ideal, abstract policy debate, sure, I'd say we should boost our attention to adaptation," he wrote. "But in the current political situation, I don't want to provide any ammunition for the moral cretins who are squirming frantically to avoid policies that might impact their corporate donors."
This is like denigrating HIV treatment and blocking condom distribution in order to discourage promiscuity. And it is every bit as callous and irresponsible. Where climate change is concerned, the truth — and this truth really is inconvenient, or at least sad — is that too many activists and politicians mistake panic for virtue.
The morphing of "Global Warming" into "Climate Change" is a brilliant stroke since, well, there's always some climate change going on somewhere. That sly semantic shift alone is good for a couple of decades worth of sturm und drang studies and useless programs costing billions. You can believe what you wish about Global Warming, but what is beyond argument is the fact that the Global Global Warming Funding Scam is here and not going away. Too many people have mortgages to pay and kids to put through college.
What's the take-away from this Oscar award winning line of bullshit? "Everybody argues about the weather, but nobody knows anything about it."
Gerard Vanderleun, "You Want the 5-Minute Argument or the Full Half-Hour?", American Digest, 2007-03-12
A.A. Gill goes postal on expat Brits in the big city:
If it were just you that the Brits annoyed, I wouldn't really care. What I mind is that they've re-created this Disney, Dick Van Dyke, um-diddle-diddle-um-diddle-I, merry Britain of childish grub and movie clichés, this Jeeves-and-Wooster place of mockery and snobbery, and I'm implicated, by mouth. Made complicit in this hideous retro-vintage place of Spam, Jam lyrics, bow ties, and buggery. These ex-Brits who have settled in the rent-stabilized margins of Manhattan aren't our brightest and our best — they are our remittance men, paid to leave. Not like the other immigrants, who made it here as the cleverest, most adventurous in the village. What you get are our failures and fantasists. The freshly redundant. The exposed and embittered. No matter how long they stay here, they don't mellow, their consonants don't soften. They don't relax into being another local. They become ever more English. Über-Brits. Spiteful, prickly things in worn tweed, clutching crossword puzzles, gritting their Elizabethan teeth, soup-spotted, tomb-breathed, loud and deaf. The most reprehensible and disgusting of all human things; the self-made, knowing English eccentric. Eccentricity is the last resort of the expat. The petit fou excuse for rudeness, hopelessness, self-obsession, failure, and never, ever picking up the check.
In response to an earlier (unquoted) bit, I confess to still visiting little tea shops and picking up British sweets whenever the opportunity arises: some childhood habits are harder to break than others. And he also discusses one of the easiest ways to annoy Brits in conversation (ask what part of Australia they're from), which has its parallel for the British habit of asking Canadians what part of "America" they're from. Equally effective.
H/T to Johnathan Pearce.
I recently received a "tagged.com" invitation from a fellow blogger, with whom I'd had friendly conversations, but who I didn't consider a close friend. I just ignored it. A few days later, another invitation arrived, telling me that if I didn't join up, the fellow blogger would feel I wasn't his friend. I emailed him directly, to let him know that I wasn't interested, and discovered just how sneaky the idiots at "tagged.com" really are:
It took some generic contact details from me, then informed me who else in my email list is also a member. I figured, sure, I will add them to the set, since they are already involved. But one thing I did NOT want to do was spam all my friends - I KNOW who my friends are and I don’t need a stupid internet network to tell me who they are. I hit send…
Then I scrolled down as I waited for the next page to load.
And discovered it had not just flagged the people in the system but flagged EVERY SINGLE PERSON I HAVE EVER EMAILED for an invitation to this stupid network!
I had messages going out to customer service departments of a dozen companies, billing companies, former clients, casual acquaintances, my PASTOR, my professors! I tried to cancel it, but it was too late.
Let's do our best to stamp out this kind of abusive practice . . . and please don't sign up with those idiots!
Thanks go to the prime minister for indicating his desire that the Red Ensign will indeed be flown at the ceremonies at Vimy Ridge:
Mr. Harper told his cabinet ministers yesterday that he wanted both the Red Ensign and the Maple Leaf hoisted in Vimy, France, at the 90th anniversary of the First World War battle, sources close to the Prime Minister said.
"He said, 'The Red Ensign of 1917 will fly over Vimy,' " one source told The Globe.
The decision was hailed as a victory by veterans' groups and advocates, who have been lobbying Ottawa to have the historical ensign displayed over the Canadian National Vimy Memorial.
H/T to Taylor & Company for the Globe link.
Wired News has a report on a very troubling case:
As they carried out the killing of an Iraqi civilian, seven Marines and a Navy medic used their understanding of the military's airborne surveillance technology to spoof their own systems, military hearing testimony charges.
"These are people who every day deal with such things and understand how the images are gathered, as much as understand other tactical and weapons issues," says defense attorney David Brahms, who represents a Marine who's pleaded guilty to conspiracy and kidnapping in the case. "They are warriors and this is what warriors do."
Ahem. ". . . this is what warriors do". Well, no. This is what many anti-military types believe warriors do. These guys are not exemplars of "warriors". They're parties to conspiracy and murder. That is not what soldiers do. The distinction may be a bit subtle for those raised on anti-war protests and anti-military propaganda, however.
The case is remarkable for the fact that the killers nearly got away with their alleged crime right under the eye of the military's sophisticated surveillance systems. According to testimony, at least three times the warriors took deliberate, and apparently effective, measures to trick the unmanned aerial vehicles — UAVs in military parlance — that watch the ground with heat-sensitive imaging by night, and high-resolution video by day.
Technology can — and will — be abused for illegal purposes. The technology itself merely does the job . . . the morality of the action is determined by the human operators. Even the highest of high-tech devices is still subject to deliberate attempts to counteract or twist the evidence the tools can provide. This is merely the first time this has come to public attention . . . it's almost certainly not the first time it has happened.
I can build a pretty cogent argument in favour of single-provider education based on equity. We could conceivably say that we want every child in the country to receive a uniform educational product, in the interests of levelling the playing field as much as possible before we send them out to compete in Life's Great Rugby Scrum.
But I can only construct this argument if I completely ignore what American education actually looks like. Democrats complaining that a voucher system would lead to massive stratification by income leave me slightly flabbergasted. In what way could our educational system possibly become more stratified than it already is, short of just pulling poor kids out of school entirely and sending them to work in the coal mines at age six? Is it really conceivable that kids in inner city schools could get a worse education even from some awful fly-by-night unit where the books are written in Swahili, than they are currently enjoying right there at PS 82? I mean, at least they might learn a little Swahili.
Jane Galt, Asymmetrical Information, 2007-03-18
. . . about the cancellation of Firefly:
According to his signed confession released this past week, purported 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed has admitted to a great number of heinous crimes in the name of Al Qaeda including hijackings, bombings, and murders. Most shocking of these was the admission that Mohammed had infiltrated the American media by becoming a high-ranking executive for Fox Television and was directly responsible for the devastating 2002 cancellation of Joss Whedon's Firefly after just a few episodes.
Fox Television, sister company to Fox News Channel, has vehemently denied ever employing the infamous terrorist, but anonymous sources at the network have reported seeing his name on a variety of emails and memos during that period.
"I never actually met him," says our source, "but I have to admit I liked the guy. He was so ruthless, so affably callous, that he fit right in."
Read the whole thing.
H/T to Justin Mohareb.
Update 22 March: Steve H. uncovers the even nastier truth.
In what amounts to a shocking admission that the "science" supporting anthropogogenic global warming is anything but settled and supported by data, we find that post-modernist thinking has been drafted into the service of stopping climate change.
It turns out that AGW is what is called "post-normal science", meaning that old-fashioned ideas like data and testable hypotheses have to be left on the wayside as we march in lockstep toward the Greater Truth demanded by The Times We Live In.
In other words, its our old friend Fake but Accurate, hanging out with the usual crowd. Don't look at the man behind the curtain, and all that.
Robert Clayton Dean, "Truthy science", Samizdata, 2007-03-16
Jane Galt foresees some technologically driven changes in the political arena:
There has been talk about this problem for a while among television personalities and . . . er . . . adult entertainers. Today, though, it suddenly occurred to me that this might have an impact on the 2008 election. Just as the introduction of television famously altered voter perceptions of the candidates in the 1960 election (those who listened to the debate thought that Nixon had won, but those who saw it on television overwhelmingly favoured the more telegenic Kennedy), HDTV could skew who we nominate and/or elect.
For example, though I've never met him, my understanding from those who have is that McCain's image of vitality is very carefully projected, and that when you actually meet him up close, he looks pretty frail. Will that come out on HDTV? How about Hilary? HDTV is least kind to older women; I'd bet it puts at least ten years on her. I suspect that Obama is the only candidate who will actually look good on HDTV; he's younger, and even light black skin ages better than caucasian.
The adoption rate of HDTV may be critical to Obama's hopes for winning the Democratic primaries . . . the sooner people replace older TV sets with HDTV, the better he's going to look (in the purely visual sense, of course). Politics has been described as "show business for ugly people", but this may no longer be true — does this presage a take-over of public political discourse by only the physically attractive?
I did see "300," and count me among the fans. Many reviewers found it chilly, empty and distant — visually stunning, as the cliché goes, but all shine and no boot. I expected to feel the same way, based on the previews; I expected to be impressed and awed but not quite engaged, except on that adolescent fanboy level that detects the presence of coooool, and responds with shiny eyes and an idiot's grin. But it connected from the first frame to the last. Neil Stephenson nailed the reason some despised it: it did not acknowledge the presence of Camp and Irony, which I'd add are the two defining critical postures of the post-modern age. It was what it was — but even more than that, it seemed to come from an era when everything was what it was, even the falsehoods. Especially the falsehoods. (I have no idea what that means, but it sounds transgressively post-modern.)
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2007-03-19
This is a cause I fully support:
It's the flag the Canadians carried into battle when they captured Vimy Ridge in 1917. And it's the flag that should be flying when thousands assemble at the Canadian National Vimy Memorial next month for the unveiling of the restored monument to mark the 90th anniversary of the battle, say members of a campaign to get the Red Ensign to Vimy Ridge for the ceremony.
The Red Ensign was there in 1936 when the monument was unveiled for the first time.
Ottawa resident John Heyes, a retired public servant, has been lobbying to have a version of the historic flag taken to France for the April 9 ceremony.
Mr. Heyes and Bill Bishop, a maintenance worker in Maple Ridge, B.C., who has written hundreds of letters advocating a stronger presence for the old flag, don't expect the Maple Leaf, which Canada adopted as its flag 42 years ago, to take a back seat to the Red Ensign — they think both should be flown.
Call me naive, but I'd always assumed that the Red Ensign would be flown at the ceremony . . . but respect for history has never been a strong point for Canadian governments before.
H/T to Damian for bringing it to my attention.
Update 22 March: Thank you, Stephen Harper.
As I've possibly indicated before, I'm not over fond of Macs. This, however, takes it a few steps further:
The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign — the only difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show — probably the best sitcom of the past five years — in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, "PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers." In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.
I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui. [. . .]
Mac owners often sneer that kind of defence back at you when you mock their silly, posturing contraptions, because in doing so, you have inadvertently put your finger on the dark fear haunting their feeble, quivering soul — that in some sense, they are a superficial semi-person assembled from packaging; an infinitely sad, second-rate replicant who doesn't really know what they are doing here, but feels vaguely significant and creative each time they gaze at their sleek designer machine. And the more deftly constructed and wittily argued their defence, the more terrified and wounded they secretly are.
SpaceX may have a launch later today:
The flight readiness review conducted tonight shows all systems are go for a launch attempt at 4pm California time (11pm GMT) tomorrow (Monday). The webcast can be seen at www.spacex.com/webcast.php and will start at T-60 minutes. Please check back for updates, as the launch will be postponed if we have even the tiniest concern.
Kerry Howley sums it all up thusly:
Got that? Small girls are baring more skin because they hate their bodies. They hate their bodies because they sense that adult women, as a unit, are insecure. We know that all women are insecure, because a lot of them hate their thighs, and some of them are learning to pole dance. The solution? Love yourself!
This is what happens when your worldview is entirely framed by random New York Times trend stories.
A recent study showed that the most important generation ever to stride the Earth, the boomers, complain more to their doctors about minor aches and ailments. Not surprising. Their parents knew how to suck it up; if they went to a doctor it was for something good. "Sorry to trouble you, Doc, but I lost a leg in the auger the other day, and I had to sew up the stump with barbed wire. I wonder if you'd give me some salve for the itch." Many boomers, however, regard the minor afflictions of life, particularly those associated with the ravages of age, as a personal affront. I'm surprised they don't form a class-action suit to sue God for mortality. If that's not a product defect, what is?
James Lileks, "It's this or smell like Ben-Gay", Star Tribune, 2007-03-13
Clearly, [they] do not frequent EvilBay where every thing the seller has not seen before is R@RE, anything more than five years old is VINTAGE, and if not broken in pieces, MINT.
Supreme Ruler of the UniverseBob Netzlof, posting to Yahoo group "StillGrumpy", 2007-03-13
The relationship between Cheney and George W. Bush is also perplexing. Despite the nearness in their ages, Cheney acts like Bush's father (no coincidence since Cheney served in George H.W. Bush's administration). There's something creepy about how Cheney, after heading the candidate search, insinuated himself into the vice presidency. He locked onto Bush like a limpet, using the more extroverted and physically dynamic president as his proxy. Bush's independent judgment was paralyzed, as if by snakebite. It's an unsavory, toxic relationship, a vampiric pseudo-marriage like that of the shadowy, Machiavellian Roger Chillingworth and the impressionable, waffling Arthur Dimmesdale in Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter."
Hence I've always felt that liberals' hatred of Bush is misplaced. I feel pity for him — he is a genuinely tragic figure who made the wrong choices and destroyed the promise of his presidency. His sense of divine election and destiny, a defense mechanism that allows him to survive that crushing job, is of course positively dangerous for the country. At this point, it seems Bush's persona will never mature in office. As he blustered with dangling arms and stiff cowboy legs to the podium during last week's South American junket, I felt embarrassed at his lack of diplomatic courtesy and simple savoir faire. Confident manhood does not need to constantly strike poses.
Camille Paglia, "Hillary vs. Obama: It's a drawl!" Salon, 2007-03-14
Senator Chuck Schumer said today that Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez should get the boot; so did the New York Times. In most circumstances I would agree; it's not making an argument that Gonzales is a competent attorney general that's hard, it's making the argument without giggling that's the problem.
However, the fly in the Gonzalez resignation ointment is that the guy who appointed Gonzalez would be in charge of appointing his successor, and if six years has taught us anything about Dubya, it's that "appointing competent people" is only slightly above "speaking both grammatically and extemporaneously" on his "Things I'm Really Good At" list. Moreover, if the recent attorney firings scandal tells us anything, it is that when it comes to the Department of Justice, Bush appointments trend toward devolution; hell, that's even evident at the top, since Gonzalez is an even worse Attorney General than John Ashcroft was, and when you consider that what Ashcroft really needed was a two by four with the United States Constitution laser-etched onto its surface liberally applied to his skull at least twenty hours a day, that's no mean feat.
John Scalzi, "The Practical Argument Against Giving Alberto Gonzales the Boot", Whatever, 2007-03-11
"Da Wife" sent along a link to a new product at Lee Valley Tools: something which no Canadian coffee-drinker can be without.
This is a product that really needs a lot of explanation, not because it's mysterious in function or even difficult to use (quite the opposite), but to explain what it's doing in our stores!
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." Unfortunately, Ralph apparently wasn't writing from personal experience when he penned that quote, as one of the most difficult challenges an inventor can face is bringing a finished design to market.
When we were first shown the Rimroller many months ago, we recognized immediately that this was an elegant, well-designed, and well-manufactured product at a very reasonable price. It was one of those products that just delighted people when they used it. We also recognized that the inventor, Paul Kind, had plowed a ton of time and capital into bringing the product to the point where it was ready to market. So, while Lee Valley is clearly not the most appropriate retailer of this product, we could only stand by for so long watching Mr. Kind work hard to sell this product without success.
This is the sort of product that I'd normally expect to appear in the April update to their website, but perhaps because I rarely drink take-out coffee, I underestimate the huge demand for this sort of product.
I just noticed that the time stamp for my last few postings is off by roughly an hour. I guess bolditalic.com didn't get the daylight savings time patch.
Australian take on creation . . . and something to do with life saving, too.
H/T to Roger Henry for the link.
"Da Wife" sent along this link to a really big pit.
In my line of work, I have to look at the Internet for many hours a day. As a steady diet this is not good. As you all know, the Internet makes it drop-dead easy to find at least 30 things that really piss you off before your first cup of coffee cools. I don't care where you're coming from, this axiom (15 Minutes Internet = 30 Things That Frost Your Cookies) is universal.
Gerard Vanderleun, "Run, Jump, Skip, Hop", American Digest, 2007-03-05
Within the last decade, technology advances have made it possible to unlock more oil from old fields, and, at the same time, higher oil prices have made it economical for companies to go after reserves that are harder to reach. With plenty of oil still left in familiar locations, forecasts that the world's reserves are drying out have given way to predictions that more oil can be found than ever before.
In a wide-ranging study published in 2000, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that ultimately recoverable resources of conventional oil totaled about 3.3 trillion barrels, of which a third has already been produced. More recently, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an energy consultant, estimated that the total base of recoverable oil was 4.8 trillion barrels. That higher estimate — which Cambridge Energy says is likely to grow — reflects how new technology can tap into more resources.
"It's the fifth time to my count that we've gone through a period when it seemed the end of oil was near and people were talking about the exhaustion of resources," said Daniel Yergin, the chairman of Cambridge Energy and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of oil, who cited similar concerns in the 1880s, after both world wars and in the 1970s. "Back then we were going to fly off the oil mountain. Instead we had a boom and oil went to $10 instead of $100."
Jad Mouawad, "Oil Innovations Pump New Life Into Old Wells", New York Times, 2007-03-05
Foods That Make Your Children Cry: A Participatory Thread. And John has a daughter at about the right age for some of these suggestions to leave really lasting mental scars.
John Donovan, castellan of Castle Argghhh posts some very sad news.
"Da Wife" started typing in a comment to the Quote of the Day on Self-Esteem, but it quickly outgrew what the comment dialog box allows. She sent it along to me by email, and I decided that it deserved to be an entry in its own right:
Recently we went to a birthday party for a classmate of my 4 year old. I left 2 hours later shaking my head and completely irritated.
Every minute some parent would be exclaiming "Good job, Buddy!" (GJB) to a child for some minor achievement. To show how minor: one of the GJBs was because the birthday boy picked up a gift bag. Yes, closing his hand around the handles of a gift bag and picking it up, was enough of a reason for the mom to burst into rapturous (and I mean rapturous) congratulating. This mom was constantly hovering over this kid and GJBing everything he did. Now imagine how irritating it was in a room FULL of parents like her.
Somewhere in the brainwashing and guilt-tripping that passes for parenting education these days, they have taught parents that children need to be praised for breathing. If they are not praised, their wee little self esteems will suffer and in addition, they will not like their parents. Parents have to realize that it is their role to parent and not to be their kids' best friends. Kids have plenty of friends but only 2 (1, 3, who knows in these days, but let's say a small number) of parents. These parents need to remember that kids mistreat their friends all the time. Are they more likely to mistreat their parental buddies too if they think of them at the same level and not figures of authority? What exactly are parents teaching their kids by all this excess praise?
My kids get praise when appropriate. I have one daycare child who is obviously in the praising buddy category with his parents. Firstly, he does not listen to them. They do not enforce discipline or do so with reasoning, talking, empty threats, and few if any consequences. Secondly, this child will walk up to me dozen times a day pointing out that he did this, he did that, and "aren't I a good boy?" Demanded praise looses all the meaning of praise. Something that should be spontaneous and from the heart, is now irritating to the person forced to give it.
New York is about to become the 20th state with a civil commitment program for sex offenders, thereby embracing an increasingly fashionable contradiction: When sex offenders are caught and convicted, the government says they're responsible for their actions, so it locks them up. But after they serve their time, it says they can't control themselves, so it locks them up some more.
After nearly two decades of forcibly "treating" sex offenders deemed especially likely to commit new crimes, it seems clear that psychiatrists are not psychics, treatment is an expensive failure, and commitment is a euphemism for imprisonment.
Jacob Sullum, "To Life, to Life! Or Fry 'Em?: Even sex offenders can be punished too severely", Reason, 2007-03-06
The world is full of belligerent numbskulls; frequently, the more ignorant, the more belligerent.
It is a soppy, and dangerous, progressive cliché that lack of self-esteem among the indigent and the criminal is a cause of poor social integration. There's actually no evidence that the indigent and the criminal do have low self-esteem. On the contrary in fact, they tend to have rather too much of it.
Yeats got that. Polly Toynbee gets it too. Charles Darwin wrote, "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
While this is distressing for the world's more sentimental do-gooders, and seems to have had no impact at all on the growing self-esteem industry, it is an important observation, having great explanatory power, and not just for the history of idea. It is, I submit, at the core of such diverse social phenomena as gangstas, bling, Islamism, dangerous driving, the bullying petty official, the modern media health scare, the conspiracy theorist, and large chunks of the content of the web. Combined with the tendency for the assertive and persistent to get their own way, because others can't bear endless futile arguments, it is much more than a marginal nastiness. Which is distressing even to the unsentimental.
Guy Herbert, "Doctor Bickle, I presume", Samizdata, 2007-03-06
We've apparently moved beyond the age of the tarted up 'tween and into the era of the prostitot, the epoch of the kinderwhore. The hallowed thong, "an item of clothing based on what a stripper might wear," now comes in kid sizes. "Pudgy, cuddly, and asexual troll dolls" have been traded for "trollz," apparently highly gendered. Even the American Girl dolls, who might as well come packaged with promise rings on their porcelain figures, are not immune. "American Girl's recent co-branding with Bath & Body Works," we learn, "may lead to product tie-ins that will encourage girls to develop a precocious body consciousness and one associated with narrowly sexual attractiveness." And let's not even get started on Bratz.
The report is short on numbers, heavy on anecdote. But it's easy to be persuaded that 8-year-olds are dressing more like 'tweens, 'tweens more like teens, and teens more like 20-somethings. Which means — what, exactly? Kids ape their older peers, and they've never had more access to images of underdressed celebutants. A sixth-grader in a short skirt could well be a sign of a sexually dysfunctional society, a pie-eyed Paris in the making. Or she could simply suggest that 11-year-olds pick an outfit the same way they long have, hoping to find acceptance within a social group and signal mastery over a shared culture. Fashion can suggest sexual availability, or it can imply inclusion. Are they dressing for men, or for one another?
Kerry Howley, "Invasion of the Prostitots: Cultural warriors decry the sexualization of girls. But where's the proof there's a problem?", Reason, 2007-03-06
"Sophisticated" Canadians mock so-called "inbred" folks in Alabama, but consider it perfectly natural and oh-so-chic that our media and political elites all share the same last names: Mulroney, Trudeau, Richler . . . What a second-rate country we can be sometimes.
Kathy Shaidle, guestblogging at SDA in "Satire is dead", Small Dead Animals, 2007-03-02
I don't know about this whole Sudafed issue. My example of clueless governmental overregulation would be the confiscation of a tin of boot polish from my carry-on bag on a recent Ottawa-Toronto flight of mine. I should probably mention I was in uniform at the time.
I do think it's reasonable to assume that the threat of a uniformed, accredited Canadian soldier threatening the safety of a Canadian plane with his can of black polish is even theoretically nil. Anyway, I decided to take another look at the current official list of prohibited flight items for Canadian airlines, figuring I'd missed the relevant regulation. I can't help noticing that boot polish is not on the list.
Bruce Ralston, "Airline travails", Flit, 2007-03-01
Wil Wheaton has a great post up about those incredibly irritating anti-piracy segments on DVDs, which I must agree with absolutely wholeheartedly:
I really hate it when I put a DVD into my DVD player, and before I can actually get to the fucking movie I paid to watch, I have to sit through a big bunch of stupid, time-consuming, not-the-movie bullshit.
I can skip those stupid trailers for movies that will be out of date in six months easily enough, but I can't get past that insulting and annoying series of anti-piracy warnings they make me watch on every. single. dvd. I. watch. Okay, guys. I get it. In fact, I got it about forty thousand fucking DVDs ago.
Wil also links to this great parody at Boing Boing:
It's impossible for a serious person to take Fox News seriously. But up until now, you never actually had to. We always knew Fox was comedy masquerading as reporting, but that was the whole idea behind it. Like Ali G, Fox was self-serious. This was the one thing that made it mildly interesting.
"The Half Hour News Hour" blows the whole joke out of the water. After all, this show is a "comedy" program. By running a "comedy," Fox is basically saying the rest of its shows constitute real reporting. Fox isn't a parody of the liberal media; it's just the conservative version of it. Instead of self-serious, Fox takes itself seriously — which is especially disconcerting when you realize this channel gave Geraldo's mustache a news show.
Jonathan David Morris, "Fox News: Fair, Balanced, and Completely Full of Crap", Libertarian Enterprise, 2007-03-04
Jay Jardine reports on a recent botched police raid in Montreal:
When this story broke last week, I cringed at having to endure yet another round of politically charged nonsense surrounding drugs and guns. Today's developments put the case in a whole new light. Radley Balko (who has researched American SWAT raids extensively) has often noted that after a police shooting, usually the first thing the cops do is point out the amount of drugs that were seized in the raid. I haven't read anything yet pertaining to seizures. One Post story notes that of the six people arrested in the raids one had already been released without charges. The Globe notes that neither Parasiris nor his wife (who was presumably shot by officers returning fire?) have criminal records. At this point, all we have are the comments of his lawyer — take that as you will, and the rather exceptional details coming out of the raid (a fairly traditional family arrangement, with no criminal record and a legally registered firearm doesn't sound like a typical crackhouse to me), but rest assured I'll be paying close attention to this case as details emerge.
Proving yet again — as if it needed more proof — that the militarization of the drug war is an almost unmitigated bad idea. In this case, unlike too many others, the innocent victim survived the initial onslaught of battering-ram-equipped paramilitaries breaking down his door.
The Register reports on the U.S. Navy's vomit ray project:
The new technology has been given an acronym, EPIC, for Electromagnetic Personnel Interdiction Control. The idea is that intense radio-frequency emissions — capable of passing through walls — would be used to temporarily disrupt the balance and coordination functions of targets' inner ears, knocking them down relatively harmlessly.
The Navy notes that "second order effects would be extreme motion sickness," suggesting that in fact the order given by future Captain Kirks may be "set phasers on 'puke'".
Oh, barf!
Stop me if you've heard this before, but the other day the Rev. Al Gore declared that "climate change" was "the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced.'' Ever. I believe that was the same day it was revealed that George W. Bush's ranch in Texas is more environmentally friendly than the Gore mansion in Tennessee. According to the Nashville Electric Service, the Eco-Messiah's house uses 20 times more electricity than the average American home. The average household consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours. In 2006, the Gores wolfed down nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours.
Two hundred twenty-one thousand kilowatt-hours? What's he doing in there? Clamping Tipper to the electrodes and zapping her across the rec room every night?
Mark Steyn, "How Gore's massive energy consumption saves the world", Chicago Sun-Times, 2007-03-04
. . . is to imprison the people who attempt to film it.
The French Constitutional Council is moving to solve the problem of non-accredited journalists filming or broadcasting acts of violence — by making it illegal for anyone other than bona fide journalists to do so:
The council chose an unfortunate anniversary to publish its decision approving the law, which came exactly 16 years after Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King were filmed by amateur videographer George Holliday in the night of March 3, 1991. The officers' acquittal at the end on April 29, 1992 sparked riots in Los Angeles.
If Holliday were to film a similar scene of violence in France today, he could end up in prison as a result of the new law, said Pascal Cohet, a spokesman for French online civil liberties group Odebi. And anyone publishing such images could face up to five years in prison and a fine of €75,000 (US$98,537), potentially a harsher sentence than that for committing the violent act.
Clive sent me a link to Into the Black, a site which hopes to create more shows based in the setting of Joss Whedon's Firefly and Serenity:
"Into The Black" is the first ever fan-made show based on the setting of Joss Whedon's "Firefly".
It's a labor of love, being made entirely by Browncoats in and around Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada. We loved the show, and it ended, and gorram it, we weren't finished watching it! There seemed to be very few Firefly/Serenity fan productions of any kind out there, and we had some stories to tell... so we decided to.
"Into the Black" is being made in the format of a one-hour TV show. The first episode — and we do so hope there will be more! — is called "Mined Control", and is set on the backwater mineral-rich moon of Iscariot.
Global news even did a brief report on the project:
And the actual trailer is here.
This Toronto Star article was sent to me with the heading "Al Gore was in town recently, wasn't he?":
February was coldest in 28 years
If you thought February was particularly cold, you were right.
Frigid conditions made the month the coldest February in 28 years, according to Environment Canada's senior climatologist David Phillips.
Not since 1979 has February dished up such bone-rattling conditions.
No wonder I kept hearing so many variations of the same joke last month: "Global Warming? It sounds good to me right now!"
H/T again to "Da Wife".
Brad Warbiany takes a moment to glance into his crystal ball and finds . . . shite:
After the 2001 recession, when the government was coming off small surpluses, we had very low interest rates, and the political will to cut taxes, we were able to protect against a major economic crisis. We don't have the same situation now. The government is running enormous deficits (and has added several trillion to the debt), the politicians are debating raising taxes, and interest rates likely won't be able to hit the rock-bottom levels we had in 2002.
What does this mean? I don’t think we can spend our way out of this. I don't see any way for us to have liquidity in a stagnant housing market and a tight credit market. In a tighter credit market, with rising interest rates, the cost of borrowing to cover deficit spending will not be feasible for the government. I don't see an engine for economic growth appearing to cover the recession. There's only one way for this liquidity to arrive, and that's for the government to print money. Loads and loads of money. Helicopter drops of money. And the result is stagflation. This is quite possibly the worst thing our government can do, but I don't trust any politicians to take the tough medicine — I expect them to print money.
Further, if things get bad, you can expect a quick increase in the level of socialism in this country. In an effort to placate both American big business and American voters, you'll see the government take over health care. As a result of the inflation government will cause, you'll quickly see them try to institute price controls and wage controls, like the 1970's. All the while, they'll blame scapegoats like outsourcing companies, while their own inflationary policies are causing the problem.
Before you jump to the assumption that this is the worst of his economic and social fears, the next paragraph starts with "Wait, though, it gets worse."
It's always easy to find the dark and depressing side of the current economic picture . . . regardless of the time you live in. I'm not hugely optimistic about the immediate future, economically speaking, but (to borrow a phrase) there's a lot of ruin in a country, especially one as big and dynamic as the US. Canada, being smaller and less entrepreneurial, is somewhat more brittle, and can take relatively less reassurance from world events (but with the vast majority of Canadian exports going south, any downturn that impacts the US will have even more immediate effects on the Canadian economy).
That being said, I'm not hoarding tinned goods and ammunition in my basement. This time next year, I may be regretting this oversight, but on balance, I don't think the situation is anywhere near as grim as Brad does.
What do you mean "what colour is the sky in my world"?
It's odd to see [Republican Presidential candidate Ron] Paul in this format. He really doesn't get the language of these cable appearences; he couldn't dodge a question if it was tossed 100 feet over his head.
David Weigel, "Ron Paul Exists!", Hit and Run, 2007-02-27
Wow. A Bugatti Veyron, taken to top speed. H/T to Dave Slater for the URL.
Samizdata Illuminatus has some interesting thoughts on the recent economic disruptions emanating from China:
In spite of a widespread belief in China's embrace of free-market capitalism, enormous economic distortions characterise modern China's economy. For example, why is it that, relative to China's economic footprint, the Chinese stock market is rather pathetically stunted — especially in light of the vast savings pool the Chinese people have accumulated? As mentioned in the above article, the Chinese are great savers and they tend to deposit these savings into bank accounts because alternative investment opportunities are limited compared to those offered to a Western investor. Consider the following:
Why does the Chinese investor not sink his surplus funds into foreign commodities? Because he is restricted from doing so.
Why does he not invest in Chinese stocks? Because he (probably correctly) views the Chinese stock market as being distinctly ropey.
In light of these state-imposed distortive realities, what does one do with one's savings? One puts them in the bank, of course. Predictably, the banks are awash with deposits. Under these circumstances, the principles of fractional reserve banking have been taken to the extreme in China, allowing the central government to durably zombify huge segments of the otherwise bankrupt state-owned industrial sector by forcing the "big four" state-owned banks to continuously loan depositors' money to these failed state enterprises, in the full knowledge that these loans will never be repaid.
Of course, you'd expect me to be bearish on the Chinese economy, based on things I've posted before.
It doesn't happen as often as it used to, but something caught James Lileks on the raw, and he must scream:
What really caught my eye was an interview with a University of Minnesota professor named Thomas Fisher, the dean of the U's new School of Design. It was a conversation about the new Design Economy, a term I hadn't heard before. America will compete and thrive because we design good things, like the iPod. You might wonder how a nation of 300 million can be sustained by design, but rest assured the term has broader definitions. The interview, called "Intelligent Design," focused on cities. As you might expect they are in dire need of Design, and I suspect this design will be administrated by experts. (As Dr. Johnson once said: A man who has tired of criticizing London is tired of tenure.) In order to compete, our cities need better design. No argument here — until we look at the specifics.
While it might seem a bit unsporting to take potshots at experts of this type, it can be very satisfying. Read the whole thing (after the initial refrigerator digression, that is).
Under Arizona law, each "visual depiction in which a minor [under 15] is engaged in exploitive exhibition or other sexual conduct" is a separate offense, triggering a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years, and the sentences must be served consecutively. The upshot is that a defendant who has a few of these pictures on his computer can easily serve a longer sentence than a bank robber, arsonist, rapist, or murderer. By what peverted standard of justice does that make any kind of sense?
Jacob Sullum, "Arizona's Perverted Sense of Justice", Hit and Run, 2007-02-28
I was reminded recently of a phrase that haunted politically engaged undergraduates of the late 1980s, viz "the hierarchy of oppression"; perhaps the most pernicious doctrine of what has come to be called cultural Marxism. This last is a by-blow of the Frankfurt School, Marxists who have not read Marx and the failure of Marxism in every sphere excepting the one constituency whose moral and intellectual bankruptcy left them vulnerable: Academics. Gone are Marx' response to Hegel and a polemical Utopianism for a world beyond the urban mega-squalor of Victorian England. In its place we have been offered a Marxism devoid of history, devoid of economics and devoid of a basic reflexivity of class position; no Marxism at all. The full cocktail of stupid goes beyond the scope of a post but this Marxism for Dummies needs no more time to explain than it does to embrace. Remember this simple formula: Race trumps gender and class, gender trumps class and a working class background is what you claim if no one will buy being a white guy of Irish descent makes you oppressed.
Nick Packwood, "Infidel", Ghost of a Flea, 2007-02-28
There are very few things which we know which are not capable of being reduc'd to a Mathematical Reasoning, and when they cannot, it is a sign that Knowledge of them is very small and confus'd.
Dr. John Arbuthnot, On the Laws of Chance, 1692
As one or two of you know, Victor went off on a school trip to Europe yesterday. His flight was delayed getting out of Toronto, so they missed their connecting flight from Charles de Gaulle Airport, and their baggage went somewhere else entirely, but the last email from the group indicated they'd successfully arrived in Montpellier and (a few hours later) their baggage was present and accounted-for.
Tomorrow, off to Nîmes!
Not to be too snarky about this, but at what point should a reasonable person simply assume that any minster all het up about the gays is just a step away from being a Bathhouse Billy? Because I have to tell you, at this point it's getting to be my default setting.
John Scalzi, "I'm Willing to Bet The Reporter Was Snickering His Head Off as He Wrote This Lede", Whatever, 2007-02-24
. . . some folks are waxing nostalgic for old-time gas stations. My family came to Canada in 1967, so I certainly remember seeing similar Texaco, Gulf, Sunoco, Supertest, Shell, and Esso stations before they were "modernized" into some of the worst examples of commercial architecture in the 1970's. Some of 'em couldn't have looked uglier if they were made of solid bales of orange shag carpeting.
H/T to Jeff Scarbrough.
Michael Pinkus has posted the latest edition of the OntarioWineReview. This issue includes a visit to the Lake Erie North Shore DVA.
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition, 2003
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