the blog quebecois

Happy Whatever Day. I really mean that.

I consider Trevor Lautens, along with Mark Steyn and David Warren, one of the best political writers in this country. He published a column in the Winnipeg Free Press Thursday that Terry O'Neill featured in The Shotgun; I've taken the further liberty of reprinting it here, as Mr. Lautens speaks eloquently and precisely to my feelings of malaise these past months.

UNFORGETTABLY, though I've forgotten his name and can't find his exact words in 45 years of my notebook-diaries, a U.S. senator once said, in surveying his career: "I began by wanting to save the world. Then I wanted to save the United States. Now I want to save... (some local slough or woodland)."

Derivatively -- and what better time than Canada (nee Dominion) Day to quote or misquote an American? -- I once loved Canada. Then I loved my neighbourhood. Now I have some regard for the tree-clad slope behind my house.

It is partly my property, partly my neighbour's -- I met him after just 18 years of residence and he proved to be an agreeable fellow, though neither of us has felt an urgent need to communicate again in the intervening two years.

Possibly a metaphor lurks here. Or not. In what used to be regarded as old age (in my case, 70 is the new 90), Canada looks too big for intimacy, too big for the imagination. It has to be broken up into small pieces to be lived in and through. In its larger cities, even downtown is a place too far.

Politically, the country is uninhabitable. Pride in today's Canada is embarrassing, if not repelling. I won't be there for the fireworks tomorrow.

You can stay while I tilt my kitchen chair back and reminisce, or leave now.

There seemed to be a fresh new dawn in the 1950s, that decade scorned as boring and repressive by those who weren't there for it. The Canadian vocabulary unashamedly included kindness, thankfulness, manners, and such, and citizens quite often even put those words into practice. The actual and linguistic horrors of lifestyle, fulfillment, liberation, orgasm (good, better, best), closure (what of importance is ever closed, especially the death of the loved?) and that tool of the institutionalized New Bigotry, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, all gratefully lay far ahead.

Of course, there were unfairness and prejudice, but also -- still in the glow of triumph over evil in the last war, whose righteousness we may ever universally agree upon -- a strong sense of hopefulness, of better days ahead, real wrongs being really righted.

More than an aside on that war: In a Times Literary Supplement review of David Dilks's The Great Dominion: Winston Churchill in Canada, 1900-1954, Nathan M. Greenfield writes: "The Canada Churchill knew is almost unrecognizable, especially to those who have followed the country's reduction in military capacity. The Canadian army rushed to England in 1939 was the only army that could defend Britain in the months after Dunkirk."

Canada's wartime gifts to Britain "totalled one-quarter of those under the more famous American Lend-Lease Agreements -- and Canada's population was one-twelfth that of the United States." Furthermore, Canada supplied 44 squadrons in Britain by 1944, and had built 100 of the Royal Navy's ships and 1,223 of the 5,000 tanks the Allies shipped to Britain.

Since then, countless brains have been addled by an approved high-school textbook that ignored the soldiers and reduced the war to two consequential issues -- women's work (invaluable, certainly) and the expulsion of ethnic Japanese from the West Coast to virtual internment camps.

I've long admired what I call the Class of 1920, those born a few years on either side of that year who ground through a devastating depression, fought and won a war and, hardened into smartness, brilliantly provided Canada's leadership for decades.

Now Canada is uber-enlightened and people are afraid to go out at night. (One never knows, a crooked MP might be lurking in the shadows.)

Dismiss all this as an old man's grumbling if it makes you feel better -- or the mutterings of one who confuses happier times with his youthful self, an argument I grant has some merit. But, when not in danger of being overheard, people of my generation agree with me that it's not just rosy nostalgia for youth. Objectively, life in Canada really was better before the Hippies and the Me Generation and Generation X, and even, amazingly, human rights commissions and liberal judges secretly terrified of their ambitious and even-more-liberal young law clerks.

One finally learns that a single act of personal kindness and civility that lightens a heart and makes life more endurable is more virtuous than an act of Parliament. (To quote myself: All great crimes begin in committee.)

One also learns -- a subversive belief, unpopular and deserving of quick suffocation lest it gets around -- that the displacement of God and enthronement of Man has had only dimly understood but devastating social consequences. To think that we are the universe's highest beings should fill us with the greatest alarm and dread if we look around and, especially, inward. (This, as I always feel obliged to state, from a non-Christian, non-church-going, gin-swilling blasphemer. But that doesn't mean I'm stupid.)

So other hands will have to wave the flags tomorrow. The Canada I cherish -- still -- is a private and mystical one, somewhere up that backyard slope of wild greenery, where a chickadee announces his pert importance over a flower born to blush unseen.

The comments that this inspired at The Shotgun are well worth reading, too.

Those who are fond of legislation and of sausage and of smilies ought not watch them being made.

-- Otto von Bismarck (sorta)

Via b3ta

The buzzword "brainstorming" is off the list of phrases deemed acceptable to for civil servants in Northern Ireland to use because it is said to be demeaning to people with brain disorders, according to the Observer.

Staff at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment in Belfast will from now on be using the term 'thought-showers' when they get together to think creatively.

Sources inside the department tell the paper that there was concern that the term brainstorming would offend people with epilepsy as well those with brain tumors or brain injuries.

A spokesman for the Campaign for Plain English said such edicts have "reached the point of real ridicule."

'You do sometimes wonder if some people haven't got anything better to do with their time,' said John Wild.

Via Tongue Tied

The government of Canada decided to consult its aboriginal people on ways to reverse the country's slide to banana republic status among nations.

Chief Two Eagles was asked by one official:

"You have observed the white man in Canada for 90 years. You've seen his wars and his technological advances. You've seen his progress, and the damage he's done."

The Chief nodded in agreement.

The official continued, "Considering all these events, in your opinion, where did the white man go wrong in Canada?"

The Chief stared at the government officials for over a minute and then calmly replied ....

Mosey on over to I Am (Also) Canadian for the rest. Here's my money-back guarantee: If you don't find the punch line deeply, searingly hilarious, the exemplar of hard-hitting humor; then feel free to yell at him in his comments section.

This reminds me of a Japanese game show I once saw. A car was the big prize -- the trick was that the keys for it were at the bottom of an aquarium filled with crabs.

Warning: audio.

DUBLIN, Ireland (CP) - Prime Minister Paul Martin will do what he can at the G8 meeting in Scotland to persuade his neighbour George W. Bush to recognize the reality of climate change, say senior Canadian officials. But no one should expect the American president to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol against global warming, they said, adding that just an acknowledgement of climate change would be a big step.

It'll be a big step if Bush acknowleges that Martin exists. Even if he believed the moronic Kyoto treaty would accomplish anything besides destroy the U.S. economy, he'd be up against the Senate's 95-0 peremptory vote against ratifying it. Talk about your bipartisan consensus.

But by all means, Paul, just keep nagging away on -- or as I just heard you on the national news -- "explaining" the concept. I'm sure the President will be all ears. While you're at it, see if maybe he's interested in buying a slightly-used gun registry. Sure, the computer code's still a bit buggy, but it's nothing another few billion shouldn't fix.

If Iowahawk ever decides to turn his guns on you, accept your beating with good grace and a rueful chuckle. If you try to fight back, it only gets funnier.

Warning: Language.

The option to print anywhere, onto anything, is an important factor which will provide the users with the ability to print digital content onto floors, walls and ceilings, both indoors and outdoors. Further substrates will include surfaces such as paper, brick, concrete, glass, and grass.

Neat. It's a paint roller married to something like a dot-matrix printer that allows you to easily put text or graphics on large surfaces. My dreams of becoming the best graffiti tagger in town are shining ever more brightly tonight.

Or maybe not. This video demonstrates it in action; it's kind of a noisy little bugger, sure to prick up the ears of the vicious railroad bulls.

I wasn't going to post on this today, as I didn't have much to offer about the horrors in London except my sincerest hopes that the pigs who did it are caught as soon as possible. If some of them suffer fatal injuries while "resisting" arrest, so much the better.

I decided to look at Mark Steyn's website to see if he'd had anything to say. There was a note saying that he would be on Hugh Hewitt's radio show in the afternoon (transcript here) and that he would have a new column out at midnight in the Telegraph.

Immediately below that, though, was a link to a piece he'd written for the Spectator, dated for Saturday of this week, but obviously written a couple of days ago. As always, the man's prescience is eerie:

It feels like summer. Summer 2001, that is. Then, as now, Africa was in the news. There was a big UN conference on �racism� in Durban the week before 11 September. Remember that? They demanded America pay reparations � for the Rwandan genocide. And Robert Mugabe was cheered to the rafters when he called on the United States and the United Kingdom to �apologise unreservedly for their crimes against humanity�.

...

at Ground Zero and in Hyde Park, we�ve taken four years to come back to where we were on 10 September 2001.

Here's the link to it. (Registration required; or you could try this login / password combo from Bug Me Not: lagd3@cam.ac.uk / password )

Now go get the bastards who did this.

This is a video capture of an Xbox Live session of someone playing Rainbow 6. Make that someone a whiny, obnoxious 12-year-old engaged in a petulant argument with his mother as she attempts to tidy up.

I can see how video games could lead to violence -- me, I would have put up with about a minute of that nonsense before I backhanded the kid across his face and chucked the Xbox out the window.

Warning: The usual gunfire and whatnot; also, the little darling has quite the foul mouth. You might want to give this one a pass if you're on a dial-up connection. It's a huge (42MB) file and takes a long time to load even with broadband.

Update: I originally posted this a couple of weeks ago, but when I rechecked the link, the site had been shut down, having used up about 200 years worth of bandwidth. I googled around for the clip with no luck, but finally found a copy of it on one of those servers that hold large files for a short time, 7 days in this case.

So then, being mindful of my own bandwidth,

This is starting to get tedious, isn't it?

I set about looking for a server to host it. Most of the popular ones, though, like Putfile, have a 10MB size limit, or are crawling with pr0n banners and probably some even less-savory stuff.

I thought about using Google Video, but that requires the viewer to install the proprietary Google Video Viewer. Eventually everyone will probably have it, but it's considered poor form

As compared to bloggers who go on and on and on?

to send readers to some place that requires them to download new software. Unless, of course,

yaddayaddayadda

they want to get it, in which case follow the above link.

I eventually found ourmedia, which you might want to check out for your video (and other media files) storage needs. It has no limits on filesize, no expiry dates, it's sponsored and supported by

. . . tapping watch . . .

heavyweights like the Creative Commons, Tucows and the Internet Archive, and best of all, it's free.

The only downside that I can see is that it's a bit sluggish. Whether that's temporary or not I guess I'll find out. If you click the link, go grab a cup of coffee or something, because it's going to take awhile downloading and buffering it.

And in conclusion,

Hooray!

Oh, shut up.

No, you shut up.

No, YOU shut up!

No, you SHUT UP!

NO, YOU SHUT UP!!!

. . .

And in conclusion . . .

And in conclusion, if you enjoyed that pointless bickering, you're gonna love this.

According to my exhaustive research, Miming is a minor Norse forest god. The day we can't shout abuse at mimes is a sad day for freedom, if you ask me. Look what happened to this guy:

A German man has been arrested after a marriage guidance counsellor advised him to run around naked shouting at trees.

Dieter Braun, 43, from Recklinghausen said the stress release technique had worked perfectly until he was arrested.

He told police that venting his anger on the trees had stopped him shouting at his wife.

"If I didn't go to the woods and scream at the trees then my marriage would probably be over," he said.

He added taking his clothes off at the same time made him feel more relaxed.

"For me it's a type of relaxation therapy. Feeling the breeze on my naked skin really calms me down."

But local police said other visitors to the forest did not find his behaviour relaxing and have now charged him with causing a public nuisance.

The EU unveils its new counter-terrorist strategy:

The European Commission said it was initiating legal action against 11 states which had failed to incorporate the rules into national noise pollution legislation, which should have been done by July 2004.

The states are Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal and Britain.

Loud = Bad. Bomb = Loud. Therefore Bomb = Bad. Will Mohammed risk the Wrath of the Regulators?

My 6-year-old niece is spending the next couple of days here, which means a lot of Frogger and Kim Possible and The Sims for her, and a dearth of new, exciting posts for you.

In the limited time I could lure her away from the computer ("Claire! Isn't that the . . . ice cream truck??!?"), I managed to rediscover this. It's a slightly reworked version of a sniper game I saw a month or so ago. Pick off the little men before they start shooting back at you.

Or if you'd prefer to shoot at little penguins (with llama spit, I think), you can try this. It's the latest from Yeti Sports.

Be apprised of the typical game noises if at work.

The security guard would like to have a few words with you.

Sign #1154 that blogging is taking up too much of your mental existence: I had a dream last night that, disturbingly, featured Warren Kinsella. Even more disturbingly, he exists mainly as a disembodied voice.

He wanted to discuss something I'd supposedly written (about attending some interminably boring event up North, I think), so I went over to see him.

You'll not be surprised to learn that he (or at least his disembodied voice) lives in a cavernous loft-like building. There's nothing on the first floor but crudely roughed-in framing.

I guess the consulting fees aren't rolling in so great these days, because it lacked certain amenities, like a staircase. I hate dreams without staircases, because it means I'm going to have to climb up some rickety structure that I'll later be afraid to climb down. Which of course is what happened, at which point I woke up.

In the interim, Warren was a charming (if ethereal) host, showing me around the place. I don't remember too much of it, but I can at least report that there's one large room with a quite-impressive waterfall.

Keep your Freudian theories to yourself. I have enough problems as it is.

easy ivy over
oh no, here comes miss blackwell
with her big black stick
now it's time for arithmetic

trad.

I blame electricity deregulation for this shocking development.

Via grow-a-brain

As you may know, many people consider this the "go-to" blog for analysis of US Supreme Court decisions. As you may also know, many of these people are idiots, in that I rarely, if ever, do any analysis of US Supreme Court decisions. But they still come flocking back for my considered opinion. Idiots.

Bless 'em.

I do keep half an eye on what the SC is up to, though, because it's been my experience that each and every bad idea that comes out of the States shows up here ten years later, repackaged as some brilliant new Canadian initiative, just as the Americans are on the verge of ditching it.

So I was aware of the furor over Kelo v. City of New London, but mostly in the thought that this was a Bad Thing. I was aided in this perception by columnists such as Debra Saunders:

The city of New London, Conn., found itself in economic doldrums. Redevelopment was supposed to be the bromide. State and local officials created the New London Development Corp. That unelected entity decided to increase tax revenues by pushing middle-class families out of their waterfront homes and using eminent domain -- the other E.D. -- to make way for a revitalization project, anchored around a Pfizer Inc. research facility.

and George Will:

The question answered yesterday was: Can government profit by seizing the property of people of modest means and giving it to wealthy people who can pay more taxes than can be extracted from the original owners? The court answered yes.

Not to mention this from Horace Cooper, a professor at George Mason:

Reminding one more of the Queen of Heart's court in Alice in Wonderland rather than the highest court in our land, the Supreme Court ended its 2004-2005 term critically crippling the property rights of red state America while dramatically augmenting the rights of blue state America.

However, John Hinderaker of the Power Line blog argues that the decision is not a radical departure from the precedents covering eminent domain/takings law. Hinderaker (I believe) is himself a lawyer and presumably conversant with the issues. In the Weekly Standard a week ago he wrote:

MANY CRITICS of the Kelo decision have said that it authorizes seizing the property of one person merely to give it to another. Apart from any misunderstanding of Pfizer's role, this can only be because, once the NLDC acquires title to the Fort Trumble property, it will be conveyed to a developer, Boston's Corcoran Jennison, to carry out the project. Some hostility to the Kelo decision seems to be based on the belief that Corcoran Jennison may profit from its work--an odd concern, one might have thought, to be expressed by conservatives. But New London's use of a private developer highlights an important point: there is no doubt that the city (or the NLDC) could use its eminent domain power in support of the Fort Trumble project if it planned to retain ownership of the land and administer the project itself. If the project were publicly owned, no one could question that the associated condemnation proceedings would be in support of a "public use." But are the rights of Americans any less imperiled by condemnation in support of publicly-owned projects? And, as a matter of policy, if a city wants, for example, to create more housing, does it make any sense to force it to pursue the long-discredited practice of building public housing projects, rather than facilitating the use of private capital and private management to achieve the same end?

So, in conclusion: Kelo -- Good or Bad? Dunno. I suspect it has possibilities for abuses, but I'm not inclined to get as apoplectic about it as Prof. Cooper. Government and business working together is often a recipe for kickbacks and other corruption; but then, so too is government and public-service unions. Or for that matter, government by itself (see Ottawa, Canada).

This is what the Crusading Press supposedly lives to uncover, when it isn't just printing press releases from its favorite pet causes.

Hinderaker is the only person (that I've read) to point out that it's unfair to demonize Pfizer for this, when it was the city of New London who initiated the expropriation, in the hope that private business would seek to set up in that location.

I imagine it sucks equally to have your property seized for a privately-developed industrial park as it does to have it commandeered for an airport or highway interchange. It's one of those necessary evils, I guess -- it's difficult to imagine any kind of coherent society without the government having that power. About all you can hope for is that it will offer fair compensation for value.

In short, I suspect the grand Republic to the south will sputter along more-or-less successfully; what it means for Canada in the year 2015 is anyone's guess.

I'm going to be quite busy for the next five or six days -- I might make the occasional post, but I probably won't have much to say until next week.

Some video of the infamous "Hot Coffee" mod from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

It's obviously not safe for work, but not as explicit as some of the more hysterical press accounts have it.

i was lying in a burned out basement with the full moon in my eyes i was hoping for replacement

neil young

The Smoking Gun:

JULY 21--Meet Patrick Tribett. The Ohio man was nabbed yesterday morning for "abusing harmful intoxicants" as he attempted to make a purchase at Bellaire's Dollar General Store. The 41-year-old Tribett, it seems, had been huffing spray paint and needed a refill.

Actually, it goes quite well with his shirt. Most people just look ridiculous in gold paint, but this guy makes it . . . work somehow.

hey now woo look at that did she nearly run you down
at the end of the drive the lawmen arrive
you make me feel alive, alive, alive

duran duran

On the accidental killing by British police of Jean Charles de Menezes:

British opposition politicians largely have supported the actions of the government, but Brazil's foreign minister, Celso Amorim, said he was "shocked and perplexed" by the killing and demanded an explanation of the killing after speaking to his British counterpart, Jack Straw, by telephone and meeting a Foreign Office minister in London. "Here was a peaceful, innocent person who was killed," Amorim told reporters, adding, "Even in the fight against terrorism we should also be cautious to avoid the loss of innocent life."

Indeed. But methinks the Brazilians aren't exactly unacquainted with police brutality:

In São Paulo, throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Human Rights Watch/Americas documented a steady increase in the rate of civilians killed by on-duty military police officers. During this period, Rio de Janeiro state authorities did not release figures on the number of civilians killed by police, thus rendering a precise numerical comparison impossible. However, other indicators suggested that São Paulo police were killing civilians at a rate substantially higher than their Rio de Janeiro counterparts. Indeed, by 1992-the record year for military police killings in São Paulo-the number of civilians that these police killed reached 1,470, one-third of the total number of homicides in the state of São Paulo that year. By way of comparison with another notoriously violent city, the São Paulo figure represents more than sixty-one times the number of civilians -- twenty-four - that the New York City police killed in 1992, and more than fifteen times the number of police killings per capita when compared with New York.

'arry 'utton ('e could be a Cockney, Guv'nor!) weighs in from Venezuela:

If the police fired eight rounds into my head as I was boarding a train I would be disappointed, but not particularly surprised. For I live in Caracas, and the Venezuelan police, like many Latin American police forces, operate British-style death squads.

A couple of weeks ago they massacred three young men in a car, in what bore all the hallmarks of a UK-style extra-judicial execution. Which is scandalous, but nothing unusual. Normally, no one would mind; but this time their victims turned out to be university students, instead of ordinary riff-raff, so it ended up being a real pain in the arse for the authorities.

One of the downsides to being a wildly successful blogger is that many people are after you to promote their causes, figuring that your fame will bring much attention to their projects.

Or so I've heard. It must be very annoying.

I did get an email yesterday from one Susan Coulton asking me to endorse this:

‘Unite Against Terror’ Statement

Invitation to bloggers to sign and Sign and link

Please consider signing and informing your readers about the statement ‘Unite Against Terror’.

Written by bloggers in the UK after 7/7 posted on Friday it has attracted hundreds of signatories from UK USA Europe Iraq and the Middle East.

Terrorist attacks against Londoners on July 7th killed at least 54 people. The suicide bombers who struck in Netanya Israel on July 12 ended five lives including two 16 year old girls. And on July 13 in Iraq suicide bombers slaughtered 24 children. We stand in solidarity with all these strangers hand holding hand from London to Netanya to Baghdad: communities united against terror.

. . .

We invite you to sign this statement as a small first step to building a global movement of citizens against terrorism.

Initial signatories include:

Alan Johnson (Labour Friends of Iraq personal capacity) Ali Fadhil (Iraq); Adele Geras (author); Peter Tatchell; Jane Ashworth (Labour Friends of Iraq pesonal capaciity); Anthony Julius; Alex Gordon (UK National Union of Rail Maritime & Transport Workers RMT - personal capacity); Omar (Iraq the Model Iraq Pro-Democracy Party); Professor Norman Geras (normblog); Dr. Elizabeth Stewart (The Open University England); Jeff Weintraub (USA); Cllr David Boothroyd (Westminster City Council UK); Syed W Ahmed (Islamic Center of Chicago); Ami Isseroff (Israel MidEastWeb for Coexistence); David Green (Oxford University Labour Club and Delyn Constituency Labour Party; Micheline Ishay (Director International Human Rights Program University of Denver personal capacity);Osama Al-Moosawi (Iraq); Shalom Lappin (King's College London UK) Brian Brivati (Professor of Modern History Kingston University London personal capacity); Pierre-André Taguieff (France CNRS Research Director); Cynthia Epstein (graduate center CUNY USA); Christopher Hitchens; Eric Lee; Stephen Bronner; Adrian Cohen and hundreds of others.

Well, I have my doubts about the efficacy of signing petitions against terror -- but if Christopher Hitchens and Norm Geras are willing to sign it, then so am I. Or at least my pseudonym is.

I'm not sure what the jihadi will make of it.

"This 'gnotalex' . . . maybe . . . he is you, Ahmed!"

"No, maybe he is . . . you, Osama!" (Gunfire ensues.)

Yeah, we'll go with that theory.

If you want to sign the petition, or to find out more about it, here's the webpage.

I don't know if it's called that, but it should be. Part of the definition of baroque:

Architecture, departing from the classical canon revived during the Renaissance, took on the fluid, plastic aspects of sculpture.

It's a bar somewhere in Poland, but that's all I know about it. More pictures here.

Steven Bochco's new series, Over There, gets, uh, mixed reviews from some Iraq War vets:

"Bogus" was the preferred adjective among the eight soldiers -- most of them Iraq vets -- viewing the series pilot last week at Camp Murray, headquarters of the Washington State National Guard in Tacoma.

"Thank God that's over," said a master sergeant as the credits rolled.

The uniformed skeptics dissected the series pilot scene by scene, beginning with the roadside bombing and panicked soldiers. Who, they asked, was pulling security? And what kind of idiot pulls off his helmet after a bombing attack? "In real life, training takes over. Not in Hollywood," said Sgt. Dan Purcell.

The flags on the trip wires got an "F": roadside bombs in Iraq are typically hidden in watermelons, hay stacks, animal carcasses -- not marked for easy viewing. "A flag to mark an i.e.d.? What is that -- like don't land here?" [. . .]

The fast-paced premiere is packed with sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll; cool explosions and close-up gore; cussing and wrought emotion. It opens with the soldiers' goodbyes to family and a nervous flight to Iraq. In an instant -- "Yeah, right" -- the new dudes are belly-down in sand in front of a mosque full of insurgents, with two women accidentally trapped in the trenches, one with a big attitude and little common sense.

"I can do it myself!" she yells at a soldier who tries to help her dig a trench. "You deaf soldier?" It's night, she's totally exposed to enemy fire and, when it starts, it's boy-soldier who has to push her head down to save her.

No wonder the men keep asking, "What do we do about the women?"

You stand back and watch in awe as they unleash their innate woman-power mad skillz to kick-box their way into Baghdad, is what you do, fool.

Via Nealenews