the blog quebecois

Ottawa Citizen:

The federal government can't recruit enough disabled people into the public service and should develop new strategies that will attract them to federal work, says Canada's staffing watchdog.

Maria Barrados, president of the Public Service Commission, said the recruitment rate of the disabled has declined for three years and she worries that unless the trend is reversed the public service will have a problem with too few disabled workers compared with the broader Canadian population.

"We are concerned that the continued low rate of external appointments will have negative consequences for their representation in the public service over the long term," she told the Senate committee on human rights Monday.

Canada's employment equity laws require the public service to reflect the diversity of society. This means the government must hire the four designated groups in proportion to their share of the labour force or workforce availability. Barrados said the government has done well in recruiting and hiring from the three other equity groups - women, visible minorities and aboriginals - but it's slipping on the recruitment of people with disabilities.

Well, then, the solution is obvious. Not enough handicapped (can we still use that word?) people? Then by Gumby, we shall simply make more of them! Report on Monday next week for your legalized leg-breaking!

Too grim, too absurd? Maybe, but it's where their logic ineluctably leads.

The writer Kurt Vonnegut saw this coming a long way off, and satirized it in his 1961 short story, "Harrison Bergeron":

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's cheeks, but she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about.

On the television screen were ballerinas.

A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.

"That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel.

"Huh" said George.

"That dance - it was nice," said Hazel.

"Yup," said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good - no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.

There's a reason for the saying, "Close enough for government work." And it isn't a recognition of excellence.

A man is in court for murder and the judge says, "You are charged with beating your wife to death with a hammer."

Then a voice at the back of the court says, "You bastard."'

The judge continues, "You are also charged with beating your daughter to death with a hammer."

Again the voice at the back of the court says, "You bastard."

The judge says, "Now, we cannot have any more of these outbursts from you or I shall charge you with contempt! What is the problem?"

We get off to a false start on this, recording over an aborted backing track. There was some dispute, too, about who was on the bloody "rock in the middle of the sea." I think I screwed up the whole Jason and the Argonauts thing.

But the sound was closer to what we were looking for. I was feeding the guitars through some cheap echo/reverb box that I bought for $20 from Radio Shack. (There's also a low, steady whistle throughout that we didn't catch until the playback; likely caused by a failing battery in one of my other guitar pedals.)

Previous: Just Like A Woman (2)

Some vapid metrosexual (it isn't clear whether it's a he or a she; but it's definitely 100% dick) named Alex (ironically) Manley, has its eye on Heather Mallick's job:

The whole ‘Movember’ thing is cute and all, but can we stop and be real about it for a second? Movember is a movement to celebrate North American guys not practicing basic facial hygiene for a month in order to raise money towards saving a group of extremely privileged people—themselves.

Yes, if Movember was to raise money for people in third-world countries, for illiterate people, or homeless people, or for anything but what it is—which is privileged guys pretending they have it as hard as people with real problems—then it might come close to approaching something vaguely resembling worthwhile.

You'll be happy to hear that it's undergoing the equivalent of a Roto-Rooter rectal exam in the comments.

Via Stephen Taylor

AP:

. . . by nature, they will like the strong horse.”

Well, Obama's in the stable, raping that pony to death.

The State Department is considering a plan that would reroute the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada away from environmentally sensitive areas of Nebraska, an action that could delay a final decision on the project until after the 2012 election.

A U.S. official said told The Associated Press on Wednesday that rerouting the pipeline was a key issue that came up during public meetings and this fall in the six states through which the pipeline would run. The official asked not to be identified because no decision has been made.

Calgary-based TransCanada Corp. is seeking to build the $7 billion pipeline to carry oil derived from tar sands in Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. A portion of the 1,700-mile pipeline would pass through Nebraska's Sandhills region and the massive Ogallala aquifer, which supplies water to eight states.

A State Department decision to reroute the pipeline would require an environmental review of the new section, a process that would likely push a final decision on the pipeline past the 2012 election.

Screw it. Let's start building the pipeline. West, not South. We can name it the Going-For-Barack China Express.

I'd never given it much thought, but one day I wondered about the role of women poets in WWI. Poetry was considered a "proper" pursuit (as compared to, say, novel writing) for ladies of the time.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of it anthologized; and what I did find of it was often in the heroic (classical tropes of gallantry and sacrifice) mode as championed by such as W.B Yeats (as compared to the gritty naturalism of Siegfried Sassoon, et.al. Given that women were in most cases far from the front lines, it was unconvincing, at best.

But war was not only one of the greatest drivers of technological and scientific ferment; it also signalled great revolutions in human affairs. WWI started the migration from the small towns and rural life to the big cities; WWII further carried on the trend and especially emancipated women. (It is one of the ironies of history that Goebbels and the Nazis were famous for boasting of "total war" but it was the Allies who brought it to the field by completely marshalling their female citizens, freeing their men to deliver the full fury of their nations. As Toland and other historians of the war have pointed out, it was rare for German women to be employed out of the home [and with a full complement of servants for the upper classes]; and the government depended on half-starved, fully-resentful slave labor [who never missed a chance at sabotage] to staff their industry.)

Where women excelled in poetry were in small miniatures that summoned up the changing landscape of life and love. Madeline Ida Bedford (who doesn't even get a page in Wikipedia), captured the new terrain nicely in her evocation of a (Cockney?) factory worker:

Earning high wages?
Yus, Five quid a week.
A woman, too, mind you,
I calls it dim sweet.

Ye'are asking some questions -
But bless yer, here goes:
I spends the whole racket
On good times and clothes.

Me saving? Elijah!
Yer do think I'm mad.
I'm acting the lady,
But - I ain't living bad.

I'm having life's good times.
See 'ere, it's like this:
The 'oof come o' danger,
A touch-and-go bizz.

We're all here today, mate,
Tomorrow - perhaps dead,
If Fate tumbles on us
And blows up our shed.

Afraid! Are yer kidding?
With money to spend!
Years back I wore tatters,
Now - silk stockings, mi friend!

I've bracelets and jewellery,
Rings envied by friends;
A sergeant to swank with,
And something to lend.

I drive out in taxis,
Do theatres in style.
And this is mi verdict -
It is jolly worth while.

Worth while, for tomorrow
If I'm blown to the sky,
I'll have repaid mi wages
In death - and pass by.

We finally got around (I had several hundred numbered chips, each corresponding to a song, that we picked from a hat most days to figure out what to record. We probably would have been better off concentrating on the handful of songs that were nearly in finished form, but it was more fun to try to breathe life into something old.) to recording an update to this. (Some background at the link.) We fattened it up somewhat, with my cousin providing additional percussion. (He got the "drummer" gene -- my contributions usually were some half-hearted handclaps on the backbeat, or some approximation thereof.)

The Borowitz Report:

Responding to Wednesday night’s rioting in support of ousted football coach Joe Paterno, the board of trustees of Penn State University today took the extraordinary step of replacing the entire student body with an interim student body.

“After careful consideration, we decided we had to make a change,” said trustee Harley Manvers. “Hopefully, these interim students won’t be such jackasses.”

Mr. Manvers said that finding 40,000-plus new students in time to attend Saturday’s game against Nebraska was a “daunting task.”

“We needed to find a large number of people with absolutely nothing going on in their lives,” he said. “Fortunately, we found them on Twitter.”

Ever noticed the similarity between "Ezra" and a "ninja?" One is a master of secrecy and disguise; the other is, well, Ezra.

Though he does do a dazzling Mary Walsh, so I guess that counts for something.

Big Peace:

Canada overtook Saudi Arabia as America’s biggest oil supplier in the Nineties, and many U.S. politicians and business leaders have been pressing for approval of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would ship an additional million barrels of Canadian oil from the oil sands to U.S. markets every day. Though the State Department had ruled the pipeline to be environmentally safe and in America’s national interest, President Barack Obama refused last week to approve the pipeline, maintaining that it required more study and delaying the decision till after the 2012 election. Critics say the president had buckled to the anti-oil environmentalists in his left-wing base.

The Ethical Oil ad points out that by importing Saudi oil, “we bankrolled a state that doesn’t allow women to drive, doesn’t allow them to leave their homes or work without their make guardian’s permission, and a state where a woman’s testimony only counts for a half of a man’s.” It concludes by asking, “Why are we paying their bills and funding their oppression?” when there is a “better way: ethical oil from Canada’s oil sands.”

Mark Steyn, in his numerous writings on popular music, regularly comments (or at least the songwriters he interviews do) on how much more difficult it is to write a good lyric than a good piece of music. To be sure, he's more often focused on the genres of Broadway musicals and the Tin Pan Alley classics, where the audience expected verbal sophistication and flair from the likes of Oscar Hammerstein and Sammy Cahn.

Rock is a bit more tolerant of inane lyrics -- not just the nonsense, of, say, "Louie, Louie" or "Tutti-Frutti," but stuff that was meant to be taken more seriously: like America's "Horse With No Name" or Steve Miller's "Take The Money and Run."

Sample:

Billy Mack is a detective down in Texas/You know he knows just exactly what the facts is
He ain't gonna let those two escape justice/He makes his livin' off of the people's taxes)

With me, it was all-too-often plain laziness. I thought it more important to get the basic melody down, while waiting (usually in vain) for the lyrics fairy to show up. Thus all the doubled-up and repeated verses, etc. The damn words I could fix tomorrow.

But to quote the Beatles (in a somewhat different context), "Tomorrow Never Knows."

This is my 2nd demo for the (rather pretty) "Who Do You Know?" (I don't think that we ever did a version together).

Previous: Who Do You Know?

Globe and Mail:

I want to be very clear that I’m not pointing a finger at the people of Canada; neither is any American I know. We’re all in this together, and that’s the only way we’ll turn it around. We need to stand up, Canadians and Americans as one, to draw the line at tar sands.

Robert Redford speaketh. Encouragingly, he's taking a pasting in the comments.

The Globe and Mail:

Omar Khadr, the first Canadian convicted of murder, spying, and terrorism and held at Guantanamo Bay, needs another first before he can go home to serve out his sentence in a Canadian prison.

Canada must first be certified as a fit place to send a convicted terrorist, a nation not likely to permit him to attack the United States, and one that has control of its prisons.

Huh! Canada is indeed a fit place to send a convicted terrorist. Oh, you didn't mean it that way?

Apart from that first condition, looks like they're stuck with him, then.

Bon voyage, you murderous Muppet! I understand that Leavenworth is very nice at this time of the year, all things considered.

No, not well at all.

I didn't have a proper footswitch for the drum machine, so turning it on or off mid-song could be a tricky proposition. (Changing beats was even trickier.) You would sort of stab at it with your foot or hand if available and hope for the best. Matching the downbeat to one's internal metronome could prove . . . interesting.

It's easier in some ways to play with a real live drummer, who often will provide visual cues (hand signals, the spinning drumstick) to the start and tempo. Or he could keel over as a result of a drug overdose, which would indicate that the song is probably not going to start in the near future. Either way, it puts an end to the guesswork.

Previous: Truth

"There, there, Rocky. Bullwinkle's gonna get things all fixed up."

Big Government:

Revealingly, official resources provided on the Occupy site as part of the planning for last week’s chaos shows several manuals from the Ruckus Society, whose mission is to provide “environmental, human rights, and social justice organizers with the tools, training, and support needed to achieve their goals”; this includes training radical activists in direct action techniques.

The same Ruckus Society that helped to spark the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, which devolved into violent unrest, was listed as a “friend and partner” for last week’s Day of Action.

The Ruckus training manuals provided at the Occupy site leave little to the imagination. Titles include: “Blockading for Beginners,” “Anonymous Riot Guide,” “Define White Supremacy,” “Uncle Sam the Pusher Man” and, of course, the (still!) Communist Party-connected National Lawyers Guild’s “Legal Observer Manual.”

Is the ”50 Crucial Points for Nonviolent Struggle” manual offered tongue in cheek? A closer look at Ruckus reveals an even larger brigade of extremists who are now deeply tied to Occupy:

Ruckus is funded by the Tides Center, a massive money hole foundation that channels fiscal sponsorship to a who’s who of conspicuously far-left groups.

Another beneficiary of Tides is Adbusters magazine, which is reported to have come up with the Occupy idea after so-called Arab Spring protests toppled governments in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. The Adbusters website currently serves as a central hub for Occupy’s nationwide planning.

The Tides-funded MoveOn.org has coordinated with Occupy and has used the movement’s activism to springboard its own initiative to take on capitalism with a Make Wall Street Pay campaign.

A major Tides donor is the billionaire financier George Soros.

Who should be indicted for treason and conspiracy charges the day after Obama and his attack poodle Holder are booted out of power. He'll never see a day in jail, of course -- those billions will buy a lot of high-powered lawyers -- but it'd be worth it to watch the old Nazi scuttle off to China, just in case.