Tag: History

Now Twenty Years Since The Bosnian War Began

What a simple and strong tribute as reported on the BBC above. I have an odd three point connection to the Bosnian conflict as I lived in my former home of PEI when refugees were filtered through Canada’s smallest province to acclimatize them to a new home. In 1998, I played on a PEI soccer team with many Bosnians including one who had played first division football. And, years earlier, we were teaching in Poland when the former Yugoslavia began to fall apart in civil war. I saw TV twice in those months in late 1991. Once to see a soccer game and once to see the shelling of Dubrovnik. Also, in my former former home prior to PEI but after coming back from Poland in the mid-90s I met and even represented Canadian soldiers who were in the UN force that liberated Sarajevo with a proper vigor that the current Canadian government frankly seems to deny.

The stories from these three points in that decade combined giving me that sort of weighing awareness that made the news difficult to follow on one hand but saw me asking more. In the pre-pop-Internet world that meant maps and shortwave. Listening to the news fading in an out from Radio Belgrade, Croatian radio as well as B92 gave a sense. I remember when Arkan was killed a Bosnian friend inordinately connected came to my office to ask how that could have happened. I had to give him, a former Red Army soldier, a lesson on the SAS, vulnerability and other such things. He had no idea but told me much that taught me about the later NATO bombing of Serbia.

A red chair for each of the dead. Better than Yeats. Few signed up for a cause in the 90s.

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Your Weekend Bullets For Super Bowl Sunday

Friday was a bit of a write off. I couldn’t get bullety. I was over in northern NY to see Mookie Wilson and Bill Buckner at a charity dinner. A fun night of watching and talking ball and watching and talking about NNY. Then Saturday came and went. I was busy with errands, baking bread… and then not busy laying around. I watched 7 episodes of Doctor who from the early 70s and late 80s. I am not sure what this sort of weekend leads to. The Super Bowl of course. And seed catalogs. February is the New Brunswick of months, a stretch to get through.

♦ I think I find it more odd that most ancient writings passed down to us are not more like this.

♦ Hockey boycott? I never heard of a hockey boycott over the game being too rough.

♦ I remember the Spicer Commission because I was there.

♦ While I am not one of those who believes there is an anti-booze conspiracy, it does seem like this sort of article depends much on magical thinking, great pains being taking to make a rational point where benefit is harmoniously maximized.

♦ Big talk comes easy with low levels of responsibility. Like Ottawa leads the attack on the Iranian tyrant. But it would be kinda weird if we did.

There you go. Another week and another February. Think I will go for a walk. Feels like March out there.

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Your Weekend Bullets For The End of January

Will February be as soft as January? I make these observations thinking one day I will maybe go back and check how bad each winter has been year after year. But I don’t. These things just languish. Like so many dreams. Contemplating leaving other things aside first, however. The cable TV and direct line telephone are under the budget department’s eye. When we had the power outage the other day the land line failed us due to the electrified base the wireless phone depends upon. Why not just have another iPhone for about the same price? At least cable TV brings me 7 months of baseball.

♦ Quite right. Use of a martini glass does not make for a martini. Your government store in action.

♦ “As usual, the Flea is right: “I don’t expect I will be back to H+M any time soon. If you work in a “creative industry”, or hold any sort of intellectual property in any medium, I suggest you don’t either.”

♦ Neato. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935) shaking hands during his lifetime with both John Quincy Adams, born 1767, and John F Kennedy who died 1963.

♦ As we have fun watching the GOP Super PACs lead to the GOP eating itself, consider, too, the guilt of the Tea Partiers whose great-granddad didn’t fill out the right paper work.

♦ Now I know why my Mother was enthroned as the Brisbane Queen in 1949.

So, there you go. I have to make this something more than an eight day commitment. But there is beer blogging to do, you know. Lots of beer blogging.

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Your Weekend Links Of Note For A Day At The Hospital

Efficient. Kind. Relaxed. Excellent. It was a good day at the hospital helping the lad get through what turned out to be a far less onerous than feared experience of an eyeball straightening. More nip than tuck, I have spent longer stretches at the dentist. Shades of my two days long medical stays of my youth disappeared. Validated Kate’s observations, too. Realized that I have sat in small city hospital waiting rooms in Canada, the US and Poland and each time thought pretty good people go into this work. Today, a small “hooray” went up among the post-op nurses at one point. I gave the “what was that face” to one of them and was told “the babies are through.” Hooray for the babies, indeed.

♦ Good to see the students of Syracuse can tell pedophilia from hate crime.

♦ I really hope many of these citizenship investigations are linked to the PEI passport selling scandal. Good to know, by comparison, that some Spuds have some sense.

♦ Boys need this last line of defends. It’s like Cold War MAD – mutually assured destruction. I recall when the bag tag war of 1982 broke out at undergrad. We needed, after only two days, a formal truce.

♦ Seventeen century science is absolutely neato: this and this, too

There. Weekend is here. Tomorrow? A Montreal Gazette weekend edition and maybe an obscure mammal in form of sausage.

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More Linky Weekend Goodness For Late Fall

Where were we? Ah, yes. The great explosion of 1840:

Another huge fire erupted on 18 April 1840, this time on Counter’s wharf and, aided by the explosion of gunpowder stored in one of the warehouses, spread across much of the waterfront area. Strong winds helped it extend to the whole of the north block of the Market Square, and to most of the next block up to Store Street (now Princess Street)

Never heard of it until a month or so ago. You would think that the destruction of much of the town would be a folk tale, collective memory. Never understood why Ontario is not interested in its own past like other parts of Canada, the English speaking world.

♦ Saturday night update: The Flea, mon cher, teaches how to KooDon’t.
♦ Best thing ever on the internet: what is brown and sticky?

♦ I had no idea that, besides interest on debt, Italy was actually in the black. Canadian Conservatives everywhere must be hailing it as solvency as they do with Mulroney’s terms.

♦ Really? Do you think? Do you think a cabinet member gets attention from “foreign lady reporters” from nations run by totalitarian regimes because they find Tories hot?

♦ I had no idea that Harper has expanded the Federal public service by 13%. No wonder they think that Mulroney got us to solvency.

♦ What is it with all these odd Tory stories? I mean if they are going to be doing all the social engineering I really hope they know how to plug in the toaster first.

♦ Finally – a break from Ottawa’s amateur hour. A great story from Humblebub.

That’s enough of that. Check out the great series at NCPR on the state of the nations on the two sides of the Great Lakes.

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What Is Canadian Exceptionalism? [“Rimshot”!]

I watched a biography of Ronald Reagan on PBS last night and was reminded of a lot of things. He was my high school to my getting into law school. He did come across as an old stuffy bumpkin know it all as well as your favorite uncle. All anyone had to do back then was to say “wehhlll” and toggle his head to get a laugh. But he told a good story. And he used the phrase “self-government” in a way Canadians don’t understand. For us it is just about autonomy – whether a euphemism for Quebec separation or greater First Nations autonomy. But in the states, it means running your own affairs. It may also mean less government, more local government or a bunch of other things. I don’t really know. See, I am Canadian.

Over on Facebook, a beer blogging acquaintance supposed that there must be something called “Canadian exceptionalism” which immediately struck me as an oxymoron – like curling action. All I could think of was “Canada would be a greater nation except…” Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a great country except we don’t talk about it. The very idea is a dirty phrase politically. We have other things to do. Ronnie Raygun would have talked about it. He had no issue with the idea of unity, purpose and a greater collective good. In that sense he is mirrored by Obama. He just didn’t see it as a function of government action. He did see it, however, as a proper government policy but one placing the function over into the private sector, aligning it with the responsibility of each citizen. Responsibility. He was no Randian.

Is there something or someone to blame for the drift from a paradigm that Reagan would even recognize let alone support? Did he create a backlash such that conservatism had to become what it is today, the neighbour of disloyalty, the ideological puritan happy to bring the house down, the disassembler? In taking apart the story of the other side did it also throw out the idea of having any story at all? Or have we just drifted of our own accord without anyone to give a better road map, tell a better story.

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So How Many Boycotts Are There Out There?

The news of NDP deputy leader Libby Davis getting in hot water about supporting a boycott of Israel has got me thinking. Not about Israel’s right to exist – even if I understand any nation’s right to defend itself in order to better assert and ensure continuation of its existence – but about boycotting. The National Post reports it in this way:

The video shows Ms. Davies answering a series of questions about the situation in the Middle East, starting with comments suggesting that Israel has been occupying territories since 1948, which is the year of its independence. “[The occupation started in] ‘48. It’s the longest occupation in the world,” she said in the video. “People are suffering. I’ve been to the West Bank and Gaza twice, so I see what’s going on.” Ms. Davies also expressed her personal support for an international campaign for a boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, breaking ranks with her party’s official position.

Now whether or not she has deviated from the party line is one thing – not to mention to the entirely wackier thing that is any call for the end of Israel – but time was it was all boycotts all the time. We all remember the South African boycott in the 70s and 80s (actually going back into the 60s) but I seem to recall that boycotts of France over nuclear testing and Nestle were also part of my parent’s shopping reality as a kid. Earlier, there were boycotts against the Nazis as well as by them. Farm workers in the US have successfully used the boycott as did politicians in relation to the 1976, 1980 and 1984 Olympics. Right now people apparently want me to boycott Alaska, Nokia and Cheetos.

The thing is boycotting always seemed to me to be about a sort of personal expression or at least participation. My Mom could join in and neither she nor France were at risk. Cheetos will go on. They may even be improved in their Cheetos ways, policies, practices and products. It means folks don’t have to be Ghandi but can be like Ghandi. But only if the cause is right.

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Friday Bullets For…For…Hell, I Don’t Know

Jay came up with a great idea in the comments last night: creditor’s prison. What a clever bunch of civilized Whigs we are. Or are we civic republicans? A veritable moral meritocracy. Gone are the days of comments with “people like you” finger pointery. No, now we are getting to the 18th century heart of things. People can do evil with an idea. The community can be corrupted by improper deal making. Me? I don’t understand to whom all the money is owed and, if it is a great big Ponzi scheme, why such debts are being honoured and not rewritten as unconscionable? If confidence is to be restored surely it will be due to the restoration of proper valuation though the application of equitable principles.

Fine. That is it. By next week we will be mere days from March and March is when baseball starts. It is almost over! Have I mentioned I hate winter? Winter is for people who say “I like to make the most of winter” and, honestly, we know what people think about people who say that.

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Friday Bullets For The January Thaw

Things are loosening up. There is no minus sign in front of today’s temperature and that is in Celsius. It’s back to the deep cold tonight but one day of a lighter jacket and slushy rubber boots not mountain climbing gear is good. Things are lightening in the political world as well. Obama (aka Barry) is at his desk. The clench of fear may be relaxing. It may also be just moving to another part of the body, less about anticipating a body blow and more about handing out what those who wield fear deserve. Up here, Iggy seems to be trying to get us off the roller coaster of brinkmanship that we have be saddled with for most of the decade. “We need an election in February like we need a hole in the head,” Good point:

  • I am learning more about the founding of Kingston and those who founded it. Really really interesting stuff. Go here and search for Cataraqui, the French name for the town. We are Yorkers!
  • I like the ability in the US to break down party lines without causing a constitutional tizzy fit.
  • Looking at the people from space.
  • Reason enough to understand why having some idea that Any Rand offers legitimate ideas is nutty. The ideology of paranoia.
  • This is quite an extraordinary web page if you think of where China has been as a culture in my lifetime.
  • Occasional comment maker and fellow Zapster Ian (and Tesse) know the new US Senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, based on them helping her past campaigning. I now have three degrees of separation from Obama…or is it two. Do you count yourself or only the intermediaries?

A busy day ahead. Planning for the weekend. Getting into that relaxed state. Picking out my casual clothes from the pile. A really big day.

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Canada Votes Day 8: Do We Need To Reinvent History?

Stephen Harper has an eye for the use of history. It’s a means to illustrate a desired image. But is he concerned enough about actual history? He spoke yesterday about creating the notion that conservatism is something that has an exclusive hold on certain elements of the Canadian identity – yet does so quite openly without firm footing in the facts. How unsatisfactory. Consider this:

He said in the last two decades there’s been a broad embrace of policies once considered the domain of conservatives, from free trade to balanced budgets and spending restraint. “We saw the Liberal Party in the 1990s flip its positions on all these issues and adopt small c-conservative positions,” Mr. Harper said. But there’s also been a revival of pride in ideas and entities that conservatives have traditionally backed, Mr. Harper said, meaning not just policies and organization that Liberals and New Democrats say defines Canada. “Not just [in] things like Medicare and the [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] but [also] in our national military and other institutions,” he said.

So, did you know that fiscal prudence and military honour are “conservative” values? Never mind that a conservative Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, increased the national debt more than any other leader or that provincial Conservative parties from Nova Scotia to Ontario to Saskatchewan led sometimes scandalously mismanaged governments, leaving records of debt and even jail terms. Never mind that Canadians of all stripes both answered the call and Liberals guided Canada’s hand in military affairs in our darkest hours – Chris Taylor has the right read on politicizing the forces. Never mind it was a Tory who brought in the CBC and minimum wage and other socialist programs when they were needed. And it was the Grit MacKenzie King who led the fight against the Nazis and our Conservative Prime Minister Borden who understood the need to have a Unity government of both Liberals and Conservatives in WWI’s toughest times.

Strange to see Stephen Harper take the credit for these things solely for his own kind. The good values of good governance, honouring one’s duty are values all Canadians aspire to and some, regardless of party affiliation, achieve. Any half-way able opposition leader would run up and down him with the facts and leave him nothing but breathless. We do not live in those days, however. Sadder still is the lack of necessity as the Prime Minister could state instead that he seeks to capture the values held dear by all Canadians and to govern guided by those good principles. A missed opportunity to tell actual history and weave it into his own story…and his within it.

Other News For Day 8:

  • Nuttin’ yet.

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