Tag: History

Canada Votes Day 6: Friday Bullet Points For Week One

There is a certain pattern to elections. The days come and go and within only a few days some patterns seem to appear. Generalities. Themes. Motifs, even. So far in this one the main theme I see is that the Liberals have not collapsed through their own sheer incompetency. I think we all had suspected they might. That is victory in itself. Next, Stephen Harper is trying to be nice and, in doing so, is showing more confidence than his prior chippy habits allowed – though sooner or later it might cloy. Third, faction and gridlock rules. And a fair bit of ho-hum. Something is really going to have to break for anyone to get momentum. Frankly, I think the Tories have a plan to do just that after a quiet first third, a initial phony campaign. But what? What can it be? You will just have to wait.

Other news on Day 6:

Hmmm…for the rest of you unCanadians out there – what else is going on outside of mapled politics?

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Friday Bullets For The Greatest Weekend Of Your Life

Happy Fourth of July to our American Readers! I am doing a bit of research that points to our fair town being something of the refuge of the first terrorists of your fair land. Bands of Tory and Mohawk Loyalists in the 1780s left here, for example, to destroy all before them led by John Johnson, step-son of Molly Brant. Somewhere I read that of the 100 flour mills between Albany and Syracuse NY only one was left in operation that fall. These efforts kept the US army out of northern NY through lack of supplies and, hence, made a buffer that kept our small Loyalist fringe alive. In many ways, Kingston is Ontario’s Plymouth Rock but also factually related to New York. We should celebrate our own Ontarian (and therefore western Canadian) survival on this day as much as our southern pals do.

  • Speaking of our near neighbours, I came across this website of abandoned buildings of northern New York. Note LaFarge mansion to the lower left.
  • Two archeology blogs.
  • I have negotiated a 8000 character limit for blog comments. Please use these wisely as there us a character limit globally being studied by the UN.
  • I think it is time to agree with Harper’s point made yesterday – the founding of Quebec is a founding moment in Canadian history. We suffer from divisions that really are only in the mind. The idea now that there are two solitudes should be strange to us all – we have that egality now that was missing. Canada needs to understand itself to be French and English as well as First Nation, Scot and those who came after as well – not as 1970s multiculturalism but just as neighbours together. We need to find our own haka, remember and play baseball, cricket and rugby as well as lacrosse and snowshowing. And be thankful for Halifax, Quebec and Kingston, the three citadels that protected one young nation.
  • Darcey notes the passing of Bozo.
  • Wine is being grown by Lake Huron. What’s so wrong with global warming?
  • Gee, I sure hope the rude stuff I looked at on YouTube when it started up doesn’t come out in court documents.

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I Think This May Encapsulate The Whole Question Nicely

We are a people in need. It is sad but this always comes up – why aren’t Canadians as outwardly loyal as others allegedly are to their nations. The Globe and Mail thinks we need a little re-education on this point. A little time out from the family for a nature lesson:

On this Canada Day, I wonder: How do you instill a love of country in your children that isn’t hand-over-heart rote patriotism? How do you help them understand they are living in a paradise of benefits and beauty? Or make them want to, as grown-ups, become good citizens and give back to their country? You start by stepping outside. American psychologist and author Mary Pipher (The Shelter of Each Other) says that as grown-ups we tend to remember three things about our childhood: special meals, vacations and time spent outdoors…

It just sad. Can’t find a Canadian authority on point to make your argument about Canadian-ness. Then use that non-national authority to make a point that applies everywhere. Having only lived in areas Canuckian settled before, say, 1830 and for the most part before 1785, I can only say that anyone who hasn’t got special local food, interesting trips to local areas of importance or trips into the bush to to the beach must be bubble babies. Isn’t that what everyone does in Canada? Go to the cottage, the camp or the cottage or camp of the neighbour or relative?

No, I think they are making that point to miss the point. The real point is that we want to be jingoistic about something but don’t have it in us, literally. We have not been educated about the important stuff that is laying around us – unless you are lucky enough to be Newf, Bluenose or Quebecois. In his speech yesterday, Harper resorted to a call to “greatness” – which is like a call to tallness. A call to nothing. Greatness is a result not a goal. Patriotism is something that arises from pride, not from rote. So while you are at the beach or the camp, how about telling the kids why they are at that beach or camp and how folks got there Everyone’s pines are tall and lands are vast. But everyone’s history lessons and lessons from history are different. Start with who lived where you were first and go from there.

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Friday Bullets For The Last Weekend Of Winter

Another Friday. They flow by like the days of the week. A week or so from spring and still there’s feet of snow. That’s not exactly helping. Morton’s teetering and the Orange are gone. At least things are going better for me than they are for Eliot Spitzer. WFAN had an interview with his lady-friend’s grade five teacher. This is a weird world sometimes.

  • Update: Well said and RIP, hairy one:

    Mr. Ponticelli, who described war as “idiotic”, had initially refused an offer of a state funeral made by former President Jacques Chirac, considering it would be an insult to the men who had died without commemoration. He relented after Mr. Cazenave’s death, saying he would accept a simple ceremony “in homage to my comrades”. President Nicolas Sarkozy paid tribute to Mr. Ponticelli and said a national commemoration of all of France’s participants in the war would be held in the coming days.

    I had no idea that more than twice as many French soldiers were killed in WWI as there were total Canadian solders.

  • Update: Bob Costas thinks you are a loser…or maybe it’s just me that he thinks is a loser.
  • Why can’t we have a sense of humour? Why couldn’t it be called Sinistre?
  • What did the dolphin say? “Hey stupid whales! You don’t see dolphins dead on the sand. Loser whales. I am out of here. Stay if you want.”
  • Further to the question of who exactly in what capacity is suing whom, please note this:

    Prime Minister Stephen Harper is following through on his threat to sue the federal Liberals because of accusations, posted on the Liberal party’s website, that he knew of “Conservative bribery.”
    The lawsuit — a statement of claim for $2.5 million was filed today in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice — is a response to the “defamatory” statements made by the Liberals, Harper spokesperson Sandra Buckler said. “He’s doing what any other person with integrity would do to defend himself and his family,” she said.

    While the claim itself carries some errors that are a bit embarrassing for anyone who got better than a “D” at law school – pleading evidence, are we? – it is what it is. But does the spokesperson for the Office of the Prime Minister represent him in all things? Is this a political court case or a personal one? I’d be a little more comfortable if someone not on the public payroll was his spokesperson on this one.

    Update: I may be speaking out of my digestive tract about pleading evidence and the “D” thing as a read of Ontario’s Libel and Slander Act points out this dense bit of text:

    In an action for libel or slander, the plaintiff may aver that the words complained of were used in a defamatory sense, specifying the defamatory sense without any prefatory averment to show how the words were used in that sense, and the averment shall be put in issue by the denial of the alleged libel or slander, and, where the words set forth, with or without the alleged meaning, show a cause of action, the statement of claim is sufficient.

    I have not a clue but this may be the basis for an exception to the pleading evidence rule. See 1839’s Boydell v. Jones on “prefatory averment”.

  • Craig inquires into the delicate question of ladies of the night on PEI.
  • I have had the rewarding experience of being in a meeting with Senators Segle and was impressed by his dedication to local constituency work, something more in the nature of what you might expect from a senator under the US system. So I will not trot out my usual snark about monarchists on this point:

    Hugh Segal has introduced a motion in the Senate that would invoke the notwithstanding clause of the Constitution to prevent references to the Queen being dropped from the country’s oath of citizenship. The Kingston senator’s motion comes in response to a class-action lawsuit filed by Charles Roach, a Toronto lawyer born in Trinidad who never took a Canadian citizenship because he objects to the monarchy’s connection to slavery and refuses to take the oath.

    Yet it is note worthy to record for posterity that I have never quite voiced certain words in certain oaths for reasons of the history of the clan:

    The clan supported Charles I in the Civil War, and some of them fought for Charles II at the Battle of Worcester (1651). After the Restoration in 1660, the MacLeods felt a major grievance that Charles II had not been sufficiently grateful for their exertions on his behalf, and they never supported the Stewart kings again. The MacLeods took no part in Claverhouse’s campaign of 1688-89, nor in the first Jacobite rising of 1715.

    My feeling on the point is that if we are going to honour historical legacy, we ought to acknowledge the specific one.

That’s enough for this week. When we next meet over bullet points, it will be spring.

Group Project: Now It’s Six Years On

A year has passed since I wrote this summarizing what I wrote over the previous years. While my point of view is pretty much the same, it’s less intense. Too many intervening events, I suppose: SARS, tsunami and Katrina, as well as fostering again and our own growing up. But I took part in an emergency planning exercise last week and it was interesting to note that through the day no one griped about it being for no purpose or badly organized. Things are taken seriously even if the militarization of Canada’s Arctic seems a side show. Those bound up in fear seem as odd as the anti-vigilant. Pre-9/11 thinking is just a silly phrase given how badly much of the post-9/11 thinking panned out.

So where are we now? Where are you? Argghhh, as usually, is a thoughtful place.

Soviet Bombers

Much in the news about the Soviet era bombers again floating around international airspace. Apparently all that windfall oil revenue that is floating into Alberta is also floating into Russia – mention that next time a Calgarian gives you the lecture on the moralnomic superiority of western Canadians – allowing them to spend spend spend on expeditions to claim the Arctic, on joint military exercises with China and send out the long-range bombers. Excellent. So 1975. A reminder that there are scarier things than wingnuts with dirty bombs.

As a lad near the Greenwood air force base, the local military newspaper (was it called The Argus after the submarine hunter?) often had close up pictures on the front page of the Soviet bomber crews waving to their Canadian escorts on the front page. There is even a Russia-Canada hockey series this fall – note all Canadian games are played out west. Expect the minders and “cultural officials” to be taking note of oil well infrastructure locations.

Extremism

Of all the “-isms”, extremism is the best. Mainly because it means nothing but also because in the 1990’s…or was it due, like so much, to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure that extreme became a positive. Anyway, Nixon was against it and had the CIA rooting it out in Canada in the 1970s right about when they were working with the mafia on stuff. Apparently the mafia is not extreme.

Ottawa was one of at least 10 foreign cities targeted by the CIA in a clandestine operation in which the agency tried to ferret out those who were fostering U.S. “extremism” in the early 1970s. The program, codenamed MHCHAOS, was described by the U.S. spy agency in documents it released yesterday, chronicling misdeeds ranging from assassination plots and domestic and foreign spying to surveillance of journalists.

I thought it was “Mu-chachos” when I first read it in my uncoffee-ed state which would only make it more excellent although the “chaos” thing is all master of disasters, so maybe it is a pretty good code word.

I wish I had the job of writing the code words for stuff. I would have saved a special place for “Operation Excellent”.

Chat. Friday. Bullets. Go!

An interesting week. The Red Sox have gotten back in gear and gotten back into the groove as the Yankees again falter. Summer is now here which means it will be a bit colder this weekend compared to last. Gary reports a tornado yesterday from the cold front that gave us hail up here. That was the sports and weather. Here is the news:

  • Neato Update: Excellent. Excellent. Excellent:

    Your order #202-6921784-XXXXXX (received 18-February-2007)

    Amazon.co.uk items (Sold by Amazon EU S.a.r.L.):

    1 Pub Games of England (Olea…) £11.94 1 £11.94

    Shipped via International Mail (estimated arrival date: 29-June-2007)…

    Excellent. Did I mention this is excellent?

  • Update: Good thing they gave him a ticket.
  • Update: I have officially coined “Royal Sombrero” and, implicitly, the intense version “Sombrero Royale”. Alert the media.
  • Chris, Darcey, and the Flea all note the most offensive and apparently acceptable thing I have ever seen in a Canadian newspaper.
  • NCPR’s Brian Mann won an Edward R. Murrow award this week for his report on a rugby tournament in the Adirondacks.
  • My good pal the Pope announced his rules of the road earlier this week. I think this is a good thing. If the Conservative party is going to co-opt NASCAR, the Vatican was wise to grab the branding of the drive home. But I am sure he ripped this one off from me, something of a personal motto: “courtesy, uprightness and prudence will help you deal with unforeseen events.”
  • Remember when cable TV was in its teens and the new channels got notice? One, the History channel, quickly was dubbed “the war channel” as it was odd to see old battle footage documentaries all the time. The other night, I was watching one about WWI and followed up with some surfing and came across this extraordinary contemporary report on the fall of Brussels in 1914.
  • I find these addiction to email stats interesting. I can’t say I am addicted to email because it’s died back a bit compared to a few years ago as a tool for me. A bit over the top to write: “[h]alf of Britons could not exist without e-mail…” Also noteworthy is the observation that Facebook is establishing itself as MySpace for adults.
  • The forces of anti-Canadian flag waving in Los Angeles have backed down. I suppose there being so few Canadians in the area, the Dodgers didn’t know what they were looking at when they saw the Maple Lead flapping up there in the bleachers.
  • Having only lived in Canadian military towns for most of my life – without being a military kid (except for that Berlin airlift bit in the RAF) – it was odd to see the brief flap in Toronto over the yellow ribbon thingies on the Big Smoke’s emergency vehicles. In the end the right thing was done which is good as I support supporting. Russon’s a bit surprised that the Star supports supporting those supporting us.

Well, that is it for now. Not an earth shattering week but we are again the house of many mouths and that sort of keeps things local. Wizards tonight as well as maybe Steve and Barry’s.

Bulletpoints For The First of May

The shift from snow to having a lawn to mow is startling. I may already be behind.

  • Update: Scots election chaos.
  • Please note two key differences between me and Mike.
  • I decided this May Day would be the day we should thank a great unheralded socialist of the past. The socialist dream we all benefit from in our day to day life is entirely due to the dreams and efforts of Victor L. Berger, US Congressman from Wisconsin – that is when he wasn’t barred from taking his seat for being against WWI. Looking back, is there any of us who is not against WWI? Thanks Vic.
  • Speaking of obscurities of the past, I came across this chart of blow-hards and their opinions in relation to the Great Depression. My favorite is “Gentleman, you have come sixty days too late. The depression is over” by Herbert Hoover, 1930.
  • I set up an account on Twitter to see what all the fun is. In the past, I set up an anonymous blogger blog and did nothing with it as I soon realized such things are sad. I also have a MySpace out there somewhere but it is in German so I don’t understand it. As Rob points out, Ontario has now banned Facebook in the public workspace which is fine as these sorts of things are really private hobby activities anyway. But play with the Twitter thing to see if it does anything. Herbert Hoover I am sure would approve as there are great days ahead. If you need to set up a new email account to play with it, I have about 200 of them to give away.
  • Good news out of Afghanistan and as positive a flip-flop as the Harper government might flop-flip:

    Afghanistan, in what amounts to a tacit admission that its security forces may be compromised by torture, has accepted that Canadian monitors be allowed to interview transferred detainees privately. In effect, the secret police colonel — who may terrify a hapless captive — can be turfed out of the cell by Canadian monitors. That provision alone is a measure of just how far Afghanistan was willing to go to accommodate Canada’s newfound need for a landmark pact.

    So there was something wrong, there was likely the need to monitor and control movement of people who had come into Canadian detention and now it is up to our leaders to make sure they are handled properly by those into whose trust they are passed. Sounds all grown up and planned.

  • Fabulous news out of baseball with the 13th one man triple play in the history of the game’s top level:

    To put it in perspective with the game’s other great rarity, there have been 17 perfect games pitched, including Don Larsen’s in the 1956 World Series. Even the “natural cycle,” hitting a single, double, triple and home run in order in one game is more common, having occurred 14 times in the big leagues.

    If I had had it on the TV, my head would have been in the fridge at the time.

And on a personal note, I will not as it turns out be going to my undergrad reunion after all. Instead, I will enjoy the enhanced cost of my new roof shingles later this summer. The purveyors of ales and seafood of Halifax and the Maritimes will have to live another year without me. But fear not as instead of six or seven nights of hotels we are investing in Sea Dogs tickies and Boston Chocolates instead as I’ll will be reporting from Maine later in the month. I understand there will be parades on Memorial Day. Parades are excellent. As are Boston Chocolates.