Tag: News, Politics, Events

World Cup Warm-Up Week: How Am I?

It is not without some concern that I note tomorrow is 6-6-6 but I can’t let that take away from my World Cup planning. So far I have established pretty much that there is maybe a game Sunday for the lads in orange. And that is about it. I think I am in Maine for the final om July 9th which means I may have to bear the slings of portland as I try to explain why seven of the eleven guys playing for Brazil have different versions of the name Ronald on their jerseys.

P’raps I will watch some animated highlights of England’s win over Jamaica from the BBC’s Virtual Replay pages so as to get more in the mood. Six to nothing. That’ll be just like the games to come against Argentina or Germany. Sure it will.

The Redesigned CBC.ca

I came across the new vision for CBC.ca and it appears bland is in. Grey upon grey in an exciting vibrant riot of greyness:

  • The weirdest thing is the use small font of a medium grey on a coloured background for titles. It makes for very squinty reading. Sadly, before the CBC wallowed in white text on a black or other dark background. It was apparently too useful.
  • Other than that, the use of orange to highlight lesser points of interest on a page is just weird. You would think on the “Canada” news page the most important links are RSS, sign-in and services. Someone in tech clearly had a strong voice at the committee table. Otherwise “new” might have gotten the more visually important link.

I made some other pomposities here.

Friday Chat Or The Chat For The Day After The Red Sox Win!!!

Eight AM meeting across town so I may be brief today. Rainy Friday in May here, by the way. It’s close enough to winter still that you think rain is great.

  • Yes, the Red Sox took the Yankees in the final game of this series and did so in high style 5-3. It was a close game even if the Yanks got two of their three in the first inning when Wakefield’s knucklebal was wonky. After that is was all horsetails and flies. But the Red Soxs left the bases loaded three times so it could have been a bust out but for some good defence by the Yankees at the right times. Big outing for Loretta, the Sox second, who went 4/5.
  • I am inordinately fixated on baseball this weekend with the first GX40 Rewards ProgramTM Event at Cooperstown when Gary and I and maybe even portland will converge for the Hall of Fame Game as I got tickets. There have been rumours of later events such as a Thousand Island BBQ and the Flea says we can all go to Toronto one day and play with his vintage Twister games.
  • You know, I probably believe George when he says the government wasn’t “trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans” but should you really put yourself in the position where you have to say that? I believe him in the sense that the technology and personnel are simply not there to listen to everything and make coherent sense out of it all. And telephone records are always compellable by the courts on a subpoena issued on the request of a lawyer as opposed to by a judge upon a hearing. This is not really the stuff of privacy anymore than the internet is. Yet…there is that whole appearance thing and, more importantly, the mishandling of the appearance thing. Will he lose Congress to a hapless opposition. Will he be look back on one day as the US’s Paul Martin?
  • Apparently nice is the new cool. You have to look who is behind these sorts of studies, though, and I have it on good authority that the money for this bit of work came from the Association of Grannies and Librarians of Maine as well as the Cardigan Manufacturers Association of Indiana.

    He said fewer people identify with the classic image of cool than one would expect. For most, the new cool is someone who possesses more “socially desirable” characteristics. “I don’t know if I can blame marketers, or if there is even anyone to blame, but the mainstream got a hold of coolness and turned it into a mainstream version of coolness,” he said. “People now identify passionate and warm as cool, which is almost oxymoronic.”

    This, of course, is the leading edge of the new neo-socialist movement that will whip neo-cons off the map from 2008 to 2022. It’ll start with nice, move through additional arts classes in high school and end up in news papers dropping their business sections. Mark my words.

  • My Google – because I own one share – is getting more open. Hoo-ray!

    Talking to the BBC, Mr Schmidt also reflected on Google’s decision to adhere to Chinese government censorship rules in order to launch its new site in China. He said the decision was “the hardest the company has ever made” but added that, despite it being heavily criticised, he still felt it was the correct move. Mr Schmidt also believed that competition in the internet search business, especially from Microsoft and Yahoo would drive up prices and increase revenue rather than threaten them. Google appeared to be benefiting from its “limitless growth model”, he said, adding that more users, more advertisers and more content would fuel further demand.

    Excellent. More kowtowing to totalitarians and bizarre enununciations on economics please. These are the snippets you cherish after the bubble bursts.

Gotta run. Someone spell check this thing, wouldja?

John Kenneth Galbraith

It is hard to say you are sad to hear of the passing of someone at 97 but it is the case with John Kenneth Galbraith. I have enjoyed a few of his many books and appreciate that he played a role in the economic modernization that helped bring the boom of wealth to North America that the combination of social welfare and well-regulated, well-taxed capitalist freedom has provided over the last 50 plus years. My favorite recollection of his observations was his description in the book Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went of the amazement of, I think, a US Secretary of the Treasury coming to the realization that banks, when loaning money, create the money loaned out of thin air as opposed to partaking of any sort of transfer away from A to give to B.

But it is his autobiographies that I would recommend first. In The Scotch he wrote about his south-west Ontario roots, including a great discription of his family’s weekly rushed clearing our of the local market town at the end of Saturday afternoon as the drunken brawls of less temperate but temporarily funded neighbouring farmers began pouring out into the streets. In another autobiography, I remember him describing the work he did as a economist for the US Navy after WWII figuring out the effect of Allied bombing on German industry as well as seeking out the basis for the Nazi war machine. He was quite shocked to learn there was no machine, that the Nazis refused to run factories on more than one eight-hour shift a day or employ women in them due to their puritanical belief in their “traditional family”.

Even if your economics are mere faith-based contrarianism, you may try to resist but should not as you will find the bright quality of his mind reflected in the writing nonetheless, the sort of mind which, when asked as an election night pundit at 7 pm who would win replied ask me at 11 pm and was happily never asked back to be an election night pundit.

Certainty

I have always considered the desire to firmly fix the future – to seek certainty in the uncertain flux of what is to be – a sign of some sort of weakmindedness, hubris over the temporal. No wonder, then, that the news of the day, a cap on trade in lumber to the US and set dates for Federal elections has assured me once again that we now live in Simpleton.

The second is being proposed for reasons antithetical, to avoid early elections. Well, having had two Federal elections in the last two years and no one having lost an eye I simply do not see the reason. We started having maximum terms between votes to assure that we got a vote sooner or later. I like voting. If we voted more I would be happy as that is when I get to be involved in the process. Fixed election dates only stop idiots with perceived leads from getting the boot when they dare to go to the pools early. Serves them right. Leave me and my boot that pleasure.

First of all, why would we think that maxing out the amount that we can sell to anyone? We are a nation of exporters of raw goods, all vanities otherwise aside. What good comes of shutting down a resource market to get a payback of what was improperly taken by a buyer? We aren’t needy. Especially as this country is experiencing a sustained economic boom despite the unfair imposition of that duty. Especially when the amount we are to receive is about half to be blown on the beer and popcorn money. Chicken feed in the big picture. It would seem that economically we are able to deal from a position of strength as a nation but the new negotiators weren’t told.

There. Believe it or not, I lack faith in the new mid-minor masters based on the evidence of their deeds. Who’d believe it? Sooner or later I will put that second string on the banjo…I suppose.

Update: Hey, they listened to the complaints. That’s good.

Incredibly Sad

Without getting into the politics, this news strikes me as simply incredibly sad:

The bodies of more than 85 executed men have surfaced across Baghdad in the past two days, in Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods, providing graphic proof, yet again, of sectarian mayhem. Many bodies bore marks of torture — badly beaten faces, gagged mouths and rope burns around the neck — though it remains unclear who is responsible.

The article reports fear that the killings are by “police commandoes” but that is unknown:

The widespread suspicion is that many executions are the handiwork of death squads backed by the Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry. On the other side are well-organized Sunni insurgents, quite skilled at killing, too. One result is a slow strangling of whatever had remained of normal life: shops are closing earlier, people are hunkering down and politicians are feeling squeezed. Iraqis elected a new Parliament in December, but until now, political leaders have been wrangling over the composition of a new government.

You feel it is banal even to make any observation at all. Maybe it is my age but I think of a view of a bridge at the beginning of the Balkan War with people trapped among gun fire. I think of sitting in the school bus in junior high listening to the end of the Vietnam war or, later, revelations of Cambodia. It flows over you day ater day until you notice enough to thank God it is not here and then it flows over you again.

Trevor Greene

I got this sad report through the Kings College grapevine this afternoon:

A Canadian soldier in Afghanistan is in critical but stable condition after being attacked by a man wielding an axe during a meeting with tribal elders today. The reservist soldier, Lieutenant Trevor Greene, of Vancouver was initially taken to the Canadian-led multinational hospital at Kandahar Airfield where he underwent treatment for head wounds. He will now be airlifted to the U.S. medical facility in Landstuhl, Germany, said CTV’s Steve Chao, in Kandahar. Early reports suggested Greene was injured in a firefight with insurgents. It was later learned that he was attacked during a sit-down meeting with tribal elders when a man struck him in the back of the neck with an axe.

Trevor was a couple of years behind me in undergrad but Kings being so small we certainly knew each other, played intramurals, argued over the merits of pre- or post-Wham George Michaels and shared beers. It is quite the thing, 20 odd years after the age folk sign up, that Trevor was still ready and able to volunteer as a reservist. Thoughts today are with him.

In addition to be an officer in the Canadian reserves, Trevor is an author and journalist who wrote on the killings of prostitutes in Vancouver which are now the subject matter of the Pickton trial. More here and here and here and here.

Update, March 8: more stories on Trevor and his condition here, here, here, here and here.

Update, March 9: There is an interview in the Toronto Star with Trevor’s Dad. More here.

Update, March 10: A good story in the Vancouver Sun today about Trevor’s time in the navy.

Update, March 11: here is a CBC radio interview with Trevor’s Dad, Richard Greene. The link should open a real audio player and the interview is about 6 minutes long. [Later] Here is a story from CTV about improvement in Trevor’s health over the last few days.

Update, March 13: Here is a story from the Ottawa Citizen today with updated information on the state of Trevor’s health.

Update, March 15: Trevor’s back in Vancouver.

Update, March 22: Stephen Kimber (who knows Trevor as a Journalism professor at Kings then and now – and who posted in the comments below) wrote this article on the attack on Trevor.

Update, March 29: Barb in Vancouver has posted an update.

Update, April 26: Debbie has posted an update on the great improvements on Trevor over here.

Update, April 27-28: news updates of Debbie’s comment posting here and here and here and here.

Update, 29 April 2006: our pal Stephen Maher has a very good essay in the Chronical Herald today.

Update, 14 September 2006: there was an update on Trevor’s condition in the Vancouver Sun this week.

Update, 21 October 2006: there was an update in the Globe and Mail this morning with lots of quotes from lots of you. Funny – I have never seen the words “Mr.” and “Gibson” placed together in that way. Sounds like Trevor is moving forward.

Update, 16 December 2006: The Toronto Star has an article on Trevor’s recovery in this morning’s paper.

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NPR Expansion

Rob, who drew me into this gig of his as a volunteer, points out a very interesting phenomena: NPR is expanding:

While many newsrooms are shedding reporters—from the New York Times to the Dallas Morning News—NPR is one of the few places an experienced journalist can hope to get a job.
“I wouldn’t call it a binge,” says Bill Marimow, himself a former denizen of the print world. Fired from the Baltimore Sun in 2004, Marimow went to NPR and this week took over as its news chief. “I would call it significant growth.”

The NPR news operation has added 50 journalists in the past three years, raising the total from 350 to 400. Ten years ago NPR had six foreign bureaus; it just opened its 16th, in Shanghai, putting it in the running with major national news organizations. The New York Times and CNN both have 26, the Los Angeles Times has 22, the Washington Post has 19.

It is no secret that I love NPR and, frankly, I wish Canada had its own version that was more closely connected to the listener and viewer than the CBC is. For all the big yap about how the main stream media is bowing to losers like me who type in their pajamas and pretend (to the embarassment of our spouses) we are Edward R. Murrow reporting from the blitz…that is simply not what is occurring. We are watching re-ordering of news media not collapse.

Nothing new. It is part of the same phenomena that same the rise of talk-radio including political talk radio in the US. When I sketched out my seminal but now dust-coated plan for the left in North America, the first thing I thought of was taking back a solid part of the media. I am doing my part but apparently the $200 million gift to NPR from the estate of a nice person called Joan Kroc is being the NPR news boom. What good folk who want objective thorough news reporting (professional unbiased news being a classic progressive or liberal goal just as much as a cheap quality and broadly available education) need to do is put their money where their mouths are.

Others have proven this works. This is just the same as the US right realized it needed to do something and fund something somewhere back in the 60s, achieved break-through in the 80s and achieving inordinate dominance in the last decade. Just as with that shift, the change that NPR is part of is not a single path. Remember how many foretold the demise of Air America during its first days? Well, it is still there and has 89 stations. What we are watching in the reshuffle is an enrichment of news sources, just in the same way that broadcast shortwave radio provided and then cable TV again provided before the internet. The strengthening of NPR is one compliment to the strenghtening of talk-radio of all sorts along with pajamastan and the next new thing that we have not even heard of yet. More voices please.

Where Do You Place 9/11?

That great voice of contemplative thought, the NYT op-ed, published a really interesting essay yesterday by Joseph J. Ellis, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. Entitled “Finding a Place for 9/11 in American History”, it posed that interesting question from a historical perpective. What caught my eye most of all was that, even though we are four and a half years past 9/11, we may be only read these sort of thoughts now. Here is the full essay in a non-subscription-only format:

Here is my version of the top tier: the War for Independence, where defeat meant no United States of America; the War of 1812, when the national capital was burned to the ground; the Civil War, which threatened the survival of the Union; World War II, which represented a totalitarian threat to democracy and capitalism; the cold war, most specifically the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which made nuclear annihilation a distinct possibility. Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival of the American republic, even though the terrorists would like us to believe so.

His last point is interesting. The terrorists would like the US and other free nations to fall into the belief that freedom is at risk. This is different that saying freedom is under attack, of course. But reacting as if it is at risk creates the real danger, Ellis argues:

It is completely understandable that those who lost loved ones on that date will carry emotional scars for the remainder of their lives. But it defies reason and experience to make Sept. 11 the defining influence on our foreign and domestic policy. History suggests that we have faced greater challenges and triumphed, and that overreaction is a greater danger than complacency.

Of course, there is nothing as interesting as someone who agrees with something you have written before. In the fall of 2003, I was very surprised to find that the relative fear level of 9/11 was considered greater than in the Cold War, the latter end of which framed my youth. In March 2004, I thought about it again and did so again in October 2004.

Where do we stand now that we have learned that 9/11 will not be repeated annually, that we have seen great changes or perhaps only admissions as to the way we are watched and interogated when suspected, that we now know that giving people the right to vote will not ensure those people will vote for what you want? I don’t mean this as a telling “gotcha” sort of comment so much as an invitation to ask yourself it is now acceptable to consider and perhaps reconsider given almost half a decade of subsequent history.