Friday, March 27, 2015:
Saturday, March 28, 2015:
In the News
Aggravating Agitprop by the Grief-Stricken Aggrieved
Pushing Bill C-51 through Parliament, the government has chosen to ignore the nation’s lawyers, judges, law professors, former prime ministers, and the newest polls. In the hearing for the bill, our elected representatives will not hear from privacy experts, nor from the Privacy Commissioner who Harper himself appointed recently. Instead, we get an emotional appeal from the sister of a soldier killed not long ago in an act of domestic terrorism. Her sadness, presumably, making her an expert on civil liberties and anti-terror legislation.
What Mrs. Vincent doesn’t seem to understand is that her brother was a soldier in an army of a nation that declared war on an enemy which practices the type of asymmetric warfare that leads to people being killed in Canada. It will probably happen again. A soldiers death, like the death of any human being is unquestionably a tragedy; but it’s insanity to change the laws of the nation in response to their deaths. Soldiers die in war, and if you don’t want your soldiers to die, don’t send them to war, especially wars which are ill-conceived, unwinnable, and aimless.
As a soldier in the Canadian Armed Forces, Patrice Vincent made an oath to the Crown and, by extension, the Constitution. He died in service to that oath. His sister now lives to undermine it. I mean, yeah, we all grieve in our own ways I guess, but sometimes people, in their grief, act out in destructive ways. They develop drinking problems, or start supporting authoritarian political parties. They make public statements in an attempt to leverage their grief to make the country worse.
And someone has to tell them, someone has to have the heart to say, “Stop. Undermining civil liberties and the rule of law, ripping up the Constitution won’t bring your brother back.”
Trouble at the Old Advert Mill
Yesterday it was announced that The Grid would be publishing its last issue ever. It was met with universal dismay by Toronto media and probably anyone who hopes to make a living in the industry, not to mention its readership.
News of the troubles at the Globe and Mail, by contrast, is a reassuring affirmation of karmic justice. While the newspaper’s reporters go on strike to protest the requirement that they write articles paid for by advertisers, management is erecting a fence to keep them out.
If this is the beginning of the end for the company, it could not have come sooner. A few weeks ago, it was revealed that when the Thompson family-owned paper announced its editorial board’s endorsement of Tim Hudak in the Ontario provincial election, it actually did so over the objections the editorial board who had unanimously endorsed Kathleen Wynne.
Last summer, while Canada’s Big Three telecommunications giants initiated an hysterical fear-based marketing campaign over the potential entry of Verizon into the Canadian wireless market, allegations emerged that executives at Bell Canada, which owns a minority share of the Globe, ordered its media subsidiaries to write telecom-friendly op-eds. Though the Globe and Mail was not named specifically in these allegations, it did run favorable press at the time, and the whole incident raises serious questions about journalistic integrity.
Hopefully, we will not have to go too long without the work of accomplished reporters such as Robin Doolittle, Jeffrey Simpson, Colin Freeze, among others. Already, striking writers are threatening to publish a rival publication which would appear at the URL globenation.com.
However, if the Globe becomes the latest casualty in an industry struggling to adapt to the Internet Age expectation of free content, it will not be the one to miss.
Historic agreement between US and China promises to not make history
REUTERS/Jacquelyn Martin/Pool
In what has been described as “a unique, cooperative effort between China and the United States,” by American Secretary of State John Kerry, the United States and China have agreed to work together on climate change. The historic agreement, which was announced in a joint statement issued at the end of Kerry’s tour of China, promises that the two nations will “collaborate through enhanced policy dialogue, including the sharing of information regarding their respective post-2020 plans to limit greenhouse gas emissions.”
What makes these noncommittal and inspiring words so significant, is that China and the United States are not only the two dirtiest carbon-spewing nations in the world, they also habitually portray the other as the chief obstacle to international action on global warming. China has long argued that it is the legacy of western industrialization that is most responsible for climate change, and it should be able to continue to burn as much fossil fuel as it can to become as rich as it desires because the US and others did so already. In the meantime, it should be up to the rest of the world to cut down on their carbon emissions, preferably by purchasing solar panels and windmills made in China.
The Americans, for their part, have chosen to ignore the fact that allowing developing nations more leeway to pollute while crafting an international agreement on reducing those same pollutants actually succeeded in lowering CFC emissions with the Montreal Protocol of 1987. They insist that China must be subject to the same limitations on greenhouse gases as the US, if they are to agree to anything. The logic being, apparently, that global warming is too serious an issue for the world to wait for China to catch up, but not too serious an issue that it can’t wait for two rival nations with incompatible economic systems and ideologies to come to an agreement.
Of course, things will be different now that China and the US have opened a dialogue. With a little bit of luck, their agreement to start talking about maybe eventually doing something about this global warming thing will lead to a further agreement to definitely start doing something soon probably.
One day, after a future Republican administration, motivated by the fact that global warming is a hoax perpetuated by aborition-addict hippy chicks and socialist jihadi atheists, scraps every environmental policy, every empty gesture, token agreement, and half-measure made under Obama; and after the Chinese government, fully aware of the extent to which the West is simultaneously terrified of its success and nervous that its economy will falter, decides to abandon any agreement which it finds inconvenient just because it can; after some, but perhaps not all, of the worst predictions of climate scientists have befallen us; we can look back at this day as an unforgettable, historic moment when nothing really happened.
Gay Divorce Now Legal in Canada
The problem with the politics of hysteria is that it rarely gets things right.
A little while ago, two foreign citizens, both women tried to get their Canadian-sanctioned marriage annulled, only to discover that their marriage was not legal because their home nations did not recognize it. Thousands jumped on this ambiguity in the law which prevented gay divorce as proof that Stephen Harper was trying to outlaw same sex marriage by some legal back door, despite the fact that this was a matter before the judicial branch of government, and not of the legislative or executive where the office of Prime Minister holds power. Yesterday, after the law was clarified by the Harper government, those two women had their divorce finalized. They are now free to grow bitter over their failed romantic involvement, resentful over a cocktail of broken promises and disagreements over property. Just like everybody else.
Gods & Services 