Map Scopes Region's Power Future

By Colleen Kimmett, via The Tyee:

The provincial government has scoped out nine regions for large-scale wind and hydro development in British Columbia, part of an international plan to build and export renewable electricity across western North America.
It's called the Western Renewable Energy Zones (WREZ) initiative, and while in the early stages yet, experts say this plan could have significant implications for renewable energy development in B.C.
WREZ was launched in March 2008 by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Western Governors' Association. Eleven U.S. states, parts of Mexico, British Columbia and Alberta are participating.
According to its website, the goal of WREZ is to "expedite the development and delivery of electricity generated by renewable energy."
Despite that green stated aim, the mapping process is creating controversy among some environmentalists in B.C. who say it's a blueprint for cross-hatching the region with power lines and roads in order to feed, rather than curtail, society's growing hunger for energy.

Read the rest here.

Nursing mother considers human rights protest

By Jason Misner, via the Burlington Post:

A breastfeeding controversy has surfaced in Burlington.
Palmer resident Alison Kennedy says she is filing a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission after she was allegedly asked by a lifeguard at Tansley Woods Community Centre last weekend to move to a different part of the building following a complaint she was breastfeeding her one-year-old son, Logan, in a warming pool.
City officials counter that while Kennedy was informed someone had complained about her breastfeeding, she was not asked to leave the warming pool.
Kennedy, who works in the education profession, told the Post that on Sunday (Feb. 22) afternoon, she was in the warming pool with her husband Robert and sons Logan and Trevor, 4. She said Logan indicated he was hungry. Not wanting to deny her child food, Kennedy said, while sitting in the front corner on one side of the warming pool she began breastfeeding Logan.
She said she didn’t take off her top but simply exposed enough of her breast for her son to feed. She said the top of the water came to her chest level and the pool jets made the water bubbly.
According to Kennedy, a lifeguard approached her and asked that she move to the deck area on the other side of the larger swimming pool because someone complained the breastfeeding made them feel “uncomfortable”.
Kennedy said she refused to go to the chair area, saying it was a colder part of the building and kept her more exposed to people since a glass wall separated the chairs and the community centre’s lobby.
“I told (the lifeguard) it was illegal to ask me to leave,” said Kennedy, who noted she has breastfed at Tansley Woods several times before without incident. “It was embarrassing, it was humiliating (and) it was degrading.”
The lifeguard, Kennedy said, told her there was a concern the baby could spit up in the water.
Kennedy said she wasn’t told who had made the complaint.
Kennedy said she refused to breast-feed Logan on the deck chairs. By this point, her older son said he was hungry and the family left Tansley Woods to go eat at a restaurant.
Husband Robert said he supports his wife “100 per cent.”
“Mothers should know their rights,” he said.
City spokesperson Donna Kell said there is a written “procedure” that stipulates breastfeeding is allowed at all city facilities.
“The procedure staff follow is breastfeeding is permitted in all city facilities,” she said. “The city does try to create a safe and caring family environment and breastfeeding is part of that.”

Read the rest here.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I do not dispute the right of a mother to breastfeed her child. That's a given for me. But at the same time, I believe people have a right to respond, and to ask that mother to breastfeed somewhere else. In a private space especially, but even in a public. If I expect the right to act, then I must allow that others can react to my actions. Otherwise, I only believe in my own freedom, and that is the very definition of hypocrisy.

I'm looking forward to seeing The Watchmen

'Cause it sounds like an awesome movie. Wired Magazine has done a good job of interviewing and looking behind the scenes a little, about the Watchmen movie ( based off the graphic novels written by Alan Moore ).

Here's an interview with Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons, with some more of Dave Gibbons on video, here.

A behind the scenes of the movie here.

And finally, an interview with Alan Moore here:

Wired: What's the significance of the superhero? What's interesting about the iconography or the archetypes?
Alan Moore: I don't actually think that anything is, at the moment. I don't really think that very much is interesting about the superhero as an archetype. I've been distanced from the whole concept for quite a while now, but I've been considering it.
It has occurred to me that the superhero really only originates in America. That seems to be the only country that has produced this phenomenon. Yes, we have had knockoffs of American superheroes originating in this country and presumably in other parts of the world, but they're not natural to this environment. They're an alien species. And I've thought about it and wondered why that was. And I wonder—perhaps this is being too simplistic, I don't know, but I wonder if the root of the emergence of the superhero in American culture might have something to do with a kind of an ingrained American reluctance to engage in confrontation without massive tactical superiority. I mean—does the term 7/7 mean anything to you at all?
Wired: Sure.
Moore: During the 7/7 bombings over here, it was announced a couple days later that as soon as the first two trains had gone up, all of the American forces that were in London were recalled to safe distance outside the M24 orbital motorway. After a few days, when they realized that it was safe to go back into London, they realized also that it looked kind of bad, sort of rushing out of the capital at the first sign of any trouble when the main reason for the bombing was England's support of America in the Iraq war.
It does seem to me that massive tactical superiority might be a key to the superhero phenomenon. That, if it's a military situation, then you've got carpet bombing from altitude, which is kind of the equivalent of having come from Krypton as a baby and to have gained unusual strength and the ability to fly because of Earth's lesser gravity. I don't know, that may be a simplistic interpretation, but that's the way I tend to see superheroes today.
That wasn't what it used to mean. That wasn't what it used to mean to me when I was a child. What I was getting out of it was this unbridled world of the imagination, and the superhero was a perfect vehicle for that when I was much younger. But looking at the superhero today, it seems to me an awful lot like Watchmen without the irony, that with Watchmen we were talking very much about the potential abuses of this kind of masked vigilante justice and the kind of people that it would in all likelihood attract if these things were taking place in a more realistic world. But that was not meant approvingly.
I have to say that I haven't seen a comic, much less a superhero comic, for a very, very long time now—years, probably almost a decade since I've really looked at one closely. But it seems to be that things that were meant satirically or critically in Watchmen now seem to be simply accepted as kind of what they appear to be on the surface. So yeah, I'm pretty jaundiced about the entire "caped crusader" concept at the moment.

Read the rest.

Covenant Zone: CPSIA Crashes Into Minibike Industry

Covenant Zone: CPSIA Crashes Into Minibike Industry

I love Ricky Gervais

Yeah, you heard me.

Today's Iranian Fun

The top pick: Entangled in Tehran

Plus:

The persecution of Baha’is in Iran must stop

Iran: The Threat

Iran Using Stem Cells to Reduce Amputations

Support these Iranian trade unionists!

Iran owes BOTAS $750 million

Ali Karimi & Ali Daei Meet To Discuss Iran Return - Report

Obama - Iran: Bush - Iraq Redux

Iran-Mexico want to expand relations

Baha'is fear for Iranian members

Concerns About Iran's Nuclear Program Linger As Bushehr Prepares Start-Up

President Obama should listen to the Godfather when dealing with Iran

Russia 'not involved in Iran sanctions plan'

Hollywood Group Visits Iran for 'Creative Exchange'

Iran welcomes Palestine unity government

Iran stresses need for nuclear fuel production

Canada PM says Afghan mission major NATO test -WSJ

Iran's Jews

Turkey, Iran and Balance of Power

Iran, Not So Far Away

The Mossad's Plan to Stop Iran

Red Meat Takes on Iran

Iran seeks closer ties with Bahrain

Iran says no military agenda in nuclear plan

Iran's clenched fist

Iran's Rafsanjani: Israel's claims of nuclear program nonsense

Ahmadinejad: Iran wants to cooperate with Iraq

REFILE-Ahmadinejad says Iran ready to help Iraq develop

Iraqi President Meets With Iranian Officials in Tehran

Iran looking to boost trade ties with Mexico

Former US diplomat blasts Obama on Iran, Iraq

Obama sets Iraq deadline, unveils new strategy

CanWest dropping lawsuit against mocking printer

Via The Hook:

Canwest has dropped its lawsuit against a Vancouver printer in a case involving a parody of the Vancouver Sun.
The parody, which included headlines such as “Study Shows Truth Biased Against Israel,” mocked Canwest’s coverage of the Middle East. The media company is suing those responsible for the parody, claiming copyright violation and trademark infringement.
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Elliott Myers approved Thursday a new statement of claim that does not include Vancouver printer Horizon Publications and its general manager as defendants.
The new statement of claim also drops allegations that the remaining defendants, Gordon Murray and Carel Moiseiwitsch, committed the civil wrongs of conspiracy and injurious falsehood.
Lawyers for the two sides appeared Thursday in Supreme Court Chambers before Justice Myers on an appeal of a November ruling by Supreme Court Master Alan Donaldson.

What a stupid bloody lawsuit. It's the bloody Vancouver Sun! What, some small parody newspaper is a threat to them?

A problem with Canada's access to information system?

Via the National Post's Posted:

Canada’s access-to-information system continues to be plagued by long delays and other serious flaws, creating a “major information management crisis” throughout the government, Information Commissioner Robert Marleau said Thursday.Marleau surveyed 10 federal institutions, including the Justice Department, Department of National Defence and Health Canada, to gauge how they respond to their obligations under the Access to Information Act.Under the law, federal departments must disclose public records upon request, subject to a number of exemptions, such as when releasing documents threatens national security.But in his annual report cards for the government, Marleau found that most institutions performed below average for various reasons, including excessive workload, lack of resources and inefficient processes.The law requires departments to respond to access-to-information requests within 30 days. However, they can ask for extensions, and Marleau found that departments are asking for extensions more often, and for greater lengths of time.“The poor performance shown by institutions is symptomatic of a major information-management crisis throughout government,” Marleau said in a statement.

Gee, who would have thought that bureaucracy could move slowly.

An unreleased Beatles track?

Perhaps....

Man, that'd be awesome.

What's not to like about Twitter?

" The clinical psychologist Oliver James has his reservations. “Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.” "

Oh...

More at Red Tory.

Gym owner opts to go to tribunal

I've posted about this alread, but what the hell. Via the Owen Sound Sun Times:

TORONTO-- The owner of a St. Catharines, Ont., fitness club says he has opted to go to a Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario hearing in a dispute initiated by a transsexual.
The complaint alleges John Fulton denied a pre-operation transsexual access to the women's only areas of his gym.
The transsexual -- now a woman -- was a man at the time of the incident two years ago.
Following a closed-door mediation hearing Wednesday in Toronto, Fulton said he has opted to go to the tribunal rather than settle.
Fulton says he wasn't sure what to do when the pre-operation transsexual applied to join because his female clients might not be comfortable with a man in their changing room.

Read it here. You'll have to scroll down a bit.

Muslims and Christians working together...to whitewash history

How disgusting:

Catholic and Muslim officials want all negative references to each others’ religions removed from school books.
The proposal was put forward in joint statement following talks in Vatican City between delegations from Cairo’s Al Azhar University and senior Catholic officials, Reuters reports.
“Scholastic books should be revised in order not to contain material which may offend the religious sentiments of other believers, at times through the erroneous presentation of dogmas, morals or history,” the joint statement says.
The statement does not detail how the two groups would attempt to achieve this rewrite.
At their first Catholic-Muslim Forum in November, Vatican and Islamic scholars discussed the need to stop the spread of mistaken impressions about the religions by improving the books used to teach about them.

I'd much rather make my own decisions about history by reading an objective account of it. That's admittedly hard to do, but it's not going to be helped by religious interference.

And update on Tariq Ramadan

I had mentioned him earlier, as he was speaking at the University of Victoria. Well, apparently the man may not be all that's he's cracked up to be, or at least according to Robert Jago.

Covenant Zone has much more:

A CZ friend and I attended last night's public talk in Vancouver by the well-known Muslim public intellectual, Tariq Ramadan, on "The Scope and Limits of Reforming Islam". Our friend went in, after having read what the likes of Caroline Fourest and Jihad Watch have to say about Ramadan, in a bit of a rage. I counseled the usefulness of having a calm listen. Our friend was not outraged by the talk like he thought he would be, but I came out unimpressed by the "intellectual" game being played. I was not immediately inspired to blog about it because I did not feel Ramadan dwelled on any of his points long enough to open up any kind of serious discussion of his ideas and the contradictions they would run into if pursued. And having never read his books, I can only offer some general impressions. The Vancouver Sun's terminally-liberal religion reporter, Douglas Todd, had a pre-talk interview and seems to have been happy to take the easy way out of reporting on this controversial figure: accenting Ramadan's communion in the popular hate-George-Bush cult (the Sun website is presently down and I don't have the link).

There's a snippet of video, provided by Robert Jago. Give 'er a watch, if you'd like .

MPs’ voting records expected to be available soon online

By Glen McGregor, via the Ottawa Citizen:

OTTAWA - The House of Commons is developing a system to put every MP’s voting record on the web, shining light for the first time on information that has long been buried deep within House of Commons records.
While voting records of elected officials in other countries are often easily accessible, the House of Commons currently provides no comprehensive records of how MPs vote on bills and motions in Parliament.
The information can only be found by searching through thousands of pages of Hansard, the official record of the House of Commons debates, and extracting the listings for results of each individual vote, a process that would be extremely time-consuming.
The situation was highlighted last spring in an Ottawa Citizen analysis of voting patterns. It found that Liberal MPs, then led Stephane Dion, cast a vote in the House only 64 per cent of the time - a rate below the lacklustre turnout in the 2006 general election.
Citing the Citizen report, NDP MP Libby Davies wrote to House Speaker Peter Milliken in April and asked him to set up a system to allow the public to easily see how their MPs vote on motions, bills and other matters before the House.
Liberal MP Mauril Belanger, a member of the House board of internal economy, says the House is now working to make voting records public. The software to post the results is currently being developed, and he expects the system will be running in a matter of weeks.
The records would likely be accessible at the parl.gc.ca website.

Read the rest here.

So that's kind of cool, huh? No more digging through obscure archives. Just easily accessible ones.

BC healthcare cuts are being predicted

I'm of rather mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, I'm somewhat leery of federally subsidized medicine. But on the other hand, you hate to see such floundering about at the patients' expense.

The Hook reports that:

British Columbia health authorities will have to find another $319 million in cuts over the next few years to meet the government's budget projections, said NDP health critic Adrian Dix.
Recently released 2008-2009 service plans for the six health authorities show “dramatic cuts” will need to be made, he said. Vancouver Coastal Health Authority has a $200 million unfunded shortfall over the next two years and the Vancouver Island Health Authority's is $107 million.
“The balanced budgets in 2009/10 and 2010/11 exclude cost pressures of $91.1 million (2009/10) and $109.7 million (2010/11),” according to a note to the financial statements on page 33 of Vancouver Coastal's service plan.
VIHA's plan makes a similar statement.
The health authorities will either need more money than the government has budgeted, or they will need to make cuts.

Ouch.

And while you're reading, check this out, also from The Hook: Canadian government hires BC job placement business to help vets

Today's Iranian Fun

The top pick: Iran's Women Are Taking On The Mullahs

Plus:

Tougher list of Iran sanctions proposed

Roger Cohen's Very Happy Visit with Iran's Jews

Remains of Iraqi soldiers from earlier wars buried


The Iran-Israel Nuclear End Game Nears

Olmert warns Iran over nuclear plant

Italian foreign minister invited to Iran

Iranian clerics slam Medina attack

Iran neighbour UAE spends $5 bln on arms deals

Iran assuming Mughniyeh role inside Hezbollah

Diplomat to an Ever-Changing Region

Baha’is enjoy same “facilities” as others in Iran – judicial official

An easy point of cooperation with Iran

The U.N. is proposing a binding resolution for all member nations to make defaming religion illegal

And the real question is - does anybody give a flying f**k about the U.N.'s resolutions?

Red Tory's got the story.

Right decision, wrong reason

By Lorne Gunter, via the National Post:

I don't believe Canada should have hate crimes laws. By their very nature, they seek to punish people for thoughts rather than actions. And the state has no business punishing people for their thoughts and opinions, no matter how vile.
Hate crime laws establish a hierarchy of criminality based on politically correct standards of guilt. Somehow it's worse to beat someone for their race, ethnicity or sexuality than to beat them for their money. Hate crimes imply some victims are second-class sufferers, less worthy of justice than others.
So, philosophically, I am glad former Assembly of First Nations chief David Ahenakew was acquitted on Monday. No one should be punished for his or her thoughts, regardless of how reprehensible those thoughts are.
But give me a break. Justice Wilfred Tucker acquitted Mr. Ahenakew because he claimed he had not shown intent to incite hatred against Jews when he called them a "disease" and lauded Adolf Hitler for having "fried" six million of them in the Holocaust.
Asked to bring greetings to a Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations health care conference in Dec., 2002, Mr. Ahenakew launched into an obscenity-laced 45-minute harangue, accusing the media and non-aboriginals of inciting bigotry against natives. After making some unintelligible remarks against "goddamn immigrants," he finished by insisting that Jews had started the Second World War and were preparing to start the next one by inciting troubles in the Middle East.

Asked later the same day by a reporter to clarify his bizarre comments, the chief went further, charging that Jews "f---ing dominate everything," they "own the goddamn world" and that Hitler "cleaned up a hell of a lot of things, didn't he?" He abruptly ended by saying, "The hell with the Jews. I can't stand them. And that's it."
Judge Tucker ruled that Mr. Ahenakew had not intended the remarks in his speech to become public. Also, because the chief walked away from the later media interview, he was not acting like "someone who was seeking to promote hatred of Jewish people."
In a country where judicial reasoning is often comical, this line of thinking is particularly farcical.
Mr. Ahenakew hadn't intended remarks made in the keynote address at a convention to become public? Come on. By definition, they were public the moment he uttered them.

Read the rest here.

And in the Globe and Mail: Dealing with Ahenakew

Blazing Cat Fur: CRTC- We have to kill the Internet in order to save it

Blazing Cat Fur: CRTC- We have to kill the Internet in order to save it

The human right to let it all hang out

Via Closet Conservative:

More serious Human Rights concerns at the Ontario Human Rights Commission! This case has been dragging along for two years. A guy, dressed as a chick walks into a health club to get a membership in the women's-only part of the club. Just before signing the contract, he says to the owner, hey-I'm a dude! I'm planning to be a chick, but I still have my equipment. Club owner says-I think my female patrons would have a problem with that (YA THINK?), checks with police and OHRC but eventually gets sucked into black hole mind-numbing, expensive, process-is-the-punishment Orwellian vortex of OHRC hell.

Read the rest here.

Private businesses can set their own policies. Period.

Gloomy bastard...

Via the National Post's Posted:

A British climate researcher says that by the end of this century most of life on Earth will be gone. And there is nothing we can do to stop it.
James Lovelock, well-known for his Gaia theory of the Earth, told Reuters that rising temperatures will cause rising sea levels and worldwide drought.
Lovelock predicts that the human population could drop down to less than one billion from the seven billion alive now.
"It will be death on a grand scale from famine and lack of water," he said.

Man, I wish I was that gloomy. Those guys get all the babes.

Bishop Apologizes for Statements on the Holocaust

By Rachel Donadio, via the New York Times:

ROME — A bishop whose recent rehabilitation by Pope Benedict XVI provoked global outrage has apologized for remarks in which he denied the Holocaust, a Catholic news agency reported on Thursday.
The bishop, Richard Williamson, was one of four traditionalist bishops whose excommunications Benedict revoked last month. In an interview broadcast on Swedish television several days before that, Bishop Williamson, a Briton, denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and the scope of the Holocaust.
In a statement published by the Zenit news agency on Thursday, Bishop Williamson said: “I can truthfully say that I regret having made such remarks, and that if I had known beforehand the full harm and hurt to which they would give rise, especially to the Church, but also to survivors and relatives of victims of injustice under the Third Reich, I would not have made them.”
He added: “To all souls that took honest scandal from what I said, before God I apologize.”

Read the rest here.

A Flying Dutchman in pursuit of speech

By Wesley Pruden, via the JewishWorldReview:

Geert Wilders comes to DC this week as Exhibit No. 1 of why the Europeans no longer matter. Even our British cousins, who not so long ago bristled at even being called Europeans, have abandoned their ancient traditions of free speech.
Mr. Wilders is a member of the Dutch parliament, but to the irritation of the Dutch government he has become more than a mere parliamentarian, embracing the role of Jeremiah, warning that the Europeans are succumbing without even a whimper to radical Islam. He exaggerates, as a Jeremiah can do. You can occasionally hear a whimper or two.
When he was invited by the House of Lords a fortnight ago to show his documentary film about radical Muslims and their vow to conquer the world for Islam, he was denied entry into Britain. The only explanation he got was this whimper from the British government: "The Secretary of State is satisfied that your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film 'Fitna' and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the United Kingdom." (You can watch the 15-minute film by clicking here.)
Britons, to be sure, have no First Amendment, the Constitutional guarantee that every citizen has the right to say whatever he pleases. The glory of the First Amendment is that it does not guarantee responsible or speech, but even irresponsible speech short of crying fire! in a crowded theater. But our Constitution was, after all, written by Englishmen, inspired and guided by the fiercely held notions of freedom and liberty inherited from their forbears. Alas, the bulldog lies grievously wounded.

Read the rest here.

“Hate Crime” Bill Makes Its Way Forward

Via the Right Perspective:

While talk radio is fixated on the mere possibility of a return of The Fairness Doctrine, two bills introduced by Texas Democrat Congresswoman Shelia Jackson would make “hate” speech a Federal offense in America.
H.R. 262 and H.R. 256 were introduced by Congresswoman Jackson on January 7, 2009 and have been referred to committee. Their combined legislative powers actually go beyond their initial intent.
H.R. 256, aka David’s Law, is a condensed version of previous “hate crime” legislation that successfully made its way up to the Senate in the 110th Congress. H.R. 256 defines what a “hate crime” is and also requires the Department of Justice to add extra money and manpower to states “to combat hate crimes committed by juveniles”.
The most ominous part of the bill comes when it “Directs the U.S. Sentencing Commission to study the issue of adult recruitment of juveniles to commit hate crimes and, if appropriate, to amend the federal sentencing guidelines to provide sentencing enhancements for such an offense”.
“This part of the bill means [H.R. 256] will very quickly turn into a speech crime law,” explains Rev. Ted Pike, a Christian minister and free speech advocate.

Read the rest here.

This is why Michey Rourke is awesome

H/t Small Dead Animals

One-armed presenter is scaring children, parents tell BBC

By Liz Thomas, via the Daily Mail:

A disabled CBeebies presenter has been the victim of a disturbing campaign after parents complained that she was scaring toddlers.
They claimed that host Cerrie Burnell - who was born with one arm - is not suitable to appear on the digital children's channel.
Miss Burnell and co-presenter Alex Winters took over the popular Do and Discover slot and The Bedtime Hour programme last month.
But the decision to hire her has prompted a flurry of complaints to the BBC and on parenting message boards, with some of the posts on the CBeebies website becoming so vicious that they had to be removed.
Incredibly, one father said he wanted to ban his daughter from watching the channel because he feared it would give her nightmares.
Others claimed that they were forced to discuss difficult issues with their young children before they were ready.

Read the rest here.

Imagine the gall of that horrible woman - forcing you to talk to your children. What a hag!

Mother sets fire to her daughter's gloating rapist

By Peter Upton, via the Telegraph:

A Spanish mother has taken revenge on the man who raped her 13-year-old daughter at knifepoint by dousing him in petrol and setting him alight. He died of his injuries in hospital on Friday.
Antonio Cosme Velasco Soriano, 69, had been sent to jail for nine years in 1998, but was let out on a three-day pass and returned to his home town of Benejúzar, 30 miles south of Alicante, on the Costa Blanca.
While there, he passed his victim's mother in the street and allegedly taunted her about the attack. He is said to have called out "How's your daughter?", before heading into a crowded bar.
Shortly after, the woman walked into the bar, poured a bottle of petrol over Soriano and lit a match. She watched as the flames engulfed him, before walking out.
The woman fled to Alicante, where she was arrested the same evening. When she appeared in court the next day in the town of Orihuela, she was cheered and clapped by a crowd, who shouted "Bravo!" and "Well done!"

[...]

As decorators painted over the blackened walls of his bar last week, Antonio Ferrendez Lopez told how Soriano had walked in at lunchtime.
"The place was packed with people eating. I was sitting at a table and Soriano was standing at the bar very close to me when the woman walked in," he said. "She didn't acknowledge anyone but walked up to Soriano, who was drinking a coffee, put her hand on his shoulder and turned him round to face her.
"Then she pulled the bottle she was carrying from under her arm and began to tip it over him. At first I didn't realise what was happening, but then I smelt the petrol. I jumped up and tried to grab her, but when she struck a match I got clear.
"The petrol was in a pool around Soriano, and she threw the match into it. It ignited with a whoosh, and he screamed and staggered about covered in flames. As people rushed outside to escape the flames, she just looked at him, then turned and walked away."

Read the rest here.

That. Is. So. Badass.

Influential Muslim scholar to speak at UVic

By Jeff Bell, via the Victoria Times Colonist:

He has been called provocative and controversial but there is no denying that Tariq Ramadan is an influential Islamic scholar and a touchstone for debate.
A New York Times article noted some of the labels that have been given to him over the years, have gone from "slippery" and "double-faced" to "bridge-builder" and a "Muslim Martin Luther." Time magazine listed him as one of the top 100 innovators of the 21st century.
"I have multiple identities," he once told Britain's Guardian newspaper. "I am Swiss by nationality, Muslim by religion, Egyptian by memory. This is the way I think it can work."
Ramadan, 46, speaks tonight at the University of Victoria. His 7:30 p.m. appearance is presented by UVic's Centre for Studies in Religion and Society. He will be first speaker in what the centre hopes will be an annual lecture series on Islam.
The series is supported by an endowment.
Having Ramadan at UVic is "a huge coup," said Paul Bramadat, the centre's director. The university was involved in organizing a Canadian trip in which Ramadan worked with CBC in Vancouver yesterday, then heads to Ontario after his Victoria stop.
He will be in the Toronto area and will also speak at Kingston Penitentiary.
Ramadan elicits a variety of reactions from people, Bramadat said.
"He's kind of like a blank screen, lots of people project things on him."
One item Ramadan will talk about at UVic is his most recent book, A Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation. The book advocates the transforming of Muslim traditions, from the spiritual to the legal, to respond to the challenges of today's world.

[...]

According to Time, one of Ramadan's goals is to develop "an independent European Islam.
"We need to separate Islamic principles from the their cultures of origin and anchor them in the cultural reality of western Europe," he told the magazine in 2000.
The Guardian described Ramadan's aura at a Labour Party conference in 2005, saying he commanded rapt attention.
"He has a global following, particularly among young European Muslims," the Guardian said. "CDs of his lectures sell like pop music."
But it doesn't all come easily. Writing about his latest book, Ramadan acknowledged that the process of putting the volume together had many rough patches.

Read the rest here.

The Case for Natural Money

By George F. Smith, via the Mises Institute:

Studying Jörg Guido Hülsmann's latest book, The Ethics of Money Production, is a vastly enriching experience. After building his case for natural money on the inviolability of an individual's right to his own property, he then shows us how the state has spent the last 400 years usurping this right for the benefit of a privileged few through its protection of fractional-reserve banking.
It is the state's insatiable appetite for revenue, he argues, that is the motivation behind the various monetary schemes it imposes on us, which on an international level begins with the classical gold standard and runs through today's paper-money agreements. Although he doesn't discuss the current economic crisis directly, his observations provide a much-needed correction to government's "do something" approach.
In this essay, I will touch on some of Hülsmann's more salient points, beginning with the origin of money.

Read the rest here.

Ezra Levant versus Merle Terlesky

Hmm....

Today's Iranian Fun

The top pick: Iran Arrests Up To 70 Students After Rare Protest In Tehran

Plus:

Does Iran Care About Having Safe Nuclear Reactors?


Dutch gov't presses for fair trial of citizen jailed in Iran

UPDATE 2-Germany cuts Iran guarantees but exports rise

Human rights and China; Building bridges with Iran; Time to include Russia; ‘Wishful thinking’ economics

Iran president seeks to ease tension with Bahrain

Israel killer drones to counter Iran S-300?

Karzai offers Iran joint media satellite

Negotiator Picked for Post at State Dept.

Iran vs. US

Schroeder Iran trip may improve climate for talks

Spokesman: Iran's nuclear activities have not slowed down

Veteran Mideast Envoy Ross Named to Advise Clinton on Iran Strategy

Iran: It is "impossible" to stop nuclear plan

link to watch Iran’s satellite in real time

Russia, Iran to discuss Bushehr nuclear power plant construction

Iran Denies Nuclear Slowdown, Sets Big Expansion

Notes on the Iran/Persia Conflict: A Travelogue -- Part Six

Experts Question Significance of Iranian Nuclear Breakout Status

FAS on Iran's enrichment situation

Says Obama right to negotiate with Iran

Norway's GGS says Iran survey attracts US interest

Veteran Mideast Envoy Ross Named to Advise Clinton on Iran Strategy

A Nuclear Iran? Just Suppose...

Iran's reformers put hope in 'New Khatami'

Iran Cracks Down On Religious Minorities

Iran presidential campaigns off to early start

Iran to Begin Tests at Nuclear Station

Iran sees Palestinian issue as test for Obama's "change" slogan

U.S. navy says no sign yet of new Iran naval bases

Iran says no slowdown in its nuclear work

Iran cracks down harder on the Bahá’í

'Corner Gas' celebrates 100th episode

Via CTV:

Dog River gets set to unplug their TVs for a week in a town-wide celebration of "Turn Off Your TV Week."
How will Dog Riverites make out without television 40 kilometers from no where? Canada's #1 original comedy series CORNER GAS commemorates its 100th milestone episode in "TV Free Dog River", premiering Monday, March 2 at 9:30 p.m. ET, once again rounding off CTV's two-hour Monday night comedy block. The history making episode kicks off the series' final victory lap, with seven episodes left until Dog River says good-bye forever. The episode also airs Saturday, March 8 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The Comedy Network, on demand on the CTV Video Player at CTV.ca, and on the go at iTunes.
"After 100 episodes, CORNER GAS' resounding success is attributed to its incredible creative team, and the audiences across Canada who have welcomed this ground-breaking series into their homes from the very start," said Susanne Boyce, President, Creative, Content and Channels, CTV Inc.
"While Dog River finds ways to cope without TV for a week, in a few months, we will all have to find ways to cope without new episodes of CORNER GAS."
As of March 2, CORNER GAS will stand proud amongst a short list of Canadian scripted series to have reached 100 episodes. This notable list includes: THE KING OF KENSINGTON, Degrassi: The Next Generation, Kids in the Hall, and The Beachcombers, to name few.
"I grew up dreaming of being on TV, but I never dreamed, or certainly never expected, to be on a show that runs for more than100 episodes," said creator Brent Butt. "CORNER GAS slips into rare company now, and I could not be more proud."

Read the rest here.

Ministry of Justice consults on 'excessive' libel costs

By Dominic Ponsford, via the Press Gazette:

The Government launched a consultation today aimed at curbing high British libel costs which many fear are chilling freedom of speech.
Announcing the consultation, Justice Minister Bridget Prentice said: "Excessive costs and their threat may force defendants to settle unwarranted claims.
"The aim of these proposals is to bring more effective cost control to litigation in defamation proceedings and to ensure that costs in this area are more proportionate and reasonable.
"We need to ensure that people's right to freedom of expression is not infringed, and media organisations continue to report on matters of public concern."
Libel costs for news organisations have escalated in recent years because of the huge costs of settling cases brought under no win, no fee rules.
These Conditional Fee Agreements allow claimants to pay nothing up front on the understanding that their lawyers can double their money if they win.
With media lawyers charging up to £700 an hour, costs settlements often hugely outweigh any damages paid.
Earlier this month, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger revealed that Carter Ruck had issued his newspaper with a bill of £803,000 for a libel action which had resulted in a payout to Tesco which is believed to have been just a few thousand pounds.
And he has warned that such costs seriously undermine the ability of journalists to carry out investigative journalism.

Read the rest here.

H/t to the Index on Censorship.

Man...

...Matt Groening is cool.

Kindle 2...cool

Steven Levy from Wired Mag gives a very interesting review of Amazon.com's Kindle 2 e-book reader.

What could the future hold, eh?

This is what I think should have happened at Gitmo

I think rather than closing down Guantanamo Bay and related prisons, this should have happened. A review to make sure that the human rights conditions in those prisons are up to snuff, and continual oversight to ensure that those conditions are held to a high standard.

Or is that too much to ask?

Dear Editor, Ken Whyte Says You're Boring

By David Ravensbergen, via The Tyee:

It's no secret that the newspaper industry is sick. Hardly a week goes by without some new pronouncement of doom: job cuts at the Globe and Mail or the imminent demise of the New York Times in print.
But if you think the Internet is to blame, think again. One of Canada's leading editors says the deep roots of the problem with papers go back nearly a century.
According to Ken Whyte, Maclean's editor and recently crowned Canadian Newsperson of the Year, the news industry isn't reeling from the effects of the web or the economic crisis so much as from its own lack of innovation. In his first book The Uncrowned King, Whyte chronicles the rise of one of the most controversial newspaper barons in history -- William Randolph Hearst -- and makes some observations that today's papers would do well to note.
Perhaps best known as the inspiration for the maniacal Charles Foster Kane in the film Citizen Kane, Hearst has already been the subject of numerous biographies. The son of a U.S. senator and a two-term congressman himself, Hearst has long epitomized the nepotism of the American upper crust. Yet Whyte found omissions in the scholarly record. "A lot of what had been written about him was just based on the recollections of old journalists who'd written their memoirs 40 years later," Whyte explains. "Journalists have always self-aggrandized and aren't entirely objective or reliable in their memoirs to begin with, and with Hearst there was more myth-making and more inaccuracy than usual."

Read the rest here.

Don Butler's opus - The Surveillance Society

Don Butler has written a very interesting series for the Ottawa Citizen, all about surveillance - not only government, but corporate as well, tracking our online movements, storing information for advertising purposes, and the like.

The articles are gathered together here.

You can see video of Don Butler explaining his journalistic project here.

And you can see a list of cities in Canada which use cameras here.

I'll lay out the series as it's been gathered on the Ottawa Citizen website, with excerpts. Just click on the links for the full articles.

Part one of the series: A very different world:

David Lyon is studying the ceiling in a Westboro coffee shop, searching for hidden cameras. A leading figure in the fast-growing field of surveillance studies, the Queen’s University sociologist is only too aware of the many ways we’re all being watched.

Closed-circuit TV cameras, like the ones likely concealed in the coffee shop ceiling, are among the most common. Since 9/11, their use has exploded worldwide. Britain now has an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras — one for every 14 citizens. People in central London are now caught on camera about 300 times a day.

One estimate puts the number of public and private CCTV cameras in the United States at 30 million. So far, similar estimates are lacking for Canada. But experts agree camera surveillance has been growing steadily here as well.

Mr. Lyon, a triathlon-fit 60-year-old whose imposing beard compensates for his follicly challenged pate, is first and foremost a scholar. He is not given to sensationalism. But he can’t conceal his unease at the extent to which some have embraced CCTV surveillance.

“I find it mind-boggling when I see what they do in Britain. Police officers on bicycles now have video surveillance cameras in their helmets,” he exclaims, wide-eyed, then blurts, “What kind of a world are we living in?”

A very different world. Enabled by computer technology and algorithms, driven by a mania for security, safety and certainty, and engineered by a class of mathematicians and computer scientists that author Stephen Baker has dubbed “the Numerati,” surveillance is emerging as the dominant way the modern world organizes itself.

“We’re seeing just an unbelievable intensification of monitoring capacity,” says the University of Alberta’s Kevin Haggerty, a surveillance expert. “There’s an ability to connect all of this stuff across realms that is just a little unnerving.”

That has immense implications for each of us. As American security guru Bruce Schnier has observed, those who control our data control our lives. The information others are compiling about us can determine whether we get a mortgage or a job, whether we’re allowed on an airplane or into a country, even whether the service we get from a company is attentive or desultory.

Part two: Devil in the details:

OTTAWA — Last summer, the Laurentian Bank rejected a loan application for an all-terrain vehicle from a resident of the Kitigan Zibi First Nation, an Algonquin community near Maniwaki. The man had an impeccable credit history. The problem was where he lived.

The bank’s policy is to deny all-terrain vehicle loans to people who live in thousands of postal codes, most of which are in aboriginal reserves. For those who reside in those codes, it doesn’t matter how good their personal credit rating is. The bank has categorized them as unsuitable.

Its policy is a classic example of social sorting, driven by surveillance processes that legally vacuum up information about us — including where we live — and use it to slot us into categories of risk or desirability that affect our life chances, for good or for ill.

Increasingly, social sorting defines the surveillance society. Governments and corporations both draw on large databases of personal information compiled by commercial data brokers, credit reporting companies and others to define target markets and risky populations. “We’re being classified and rated, no question about it,” says Jeff Chester, of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington.
Based on information collected about us — sometimes referred to as “dataveillance” — we’re being slotted into categories such as Golden Empty Nesters, Burdened Optimists, White Van Culture and High-Rise Hardship, or being assigned “trust scores” that can determine how we’re treated.

Our classifiers examine our online and in-store purchasing behaviour, the Web sites we visit, geographic data, information we post on social networking sites, credit reports they gather from companies such as Equifax and TransUnion, and anything else they can get their hands on.

“Every minute little detail of information gets caught in an algorithmic way to paint a picture about you,” says Valerie Steeves, a criminology professor at the University of Ottawa. “Judgments are made about you on the basis of that shadow, even though the shadow may or may not be accurate.”

All this takes place almost entirely out of sight. Few of us even realize it’s happening. Yet these hidden processes are having real effects on our lives.
Because of social sorting, people are being denied jobs and insurance, says Philippa Lawson, former director of the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic. “Their lives are being seriously affected by decisions based on this information, which didn’t used to be collected simply because we didn’t have the technology to do it.”

Part three: Social networking or social spying?:

Like most young Canadians, Dan Trottier is on Facebook. With 140 million active members worldwide —more than 10 million in Canada alone — Facebook and other social networking sites are how friends today stay connected.

But unlike many of his peers, the 27-year-old Queen’s University Ph.D. candidate understands such sites are also tools of surveillance. For his dissertation, due in 2010, Mr. Trottier is studying the connection between surveillance and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

Have no doubt: the connection is real. Employers, university administrators, police, security services, marketers, parents and fraud artists routinely troll social networking sites for information about interests and behaviours freely posted by members. “A lot of what’s out there is kind of up for grabs,” Mr. Trottier says.
Potentially, that includes a veritable treasure trove of personal information — names, addresses, birth dates, home towns, political and religious views, telephone numbers, relationship status, schools, current and past employers, and personal interests.

Information gleaned from social networks has cost people jobs, led to suspensions and expulsions, damaged prospects for employment and university admission, helped crooks defraud victims and generated criminal charges.
Universities scour social networking sites for evidence of residence keg parties, in violation of campus policies. Admissions officers use them to evaluate university-bound students. Police tap into them to investigate underage drinking and sexual activity. Companies check out Facebook to help with direct marketing campaigns. And increasingly, employers are using them to screen prospective employees.

Part four: Keeping tabs goes high-tech:

It looks like any other teddy bear. But the cuddly toy conceals a surprising secret. Hidden in its right eye is a tiny wireless pinhole camera, designed to capture damning images of dishonest or abusive nannies.

The teddy-cam is a popular item at Spytech, a Toronto-based spy shop with stores in Ottawa and London, Ont. But it’s also a symbol of how we’re increasingly turning to surveillance to check up on one another.

Parents are embracing computer monitoring software and location tracking devices to keep an eye on their teenagers. Shop owners are installing hidden cameras to catch dishonest clerks. Neighbours are spying on one another to counter vandalism. And spouses are hiring tech-savvy private investigators to get the goods on cheating partners.

Business at Ottawa’s Triangle Investigations Agency — 90 per cent of which involves marital cases — is up 15 per cent in the past three or four years.
“Every time there’s a downturn in the market, guys will go out and drink and find somebody’s shoulder to cry on,” says John Sullivan, the 28-year-old firm’s general manager. “One little bump in the road and he’s out in the bar, picking someone up or talking to the girl at the next desk. It’s always the same.”

Shops similar to Spytech, which has been in business since 1991, are popping up online and in cities across Canada. According to Spytech’s owner, Ursula Lebana, hidden cameras are the most popular item.

Spytech’s store on Bronson Avenue near Carling sells a camera a day on average, says clerk Cody Crosby. In addition to teddy bears, they come embedded in smoke detectors, wall and desk clocks, air purifiers, books, pagers and pens. One is concealed in a button and comes with a matching set of regular buttons.
“Everything’s just getting smaller and smaller,” says Mr. Crosby, who’s worked at Spytech for two years.

Signals from wireless cameras tiny enough to peek through a buttonhole can travel up to 300 feet and pass through walls. The smallest cameras measure just eight millimetres by eight millimetres.

Part five: You’ve been targeted:

How would you feel if online ads, pitching deals on products and services aimed directly at your interests, popped up automatically whenever you surfed the Internet?

What if it meant someone was tracking all your Internet activities and merging them with other information about you to build a comprehensive profile of your likes and dislikes?

That’s the promise and the price of a fast-expanding advertising practise known as behavioural targeting that categorizes people based on their web-browsing activity and directs relevant ads to them.

Advocates wax lyrical about the potential of behavioural targeting to enhance users’ online experience and — more importantly — generate income for revenue-hungry web operations.

“For the first time in the history of marketing,” declares author Rob Graham in his 2007 book, Fishing From a Barrel, “the ability to reach individuals based on their needs, interests, desires and sudden urges is within reach of advertisers.”

But Mr. Graham also acknowledges the elephant in behavioural targeting’s room. “In order to learn more about individual consumers, marketers have to resort to ‘spying’,” he writes. For privacy advocates, that’s one hefty elephant.

Part six: Everyone’s watching:

In a world in which surveillance is pervasive, is it possible we could restore the balance of power and regain control of our lives by watching the watchers — and one another as well?

That’s the provocative and perhaps counter-intuitive thesis of Steve Mann, a University of Toronto professor who’s been described as the world’s first cyborg for his pioneering work in the field of wearable computing.

Mr. Mann is a passionate advocate of “sousveillance,” a word he coined from French roots that literally means to watch from below. Surveillance, by contrast, means to watch from above.

Sousveillance, he says, is “human-centric.” People engage in sousveillance when they record pictures or video of the people, places and events around them. Cameras mounted on lampposts or buildings, on the other hand, are by definition surveillance devices.

It’s not that Mr. Mann disapproves of surveillance, per se. In fact, he makes no value judgment about it. But its dominance has produced an imbalance that tilts power unfairly toward the institutions and agencies that watch us, he says.
“When you have a situation that is extremely unbalanced, which we’ve never had before throughout recorded history, you have a dangerous situation,” Mr. Mann says.

The solution, he argues, is “equiveillance,” another word he invented — a state of equilibrium between surveillance and sousveillance.

“What’s good for the goose is good for the gangster,” Mr. Mann quips. “If you’re going to watch the gangster, you should watch the goose. Sousveillance creates a more fair and balanced form of veillance. I think we’d be living in a better society.”
Sousveillance has grown as people have acquired camera phones, digital cameras and other mobile devices. It even has it’s own designated day: since 1998, activists have marked Dec. 24 as World Sousveillance Day.

An early instance of sousveillance was the 1991 Rodney King tape, in which a bystander videotaped Los Angeles police officers repeatedly striking Mr. King with their batons.

Once again, major props to Don Butler on this one. I think the series is done, but I could be wrong. I wonder what he'll take on next?

Warren Kinsella sues Ezra Levant for defamation....again

Only this time, it's for five million dollars. Seriously. That's a bigger number than any defamation lawsuit has been settled for in Canada. Ever.

Does anybody take Warren Kinsella seriously anymore? I think he went off the rails when he started suing bloggers and withdrawing his lawsuits seemingly at random, but his cat meat faux pas, and his attempt to get Kathy Shaidle kicked off of TVO's guestlist by muscling around Steve Paikin, not to mention his repeated attempts to hassle Ezra Levant with lawsuits, have made Warren a sort of cult figure as far as being on a lawsuit-bender goes.

What does Iggy see in this guy?

Doug Christie asks to intervene on behalf of Arthur Topham in Radical Press versus B'nai Brith Human Rights Tribunal case

Douglas Christie, who intervened in the Marc Lemire case, has asked to be an intervenor in the case of B'nai Brith versus Arthur Topham and the Radical Press, which is being seen by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.

You can read about it here.

Today's Iranian Fun

The top pick: What Iran’s Jews say

Plus:

Total says no imminent deal on Iranian gas field

Relationship between U.S. and Iran too complex to heal grievances

Iran says invited by Italy to Afghanistan meeting

Iran tries to defuse row with Bahrain

IAEA says Iran cooperating despite reporting error

Fisher: Iran likely to define Israel-U.S. relations

Iran says comments on Bahrain misunderstood

Proof: Obama administration doesn't understand Iran

A Nuclear Iran? Just Suppose …

Rice: U.S. may talk to Iran

Israel, U.S. react to IAEA reports

Scientists are apparently closing in on a universal flu vaccine

So that's kind of cool.

Feds Propose Storing Internet User Data for 2 Years

By David Kravets, via Wired Mag:

In the name of combating child pornography, federal lawmakers are proposing that internet users' online surfing habits be retained for two years.
The so-called "Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act of 2009," or SAFETY Act, was floated in both the House and Senate on Thursday.
Among other things, it demands: "A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user."
In short, if approved, everybody from employers to ISPs to coffee shops and universities would be required to keep logs of all data associated with IP addresses assigned randomly to individual users – from e-mail logins to search queries to sites visited, legal experts said.
"This provides a historical picture of individuals that I think a lot of people think would find creepy," said Albert Gidari Jr., a Seattle attorney who successfully defended Google in the government's bid to acquire billions of customer-search queries. "When you're on the phone, there may be a phone record of what you called, but it doesn't contain what you said. These proposals allow the government to get access to activity that they would never have before, because providers don't keep it because of volume and cost.

Read the rest here.

And in other internet-related free speech news: Who’s protecting whom?:

per cent of UK broadband connections have not signed up to the Internet Watch Foundation’s (IWF) system for blocking images of child pornography, despite the government’s call for all Internet Service Providers to block access to illegal websites by the end of 2007. The Children’s Charities Coalition on Internet Security (CCCIS) is now calling for government action; in other words, legislation. Over 700,000 households, they claim, could potentially get ‘uninterrupted and easy access to illegal child abuse image sites’. The NSPCC has added the alarming caution ‘this loophole helps feed the appalling trade in images featuring real children being seriously sexually assaulted’.
The truth is though, as the IWF itself acknowledges, that blocking these images is not directed at the paedophiles who commit the abuse or those who routinely view them - and will have no impact on them. It is not aimed at controlling the child pornography trade. It is aimed at the casual Internet user.
John Carr, spokesman for the CCCIS, told Index on Censorship ‘this type of blocking will not stop technically literate and determined persons from accessing materials’. Rather, Carr added, it will stop someone who might go into their study drunk one night to see if it’s possible to view such material. The implication here surely, as in many forms of censorship, is that somehow we need to be protected from ourselves; it has nothing to do, in fact, with defeating ‘the appalling trade in images’ of abuse, as the NSPCC claims.

Read more about it here, via the Index on Censorship.

Hey...

...get more out of your Google Docs.

Day hits his political stride

By David Akin, via the Ottawa Citizen:

On overseas trips, International Trade Minister Stockwell Day is up at 4 a.m. so he can squeeze in a 10-kilometre run -- puffing security guards in tow -- before beginning the day's meetings.
On Parliament Hill, Day recently sent out a memo to MPs from all parties seeking to organize a weekly fun run to encourage fitness and some non-partisan camaraderie.
Day, now 58 and a grandfather, is in the best physical shape of his life and, according to politicians on both sides of the Speaker's chair, he just might be in the best political shape of his life.
It's been a remarkable political turnaround for Day. In 2001, a little more than a year after he was elected as leader of the Canadian Alliance, Day lost a general election, had been mercilessly mocked by his political opponents and watched as several caucus colleagues openly rebelled against him, even leaving the party to sit as their own group in the House of Commons.
Now his caucus colleagues -- including some of those rebels of 2001 -- and even political opponents say Day is now one of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's most effective cabinet ministers.
As Canada's trade minister, Day is Harper's right-hand man on one of the trickiest, most important files for the government, which requires fighting off protectionist trends in the U.S. to preserve a $1.5-billion-a-day trading relationship while forging ahead with building new trade ties.
Keeping borders open to trade -- and even knocking down some trade barriers -- is a key part of the federal government's plan to lift Canada's sagging economic fortunes.
"Canada is as prosperous as it is because we have been free traders for our entire history," Day said in an interview with Canwest News Service.
"Because of great technology and great skills and great education, we produce a lot more than we can consume. And if we can't sell it abroad, then it's going to be lean times all the time, not just up and down in recession times. So any free trade agreement for Canada is very good and that can be demonstrably shown with very strong evidence."
Day is also the chief political minister for British Columbia, a province where Conservatives have enjoyed electoral success, but continue to face strong threats from both the NDP and the Liberals.
According to those who have watched his political career, Day has learned the hard way that there is no substitute for knowing your file inside-out.

Read the rest here.

Good on ya, Stockwell! I have to say, Stockwell Day is one of the few politicians ( that I know of ) whom I actually still like and respect in spite of my increasing familiarity with him.

Today's Iranian Fun

The top pick: German Jews oppose trip to Iran

Plus:

Websites of Iran's Khatami supporters blocked

Iran's nuke program not weapons-capable, UN official says: report

WRAPUP 2-Kuwait restarts oil exports after storm disruption

Report: Russia freezing anti-missile sales to Iran

Q&A: Iran and the nuclear issue

World Media Supports Iran's Seyyeds/Theocrats

Thug-In-Chief: "Iran, along with other world countries, is waiting to witness real changes in the U.S."

Iran websites supporting Khatami blocked: report

Iran to begin operation of 1st nuclear power plant

Iran's First Nuclear Power Plant Set for Tests Before Launch

Iran First Nuclear Plant To Begin Operation

New Vistas in German Relations

IAEA: Iran not producing weapon-grade uranium

France says Iran should allay Gulf Arab fears

Former German chancellor urges Iran-U.S. talks at highest possible level

Hamilton church charity status revoked by the CRA

You can read about it here, at the Shotgun Blog.

Social conservatism versus libertarianism

It's kind of a debate which has been going on for a very long time. We libertarians, in effect, like to look down our noses at social conservatives - I won't lie. But on the other hand, social conservatives like to look down their noses at libertarians.

And both sides of the debate are evenly matched in their principles. Social conservatives in moral principles, and libertarians in the principles of philosophical possibilities. Both sides are undoubtedly wrong on some issues.

Mike Brock, in the Shotgun Blog, starts into the debate from the libertarian's side of things:

Social conservatives have appropriated love for liberty, but only so far as economics goes. They want lower taxes and less government services, but they want strong laws, stronger police, more jails, and bigger militaries--which ironically, end up costing as much, if not more than the social services they detest. They support the idea of “big government” while pretended to support “small government”, through a redefining of the term “big government”.
For them, it’s perfectly acceptable to have a humongous government. As long as all the money goes into enforcing morality through strong policing of sexual activity and drug use, and going to strange foreign-lands to wage war. That’s a perfectly acceptable “big government”. In fact, for them, it couldn’t be big enough! The US government’s $652 billion military budget is not enough. And yet, social conservatives want lower taxes. They don’t really care about economics. They want their cake, and they want to eat it too. Social conservatives want big militaries they can't afford, like socialists want big social programs they can't afford.

Mike also doesn't like it when SoCons equate liberalism with socialism:

Social conservatives, mainly of the Christian persuasion, have always sought to group liberalism and socialism together for another reason: they are both seen as secular. That’s the common thread. That’s how they’re viewed as the same thing. And it’s probably one of the largest leaps of intellectual dishonesty that exists today among mainstream social conservatives like Ann Coulter.

Now, first of all, let me just say that I love it whenever Mike Brock talks about religion - considering his distaste for it. One who has heard his almost legendary rants against religious forays into the political scene can attest to that. Not that I particularly mind, but it just gives his statements about Christianity and religion in general a rather different tint.

Personally, I think I weighed in on this debate a long time ago, and I don't particularly want to go too in-depth on it again. To me, social conservatism is an attempt to enforce moral values on society through government, which is not the purpose of the government, but the society and culture which the government presides over.

If a SoCon wants society to be more moralistic, then that's fine - he can do so at his leisure by seeking to convince his fellow man. But if a SoCon wants to circumvent his fellow man by going to the government and forcing all others to follow the same moral codes - then I've got a problem.

I'm more than happy to debate. I'm rather ambiguous on certain moralistic debates, so they might take a few interesting detours. I certainly find morality to be interesting.

But being a libertarian, I think that such debates need to stay in the private world - not the government sphere. Any attempt to fuse the two will see the government's clumsy measures attempting to hold up the highly complex and delicate thing known as morality - we don't trust the government with our tax dollars half the time, yet we're willing to trust the government with upholding our 'family values'? That seems a far stretch.

And to finish, yes, I am a heartless, depraved, immoral libertarian. But I'm damn happy to be so, and I think when everybody is freer to explore the ideas of morality and society without the cudgel of the government at their backs, then we will be a much happier people as a whole - including Social Conservatives.

Damn, this turned out to be kind of a long post, didn't it?

Only in BC...

...will you see a headline like this: Hungry sheep mob police officers:

A flock of 12 sheep turned ornery Wednesday when police officers visited a Cowichan Valley acreage to assess the animals' condition.
The Mounties first noticed the sheep during a Feb. 13 raid on a marijuana grow-operation at the rural residential site. Officers seized more than 1,400 plants, 36 kilograms of dried marijuana and $150,000 worth of equipment.
Police said it was clear no one had offered the animals food or water since the raid.
When officers stepped into the sheep pen on Wednesday, the animals charged, "almost pushing them over, they were so hungry," said Cpl. Kevin Day of Duncan/North Cowichan RCMP.
The sheep had calmed down by the time Cowichan SPCA officials arrived, said branch manager Sandy Trent, who laughed at the idea the sheep were aggressive to the police officers. "Cops in uniforms do that to most animals."

Read the rest here, via the Victoria Times Colonist.

Let this be a lesson to you. In the war on drugs, nobody's a winner - especially those of a bovine disposition.

B.C. man who filed human rights complaint after reading Koran has case dismissed

Via the Canadian Press:

VANCOUVER, B.C. — A B.C. man who filed a human rights complaint after buying a copy of the Koran at a Chapters bookstore has had that complaint dismissed.
John Simpson alleged certain verses of the Koran discriminate against people of Christian and Jewish faith and filed his complaint against Indigo Books & Music Inc. (TSX:IDG), the store's parent company.
Simpson's complaint came under Section 7 of the Human Rights Code.
The section states that a person must not publish any statement that is likely to expose a person or group to hatred or contempt because of their religion.
But B.C. Human Rights Tribunal member Barbara Humphreys says Simpson didn't explain how the Koran, the central religious text of Islam that has existed for more than 1,300 years, had a negative impact on him.
Humphreys dismissed the case after ruling that Simpson's complaint would not further the purposes of the Human Rights Code.

Read it here.

I know they're different jurisdictions, but one has to hearken back to the case of Stephen Boissoin, when he was forbidden, by the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission, from saying anything 'disparaging' on the topic of gay marriage.

So one religious idealogy is permissably censored, but another is dismissed? And keep in mind that this is the same British Columbia Human Rights Commission which allowed a McDonalds employee with a skin condition to continue working at the McDonalds, without washing his hands as much as his condition needed him to ( apparently, the man with the skin condition was a group in need of protection. Gee, wish I could develop a serious rash - I've got my eye on a job as a chef down at the White Spot, and I just absolutely hate washing my hands, too. )

From Meccania to Atlantis Part 8 – Drenched to the Bone

By Takuan Seiyo, via the Brussels Journal:

Squaring the circle

To square a circle is a common metaphor describing a futile attempt to solve the unsolvable. But a glance at the root of this metaphor may prove instructive.
Since ancient times, geometricians have tried to construct a square with the same area as a given circle by using only a finite number of steps with a compass and straightedge. Without going into the details, outside this author’s competence anyway, the challenge was invalidated as per the Lindemann–Weierstrass theorem, which proved that pi (π) is a transcendental rather than algebraic irrational number.

It is the founding premise of this series that the central undertaking of Western Society in the last 45 years – the attempt to “diversify” itself and to equalize by fiat all people and categories of people, cultures, lifestyles, ideas and religions – has caused a catastrophic misapplication of human energy, attention and resources. And for the same reason as has foiled the squaring of the circle: the underlying π is a transcendental rather than merely rational or irrational constant.

In 1963, perhaps the year in which the West took the decisive step on the road leading to the crumbling Babel of now, Bob Dylan released a song that would become a hymn of the irrationalists of the Left (i.e. Pods): The Times They Are a-Changin’. It’s been known ever since as the archetypical protest song, and has been recorded by every major leftoid singer with a big heart and a small left brain. There are versions by Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, Tracy Chapman, videos by miscellaneous Obama worshippers and so on. This is the song’s opening stanza:

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to youIs worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Good poet though he is, perception and analysis of social reality have never been Mr. Dylan’s strong points. And so, the “Civil Rights” struggle on behalf of America’s blacks and egalitarian potheads that The Times are a-Changin’ has come to symbolize would metastize into a cult of fraudulent equality of all and everything, allowing not even the distinction between the host-civilization’s self-preservation and self-erasure. The process reached a symbolic closure with the release in 2005 of Things Change, a rap piece co-performed by a black multimillionaire named 50 cent on the soundtrack of a film entitled Get Rich or Die Tryin', about Mr. 50 cent’s life.

The platinum soundtrack album with Things Change, produced by Mr. Black Jeruz and Mr. Sha Money XL, has sold 3 million copies. To compare, one of the great popular thriller book publishing successes of 2005 by a superstar author, Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, had a print run of 1.5 million copies.
The opening stanza of the artistic effort of Messrs. 50 cents, Sha Money XL et al., was:

Nigga, things change
They dont stay the same
Now watch me come up I hustle, I hustle even harder I put that work in to win, no problem

The times have changed, and not for the better. The Western peoples whose lunch the Body Snatchers and their clients have been eating since the 60s should have tried harder to defend it from the hard hustlers. What remains now is to take Dylan’s advice and either empty the pond or start swimmin’. But not in the direction he had in mind.

Read the rest here.

cowboys herding cats

Easier than you'd think.

Gates of Vienna: A Hatchet Job by the Swedish State Media#readfurther

Gates of Vienna: A Hatchet Job by the Swedish State Media#readfurther

Disgusting. Just disgusting.

Tonight's easy listening

For tonight's easy listening, I provide, for you, Yello playing Oh Yeah.





And while you're at it, here's Christopher Hitchens being interviewed on France 24 earlier this month. Part one here, and part two here.

Blazing Cat Fur: God is not dead Kuffar! Except to you and apostates!

Blazing Cat Fur: God is not dead Kuffar! Except to you and apostates!

Syed Soharwardy is looking for pro-theist slogans.

How about "There probably is a God. Now let's all start worrying about whether we should eat pork ( or whichever culinary substitute you may like ) or not. "

No?

Yeah, that one sucks.

Blazing Cat Fur: Hmmm talk about torn....

Blazing Cat Fur: Hmmm talk about torn....

Alberta eyes a return to saner days of human rights rules

By Colby Cosh, via the National Post's Full Comment:

The war between free speech and human rights commissions took an interesting twist this week in Alberta, where the fighting never ceases for too long. The casual observer might assume that the province is a place where old-fashioned civil liberties are rated higher than the sensitivities of politically aggressive minorities who wish to criminalize subjective threats to their dignity.
But the real picture is more complex. Alberta’s human rights law was enacted in 1972 by the new Conservative government that has remained in power ever since; the enabling legislation was literally Bill 1 of Peter Lougheed’s first legislative session as premier. For better or worse, that makes the commission a symbol of Conservative power, one that the redder Alberta Tories do not like to see impugned.
But the most contentious part of the Human Rights, Citizenship, and Multiculturalism Act dates back only a few years. Before that, the act outlawed “any notice, sign, symbol, emblem or other representation indicating discrimination or an intention to discriminate.” In other words, it forbade putting “No Indians” on a “Help Wanted” sign. In 1996, the wording of that section was changed to include “statements” and “publications,” and to proscribe not only explicit discrimination but “exposing a person or a class of persons to contempt.”
This change, which represented a vast increase in the commission’s power, went virtually unnoticed at the time — I was then working at the iconic conservative magazine Alberta Report, and if someone in our newsroom had spotted it seven different kinds of hell would have broken loose. Since then, a few plaintiffs have sought to take advantage of the commission’s offer of free revenge-for-hire to the offended, leading to high-profile fracases like those involving the Reverend Stephen Boissoin and Ezra Levant’s Western Standard magazine. That, in turn, has made the Alberta commission one of the most closely scrutinized in the country.

Read the rest here.

Today's Iranian Fun

It's been a couple of days since I've done this, unfortunately.

The top pick:

Plus: Iran blocks Web sites promoting reformist Khatami

Iran Sanctions Collapse?

Iran clear on Bahrain independence

Russia shatters Iran SCO membership hopes

Ex-German chancellor, in Iran, says "Holocaust a fact"

Israel urges pressure on Iran, Syria

Iran hangs man sentenced to death by stoning: report

Interview: Iran May Achieve Capability to Make A Nuclear Weapon in 2009

Bahrain bans Iranian ships from its waters

Utahns protest abuses against Bahais in Iran

Khatami Websites Blocked By Iran

Iran's Détente Gesture to Obama?

Khatami Websites Blocked By Iran

Iran’s methodical march

Persian Gulf Arabs Help USA With Iran

Iran hails military ties with Russia

Netanyahu names Iran as Israel's main threat

NATO leader: Iran could play role in Afghanistan

Russian-Iranian trade turnover hits $3.7 bln

Former German chancellor Schroeder welcomes direct Iran-U.S. talks

Iran in 'backroom offers' to West

New Tajik-Afghan-Iranian TV Network Discussed

Iran And Russia Boost Military Cooperation, Threatening Stability

WALLACE: Reverse 'oil weapon' on Iran

Iran Has More Enriched Uranium Than Thought

Iran's rocket technology is more advanced than previously thought also

Iran and the Virtual Bomb

UN: Iran has enough uranium for nuclear weapon

IAEA’s Iran report has nothing new: Diplomat (Lead)

‘Obama diplomacy will give Iran nukes’

Iran slows atom plant growth but fuel stockpile jumps

Iran, Afghanistan to boost trade

Chance for change in Iran

Iran Will Consider Talks After Obama Changes Policy, AFP Says

Obama in Canada, Iranian Drones, and Australia and Afghanistan

Iran, Afghan leaders meet for mutual talk

Bahrain halts gas talks with Iran over insult

Iran, Afghanistan pledge to boost bilateral trade

Bahai followers face spy charges in Iran

Iran refusing to co-operate with nuclear inspectors, says UN

Iran judiciary proposes legislation lessening penalties for juvenile offenders

Iran urges global nuclear disarmament

UAE strongly condemns Iran's hostile statements against Bahrain

Israel's leaked, not-so-covert war on Iran