Boom! Boom! Boom!

Uptown Waterloo is booming.

Just at the corner of King and William, there are two new buildings going up. In the pie-shaped lot where Quiznos used to be, a financial services company is putting up an office building:


Across the street, the region's most expensive and luxurious condo building has been announced at 150 King:


Over at Erb Street there's the Barrelyards, nearly 13 acres in size. The details keep changing, but when it was officially announced in 2007 it was slated to have two hotels, two 25-storey condo towers, four rental apartment towers, 230,000 SF of office space, townhouses, and ten mixed retail/residential low rise buildings.


Next to the Barrelyards is the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics, which is getting a mammoth and very exciting-looking addition:


Across the street from the Perimeter Institute is the Balsillie School of International Affairs, a complex of buildings:


And kitty-corner to the Balsillie School is the new Knox Presbyterian Church:


Then there's the 21-storey condo/townhouse complex at 144 Park, the new condo at Bridgeport and Peppler, and a proposal for a high-rise condo at 31 Alexandra. That's just what's already in the pipe. A commercial realtor told me recently that within five years he expects that King Street north of Erb will be a canyon of large new buildings. Projections of Caroline between Erb and William show all those parking lots replaced with buildings.

Minor note: None of this development has anything to do with LRT plans. Most was already in the works before the LRT proposal, and all of it is a direct result of the high rental rates in Uptown - brought about by the redeveloped Waterloo Square, new streetscape, programming in the Public Square, and general momentum of success in Uptown.

###

The Embarrassing Past of a Kettle and Pot

The ever-astute Elizabeth May has a theory. She thinks Harper is going to call an election this fall, even though he's down in the polls. She believes that Harper is focused on voter turnout rather than ratings, and that his strategy has been to reduce voter participation outside his base.

In the 2008 election campaign, she maintained, Mr. Harper purposely drove down voter participation in several ways. He called a snap election, he had the minimum numbers of days for a campaign, he had election day right after the long Thanksgiving weekend, he had changes in the Elections Act that meant people couldn’t vote without additional ID, and his attack ads had increased cynicism toward politics. The result was that every party’s total vote number went down, except the Green Party’s. The Liberals’ dropped the most and Mr. Harper was able to increase his minority.

. . .

Everybody thinks Mr. Harper’s right-wing manoeuvring, like his move on the census, has been disastrous, Ms. May said. "I bet he doesn’t think so. For his base, which is essentially the tea party of Canada, these are good messages."

May predicts that Harper's got a bunch of devastating attack ads to use against Michael Ignatieff, and that he'll unveil them during the campaign. They will include footage of Ignatieff before becoming Liberal party leader.

An example, she said, is some incredible statements the Liberal Leader made on torture when he appeared once on the Charlie Rose show. "The Conservatives must have a video archive of him saying things that Harper believes will make him unelectable." The Prime Minister is saving them for the campaign because "he wants the shock value."

This tactic could work if Harper gets the timing right and prevents Ignatieff from having time to respond or recover. In the 2006 election a fake scandal invented by the NDP sewered Paul Martin; Martin was bouncing back from it, but he didn't have time before the election to recover enough, and it wasn't until months after the election that the scandal was fully debunked.

Or is it possible? Harper himself has recovered from revelations of his saying far worse things than Igantieff ever said. Harper, after all, denounced Canada as a "Northern welfare state in the worst sense of the term." In that speech he also spat on universal health care, women’s rights, the unemployed, francophone Canadians and all Canadian political parties, including his own.

###

Culture of Layoffs

Another story about another company laying off a percentage of their workforce. This time all we're told is that 81 employees were laid off, representing 5% of the workforce, and that the company "ended production of some unprofitable products".

I wonder what would happen if companies were expected to report more information about layoffs - and by "expected" I mean by law where possible, and by convention and community standards otherwise. And if they don't provide the info, newspapers should investigate and get the goods.

The information I'm looking for has to do with the negative side of layoffs. How long, on average, had these people worked there? What percentage got a good performance ranking in their last review? What sort of severance did the company provide? What was the total direct cost to the company of the layoffs (severance, out-placement, travel and consulting fees required by the move)?

If all these details were provided, would the market automatically react as strongly to reward companies that lay off a big chunk of their workforce?

I once worked for a publicly-owned company whose management was committed to avoiding a take-over. Every time the stock price fell they laid off employees to bring it back up. There were so many layoffs that they didn't use the terminations to get rid of low performers: terminations were totally a function of what someone was working on, and the best and the brightest regularly got cut. This culture of continuous layoffs created a totally dysfunctional company with a decidedly subpar product, but it also kept it successful.

That kind of success is a market distortion. Unproductive - even antiproductive - behavior is rewarded. It's a systemic failure.

###

BRT not a Viable Plan "B"

Now that we know how much the federal government is willing to contribute, it’s clear that the Region of Waterloo can’t afford the proposed LRT. The combined provincial/federal contributions leaves $235M to the Region and that is too much for us to carry. LRT is dead.

Well, not really. Now there's talk of going to the Region's Plan B, Bus Rapid Transit, or shortening the LRT route.

In the BRT plan, curbs are inserted in the middle of our streets so that buses can run in dedicated lanes. The BRT has many of the disadvantages of LRT:

• It costs hundreds of millions to build.
  
• It puts a disproportionate amount of our resources on one route.
  
• It prevents cars from turning left except at designated intersections.
  
• It disrupts car and bike use of the street.
  
• It disrupts other use of the street, including parades and festivals.
  
• The route is very difficult to alter.
  
• It is inconvenient for transit users because the stops are so infrequent.
  
• It creates an accessibility issue for seniors with walkers, parents with baby strollers, and the like.

The iXpress, which runs high tech buses on the same route as BRT, is no slower than BRT and costs one or two percent of BRT. (The iXpress route, including marketing, cost $9M. Of that, the buses cost $4M.) There is simply no reason to spend over $500M creating curbs in the middle of our streets.

In fact, it boggles the mind how the Region could propose creating a single bus route that costs $550M. In Toronto, dedicated bus lanes have nothing more than some diamond shapes painted on the pavement.

Building a shorter LRT route sounds like it might be equally crazy, but I haven't seen a proposal yet so I can't be sure. When I was in Istanbul in the early 90s I thought their two-station subway system was quite useful, so I'll withhold judgment - but with reservations.

I dearly wish that LRT were dead, for one simple reason: we're about to embark on a municipal election season, and it would be great if we could seriously discuss how to improve transit, rather than fight over this ridiculous, over-priced, destructive plan.

We could discuss initiatives such as the following:

• Running multiple iXpress routes.
  
• Forming a fleet of minibuses that run on little-used routes.
  
• Creating an on-demand transit system for the elderly and poor families.
  
• Implementing marketing programs such as cheap family passes on weekends.
  
• Running more buses to festivals, events, the Aud, and so on.
  
• Creating a free shuttle.
  
• Reducing fares.
  
• And on and on...

We could take a step back and look at other issues around transit:

• Transforming our sprawl into a livable city.
  
• Making sure our transit system is adequate for the needs of people who have to take transit.
  
• Identifying people who don't take transit but would like to, and finding how we could get them to use it.

We’re the community that got designated the world’s most intelligent. Why have we spent two years chasing the old failed trend of rapid transit? It all comes down to the way LRT was pushed on us. There were fake public consultations (I say they were fake because I went to them) and there was never any real needs assessment: someone at the top of the Region conceived this notion and forced it through the system. Here's an example: about 18 months ago a city hall committee I'm on met with rapid transit planners. At that time my committee included a former mayor, former city councillor, and former regional councillor, and we had spent a lot of time researching and discussing the issue. Over a couple of hours we discussed our concerns with the regional employees, and they didn't take a single note. They didn't even bother to get out a pen or notepad. They hedged most of our questions. It is really no wonder why we ended up with an LRT plan that would have killed uptown Waterloo, been an enormous white elephant and drained funding from the rest of the transit budget. It was a vanity project.

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Canada's Homegrown Terrorists

I don't condone terrorism at all. But the western military involvement in Afghanistan is a humanitarian disaster, and Afghans who fight to end it are not necessarily in the same class as religious fundamentalists who want to punish the west for holding different values.

When a community is occupied by military forces who round up innocent citizens and transfer them to people who torture, abuse and in some cases kill them; when bombs are dropped by planes on a regular basis; when regular citizens are regularly killed; when infrastructure is destroyed; when a country turns into a chess board for foreign powers to fight over - we have to expect that people are going to fight back.

A lot of Afghan "insurgents" aren't Taliban or gangsters but just people who are protecting their homes and families. Western media presents the occupation as humanitarian, but it isn't. We are killing innocent people. Their families are fighting back. The longer we continue to kill Afghans, the more Aghans are going to become "radicalized."

There is incontrovertable proof that Canada had a policy to pass on Afghans we detained to people who would torture them. Our roundups captured a lot of innocent people. When this came out in the press, most Canadians didn't care. Our government was very clear that it didn't care. Don't you think that might be a reason for an Afghan-Canadian to become "radicalized"?

The latest terrorist plots are homegrown in that our military policy is creating them. Our government's policies appear to be breaking international law. In order to cover up their acts, Harper took extraordinary antidemocratic measures, including disrupting parliamentary committees, smearing whistle blowers and shutting down parliament. This whole situation smells very bad.

###

Did You Get Pears?

"Did you get pears? Did you get pears? Did you get pears?" "We'll discuss it inside."
- the last lines of last Sunday's episode of Mad Men

What the heck was that all about? Were they showing us that Don has sunk so low that his decrepit old neighbors don't trust him enough to discuss produce purchases in front of him? Were they telling us that Don has returned to his roots - left upper middle class suburbia for a low-rent dump? Was this Don observing what he might have become - a whiny, dependent old man - if his marriage hadn't ended? Were we seeing that even when he's sunk into alcoholism and isolation, Don is always observing things about people that help him be a great ad man (as opposed to the focus groups he dismissed earlier in the episode)? Was it a comment on the paranoia in America during the 60s? Or was it a coded message to the audience, with pears really being "pairs" - telling us to observe the dualities in the episode?

Could it possibly be that all those meanings were packed into that one, brief, seemingly pointless little segment? Or is this show so enigmatic that we can create our own meaning?

Sometimes Mad Men seems more like a poem than a novel.

###

Waterloo's Burgeoning Club Zone

On King Street in the block north of Erb, we already have two bars catering to heavy drinking: the Vault Lounge and Chainsaw. Around the corner on Regina, the patio of the Royal Canadian Legion is another noisy, boozy spot.

New Year’s Eve, 2008, I walked by the Vault with my 80 year old mother about an hour before a massive brawl broke out on the sidewalk. The police called it a riot as dozens of drunken patrons fought; people were stabbed with broken bottles and bones were broken. Last summer the Vault was the scene of another late night brawl.


Now, directly across the street from the Vault and next door to Chainsaw, the Waterloo Theater seems poised to become a nightclub.


Here's some local buzz about the plans for the Waterloo Theater, which apparently will be called Beta. I'm not sure there's anything to be done to prevent Beta at this stage. A local resident has asked the Alcohol and Gaming Commission to withhold the liquor license, but it's doubtful that that approach will work. If the City of Waterloo had funded the arts to a decent degree (and not thrown so much of available funds into the pit that is the Clay and Glass Gallery), perhaps the previous attempts to make the theater a cultural center (Theater Athena and the Waterloo Entertainment Center) would not have failed.

As a long-time Waterlooian, I'm a bit paranoid about Waterloo suffering the fate of Kitchener. When I was growing up in Waterloo in the 60s and early 70s, downtown Kitchener was a wonderful, vibrant area full of interesting shops. The main attraction was the string of movie theaters along King Street. One of the downfalls of Kitchener was when those theaters got turned into clubs, with all the drunken brawls, public urination and vandalism that goes along with nightclubs.

The core of Uptown is King Street from William to Erb. Uptown needs to expand north up King, and our new nightclub zone is the first block north. The area is slated for streetscape improvements next spring. I'm really concerned that this concentration of booze cans (as the Chronicle likes to call them) will mess up the development of other blocks to the north.

Some of our city councillors believe that any criticism of bars is due to teetotalling tendencies that must be ignored. I disagree. Local politicians may have heard out-of-line complaints about bars; that doesn't mean that all concerns about bars are invalid.

###

Laurel Trail Interrupted

Laurel Trail runs along Laurel Creek and the railway tracks through Uptown Waterloo, Waterloo Park, and the University of Waterloo. It's a beautiful trail and my bike route to work. Here's a particularly pretty spot:

In recent years, the city of Waterloo planted flowers where the trail used to be along the tracks from Caroline to King. From the Waterloo Square north parking lot, here's where the trail used to be, east to King:

...and where the trail used to be, west to Caroline:

I guess City Hall figured that people following the trail can walk on the tracks or in the parking lot. That's a real pain for bicyclists and roller bladers. Also, the break in continuity is a problem for what is already a poorly marked trail.

Laurel Trail should be clearly marked, be paved, and have snow removal - not be a hodgepodge of unmarked segments of path.

The Iron Horse Trail is also abandoned as it goes through Uptown, picking up as it exits each end. Trails should be showcased in Uptown, not abandoned!

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Empty Lakes and Concrete Canyons

I snapped this picture of Silver Lake in Waterloo Park yesterday. I was standing on the foot bridge at the western edge of the lake.


In case you're wondering, that dry land is part of the "lake". Water levels in creeks and rivers around the area are fairly high now, even though it's the middle of summer. Not so with Laurel Creek in Waterloo.

A few decades ago, amid concerns that water levels would rise, the city of Waterloo lined creek beds in ghastly-looking blocks of rocks encased in chicken wire. I remember when they did that to Laurel Creek near Marshall, destroying beautiful banks, trees, and plants. You could see the wheel treads of the bulldozers for years. A beautiful burbling brook became a hideous mess.

The park behind Waterloo City Hall got the full treatment: Laurel Creek was buried at the bottom of a concrete canyon:


A block away, just across Erb Street in a less heavily travelled area, Laurel creek is in its natural banks again:


Former mayor Joan McKinnon told me that the water projections of forty years ago turned out to be incorrect, and Laurel Creek has instead dropped in volume. I wonder if there's any way to boost it.

We could have a beautiful (and cooler) uptown if we made the most of Laurel Creek. A hundred years ago Silver Lake was a popular swimming spot; we might not achieve that again, but it could be a pretty place if it had water and maybe even a fountain. Laurel Creek behind City Hall should be naturalized with willow trees hanging over it and rounded grassy banks. It may never be as spectacular as the rushing creek that runs through downtown Boulder, Colorado, but it could be a lovely urban park.

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Cleanup efforts

Immediately after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up and it was known that oil was gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, people around the world started offering assistance to clean up the oil. There are many countries that have skimmers that can remove oil from water far more efficiently than any US technology can do it. A great unexplained scandal is why they have not yet been allowed to help, but it seems to have to do with overly cautious US bureaucracy. Now that hurricane season has arrived (and it's predicted to be a bad one), there will not be as many opportunities for skimming oil.

The first good news has arrived in the form of a Taiwanese tanker that [it is hoped] can scoop up 21 million gallons of water a day, separate out most of the oil and siphon it to a nearby ship, then put the cleaner water back in the Gulf. However, even it needs to wait approval from the Environmental Protection Agency, as current regulations won't allow it to put dirty water back in the Gulf - even if it's cleaner.

###

How much oil has spilled?

Since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew up on April 20 until today (July 1), various estimates put the amount of oil that has gushed into the Gulf of Mexico at between 100 million and 200 million US gallons. Some of the oil has been siphoned, burned or skimmed from the water. The current official estimate of the remaining oil in the Gulf as of Thursday was 140 million gallons. It is estimated that 1.4 to 2.7 million gallons is being added to that each day.

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Why is the Gulf Oil Spill Different Colors?

When I was collecting photos of the Gulf oil spill recently, I was puzzled why some of the pictures showed red oil, while some was the usual iridescent black.

Turns out oil turns red when mixed with water. Wierd Koops, chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, says, "the red-brown color happens when oil picks up more than 60 percent water."

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What Will Happen to All that Oil From the Gulf Oil Spill?

Some of the oil that has gushed into the Gulf of Mexico is being reclaimed by BP. The rule of thumb seems to be that if it has turned red, the oil is too "weathered" to be commercially viable, but if it's still black it may be salvagable with processing.

In a gigantic rescue effort, a small amount of the oil has been brought ashore manually - by boats and by people bending over and picking it up off beaches. The oil in liquid form will be put in injection wells, while contaminated solid waste will go to special landfills.

As part of the cleanup effort, some of the oil on the surface of the water has been set on fire.

The Automated Data Inquiry for Oil Spills predicts that about 35 percent of the remaining oil will evaporate, about 20 percent will find its way to the ocean, and roughly half will remain in the Gulf of Mexico - some on the surface and the rest dispersed throughout the water.

The oil that goes to the ocean will round the tip of Florida and then probably get caught up in the northward-flowing Gulf Stream. Simulations predict that that oil will flow close to the coast of North America.

The Gulf Stream eventually finds its way to the Norwegian Sea, where the cooled water becomes heavy and sinks to the bottom of the ocean. The trip from Florida to the sink will take about 18 months (based on this analysis of how long ashes dumped in Fort Lauderdale will take to get to England). After sinking in the Norwegian Sea, the Gulf Stream waters flow back south and reappear in the Pacific about 1,600 years later.

Some or all of the oil in the Gulf Stream will drop off en route. Tar balls may wash ashore. The oil may foul beaches and fisheries all up the east coast, although the simulations predict it will veer offshore long before Canada. Some of the oil will disperse in the Atlantic or sink to the bottom - which is reputedly already littered with tar balls from other oil spills and from chronic oil leakage from practices like dock degreasing.

A hurricane, tropical storm, or even plain old high winds could cause several problems.

High winds could dislodge or destroy the booms that are containing some of the oil, causing the slick to spread further. They would also likely cause large waves that will drive more oil ashore.

Storm surge could drive contaminated water up canals and rivers. (It was storm surge that caused the flooding of New Orleans in the hours and days after Katrina.) A major concern in New Orleans is that the contaminated water will reach Lake Pontchartrain.

The oil itself is a deadly carcinogen, and the tons of dispersants that have been dropped on the slick make it even more toxic. It might seem insane to add more poisons to the mix, until we get to the next hurricane problem - which requires that we get oil off the surface as quickly as possible, and which is the reason for the dispersants.

The biggest concern about hurricanes is that the toxic mess will be picked up by the wind and carried inland. It could be carried hundreds or even thousands of miles before it's dropped on crops and pastures (from which it will spread throughout the food chain) and it will contaminate lakes, rivers, reservoirs and the rest of the water supply.

Of the oil that remains in the Gulf, some will stay in the water forever. Some of it will seep onshore, especially into the salt water marshes that stretch inland for a hundred miles in places. Hurricanes, storm surges and other forces of nature will continue to carry it further inland, possibly for decades to come.

Many people seem to think that BP can pay the costs of the oil spill's damage, but this is way too big for a single company to cover.

(The comic is from xkcd.)

###

Oil Spills

Let's all keep in mind that the BP oil spill is a big story because it's close to home and because it's a follow-up to the even bigger (in terms of newstand revenue) story of the Katrina disaster. Oil contamination of the oceans goes on all the time, and is greatly under-reported.

Nigeria has been devastated by oil for decades. The New York Times reports that an oil spill the size of the Exxon Valdez has happened every year for 50 years in the oil fields of Nigeria, with the oil gushing into sensitive wet lands. A recent article in The Guardian is even more devastating, saying that life expectancy has plummeted in rural Nigeria as the oil spills contaminate drinking water. Protest has been brutally repressed, epitomized by the horrific execution of poet Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995. (Due to outrage at that atrocity, Shell finally paid $15M for its involvement, which was just one in a long history of human rights violations perpetrated by and for the oil companies.)

Like the Gulf spill, Nigerian oil spills don't just affect the local ecology. The oil flows out the Niger delta and into the Atlantic ocean. Also, over half of Nigerian oil wells are off-shore, and they're no safer than the ones on land.

Mexico had an oil spill in 1979-80 that held the previous record (140 million US gallons) and was only surpassed by BP today, at least according to current official estimates.

Tankers have spills at sea all the time that cause barely a ripple of notice.

Chronic oil pollution activities such as degreasing docks has also been chronicled as causing major environmental damage everywhere that oil is shipped.

Years ago I read an interview with a deep sea explorer who said that tar balls litter the floors of our oceans.

(There are also natural oil leaks, like Bush Hill in the Gulf of Mexico, but they generally become part of an ecosystem: the oil and gas is eaten by bacteria, which are in turn eaten by things like worms and mussels. Still, they sometimes result in tar balls washing on to beaches.)
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The Singularity Happened... and I Missed It!

Why should we accept that transformative change can only be caused by artificial intelligence or genetic modification of the brain or encounters with aliens? What if it's something so profound that we're not able to predict it or even realize, at the time, that it's happened? What if it's something not even dreamed of by Ray Kurzweil or Charles Stross?

Old-timey sci-fi writers John Wyndham, Charles Harness and Theodore Sturgeon saw the future as human evolution. In More than Human, Sturgeon saw evolution as not just the development of psychic abilities but also the creation of multi-person organisms, leading to the next stage of man, homo gestalt.

In one of my [many] favorite sci-fi novels, Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain, there's a sort-of singularity (arguably it's not fast or profound enough, but it's the same idea) that's a confluence of three events: breakthroughs in human genetic engineering, the invention of cold fusion, and a popular new religion that preaches libertarianism.

Female authors Margaret Atwood and P.D. James envision a future where a failed ability to reproduce is the cause of massive change. I don't see futurism as a feminist issue, but they do suggest a different direction - and the paranoia that we won't wake up to the change until it's too late. I suppose you could translate that paranoia to the singularity idea by suspecting that aliens are already among us, changing things quietly under the covers. Or maybe we simply can't comprehend the change that's happening to us personally, as I can't differentiate my personal development from the societal changes happening during my childhood in the 60s and 70s.

In Stross's worlds a singularity is akin to an apocalypse: overnight society crumbles and most people die. That's not an event that people would fail to notice. (Unless it didn't happen in the northern hemisphere, or wasn't good at selling papers?)

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Bribing Canadian Politicians

Richard Fadden, the head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), is in the news this week spilling some very important information: the Chinese government is paying Canadian politicians to spy for it.

It seems clear to me that this was no mistake: he went to the CBC interview to give this information. He must have known that he was risking his career to say this. I suspect he felt it was important for the public to know. Why would he do that? Because we vote in politicians, and once in office there's little that can be done to prevent this sort of thing. The head of CSIS probably weighed his options and decided that the only way to successfully address the issue was to make it public.

The news spin has been about everything but the main issue.

On The Current this morning, Anna Maria Tremonti focused on how this is a slur on the Chinese community in Canada.

Today's Globe has a column about how heads should roll at the CBC because they delayed broadcasting the interview until the eve of the arrival of the Chinese head of state.

Maclean's attacks the whistle blower, saying that his backpedaling is "awkward" and a "ragged retreat".

Is this willful denial, or are serious news outlets - as I hope - sending out investigative journalists to follow up on this story and get us some facts?

And kudos to the CBC for airing this interview just before the G20, when it will get picked up by international media. They may have realized that Canadians wouldn't be able to see the forest for the trees.

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Photos of the Gulf Oil Spill

The floor of the Gulf of Mexico, pre-spill:


The surface near the gusher:


Oil approaching a beach in June:


A graph showing where oil has hit land, June 19:


Thousands of individuals are attempting to clean the beaches by hand:


Oil seeping into a salt water marsh:

The Plan

Harper's plan seemed to be this:

• In early summer, host two huge prestigious international meetings (the G20 and G8 summits). Be seen on home soil as top dog among Obama, Cameron, Herkel, et al.
  
• A few days later, host the queen. Be seen on home soil as top dog with the lady on the money.
  
• While the queen is here, announce the new G-G. Be seen as the guy who appoints the other top dogs.
  
• Ride the wave of national pride and personal adulation through the summer (without pesky parliament interfering).

Then, in late August or early September, dissolve parliament and call an election.

This scenario explains a lot.

It explains why Harper was so interested in the G8/20 all of a sudden. This is the guy who was publicly disdainful of these leader get-togethers. This is the guy who showed up late for photo ops and blew off an Obama speech to do a press event at a donut shop. This isn't even a regular meeting - the G20 summit is in November, and this is just an add-on.

It explains the odd wording of the Afghan detainee document deal that would allow Harper to cancel the opposition party's access to the documents if he wins a majority.

It even goes a little towards explaining why he prorogued parliament and then delayed so long on signing the agreement on release of the Afghan documents... his plan was that parliament would have very little time to see those documents before he used his majority to yank them back.

And he almost pulled it off. By now, the Canadian public was supposed to be dazzled by a sense of our growing international importance. By next month, we were supposed to adore the man who made it all happen. Last week Harper's PR team released a photo of him standing alone in the House of Commons, looking pensive. This was just the beginning of a repositioning. I have no doubt that a whole series of photos, events and ads were planned to remake Harper in the eyes of the country. It didn't have to fool everyone, and it didn't have to fool anyone for long - just long enough to win a majority.

It's lovely irony that Harper is hoist by his own petard. To get maximum political benefit from the summits, he let the organizers go hog wild on costs. If the government had managed to hide the costs of the G8/20 summits, we might have had a Conservative majority by Thanksgiving. (Gack - we still might.)

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Junk Food for Babies?

Gerber has a line of junk food for babies.

The label says that by 12 months babies are ready for a wider variety of foods. Called Lil Crunchies in the Graduates line, the baby junk food includes cheese puffs, vegetable puffs and fruit puffs.

To add insult to injury, it's really expensive.

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Dedicated Bike Lanes

Trendy ideas come and go. We all (myself included) have a tendency to get behind an idea that sounds good, even if we haven't completely thought it through.

The latest fad, in Waterloo Region at least, is bike lanes with curbs around them. These, it is thought, will be safer for bicyclists and so increase bike commuting. Sounds good, no? All of a sudden everyone seems to be behind the idea - you hear it all the time, proposed with great authority.

But wait. There are a few other things to consider:

• Given the much higher cost of this sort of bike lane over a regular bike lane, a shift to the new lanes will almost certainly slow down the development of new bike lanes.
  
• The new bike lanes require more space so won't be possible on many roads. This isn't a drawback unless (as I've heard) people decry the regular bike lane as unsafe - then we just end up with less bike lanes.
  
• In winter, it will be more difficult to plough these lanes. Regular bike lanes (essentially just a white stripe down the road marking off a lane for bikes) are easier to plough. The city will have to send out a different sort of snow plough to handle the new bike lanes. They likely just won't get ploughed.
  
• As a cylist, I don't relish the idea of a curb surrounding my lane because it makes it more difficult for me to merge with traffic to make a left hand turn or get to an address on the other side of the street. It also makes it more difficult to pass slow bike riders and other impediments.
  
• The curb alongside the bike lane does not solve the biggest problem of bike lanes: at intersections, bike lanes tend to disappear - leaving the cyclist high and dry in the most dangerous part of the street. This problem will probably be much worse with curbed bike lanes, as the curb will have to stop at every spot where cars need to turn.
  
• Curbed bike lanes only make sense on streets with limited car access - long stretches of road without intersections or driveways. But in those situations, a path running a few meters away from the road is a safer and more enjoyable alternative for bikes.
  
• There is an accessibilty consideration: how do pedestrians with walkers, baby buggies or wheelchairs cross them? What about the sight impaired?
  

The curbed bike lane idea may be made with the best of intentions, but it may also be a very negative force on the future of urban cycling. We'd be better off itemizing the problems with regular bike lanes and thinking up better ways to solve them: motorists parking in bike lanes; lanes running close to parked cars with doors that could suddenly fling open; safe ways for bikes to make turns and cross intersections; etc. And the number one priority is just to have more trails, paths and bike lanes, and to make sure they connect.

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Maybe Not a Merger - But Cooperation, For Sure

The 2008 coalition was impossible because there was no-one in place to lead it. Dion was so weak that he was ousted, and then Ignatieff was merely He Who Would Be Acclaimed. He couldn't take over as PM before a convention making him Liberal leader.

Harper and the boys spent a lot of money trying to convince Canadians that the very notion of a coalition is undemocratic, and that one in our current political environment would be doubly undemocratic because Liberals would have to join with "socialists and separatists." It was McArthyesque, but it resonated, despite the well-documented attempt at a coalition initiated by Harper himself in 2004.

The problem was how to ever get out of this hole. Many Canadians had bought the line that a coalition would be a coup d'etat - hell, The Economist even used the word coup to describe it (although that word didn't reappear in their analysis of their own country's current coalition).

Enter Jean Chretien, circa last week, musing about the possibility of a merger between the Liberals and the NDP. All of a sudden mergers and coalitions have resurged as a topic of discussion - and this time Harper isn't setting the agenda. This discussion has the potential to clear away some of the paranoia about center-left cooperation.

Harper is doing his best not to let it. This week the PMO/PCO has tried attacking the president of the Liberal party, creating a bunch of nutty fake quotes and so on. It's typical Conservative smear tactics, but it has a hint of desperation to it. And at the same time, Conservatives are slipping in the polls (not that that means much).

Perhaps I'm giving Chretien too much credit, but he may have been crazy like a fox in starting up merger talk. It may do all kinds of good for all nonCon parties.

Personally, I'm not pro-merger. I think it would be good for the Liberals (my party), not just because it would let us win a lot of ridings where the Liberals and NDP split the vote, but also because I'd like to see the Liberal party move left, and I have a lot of respect for New Democrats - especially a lot of current senior NDP MPs like Pat Martin, Olivia Chow, Thomas Mulclair and others. I'm against a merger because I don't want to see the NDP vanish.

However, maybe there are solutions to merging and not killing the NDP. Maybe the NDP could exist as a mini-caucus within the Liberal party. Or maybe a cooperation accord could be signed that was part coalition, part merger. I have no idea what sorts of arrangements are acceptable in the Westminster parliamentary system, which of course I would want to adhere to. Also - if the NDP decided it wanted to merge, then as a Liberal I would have to defer to them.

All in all I think it's an interesting and good discussion. For months the headlines have been that the Conservatives are ahead in the polls, when the same statistics could have been reported as that the government is hovering at preposterously low 30% support. The Conservatives get away with it because the rest of us are split, and the rest of us have more uniting us than dividing us. I'd prefer a coalition, but any talk that gets us closer to cooperating is fine by me.

Conservatives are in desperate attack mode because center-left cooperation is a major threat to them. It's quite possible that the Liberals can beat them on their own in the next election, but the more we present a united opposition, the more the Conservatives have to fear.

Update: Media pundits keep saying that coalition talk is something that has been done to Ignatieff. I disagree. Chretien and Romanow may be loose cannons, but Bob Rae didn't write a piece about his experience in a coalition without the approval - and probably the direction - of Michael Ignatieff.

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Measured in Millihelens

The Iliad has two heroes: one nominal (Achilles) and one subversive (Hector). Achilles has to be the hero because Homer's audience was Greek and Achilles is Greek (Achaean), whereas Hector the Trojan prince was the enemy to the Greeks in the Trojan war. Achilles is certainly a hero - but he sulks in his tent and fights in blind anger. In Homer's lifetime there were no Trojans left to cheer on Hector. Just to solidify our preference for Hector over Achilles, Achilles is most unheroic in his treatment of Hector's dead body after he kills him - and Achilles' blind anger and revenge-killing of Hector is not very heroic, either.

So instead of black and white, at the center of the Illiad is an odd take on us-and-them: we are great but flawed. The unattainable standard of heroism is embodied in the other. More: we destroyed the ideal hero (Hector). The nominal hero, Achilles, lives on - an interesting ploy of Homer's, as Achilles lives only because Homer stopped the tale shortly before Achilles' death. (In other versions of the story he dies during the sacking of Troy.)

On a macro level the Iliad is also subversive. While it is a book that celebrates a great Greek victory, the prominence and glorification of Hector implies that the Greeks were wrong in fighting the war. There is great sadness in the destruction of Hector and his civilization, and the Greeks come off as brutes.

There is a humanism in the Iliad that you seldom see in historical fiction. No man dies anonymously. If a man dies in the Iliad, the means of his death is described, as is the name of his father and something of his history. This makes it a bit bloody, for sure (some might say there are endless descriptions of ghastly fatal wounds), but it is also very respectful of life.

Achilles doesn't refuse to fight because of any moral qualms; he's just mad that Agamemnon has taken his slave-girl Briseis away. Achilles didn't want any part of this expedition in the first place, but was forced to go. Hector is forced to defend his city, but wants only a peaceful life with his wife and young son. Despite the bloodiness of the story, the Iliad is profoundly anti-war.

All this makes sense when you think that Homer (or a collection of writers we call Homer) was writing at the end of the dark ages and is describing the cause of the dark ages (as I've argued before). You could see the central premise of the Iliad as: The heroic deeds of our (Greek) heroes resulted in hundreds of years when civilization died.

Okay, if you got this far, here's a little Illiad joke to reward you:

Q: What's a millihelen?
A: The amount of beauty sufficient to launch one ship.

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Snooks

"Snooks" is cool-guy lingo for "sonic dematerializer," a "next-gen weapon" that provides the premise (such as it is) for the recent film The Losers. The Losers is based on graphic novels by Andy Diggle, but as far as I can tell the slang "snooks" is wholly an invention of the film.

According to the movie, snooks are the weapon of choice of modern-day bad guys because they are environmentally friendly. The film's arch-villain, played by Jason Patric, says they "produce no pollution - they're pure destruction" and so are highly sought-after by eco-terrorists. When asked about other next-gen weapons, Patric airily asks, "Have you heard of deep-space tachyons? Singularity events? No?" and he arches an eyebrow to let us know that if we don't have the science, there's no point trying to explain.

Me, I'm so old school that when you put "graphic novel" and "sonic dematerializer" together I think of Madame Castiofore, the glass-shattering opera singer in Tintin. On its own, "sonic dematerializer" makes me think of that gizmo that dental hygenists use if you forget to floss. I seem to recall in the 1960s series The Prisoner that Number Six was kept in The Village by means of a sonic weapon of some sort - they make for excellent low-budget special effects because all you have to do is shake the camera a little, have the actors grab their ears, and then have something vanish. In fact, the mad scientist in Help! tries to get Ringo's ring off with a sonic dematerializer, causing his pants to fall down and fuses to blow. (When the fuse blows John Lennon says, "My god! What's your electricity bill like?" and the scientist's assistant, Algernon, says, "Well it's sort of a long counterfoil...")

All in all, the destructive power of sound seems pretty last-gen to me (maybe even retro-gen). But I like this word snooks. Snooks even sounds like a good nickname for the old prima donna.

The idea that the next generation of terrorists is going to require environmentally friendly bombs is just, well, delightful. It's a great shame that the movie was so dumbed-down that they made no attempt to explain how the arch-villain would wield a singularity event as a weapon, not to mention how he'd harness the elusive tachyon. All we see of the snook is an island that gets obliterated, and you think you could do that for less than $1 billion cash.

By the way, The Losers is a really bad film with really good acting by everyone in it. It's a great shame that so much talent wasted nearly a year creating such a bag of crap. I saw it only because I thought there would be superheroes.

###

Ending Wagner

At the very end of the Ring Cycle there is a brief moment when we see that the age of the gods is over and the age of humanity is beginning. It only lasts a couple of minutes but it is of vital importance to the piece - all the fighting of the gods leads to this, the making of humanity. After 17+ hours, the audience can finally exhale. The leitmotif that plays at the end makes this very clear. A production that doesn't recognize it makes a big mistake. I know - I saw one once: it was a deflating experience.

At the end of The Flying Dutchman, when the young woman Senta is shot dead, the music suddenly changes from dark and menacing to romantic and optimistic. It only lasts a moment, but that music ends the opera. It is clear that Wagner intends that Senta and the flying Dutchman are both saved by her death: he has been cursed to immortal life on the sea, and can only be saved by a woman who promises and delivers on loving him until her death. She promised him her love, and continued loving him until her death.

It is unfortunate that the COC production of The Flying Dutchman, mounted in 2000 and currently being revived at the Four Seasons Center, misses the ending - either misses it, or handles it so subtlely that the audience misses it. Senta just falls down dead, and the Dutchman walks up a staircase holding her wedding veil, but that's it.

I can see that it's difficult to do justice to these brief but monumental Wagner endings, but opera productions must.

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Meddling with the Most Vulnerable

In all the newsprint spent on Harper's controversial G8 maternal health plan, I can't find mention of a very important implication of the Conservative decision to not fund abortions: how organizations that support abortion will be funded.

George Bush was explicit about it. He prohibited US funding of international groups that performed abortions or provided information about abortion. Harper's decision could have the same effect, depending on how it's implemented.

Say you have a poor country and there's an organization that provides maternal health services - it could be a clinic or a hospital or a group that covers several facilities. Say their services include family planning and/or abortion. Are they still eligible for funding under this plan?

Does someone work out what percentage of their budget is related to abortion, and then Canada asks some other country to fund that portion? That seems unlikely. But if not that sort of scenario, then it seems we must be disadvantaging organizations that support abortion. That's not just wrong; it's immoral.

It's beyond belief that a country that provides free abortions to its citizens would use its foriegn aid policies to prevent poor women in Africa from having abortions - especially since abortion is needed even more in poor African countries, where poor women have less control over their bodies and it is estimated that a third of pregnancy-related deaths are due to botched abortions.

Foreign aid is a tricky business. One of the reasons that sub-Saharan Africa is still so poor is the mess we've made with our foreign aid-slash-meddling. Just think of this scenario: there's a village with a maternal health clinic that's funded with western money, and now that clinic has been told that it won't be funded unless it ceases performing abortions - or even giving advice about them. Thanks to George Bush wooing the evangelical vote, that went on for eight years. Thanks to Stephen Harper wooing the evangelical vote, that might be about to start happening again.

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Anthony Lane Review (review)

Anthony Lane's New Yorker review of Kick-Ass bugs me - not because he hated the movie and I dug it, although that's true - but because his objections are rooted in the main character being an 11 year old girl.

Lane has various problems with the character who calls herself Hit Girl. He thinks her swearing is a cheap trick to generate buzz. He thinks her presence turns the movie into "cartoon violence" and makes the movie appeal to children. He thinks that viewing it will make children mistake savagery for slapstick and so "coarsen and inflame" them. Underlying all his other criticism, he thinks she's pornographic. While not being able to provide any evidence, Lane is preoccupied with her sexuality; he even says that she is "the dream of every pedophile."

To be clear: the little girl in question doesn't dress provocatively. She doesn't act provocatively. There's nothing sexual about her. If the actress had been 12 or 13 she might have had budding sexuality, but Hit Girl is thoroughly a child.

Lane tries to argue the pornography angle by saying that that the difference between a sexualized child and a violenc-ized child is a "false dichotomy" and a "cowardly distinction". I think he's engaged in some fuzzy thinking there. There is most definitely a difference between a child who is sexualized and one who is violent: there is no child-violence-voyeur equivalent of a pedophile.

There is one major similarity between children who are sexualized and who are violenc-ized: both situations give the child a sense of empowerment but are ultimately damaging to them. But for a pulp fiction movie, the movie is very sensitive to the child's problems. The movie makes it clear that this is one very damaged little girl. She was raised by an insane revenge-obsessed father who made killing a game. When we first see father and daughter, they are standing in a culvert and he is repeatedly shooting her in the chest with a large hand gun (we then learn he's teaching her to get used to her new bullet-proof vest). At the end, she is placed in a safer environment.


The difference between a movie about a sexualized little girl (and there have been many, from Lolita to Pretty Baby to Taxi Driver and on and on) and a movie about a violenc-ized little girl, is that millions of little girls are sexualized but few in the Western world are turned into Ninja fighters. There isn't a social issue here.

There is shock/novelty value. There may have been an 11 year old pig-tailed assassin in fiction before, but I can't recall when. And Lane is right that the Hit Girl character might appeal to kids - but this is an R-rated movie. As long as a movie is rated appropriately, I don't see how you can criticize its effect on kids.

I can't believe that Lane would have had such strong objections to violenc-izing a little boy. His review, at heart, is just old-fashioned disapproval of girls being action heroes. And he's really, really bothered about it - to the point that he expresses disgust with people who disagree with him - and to the point that he misses the good stuff in the movie.

The actress who plays Hit Girl, Chloe Moretz, has an impressive resume even though she was 11 at time of filming, and she did a brilliant acting job. When she says "Oh daddy, I'm just fuckin with ya", it's a show-stopper. She doesn't swear much in the movie, but when she does it's the best swearing I ever heard. She is convincing in a role that most actors would make laughable.

On top of all this, Lane and many of the other reviewers I read just don't get the movie. It's about the yearning and futility of wanting to be more than you can be. The character who calls himself Kick-Ass wears a baggy mail-order Hallowe'en costume and makes zero progress in becoming a superhero. He has a wealthy classmate who is able to buy a more convincing costume but does no better at the superheroing. Hit Girl is the closest we get to a human superhero, but she's ultimately just a little kid who's over-eager to please her dad. Even at the closest they get, when Kick-Ass dons a jet pack and flies himself and Hit Girl across the city, they have still failed to cross the line between being a superhero and just pretending.

In the short form of the review that appears in later New Yorkers, Lane writes that Kick-Ass "has the makings of a pointed - and much needed - poke at comic book afflatus, but the satire backs away all too quickly." Again, he misses the point. Superhero movies tend to play with the edges of the genre, exploring it and examining its internal flaws, but you shouldn't expect them to satirize and criticize the genre. The superhero genre simply isn't serious enough for satire to have any relevance.

Except for her age, Hit Girl is has a lot of similarities to Uma Thurman's character in Kill Bill, and Kick-Ass owes a lot to Kill Bill. If I hadn't liked Kick-Ass I might have thought it was too derivative. But I wouldn't have blamed it on the kid.

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Misconceptions About LRT

• Proponents of LRT claim that the current bus system is not adequate for growing demand, and so we need a long train to meet future capacity. However, the bus on the proposed LRT route, the iXpress, runs every 15 minutes. There is plenty of opportunity for expanding the service: run every five minutes or more during peak times, and move to larger (even articulated) buses. (The iXpress is a sophisticated new transit system and it didn't cost a lot to set up: see this. Buses have the great advantage of being flexible. It's easy to change a bus route, and virtually impossible with a rail line.)


• LRT is an acronym that is often taken to stand for Light Rapid Transit. However, for the trip between Fairview Mall and Conestoga Mall (the LRT route), the LRT will only be 7 minutes faster than the current bus, according to the Region's transit authorities.


• In Toronto, the name LRT refers to a very different thing from the proposed Waterloo LRT. In Toronto an LRT is a streetcar that stops every couple of blocks, just like regular streetcars. The only difference from other streetcars is that the Toronto LRT runs on a raised platform, rather than running on a lane also used by cars.
  
  In Waterloo, the proposed LRT also runs on tracks on a dedicated raised lane. However, it's not a streetcar. It's a longer train (the stations for the Waterloo LRT are planned to be 60 meters in length). Most importantly, it stops very infrequently: there are only 11 stops between Fairview Mall and Conestoga Mall (that is counting the two places where the route turns into a loop as one stop, which is fair).
  
  Check out the map here. Between downtown Kitchener and downtown Waterloo, there is only one stop. For many residents, the LRT may run near where they want to go but it probably won't stop there.


• Proponents of Waterloo's LRT have consistently painted opponents as being anti-transit. This is a tactic of demonization that is unfortunate and untrue. There are thoughtful and well-informed people on both sides of the debate. Some prominent examples:
  
  • One of the most outspoken opponents of LRT is a professor emeritus of civil engineering at the University of Waterloo who taught and did research in transportation and transit planning for 32 years and is a well-known advocate of public transit (link).
  
  
  • Here are all the anti-LRT letters to the editor that have been published in Waterloo newspapers.
  
  
  • Here are all the anti-LRT articles that have been published in Waterloo newspapers.
  
  
  • Here are my own writings on the topic, which mostly focus on negative implications of the LRT for Uptown Waterloo.

Bringing Pragmatism to Environmental Issues

Waterloo Region health officials are agitating against a provincial initiative to allow convenience stores to sell wine and beer. Their argument is that it will lead to more drunkenness.

There is no evidence that convenient liquor sales leads to more drinking, and ample evidence to the contrary (in Quebec and the many US states that allow it). However, common sense is all that's needed to see the benefits: less driving. Beer and wine stores are so widely spread in our area that you practically have to own a car to get to them. In all of Waterloo - a town of over 100,000 people in a massive suburban sprawl - there are only three LCBOs and two beer stores.

Having wine and beer in convenience stores will also make corner stores more profitable, which should reverse the trend of declining numbers of corner stores. That will provide even more environmental benefits as residents won't have to rely on a car to pick up milk, the newspaper, and a host of other items.


In our older neighbourhoods you can still see where convenience stores used to be. They are usually on corners, and are often either boarded up or have been converted to a residence. They are reminders of a time when families either shared a car or did without, and were able to buy many necessities on foot.

We're always talking about creating a walkable city. This is how you do it: small, pragmatic steps that consider how people really live.

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when faces called flowers

The glorious spring weather makes me think of this poem by e.e. cummings:

when faces called flowers float out of the ground
and breathing is wishing and wishing is having-
but keeping is downward and doubting and never
-it's april(yes,april;my darling)it's spring!
yes the pretty birds frolic as spry as can fly
yes the little fish gambol as glad as can be
(yes the mountains are dancing together)

when every leaf opens without any sound
and wishing is having and having is giving-
but keeping is doting and nothing and nonsense
-alive;we're alive,dear:it's(kiss me now)spring!
now the pretty birds hover so she and so he
now the little fish quiver so you and so i
(now the mountains are dancing, the mountains)

when more than was lost has been found has been found
and having is giving and giving is living-
but keeping is darkness and winter and cringing
-it's spring(all our night becomes day)o,it's spring!
all the pretty birds dive to the heart of the sky
all the little fish climb through the mind of the sea
(all the mountains are dancing;are dancing)

On first reading the poem seems almost treacly sweet, but on subsequent readings there are troubling hints of darkness and derangement. Like... In the third line of every stanza, if "keeping" refers to holding on to a person, then maybe there's some guilt about how his last relationship ended? There's that enigmatic last line of every stanza that's still playful and joyful but also, maybe, a bit troubling - thinking that mountains are dancing seems a bit demented. And the rolling repetitions (yes, yes, yes, now, now, now, all, all, all)... they start out affirming, then frantic, then greedy.

I don't have anything else to say; I think it's a cool poem. It's like a spectacular sunset caused by pollution or a beautiful sheen on the ocean that may be an oil slick or a hilarious friend who's an alcoholic.

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Wasted Opportunity

It was a beautiful, sunny weekend, and very little went on in our new public square. Saturday at 3 PM there was a rally protesting two women being asked not to kiss in a local restaurant - and that was it. I took this picture today (Sunday) at about 12:40; there was supposed to be skateboard classes from 11-1 but as you can see, it didn't happen. I went back about three hours later and there were some more skate boarders, plus a few people wandering around looking glum.

I'm not blaming the city - the square is new and they have a limited budget to program it. But this square needs more programming. It's not like a park where people can relax and enjoy the view. We built an expanse of white concrete that requires programming.

We could set up a citizen's committee to help program the square. In addition, organizations such as universities, schools, corporations, arts groups, sports clubs and civic groups could propose events. The Waterloo Public Square provides a lot of opportunities for Waterlooians - let's take initiative.

(link to programming info)

Update: As it happened, three weeks later on a Sunday at 12:45 I happened by Nathan Philips Square in Toronto. It was much worse!




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What's With the Harper Conservatives and the Hells Angels?

The Toronto Star says that Rahim Jaffer, husband of Helena Guergis, has been in business with "a man who claims to be a former banker for the Hells Angels."

Guergis is the second member of Harper's cabinet who was ousted due to a political scandal, and the previous scandal (concerning Maxime Bernier) also involved the Hells Angels. While Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bernier left highly confidential NATO documents at the home of a girlfriend who had long-standing ties to the Hells Angels.

It seems reasonable to suspect that the motorcycle gang is attempting to infiltrate government, or at least exert influence through social connections. This is a tactic long deployed by other organized crime such as the Italian mafia. Motorcycle gangs morphed into sophisticated organized crime syndicates some time ago, but public understanding has not caught up with reality.

Many people don't comprehend the difference between groups of motorcycle enthusiasts and organized crime syndicates like the Hells Angels. It's that ignorance that allows the Hells Angels to operate in a quasi-legitimate fashion.

I don't allege that the Harper Conservatives support or condone organized crime, but this second scandal related to the same crime syndicate has got to be a wake-up call to the Conservatives to take more care. All other politicians should take note, as well.

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Just Thanking his Supporters...

It seems that Harper learned something from the way the Bush government ran their invasion of Iraq: Haiti project goes to Tory-linked firm.

We Are Not the Good Guys

An editorial in the March 13 Globe & Mail starts, "While Canada keeps its human-rights reports on Afghanistan... strictly secret, the U.S. state department posted its 2009 report on its website Thursday for anyone who cares to read it. The report says about its Afghan ally, in part: 'Torture and abuse methods included, but were not limited to, beating by stick, scorching bar, or iron bar; flogging by cable; battering by rod; electric shock; deprivation of sleep, water, and food; abusive language; sexual humiliation; and rape...'"

The US report certainly backs up Richard Colvin's testimony that Afghans detained by Canadian troops were routinely tortured in Afghan jails. Not long ago PMO talking points claimed that the only torture was one detainee having a shoe thrown at him. They were claiming that since Colvin hadn't seen the torture firsthand, his testimony was bogus and the torture never occurred. Plus they were claiming that all detainees were murderous terrorists, rather than Colvin's testimony (backed up by the US reports) that many detainees were just ordinary Afghans who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Conservatives also claimed these things in the Comments sections of this blog (eg here). My question is: what do you have to say now? Is the US government lying too?

It's clear now why Harper prorogued parliament. He needed to create a gap in time between all those hateful things MacKay shouted last fall and the exposure of everything MacKay said as utter, self-serving lies. It also gave him time to come up with a new strategy: try to smear the previous Liberal government as much as possible before the full truth comes out so that he can say that he wasn't the only one to blame. (Not that I oppose exposing actions by the Martin government; as Ignatieff has stated all along, the investigation should not exclude Martin.)

Harper's deceitful, undemocratic actions are shameful. But the most important part of this affair continues to be this: When we have armed troops in another country, we have an absolute obligation to respect the human rights of the people in that country - and to be seen to do so. We have failed so spectacularly that we are not only in contravention of the Geneva Convention, but our government is known to be engaged in a coverup of our abuses. We must withdraw from Afghanistan immediately, have a full investigation, and start to think about reparations.

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It's a Good Time to Buy a Toyota

For the last few weeks we've been flooded with stories of out-of-control Toyotas that zoomed up to 140 km/hour without driver intent.

I'm no auto expert, but the stories don't seem credible. Braking systems are more powerful than engines so functioning brakes can stop an accelerating car; if the stories are true, then the accelerator and brakes failed at the same time - and then miraculously went back to normal. That seems impossible even with the computer malfunction explanation.

The most plausible explanation is that the drivers panicked and hit the accelerator when they thought they were braking. The more they tried to brake, the faster they went - because they were pressing the accelerator, not the brake. The panic explanation is reinforced by other things in their stories: they always seem to keep accelerating without thinking to put the car in neutral and turn it off.

This is is what I think happened: there was a problem with Toyota floor mats (the original issue) affecting the gas pedal, after which Toyota drivers with this sort of driving mistake in their past started re-remembering their mistake as a fault of the car. That whipped up a mass hysteria. And perhaps Americans who fear for their domestic car industry were happy to feed the scandal.

People who believe that Toyota has a zillion defective cars should take a look at the runaway Audi scandal of 1986. This sort of faux scandal has happened before.

Me, I drive a 13 year old Corolla that has cost me virtually nothing in repairs, and when it gives up the ghost I plan to get a Yaris. There might be some good bargains on used ones...

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Retail in Canada

I sometimes like to think that it's not so much that Canada has a lousier retail environment than the United States; it's that the US has the best in the world, and Canada is not as good but is better than the rest - with the scale continuing to western Europe, eastern Europe, and so on.

But that doesn't change the fact that choices are better in the States; prices can be far better; and the customer interface (shops, web sites, sales reps and customer support) are more enjoyable to work with and more efficient.

Case in point: I need a new ceiling fan. After checking some local stores and not finding what I wanted I looked online and found two models I liked. I called some lighting stores in town and only one had the sort of thing I was looking for. I went to the store and found they couldn't get my first choice but they could get my second, this one from Fanimation:


The price they quoted was $2400 plus tax.

In an online store in the US, the exact same fan was $1143 ($681 for the fan and $462 for the curvey blades; no tax). There's a $55 shipping charge to Canada and 11% import duty (which is handled by the courier so the fan is delivered to your door), but the dollars are nearly at parity, so the total cost is still nearly half of the store's price.

You might say that's a typical store mark-up, but they don't stock any ceiling fans: they were going to order it from a catalog.

Plus, the price differential isn't even the biggest problem. The lighting store chain's web site is uninformative (it has a lot of pages but no details of the products; the only real info is the address). They don't have any fans on display (just catalogs), yet they only carry parts of three lines of fan - and this was the only fan that was different from your typical Home Depot selection. The staff seemed uninterested verging on surly. I had to stand at a cluttered counter to look at the catalogs. The staff couldn't answer any questions about the products and didn't even give me an exact price (the guy said it would be "around $2400").

In contrast, the US online store had both an 800 number and an online chat service (both of which I used to ask questions about the fans). The guy at the store said it would take six weeks to get the fan, while the customer rep at the US web site said 7-10 days. The US outfit has a tracking page where I can follow my order. At the local store, I have to go to the store to pick up the fan.

I didn't order that fan. I bought my first choice, which was much cheaper, is about the most efficient (in terms of moving the most air) and quietest fan on the market, and has a Calderesque look I like:


My fan is in the Minka Aire line, which doesn't even have a distributor in Canada. In my town, if you want an artistic ceiling fan - with the exception of waiting six weeks for that $2400 one - you don't have much choice but to import directly from elsewhere.

Is Canadian taste so stodgy that there's no point carrying Minka Aire fans? (The guy in the store said, "I think I've heard other people asking about Minka.") If markets are so efficient, why isn't Canadian retail improving to match the US?

Canada is a great untapped retail market, yet sometimes it seems that US retailers lower their quality when they sell here. For example, a couple of years ago Target (US) and Zellers (Canada) sold the same brand of clothing, but at Target the clothes were well-designed, well-made and 100% cotton, while at Zellers the clothes tended to be chintzy and synthetic. I find it hard to believe that Canadians prefer ugly clothes. A big part of the success of Walmart is that they carry simple, cheap, well-made cotton clothing - even in Canada.

For a short while I ordered books from Indigo rather than Amazon - the Amazon search engine is so much better that I would have to look up the book on Amazon, get the ISBN and then use that to find it on Indigo. I gave up and now order everything from Amazon. Heck, I was at the Information Desk at the library once and the librarian used Amazon to find information about a book. Why exactly is it a scandal that our government might let Amazon expand here?

Is the real problem that Canadians are willing to put up with lousy selection, quality, service and prices, while Americans demand better?

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Department of Eeee-yew

The Globe reports,

Researchers in the United States say they have turned male frogs into females by exposing the amphibians to tiny amounts of atrazine, a weed killer widely used on corn fields in Canada and often found in water supplies in agricultural areas.

The chemically induced sex change occurred by dosing frogs at concentrations of the herbicide 50 per cent below Health Canada's guideline for drinking water.

...

The discovery that in an experimental setting atrazine induces sex changes in frogs is likely to further increase the controversy over the chemical, which has been banned in Europe because it contaminates ground water but is one of the most commonly used herbicides in North America.

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All the atrazine sold in Canada is made by Syngenta AG, a Swiss-based seed and pesticide producer that has previously disputed findings that the herbicide hazardous. ...Atrazine has been dogged by controversy since the late 1980s, when it was found to cause mammary tumours in one strain of laboratory rats...

A part per billion is an extremely small amount, the equivalent of one second or elapsed time over a 32-year period. The experimental dose used was below Canada's drinking water guideline of 5 ppb, but above the safe wildlife exposure standard of 1.8 ppb. Figures contained in Health Canada's 2007 atrazine evaluation found concentrations in groundwater of up to 1.2 ppb.

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MSN Makes Fun of Harper

This is pretty funny, and has a refreshing anti-prorogation message:

Stephen Harper's Olympic adventure

Losing Was Not an Option

As I write this in my apartment, I can hear the shouting and honking in downtown Waterloo. Much of downtown Toronto is closed for the celebrating fans, as are downtowns all over the country.

I was at an opera in Toronto this afternoon from 2 to 5:30. (Unfortunate timing on the season's tickets.) I was in the ladies room during the second intermission when an elderly woman burst in, shouting, "We scored!" During the intermissions the score was broadcast above the stage, and since Canada was ahead everyone (including the orchestra) cheered.

A hokey Hollywood sports movie couldn't have made this victory more important. It wasn't like the "shot heard round the world" when we beat Russia in '72. These guys all play together on the same NHL teams; there's not the usual separation between competitors. But a series of events over the last year... Jim Balsillie being denied another attempt to move a team to southern Ontario; our loss in an early game at the Olympics, ratcheting up the anxiety; Sidney Crosby salvaging our chances in overtime of another match; having a chance, with this victory, to make a new world record for one country's gold medals... then the USA tying the score 24 seconds before the end of the game! And Crosby winning again in overtime!

As I was driving home from Toronto I heard a CBC newscaster ask the question, "But did the better team win? Was Canada better than the US?" What a dope. Of course the Canadian team wasn't better: the US team had a much smoother run at the Olympics. The difference is the fans. This is our game. This is our Olympics. Losing was not an option.

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Winter in the R+T Park

I work in the Waterloo Research and Technology Park, located on the north campus of the University of Waterloo. I took these pictures out the window today...