Elmer and Gilles obviously shorted their respective progeny in the gene department. And the department that was acutely aware of that problem was Foreign Affairs.
David Emerson may be a political opportunist and one of the worst kinds of turncoats, but no one can fault him for his skills and organizational leadership ability.
"I think people are happy we have Emerson as a boss," said one Canadian diplomat. "He's a very seasoned individual." Another Canadian diplomat expressed relief that the department has finally gotten a capable minister after a string impressively underqualified ones. "There was nowhere to go but up," said the relieved DFAIT official. "This is a guy who, unlike any of his immediate predecessors, has experience as a leader, experience as the manager of a large organization and in making decisions in complex operating environments. "With his credentials, his background and his skill set, he's certainly looking better than anyone since [former Liberal foreign affairs minister Pierre] Pettigrew."
And to underscore just how bad Emerson's predecessors actually were ...
"This place has been so beat up that just a steady hand on the tiller will be welcomed," said one.
So, Harper, having made two astoundingly bad decisions and having treated one of the most important departments in government as little more than feet-on-the-desk plum-posting reward and a game of political optics, finally had to go into his largely incompetent caucus and pull out the only person with enough leadership, management and organizational ability to clean up the mess - a lapsed Liberal. (And one whose loyalty might well depend on how freely he can run his department without the PMO interfering.)
Gotta say, it's just sad to read such commentary. The Foreign Affairs department deserves much better than Harper's given them to date.
Indeed. Imagine how different things might have been if Harper had chosen his Foreign Affairs minister on the basis of skill, knowledge and ability in the first place.
Too bad that he placed his own political fortunes ahead the requirements of the nation.
So says Christopher Hitchens. That's right, Christopher Hitchens.
The same guy who argued that waterboarding was "extreme interrogation" but not "outright torture" has changed his mind.
Why?
He took up the challenge offered by those opposed to his views and allowed himself to be waterboarded. Hitchens has now changed his view.
You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.
And he found out something else. Once the actual torture has ended, the memory of it lingers.
Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass.
Hopefully.
Hitchens has a considerably different view now.
I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.[...]
1. Waterboarding is a deliberate torture technique and has been prosecuted as such by our judicial arm when perpetrated by others.
2. If we allow it and justify it, we cannot complain if it is employed in the future by other regimes on captive U.S. citizens. It is a method of putting American prisoners in harm’s way.
3. It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. (Mr. Nance told me that he had heard of someone’s being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite. I later had an awful twinge while wondering if I myself could have been “dunked” this far.) To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.” Just put a pencil line under that last phrase, or commit it to memory.
4. It opens a door that cannot be closed. Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack.
Heh! Gary Law adds something scary to chew on after Kathryn Jean Lopez gets all sentimental as she pines for the days when girls were virgins and fathers were, well, knee-capping hillbillies.
Where’s Dad? Not the “fathers” of these unfortunate pre-borns, but the fathers of these pregnant girls. Where, in other words, is the shotgun?Back in the day when birth control and abortion weren’t readily available to high-school kids, fathers were pretty good deterrents to pregnancy. Boys knew they’d have kneecap problems if they got daddy’s little girl pregnant. If they were lucky, they’d be married by the morning after.Girls, meanwhile, were less likely to risk pregnancy because alternatives to motherhood were few, adoption being the most likely.It wasn’t a foolproof system, clearly, but the specter of lifelong consequences, combined with societal and parental disapproval, helped keep the illegitimate birthrate down.Today, using the term “illegitimate” is more likely to spark disapproval than the activities contributing to the plague of unwed pregnancies. For sure there are far fewer fathers around to give young males The Eye.
The Eye? Or, more to K-Lo's liking, the baseball bat.
What got K-Lo going? Well, the pregnancy pact of 17 girls in the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. More of K-Lo:
It is a fair guess, though not possible to confirm at this point, that at least some of Gloucester’s pregnant daughters are from fatherless homes.
Yoiks! She doesn't know, so she makes it up.
Today’s girls and boys daily marinate in a culture that offers little instruction in responsibility and self-control — or the importance of marriage as antecedent to procreation — but celebrates single motherhood and encourages sex without strings.
Shorter K-Lo: Pre-marital sex is the result of the current culture. They're not being taught to repress their sexual urges the way their grandparents and parents did when they were adolescents. Why, look at the movies they see!
That would be like, you know, a scientific study. I-wonder-what-it-says? (drum roll)
“This is reality-check research. Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades,” says study author Lawrence Finer, director of domestic research at the Guttmacher Institute. “The data clearly show that the majority of older teens and adults have already had sex before marriage, which calls into question the federal government’s funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12–29-year-olds. It would be more effective to provide young people with the skills and information they need to be safe once they become sexually active—which nearly everyone eventually will.”
Yup. Even some of the student body at Dominican Academy were probably... ahem... experimenting.
But not K-Lo! Nosiree! She didn't stray down the sinful path seeking pleasures of the flesh. Oh, I'm sure she had her schoolgirl crushes, but what's the harm in that?
Boris Yeltsin's death on affected me in a way that was surely unique: He was my high-school crush.
Yes, I am serious. If you opened my locker at Dominican Academy in New York City, you would have found a picture of Yeltsin torn from Time magazine, as if it were a Tiger Beat cover featuring Kirk Cameron.
And if Boris Yeltsin, a man old enough to be my grandfather, had suddenly appeared at Dominican Academy, well... it's too painful to visualize. But it's very healthy... no?
But I digress... sort of.
K-Lo apparently hasn't bothered looking at the results of those "married by the morning after" shotgun weddings. Between 1960 and 1980 the US divorce rate tripled. At least 23 couples per thousand weren't terribly happy in their relationships and surprisingly, a lot of those couples were in longer term marriages. (Should we count the "premature births" that occurred among that number?)
Another thing she missed, (You can do that when you're rubbing a picture of Boris on your chest), was the data accumulated by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. Oh, would you look at that! Since 1981 the teen pregnancy rate was actually declining in the US... until K-Lo's other hero expanded abstinence only sex education. By 2006 a sudden and sharp increase in teen pregnancy set back a steady 14 year decline.
And as to K-Lo's assertion that in the Leave It To Beaver days "Daddy's got a gun; we can't have no fun" resulted in fewer teen pregnancies, there is this real-live, honest-to-goodness analysis which says.... BS!
Unmarried Childbearing. The rate of teen childbearing in the United States has fallen steeply since the late 1950s, from an all time high of 96 births per 1,000 women aged 15–19 in 1957 to an all time low of 49 in 2000 (see chart). Birthrates fell steadily throughout the 1960s and 1970s; they were fairly steady in the early 1980s and then rose sharply between 1988 and 1991 before declining throughout the 1990s.
I know. Another conservative myth busted. But then, life isn't a Warner Bros cartoon. K-Lo on the other hand, is.
The sponsor of Bill C-484 says his "Unborn Victims of Crime Act" has nothing to do with abortion. Nope. Nothing at all. No, siree. Inserting the notion of the personhood of the unborn into a piece of criminal law won't affect abortion rights. C-484 is a legislative island, entire of itself.
"As far as I'm concerned it is indeed controversial," said Epp, who has a private member's bill before the House of Commons that would allow criminal charges to be laid in the death or injury of an unborn child when the child's mother is the victim of a crime.
Epp also questioned the objectivity of Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin as head of the Order of Canada advisory council. "Is she now totally out of impartiality because of the fact she has weighed into this? I am concerned about all of those things," he said.
I enjoy the melodious sound of right-wing teeth-gnashing as much as anyone, and there's quite a symphonygoingontoday. Rock on! But if anyone still thinks that Epp's Bill has nothing to do with abortion, guess again. And if you guess wrong, I have a wonderful old bridge to sell you.
If my favourite poet of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats, had had his poem "Lapis Lazuli" run through the fundamentalist American Family Association’s OneNewsNow site:
I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow. Of poets that are always homosexual, For everybody knows or else should know That if nothing drastic is done Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out, Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in Until the town lie beaten flat.
All perform their tragic play, There struts Hamlet, there is Lear, That's Ophelia, that Cordelia; Yet they, should the last scene be there, The great stage curtain about to drop, If worthy their prominent part in the play, Do not break up their lines to weep. They know that Hamlet and Lear are homosexual;
--
All things fall and are built again, And those that build them again are homosexual.
A big h/t to Red Tory for this, although he owes me a new keyboard.
I was going to join Dr. Dawg and just give this a pass but it's difficult to do when "national" publications seem so bent on making a point with such dull pencils.
Outrage brews as Ottawa set to honour Morgentaler
Really. And then the question is raised, how did that information find its way out of the Honours Secretariat before the recipient was informed? The honours list is sealed after selections have been made and not made public until the head of state releases it. Leaks such as this are done with a purpose and in this case it looks like the Prime Minister's Office is the culprit.
The Conservatives sent out talking points to MPs on Friday that did not name Dr. Morgentaler, but were clearly in preparation for a controversial appointment. They emphasized that Order of Canada recipients are not chosen by the cabinet, but rather a panel whose nine members include only two government appointees.
And then the pack of howling Hyenas started.
Maurice Vellacott, a Conservative MP from Saskatchewan who has been a long-time opponent of abortion, said the honour normally goes to someone who is the unanimous choice of the advisory council. Mr. Vellacott said he has heard this was not the case with the selection of Dr. Morgentaler.
Now there's someone to lead a Conservative charge. If the so-con religious authoritarians ever wanted their highly tenuous position diminished further than it already is, pick an embarrassing, public nuisance like Vellacott to be their voice. And what Vellacott heard can be taken with a grain of the proverbial salt since he's not beyond spewing out imaginary words and scenarios as fact.
Then we get some other voices stacking up. (Emphasis mine)
But Joanne McGarry, executive director of the Catholic Civil Rights League, said that if Dr. Morgentaler is named to the order, "it would be a most unfortunate choice."
"As Canadians we would like to see the Order of Canada given to people whose contributions to such initiatives as charity, education, culture, the environment, things of that kind that are uniformly viewed as positive and tend to unite people," she said. "With this choice, the one thing that everybody really agrees on about Morgentaler is that he is a very divisive figure."
Really, Joanne? We'll keep those attributes in mind as we move along here.
Liberal MP Dan McTeague said Dr. Morgentaler is a very controversial person and if he is admitted to the order, it will polarize Canadians.The Governor-General and the committee advising on appointments to the Order of Canada have always been careful in the past not to choose people who were controversial or who would not be unanimously celebrated by all Canadians, Mr. McTeague said.
Really, Dan? Have they always been that careful? All Order of Canada inductees are unanimously celebrated by all Canadians?
So, Maurice, Joanne and Dan, if an Order of Canada appointment requires unanimous approval of the advisory board; and the criteria for such an appointment, (as viewed by the Catholic Civil Rights League), is contributions to charity, education, culture, the environment and things that are uniformly viewed as positive and unite people; and the advisory board has been careful not to choose people who would not be unanimously celebrated by all Canadians...
I was going to let this go and just party today, but reading the drivellinghatredoozing from the nut-o-sphere this morning has delayed my plans.
I'm referring to the speech-warrior crowd, the people who stand up for freedom in our Stalinist wasteland, who freep the hell out of newspaper polls, who can't even spell the name of the person they hate, the folks who make sleazy references to Morgentaler's Jewish ethnicity.
Yup, it's all the old familiar faces. There's Binky, aggregating blogposts about the Mark Steyn auto-da-fé, now dutifully directing us to various vicious anti-Morgentaler posts. Funny how the taste for freedom dissipates when women's rights are at stake. Funny how the bigotry kicks in.
Even the Globe & Mail, which crusaded early on for freedom of choice, carries today one of the most biased articles I have had the misfortune to peruse in that paper for some time.
Hed: "Outrage brews as Ottawa set to honour Morgentaler." (Whose outrage? Why, it's the usual suspects--the Church militant, the so-con nutbars inside and outside the House of Commons. Not the majority of us who are pro-choice and have found something else to celebrate today.)
Then the article: 2.75 column-inches devoted to Maurice Vellacott, MP, the fellow who was bounced from the House of Commons Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development for defending racist "starlight tours" cops. 2.5 column-inches for a spokesperson for the Catholic Civil Rights league. 5.75 column-inches for assorted other frothing "right-to-lifers."
Total: 11 column-inches for the anti-choice side. And less than 1.5 column-inches for the pro-choice side.
Fair and balanced.
But no fear. Henry's overdue honour is a slam-dunk. And tonight I'm going outside to watch all the exploding heads light up the sky. Should be quite a show.
In English, the word "our" is ambiguous. Ir refers, on the one hand, to "our, not your." On the other, it means, "belonging to all of us." In Te Reo Māori, the language of the indigenous inhabitants of New Zealand/Aotearoa, there are distinct words for each: to(pl. "o") mātou is exclusive, to (plural "o") tātou is inclusive.
Today, then, I celebrate to tātou Kanata. And so should we all--tātou katoa. But what's to celebrate? Here's my list o' ten: add your own in the comments.
We aren't Americans. (Hold on, don't get irritated--that's what Americansare saying.) All of the things that the benighted Washington Times finds to criticize, most of us read immediately as virtues. Hence, I suspect, most of us are amused, not outraged, by the linked editorial. Obama is like us? Well, good for him. Have a Labatt's Blue and a piece of backbacon, Barack. And don't forget to work on your French. (H/t.)
Canada is a breathtakingly beautiful place to live.This is what I mean. And this. And this. And this. And this. It just goes on and on.
We have basic guaranteed rights and freedoms. That doesn't mean we are truly free, of course: bourgeois legality doesn't make it so. But we are free, to a very great extent, to struggle for freedom. And we are free to argue about freedom. Take freedom of speech: some claim we are being silenced by Stalinist bureaucrats, and they argue this at the top of their lungs, day after day, month after month, with no commercial interruption or trips to the Gulag. Somehow our Stalinists fail to function. Good.
Medicare. Yes, there are delays, inconsistencies based upon geography, all manner of things that need fixing. But people here don't go bankrupt for medical reasons, everyone has access to health care based upon need, not their wallet, and the standard of care is high. (Don't believe everything you hear.) In Canada, your income isn't a matter of life-and-death. Rich or poor, you get the same top-of-the-line medical service.
Neither stones in a mosaic or more metal for a melting-pot, Canadians get along. Sure we have our ghettoes (or not), our tensions, our backlashes, even the odd bit of bizarrely incompetent terrorism on snowmobiles, but we prefer cutting remarks to knives and sarcasm to bullets, when we aren't trying to be civil. And the latter (in comparison with too many other countries) is something that a lot of us work rather hard at. The main point, though, is that we talk to each other. Or yell, but that's just another form of talking, isn't it?
Canada's first peoples have a shot at justice. They haven't got it yet--nowhere near--but in some countries indigenous peoples don't get to settle land claims or get funds and an apology from a hostile government as reparations for decades of appalling, sometimes bestial, treatment of their kids. Poverty, isolation and foot-dragging on land claims continue to take their terrible toll. But the people affected aren't taking any of it lying down, they have a lot of allies, and there is reason to hope.
Separation of Church and State. A no-brainer in the 21st century, one might have thought. And one would be very wrong. But for every Pastor Steve and Bishop Freddie and "Dr." Charlie, there are a bunch of churchy people who are content to do churchy things. Still, alas, on my nickel, but we're working on that.
Most people you will come in contact with will be friendly, however international students often remark that while Canadians are “polite”, they can appear to be distant or cold. The best way to strike up a conversation with a Canadian is to talk about the weather—weather is an important aspect of Canadian society.
The food. Whether it's rogan josh or beaver tails, pâté de foie gras or apple strudel, you can be sure that Canadian cooking offers the best choice available. Anywhere. And don't forget that country food. You haven't lived until you've tasted umingmaq. My mouth is watering as I write this. The Explorer Hotel in Yellowknife used to do maple-glazed chops. Not any more. But that was almost quintessentially Canadian, eh?
Canada Day. Never mind the stupid drunks who misbehave in our nation's capital, Canada Day is special. No tedious military parades; no appeals to nativist patriotism; no godawful speeches (well, some). It's party time. A time to feel good about ourselves and where we live. Fireworks. Fast food from booths. Picnics. Inconsequential blog posts like this. There are millions of motives at work here, but what's the collective result? Mostly, summer fun on a day off. What could be more Canadian than that?
To all the nations, then, warring in the bosom of a single State: First Nations, Inuit, Québécois, English, all of our immigrant communities, not to mention Western Alien Nation, and, God help us, SDA Nation.
Yup. My Canada includes Stephen Harper. It even includes Kate McMillan. Just don't ask me to party with them. Not today.
