Quotulatiousness

November 26, 2010

British Columbia: Canada’s Banana Republic

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:50

A story in the Globe and Mail on how Elections BC rigged the rules after the fact to reject a petition:

Elections BC rejected a Fight HST recall application as too lengthy — but did so using rules that were drafted after it received the application.

The rejection has led recall organizers to suggest the province’s chief electoral officer deliberately thwarted their attempt to get approval to launch a petition to oust a Liberal MLA who supported the harmonized sales tax, and should step down.

While Elections BC has defended its new rules — which pushed the Fight HST application over a 200-word limit by counting the acronyms MLA and HST as eight words instead of two — recall organizers expressed concern that they were not included in the application form when they downloaded it from Elections BC’s website.

“It’s a total joke. This is the kind of thing they do in banana republics … when they don’t want to have elections or they don’t want people to win. And we’re doing it right here in Canada,” said Chris Delaney, an organizer of the Fight HST campaign.

H/T to Steve Muhlberger for the link.

Marni Soupcoff says get the government out of the marriage business

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:18

Although the column was prompted by the attention-whoring actions of a British couple, the basic principle still applies in Canada:

It really doesn’t make sense for the government to be divvying up rights and benefits based on the sexual orientation of its citizens. Yes, marriage has an undeniably rich history in our cultural and serves very useful societal purposes — I don’t buy into the arguments that marriage is dead. But it’s ultimately a moral and, in some cases, religious matter that should be sanctioned (or not) by a couple’s peer group, religious group and family. It’s not rightfully a spot for government to be sticking its nose, and the fact that it does so puts it in charge of decisions it has no business making — like who is fit to be called a married couple and who should get special tax treatment based on the status relationship.

The preferable scenario, and the one which would forestall lawsuits like the Goggin/Skarsholt one, would be for the government to remove itself from the marriage business altogether.

That would mean no more government-sanctioned civil unions or marriages or references thereto in the law. Yes, that would also mean massive revisions to the tax code, family law, criminal law — really reams and reams of laws from which the government would have to extricate its judgments about couples’ legal standing.

It would also nicely short-circuit the ongoing debate on polygamy (currently active in BC, but due in your local courtroom very soon too).

Time to upgrade your rifle sights?

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:10

The Register looks at futuristic guns, including a coming-into-production sighting system:

As everyone who has read the Discworld books knows, million-to-one shots actually hit nine times out of ten. Pentagon weaponeers saw no reason why this should not also become true for US military snipers, leading them to begin work on the “One Shot” miracle sniper-scope project.

One Shot works by using a laser to measure not just the exact range to the target (this is already common practice among snipers) but also to measure the wind forces along the bullet’s line of flight. Wind is perhaps the marksman’s greatest bugbear in long-range shooting, so much so that snipers aren’t expected to achieve a first-shot kill any further off than 600m in normal circumstances.

The One Shot instrument, which will replace the telescope used by the sniper team’s spotter, will measure wind, range, inclination, air pressure and humidity. Linked to the scope on the sniper rifle, it will continually generate artificial crosshairs indicating where the bullet will actually strike: it will also indicate the likelihood of a wind shift during the projectile’s flight time, allowing the shooter to pick the best moment to fire. All the sniper has to do is move the crosshairs onto target, wait for the circle of uncertainty to stabilise, and shoot.

According to spec, the One Shot system isn’t quite as good as the Pratchett effect: it will deliver first-shot kills out to 1500m only six times out of ten rather than nine.

Rewarding bravery or giving “attaboy” awards?

Filed under: Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

Strategy Page reports on the huge increase in medals being awarded to US troops:

The U.S. Army has reported that some 857,000 medals have been awarded to the 1.2 million soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s 48 percent as many medals awarded during World War II, when six times as many soldiers served overseas. It’s also 30 percent of those awarded during Vietnam, where 25 percent more soldiers served. This odd pattern is the result of the excessive number of medals given out during the Vietnam war.

This has not been forgotten. Five years ago, American troops began grumbling about what was perceived as disrespectful use of Bronze Star medals as “attaboy” awards for officers and senior NCOs who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, or for lower ranking personnel you want to pin a medal on for no good reason

[. . .]

This awards inflation was a very unpopular aspect of the Vietnam war, and became a major embarrassment after the 1983 Grenada invasion (where the army tried to award more medals than there were troops involved, but the public caught wind of it and forced the brass to back off.)

Compared to the Canadian military, the US hands out a lot more medals: in my long-ago militia days, we used to joke that American recruits got medals for shining boots and using the latrine. Of course, that was right after the Vietnam era, so the “medal inflation” was perhaps at its most obvious stage.

Canadian retailers are “furious” at customers for looking to the US for cheaper prices

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

A brief filler piece on the Canadian Press newswire explains only part of the reason so many Canadian shoppers are headed south to do their Christmas shopping this year:

This is Black Friday in the U.S., but many Canadian retailers are a furious red at the thought of consumers heading south for bargains.

The Retail Council of Canada says there is a long list of reasons to shop north of the border.

It says retailers are a vital part of any community’s economy and it employs 10 per cent of the workforce.

It also reminds consumers that Canadian taxes — which cause much of the traffic south — help pay for health care and education.

The higher taxes are certainly a big part of the explanation, but even if you control for tax, Canadian prices are generally higher than their US counterparts. For example, a paperback I picked up at random from our coffee table (published quite recently) has a price of $7.99 on it. If you’re an American, that is. Canadians pay $10.99. The Canadian dollar is around US$0.98.

Nice little markup, eh? Add the 13% Hack-and-Slash Tax on top of that, and you know exactly why thousands of Canadians are willing to put up with long lines at the border to do their shopping in the States.

“[T]he anti-TSA movement … is really a front for the Koch brothers”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

Justin Raimondo pours scorn on the recent anti-libertarian hit piece in The Nation:

Speaking of implausible fiction, The Nation recently ran a piece by Mark “I spit on libertarians” Ames and Yasha Levine, which determined that the anti-TSA movement — that seems to have sprung up like a last gasp of life from the old America — is really a front for the Koch brothers, two formerly libertarian billionaires who have become the deus ex machina of clueless “progressive” commentators who cannot otherwise explain the explosion of anti-government anti-authoritarian populism currently upending politics. Glenn Greenwald seems to have taken care of the Ames-Levine fantasists, putting them in their proper place as apologists for the Obama regime and all its works, but one more thing needs to be said:

If Ames and Levine are going to become the “go to” team for the dirt on libertarians, such as it is, they ought to learn their subject. Because the very idea of Charles and David Koch leading a national resistance movement involving civil disobedience on a massive scale is laughable: to anyone who knows them, or knows of them in more than a glancing way, this can only provoke gales of unrestrained laughter. It is sheer laziness to believe this. Indeed, if only the Brothers Koch, and the plethora of organizations their money has funded, were that radical! Unfortunately, they are not: a stodgy, boring conservatism marks their both their methods and their politics, and always has.

Ames and Levine need to do some real research. It was the anti-Koch wing of the libertarian movement, centered around LewRockwell.com, that first gave John Tyner’s act of defiance the publicity and velocity that made it go viral. And if LRC is a front for the Koch brothers, then we have truly entered Bizarro World. In that case, so too is Antiwar.com a Koch front — and so why have we been doing this fundraising campaign for the past two weeks, begging our readers to save us from oblivion?

Gee, it seems like that check from the Kochs got lost in the mail! Charles, could you please look into that? Thanks.

H/T to Matt Welch for the link.

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