Quotulatiousness

April 17, 2012

Chateauguay Magazine: a clear and present danger to the integrity of the French language in Quebec

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:45

Because it publishes with both French and English contents, the Quebec government’s language police have launched an investigation:

A monthly newsletter in the city of Chateauguay, Quebec, has caused a stir and it has nothing to do with its content. A resident complained there was too much English in the newsletter and now, Quebec’s language watchdog has launched an investigation.

The Office Quebecois de La Langue Francaise is looking into why the newsletter, called the “Chateauguay magazine,” is written in both French and English. The office says that’s a clear violation of the Charter of the French language, or Bill 101.

The office wants to ensure that the all the city’s communication with citizens is done only in the official language of French.

The folks in Chateauguay are apparently being oppressed because the magazine includes content addressed to the 26% of the population that speaks English.

Argentina’s latest economic lesson

Filed under: Americas, Economics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:50

Jan Boucek explains why Argentina is providing a helpful example to other countries on what not to do in economic policy:

This week, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner announced the seizure of Spanish oil company Repsol’s stake in Argentine oil company YPF to give the government 51% control. Spain is outraged and has recalled its ambassador. […]

Ms Fernandez justified her move on the grounds that YPF has failed to invest sufficiently to prevent Argentina from importing ever greater quantities of fuel. The fact that Argentine oil reserves have been dwindling means the sector needs greater and increasingly sophisticated investment to reach more complex structures, just like in the North Sea. Expropriation isn’t going to attract that kind of high-risk investment.

[. . .]

The YPF seizure continues Argentina’s cavalier attitude towards other people’s money shown back in 2008 when Ms Fernandez grabbed some $24 billion of private pension funds and used central bank reserves to meet debt payments. More recently, the country has been in a spat with the IMF over the quality of its statistics. Argentina claims inflation is running at somewhere between 5% and 11% but private independent estimates put the number at somewhere around 25%. The Economist is refusing to publish official Argentine inflation data.

Update: Well, regardless of the state of the economy, President Fernandez de Kirchner has a friend in the White House! President Obama has indicated his support for the Argentinian claim to … the ¿Maldives?

President Obama erred during a speech at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, when attempting to call the disputed archipelago by its Spanish name.

Instead of saying Malvinas, however, Mr Obama referred to the islands as the Maldives, a group of 26 atolls off that lie off the South coast of India.

The Maldives were a British protectorate from 1887 to 1965 and the site of a UK airbase for nearly 20 years.

The US Navy’s next destroyer will be the USS Lyndon B. Johnson

Filed under: History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

I guess they’re happy they don’t have to use that particular name on an aircraft carrier:

Strike one against the U.S.S. Lyndon Johnson: the Gulf of Tonkin incident. A confusing episode off the Vietnamese coast on August 2, 1964 resulted in a brief maritime skirmish with the North Vietnamese. The destroyer U.S.S. Maddox got shot; one of its aircraft was damaged. It was unclear who fired first. (A claimed follow-on engagement two days later was ultimately determined to have been a fiction.) Johnson’s administration, seeking an excuse to escalate U.S. involvement in Vietnam, portrayed the incident to Congress as a clear-cut act of North Vietnamese aggression. A decade later, the futile Vietnam war had claimed 57,000 American lives.

Strike two: Lyndon Johnson’s Naval war record was similarly dubious. As Johnson’s magisterial biographer, Robert Caro, documented in Means of Ascent, Johnson’s Naval commission in World War II was the result of string-pulling. (Johnson was a sitting congressman at the time; he sought a commission to bolster his political career.) His military career consisted of a single combat flight over the Pacific for which he received a Silver Star. For the next two decades, Johnson repeatedly exaggerated his tall tale of defying a Japanese Zero.

Strike three: the U.S.S. Lyndon Johnson will be a Zumwalt-class destroyer — a class of ship singled out by good-government watchdogs as an unaffordable boondoggle.

Buckyballs: the silver bullet for aging?

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

Well, it’s been shown to almost double normal lifespan … in rats. But in only one study so far:

In the current study researchers fed the molecule dissolved in olive oil to rats and compared outcomes to a control group of rats who got plain olive oil.

The main question they wanted to answer was whether chronic C60 administration had any toxicity, what they discovered actually surprised them.

“Here we show that oral administration of C60 dissolved in olive oil (0.8 mg/ml) at reiterated doses (1.7 mg/kg of body weight) to rats not only does not entail chronic toxicity,” they write “but it almost doubles their lifespan.”

“The estimated median lifespan (EML) for the C60-treated rats was 42 months while the EMLs for control rats and olive oil-treated rats were 22 and 26 months, respectively,” they write.

Using a toxicity model the researchers demonstrated that the effect on lifespan seems to be mediated by “attenuation of age-associated increases in oxidative stress”

SpaceX Dragon cleared for April 30 flight to ISS

Filed under: Science, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Brid-Aine Parnell updates the status of the SpaceX Dragon re-supply flight to the International Space Station at the end of the month:

The cargoship test flight, assuming it goes off without a hitch, will mark the first time a commercially made spacecraft has ever blasted off to visit the ISS.

NASA and SpaceX officials met yesterday in Houston for the Flight Readiness Review, a typical part of pre-launch prep at the agency, and confirmed that the Dragon and its SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket were on track for the end of this month.

“Everything looks good heading to the April 30 launch date,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, in a canned statement.

The Dragon is due to blast off from Cape Canaveral at 12.22 EDT (16.22 GMT) carrying 1,200 pounds of cargo.

Because this is a test flight, the cargo isn’t critical stuff for the astronauts, but NASA and SpaceX are still hoping to see the ship fly close enough to the station for its robotic arm to grab it and berth it, which is the tricky bit.

Stephen Harper admits the current drug war approach is “not working”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:07

Okay, pretty pedestrian stuff for most Canadians, but an amazing admission for one of Canada’s foremost and outspoken drug warriors to make:

Harper met Canadian journalists and readily admitted differences over the exclusion of Cuba from the Latin summit. He admitted, too, to a disagreement over British rule in the Falkland Islands.

But he was not ready to agree that the division over drug policy is so clear-cut. Rather, he insisted that there is much agreement. Then came the most interesting quote of the day.

“What I think everybody believes,” Harper said, “is that the current approach is not working. But it is not clear what we should do.”

This would be intriguing from any prime minister. From Stephen Harper, whose government’s crime bill ratchets up the penalties for drug possession, it was startling.

But don’t worry, Conservative hard-liners: after that brief slip into honest talk about the ongoing failure of drug prohibition, he quickly rallied and got back to the standard drug warrior talking points:

Lest anyone think he’d undergone a conversion in Cartagena, Harper quickly added the other side of the story.

Drugs, he said, “are illegal because they quickly and totally — with many of the drugs — destroy people’s lives.”

Update: Chris Selley reads the tea leaves and thinks there’s a hint in Harper’s words that may indicate a slight improvement:

So, there’s the same old lunacy. Ending alcohol prohibition was a pretty “simple answer,” wasn’t it? One doesn’t hear many regrets about it nowadays. It is amazing that it still needs to be said, but one more time: Prohibition ensures the overall supply of any given drug will be far more dangerous, if not more addictive, than it would be otherwise. Criminals have only made as much money trafficking drugs, only killed as many scores of thousands of people as they have, because those drugs are illegal. And in light of this, cracking down on otherwise law-abiding people for growing and distributing small amounts of marijuana is patently insane.

Still, if we parse Mr. Harper’s words closely — perhaps too closely — we find him arguing that “many” drugs “destroy people’s lives,” which implies that some don’t. If the “current approach is not working,” as Mr. Harper says, and if “there is a willingness” to consider other approaches … well, what else can we possibly be talking about except, at the very least, lightening up on pot?

Most likely, of course, this was just situational rhetoric. If Mr. Harper was going to go temporarily squishy on drugs, it would be among presidents and prime ministers whose constituents are slaughtered to feed Mr. Harper’s constituents’ habits. Central and South American leaders grow weary of this, as you might imagine.

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