Quotulatiousness

November 3, 2013

“More bombshells” in the police document on Mayor Rob Ford, says the Toronto Star

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:03

I’ll be honest: I haven’t been following the twists and turns of the crusade by the Toronto media to oust Mayor Rob Ford. That’s not to say there isn’t actually news on the situation:

More bombshells are contained in a weighty police document used to obtain a search warrant for Mayor Rob Ford’s friend and occasional driver, according to a Star analysis of court information already released.

“Project Traveller and the Rob Ford connection” is the bold heading atop one section of still-sealed information. The pages are blacked out pending an ongoing court challenge.

Project Traveller was the recent guns and gangs investigation that saw massive arrests in north Etobicoke. Police Chief Bill Blair has said information learned in that probe led to the creation of the Ford investigation, dubbed Project Brazen 2. (Brazen 1 was an unrelated Scarborough investigation.)

Nearly 500 pages of a document presented before a judge to obtain a warrant to search Alexander “Sandro” Lisi’s home were released Thursday. Half is censored pending a court challenge by the Star and other media lawyers.

In examining the document, the Star has learned that some remarkable information remains sealed.

Whether any of the censored pages relate to the mysterious second video the Star first learned about in early August, and Blair confirmed last week, is not known.

The Star has been told by two sources this second video also features the mayor. Blair has said the second video is “relevant to this investigation.”

In his dramatic Thursday news conference Blair answered a question about whether Ford was in the first video. The chief first said the mayor was in “those” videos, then caught himself and only spoke about the first video.

Update: It’s worth noting that Ford’s popularity actually increased after the latest news came out.

Jim Souhan – It’s time to tank, Vikings!

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:29

In today’s Star Tribune, Jim Souhan makes a strong case for the Vikings to deliberately tank the rest of the 2013 season:

Let’s give the Vikings the benefit of the doubt, and assume they are trying to lose.

There is no reason to play Christian Ponder in a tackle football game unless you’re aggressively pursuing the first pick in the 2014 NFL draft.

While Vikings fans spend today watching Ponder run for 5 yards on third-and-10, remember that this, too, shall pass, even if the Vikings can’t.

Starting 1-6 should prompt Vikings management to orchestrate the first one-win season in franchise history.

It’s important to set goals.

Losing big doesn’t guarantee future success, but it gives an intelligent management team a chance. That’s been proved in every sport, every decade, and the best example of losing to win might belong to the franchise the Vikings will face today in Texas.

In 1989, Jerry Jones bought the Cowboys and hired Jimmy Johnson as his coach. Texans were appalled at Jones’ glib firing of the legendary Tom Landry, and at Jones’ clownish demeanor. Jones actually said he would be in charge of all phases of football from “socks to jocks,” even though Jones’ football experience was limited to playing in college and watching on television.

The JJs played up their chances of winning immediately. Then Johnson got halfway through his first preseason game and ditched all immediate ambition.

He tanked his first season, trading away his only name player, Herschel Walker, before finishing 1-15. He used prime draft slots and the bounty from the Walker deal to build a roster that won three Super Bowls and might have won more if Jones hadn’t fired him.

If the Cowboys had tried to contend in 1989, they might not have considered trading Walker, and wouldn’t have drafted near the top of each round. Inept play and intelligent management led to championships.

An interesting theory, but I really doubt that the Vikings are deliberately failing (although it would explain a few things like the quarterback controversy), and as with any conspiracy theory it’s hard to believe that such a design wouldn’t be leaked by at least a few disgruntled players and/or coaches (since the coaching staff is most likely to be negatively impacted by a terrible season).

I’d love to see the Vikings draft a genuine franchise quarterback next year, but I don’t want the team to quit playing this year.

Statue envy

Filed under: China, India, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

Tunku Varadarajan on India’s big statue and what it means:

Narendra Modi is the chief minister of the western Indian state of Gujarat, and he believes that his beloved India is a land of political pygmies. India’s current prime minister, whose job Modi covets to distraction, is an effete old technocrat who takes his orders from the bossy Italian widow of a former prime minister (who was himself the son of a prime minister, and the grandson of another). The old technocrat’s days in office are numbered, and his replacement as prime ministerial candidate for the ruling Congress party is Rahul Gandhi, the son of the Italian widow (she who must be obeyed), a clumsy “crown prince” of threadbare intellect who would inspire little confidence as the manager of a New Delhi pasta joint, let alone as prime minister of India.

India is a land of political midgets, damn it, and Narendra Modi is going to do something about it. To compensate for the meager stature of those with whom he must rub shoulders, he is going to give his country a giant statue — the tallest the world has ever seen. At 597 feet, this “Statue of Unity” will dwarf a 502-feet tall Buddha built in China in 2002, giving India — which suffers from a desperate form of penis-envy of China — something bigger at last than its massive northern neighbor. The statue, to be situated in Gujarat and made of bronze, iron and cement, will cost a scarcely trivial $340 million, much of which will come, in spite of Modi’s free-market protestations, directly from taxpayers who earn no more than $1,400 per annum. Do the moral math. (The official boast is that it will take only 42 months to build, although you’ve got to believe that the Chinese could complete the task in half the time.) When fully erect, it will be twice the height of the Statue of Liberty and four times that of Christ the Redeemer in Rio. “The world will be forced to look at India when this statue stands tall,” Modi has said. Indeed: But with what kind of gaze?

November 2, 2013

Jogging – the exercise of the devil

Filed under: Health, Humour — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:59

Scott Feschuk loves jogging. Well, he loves some things about jogging: pretty much everything about it except the actual “jogging” part:

I took up jogging recently because I had begun to lose sight of certain things in life, such as my genitals. Year upon year of sports viewing — abetted by halftime nachos, intermission chili dogs and anytime beers—had taken a physical toll. I’m not saying I was out of shape, but I still remember my first run in the springtime: the sweat, the laboured breathing, the searing chest pain. And that was just from climbing onto the treadmill.

Several months later, I am a changed man! Sure, I’m pretty much the same weight and I don’t look any better. And sure, I still consider the stairs to be the Devil’s method of ascent. (Folks, there’s a reason God invented the elevator, the escalator and waiting patiently until the object you want eventually comes downstairs of its own accord.)

[…]

Getting injured. Early this fall, I strained my hip and couldn’t run for a couple weeks. This turned out to be an ideal scenario because I could still self-identify as a jogger without having to, you know, jog. I’d wake up and think, “Yep, I’d be out there crushing a 10K run right now if I hadn’t hurt myself being SO SUPER ATHLETIC. Hmm, perhaps my recovery will be hastened by multiple Eggos!” By the way, there’s no quicker way to get in tight with runners than to ask them about their injuries. Runners love talking about injuries. YES, OLD MAN, PLEASE CONTINUE YOUR MESMERIZING TALE OF THE GREAT HAMSTRING PULL OF 1993.

The sense of satisfaction. I like knowing that I play a positive role out there: Other out-of-shape people see me and instantly feel better about themselves. They think, “Sure, my knees are shot and I’m running a 13-minute mile, but at least I’m not getting repeatedly concussed by my own man boobs like THAT guy.”

FATCA may have significant (negative) influence on Canadian law

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

In Maclean’s, Erica Alini tries to explain just what the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) is, and why Canadians should be very concerned about it:

To say that FATCA is controversial is an understatement. The law is so complex and onerous to implement that some foreign banks have reportedly kicked out their U.S. clients in order to avoid dealing with it. Americans living abroad are queuing to give up their U.S. passports over it. The other problem with FATCA is that it asks foreign banks to do things that are often illegal in their home countries, such as passing on certain private information.

It has caused a stir in Canada as well, but the press here generally portrays it as something that affects only dual citizens and green-card holders. Given the number of Americans who live in Canada, that would be enough to make it a big issue (and a big headache for Ottawa). But the truth is FATCA has the potential to touch a much larger number of unsuspecting Canadians.

[…]

In general, what you get for signing an agreement to enforce FATCA is a pledge that the U.S. will do its best to share some of its information on your country’s potential tax cheats. You read that right: Not a duty to reciprocate your efforts, but a lame “we’ll try hard” promise. That’s because the U.S. government does not, at the moment, have permission to force U.S. banks to share information with foreign governments. Only Congress can change that.

That sounds bad enough, but it gets worse for Canada. We are the exception — the only country with which the U.S. has an automatic information-sharing agreement. Now, the trouble with FATCA is that it demands some new information: Not about the Canadian assets and incomes of people who live in the U.S. but about the assets and incomes of people who live in Canada but might have some ties to the U.S. While Canadian taxation, thankfully, is based on residency — you owe the CRA if you’ve been living in Canada — the U.S. has started demanding that its citizens file taxes regardless of where they live.

One of the unforeseen effects of this legislation is that it’s been making it much harder for US citizens to do business in other countries or to work in other countries for extended periods of time. If foreign banks refuse to allow US citizens to open accounts, you’re imposing significant costs and extra inconvenience on people who are in no way attempting to hide assets or income from the IRS. As with so many government initiatives, it probably won’t inconvenience actual criminals all that much, but will primarily impact ordinary — innocent — US citizens.

It’s “time” for a change

Filed under: Business, Cancon, History, Railways, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:29

In Quartz, Allison Schrager wonders why we still bother with daylight savings time and four separate timezones for continental US states:

Click to see full-size version at Quartz

Click to see full-size version at Quartz

This year, Americans on Eastern Standard Time should set their clocks back one hour (like normal), Americans on Central and Rocky Mountain time do nothing, and Americans on Pacific time should set their clocks forward one hour. After that we won’t change our clocks again — no more daylight saving. This will result in just two time zones for the continental United States. The east and west coasts will only be one hour apart. Anyone who lives on one coast and does business with the other can imagine the uncountable benefits of living in a two-time-zone nation (excluding Alaska and Hawaii).

It sounds radical, but it really isn’t. The purpose of uniform time measures is coordination. How we measure time has always evolved with the needs of commerce. According to Time and Date, a Norwegian newsletter dedicated to time zone information, America started using four time zones in 1883. Before that, each city had its own time standard based on its calculation of apparent solar time (when the sun is directly over-head at noon) using sundials. That led to more than 300 different American time zones. This made operations very difficult for the telegraph and burgeoning railroad industry. Railroads operated with 100 different time zones before America moved to four, which was consistent with Britain’s push for a global time standard. The following year, at the International Meridian Conference, it was decided that the entire world could coordinate time keeping based on the British Prime Meridian (except for France, which claimed the Prime Median ran through Paris until 1911). There are now 24 (or 25, depending on your existential view of the international date line) time zones, each taking about 15 degrees of longitude.

Now the world has evolved further — we are even more integrated and mobile, suggesting we’d benefit from fewer, more stable time zones. Why stick with a system designed for commerce in 1883? In reality, America already functions on fewer than four time zones. I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8am instead of 9am, restaurants were packed at 6pm instead of 7pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. But for the last three years I lived in a state of constant confusion, I rarely knew the time and was perpetually an hour late or early. And for what purpose? If everyone functions an hour earlier anyway, in part to coordinate with other parts of the country, the different time zones lose meaning and are reduced to an arbitrary inconvenience. Research based on time use surveys found Americans’ schedules are determined by television more than daylight. That suggests in effect, Americans already live on two time zones.

H/T to Tyler Cowen for the link.

Catalonia – the next state in Europe?

Filed under: Europe, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:53

Daniel Bogre Udell looks at the state of the independence movement in Catalonia, which has been part of Spain since the War of Spanish Succession in 1714, except for a brief interlude during the Spanish Civil War:

This year, on September 11, hundreds of thousands of Catalans joined hands to form a human chain that extended 460 kilometers across their region, from the French Pyrenean border to Valencia. Complete with matching t-shirts and slogans, this robust act of protest was astonishingly well-organised, which came as no surprise: it was in fact the echo of a mass demonstration that took place one year prior, when a million people took to the streets of Barcelona under the banner: “Catalonia: The Next State in Europe.”

The day after that first demonstration, Catalan President Artur Mas publicly endorsed the protest and called for a referendum on independence. Shortly after, he convoked early elections which produced a sweeping pro-referendum majority in Barcelona.

Overnight, Catalan politics changed. The Independentists were now in control. Unionists softened their rhetoric. Nearly two hundred towns in the Catalan countryside preemptively declared independence [ca]. Parliament passed a declaration of sovereignty.

Instead of taking this clamor seriously and engaging the Catalan public, most in the Spanish government, including Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, positioned themselves firmly as antagonists. They insisted that referendum was illegal, framing Catalan nationalists as enemies of democracy and, in some extreme cases, comparing the sovereignty movement to Nazism.

They have also tried to promote the idea of Catalan nationalist ambitions as parochial and irrelevant. After a meeting with Catalan business leaders in Barcelona this month, Spain’s Deputy Prime Minister claimed not to have noticed any strong markers of regional identity. In a recent English-language interview with The Wall Street Journal, Prime Minister Rajoy described the hypothetical advent of Catalan independence as contrary to the world’s “natural evolution.” When addressing the Spanish public at the UN General Assembly, he went out of his way assure those in the chamber that none of his fellow world leaders had asked him about Catalonia.

Behind closed doors, however, it seems that Spanish officials are more concerned than their dismissive behavior implies: recently, Spain’s UN delegation drafted a report on how best to respond if Catalan leaders take their case to the international community in the wake of a successful referendum on independence. It asserted that Madrid could possibly draft security council allies into blocking Catalonia’s full statehood, but would be relatively powerless to stop the region’s admission as a General Assembly observer.

“Catalonia: The Next Partially-Recognized State” may not be as elegant a turn of phrase as those coined by activists, but it nonetheless haunts politicians in Madrid.

ENDA as political theatre

Filed under: Business, Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:41

Walter Olson explains why the proposed federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), even if passed, would not do much to help the people it’s supposedly designed to protect:

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote Monday on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill to “prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity” that’s been proposed in one form or another for nearly 40 years. It will be a symbolic vote at many different levels. First, the bill stands little chance of passage in the GOP-controlled House; the point of giving it prolonged attention now is more to inflict political damage on Republicans for resisting a popular measure than to get a bill on President Obama’s desk. Second, it seeks to ratify (and take political credit for) a social change that has already occurred through nearly all the country, including even very conservative locales. Most larger employers are now on record with policies against discriminating against gay employees, and even smaller employers without formal policies mostly hew to the same path in practice, for many good reasons that include not wanting to lose the talents of employees from any demographic.

ENDA is a less salient bill than it looks in a second way as well; statistics from the many states and municipalities that have passed similar bills (“mini-ENDAs”) indicate that they do not serve in practice as a basis for litigation as often as one might expect. This may arise from the simple circumstance that most employees with other options prefer to move on rather than sue when an employment relationship turns unsatisfactory, all the more so if suing might require rehashing details of their personal life in a grueling, protracted, and public process. The forbidden group categories that tend more to drive HR managers crazy are things like age, disability, and criminal record consideration, where the law regularly tries to forbid behavior that in fact is perfectly rational for employers to engage in.

On a level of sheer entertainment, the bill has certainly furnished more than one way for some conservatives and Republicans to make themselves appear ridiculous. Some GOP supporters in Congress, for example, seem to be tempted by ENDA as an “easy,” crowd-pleasing vote to show they’re not always on the anti-gay side. But consider the implication: lawmakers who take this path come across as willing to sacrifice the freedom of private actors — as libertarians recognize, every expansion of laws against private discrimination shrinks the freedom of association of the governed — even as they go to the mat to preserve disparate treatment by the government itself in the recognition of family relationships. Sorry, but that’s upside-down. A classical liberal stance can reasonably ask the government itself to behave neutrally among different citizens with their differing values and aspirations, but should not attempt to enforce neutrality on private citizens themselves.

November 1, 2013

This week in Guild Wars 2

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:32

My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. The Halloween event, Blood and Madness, is drawing to a close and the new Tower of Nightmares event has begun. There’s also the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.

Let’s hope badBIOS is an elaborate Halloween hoax

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:05

Dan Goodin posted a scary Halloween tale at Ars Technica yesterday … at least, I’m hoping it’s just a scary story for the season:

In the intervening three years, Ruiu said, the infections have persisted, almost like a strain of bacteria that’s able to survive extreme antibiotic therapies. Within hours or weeks of wiping an infected computer clean, the odd behavior would return. The most visible sign of contamination is a machine’s inability to boot off a CD, but other, more subtle behaviors can be observed when using tools such as Process Monitor, which is designed for troubleshooting and forensic investigations.

Another intriguing characteristic: in addition to jumping “airgaps” designed to isolate infected or sensitive machines from all other networked computers, the malware seems to have self-healing capabilities.

“We had an air-gapped computer that just had its [firmware] BIOS reflashed, a fresh disk drive installed, and zero data on it, installed from a Windows system CD,” Ruiu said. “At one point, we were editing some of the components and our registry editor got disabled. It was like: wait a minute, how can that happen? How can the machine react and attack the software that we’re using to attack it? This is an air-gapped machine and all of a sudden the search function in the registry editor stopped working when we were using it to search for their keys.”

Over the past two weeks, Ruiu has taken to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus to document his investigative odyssey and share a theory that has captured the attention of some of the world’s foremost security experts. The malware, Ruiu believes, is transmitted though USB drives to infect the lowest levels of computer hardware. With the ability to target a computer’s Basic Input/Output System (BIOS), Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), and possibly other firmware standards, the malware can attack a wide variety of platforms, escape common forms of detection, and survive most attempts to eradicate it.

But the story gets stranger still. In posts here, here, and here, Ruiu posited another theory that sounds like something from the screenplay of a post-apocalyptic movie: “badBIOS,” as Ruiu dubbed the malware, has the ability to use high-frequency transmissions passed between computer speakers and microphones to bridge airgaps.

The Obamacare moment of clarity

Filed under: Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:49

In the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer on the moment of understanding:

Every disaster has its moment of clarity. Physicist Richard Feynman dunks an O-ring into ice water and everyone understands instantly why the shuttle Challenger exploded. This week, the Obamacare O-ring froze for all the world to see: Hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters went out to people who had been assured a dozen times by the president that “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.”

The cancellations lay bare three pillars of Obamacare: (a) mendacity, (b) paternalism and (c) subterfuge.

(a) Those letters are irrefutable evidence that President Obama’s repeated you-keep-your-coverage claim was false. Why were they sent out? Because Obamacare renders illegal (with exceedingly narrow “grandfathered” exceptions) the continuation of any insurance plan deemed by Washington regulators not to meet their arbitrary standards for adequacy. Example: No maternity care? You are terminated.

So a law designed to cover the uninsured is now throwing far more people off their insurance than it can possibly be signing up on the nonfunctioning insurance exchanges. Indeed, most of the 19 million people with individual insurance will have to find new and likely more expensive coverage. And that doesn’t even include the additional millions who are sure to lose their employer-provided coverage. That’s a lot of people. That’s a pretty big lie.

Wine with food – the natural pairing

Filed under: Food, Wine — Nicholas @ 07:28

In the Wall Street Journal, Will Lyons discusses the correct way to drink wine … with food, that is:

HOW SHOULD YOU ENJOY a bottle of wine? The short answer is any way you like. As long as you show it a little respect and serve it at a reasonable temperature, you will be hard pushed not to enjoy its myriad flavors and aromas. I have always found that wine is much more portable and robust than you think. Over the years, some of my favorite bottles have been enjoyed not in the presence of white tablecloths and crystal decanters but on picnics in fields, over a simple lunch of fried sardines or with a salad and a plate of cold meats.

[…]

“If you want to get pleasure out of both the wine and the food, you don’t want one to overpower the other,” he says. “Think of the wine as a seasoning, almost, for the food. If you take oysters, for example, a lovely, lemony, crisp white wine is similar to that little squeeze of lemon juice or drop of vinegar you put on the oysters.”

Balance and harmony are the two watchwords in wine appreciation. Sitting down with family and friends, around the table, is one of the human race’s ancient rituals. Pouring wine with the meal is, as the philosopher Roger Scruton points out, a ritual that allows us to achieve harmony rather than slip into the temptations of excess. In “I Drink Therefore I Am,” he notes: “Wine properly served slows everything down, establishing a rhythm of gentle sips rather than gluttonous swiggings.”

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