Ignatieff feels that by tweaking the system, he can make it more palatable to rural Canadians and less objectionable to the eight Liberals who originally voted for its abolition. He thinks that by dropping the renewal fees registered gun owners pay and making failure to register a ticketing rather than criminal violation for first-time offenders, he has struck a compromise that will allow him to rein in his caucus while still being seen as a champion of gun control.
He hasn’t. Ignatieff’s plan won’t make a single Canadian safer. It will make the dysfunctional, obsolete registry more expensive while simultaneously making it weaker. The registry has already failed and permanently alienated large swaths of voters from the Liberal party. Why is Ignatieff the last person to realize this?
To accomplish his “goals,” Ignatieff has not only decided to write off any hopes for a Liberal expansion into rural Canada for a generation, further relegating his party to also-ran status anywhere outside of downtown Toronto and Montreal, but has also called into question his much-discussed respect for Parliament. Private member’s bills have traditionally been opportunities for all MPs to vote their conscience — an important tradition Ignatieff would set aside just to prop up the long-gun registry.
Matt Gurney, “Michael Ignatieff’s brand new mistake”, National Post, 2010-04-22
April 22, 2010
QotD: Ignatieff’s gun registry position
April 21, 2010
“The biggest defeat for internet freedom in the UK since it opened for business”
Andrew Orlowski looks at the overwhelming legislative victory for the music industry in the UK:
Back in January, a senior music business figure explained to me that Clause 17, which gave open-ended powers to the Secretary of State, was unlikely to survive the wash-up. But he didn’t much care; the other sections which compelled the ISPs to take action against infringers were good enough. Anything else was a bonus – possibly even a distraction. Yet to the amazement of the music business, web blocking is now legislation.
I think this is a watershed in internet campaigning. It’s not just a tactical defeat, it’s a full-on charge of the light brigade, and the biggest defeat for internet freedom in the UK since it opened for business. I’ve spent time talking to legislators and protagonists, and concluded that it was avoidable. Much of the argument was already lost when the Bill was introduced last November, admittedly, but campaigners’ tactics made a bad situation worse. This explodes the idea — sometimes called the ‘Overton Window’ in the jargon — that by adopting an extreme position, you pull the centre ground your way. The digital rights campaigners forced waverers into the music business camp, and hardened their support for tougher measures against file sharers.
In the end, the BPI wiped the floor with the Open Rights Group.
April 15, 2010
“Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! Oh, never mind . . .”
Marni Soupcoff points out that the World Health Organization should have been far more forthcoming after their intial “the sky is falling” announcements caused panic last year over H1N1:
Admit your mistakes before others exaggerate them. That’s the oft-quoted wry advice of writer and retired surgeon Dr. Andrew V. Mason. Perhaps the World Health Organization (WHO) was trying to follow it this week by convening a three-day meeting of outside experts to review the organization’s handling of the recent swine flu outbreak. The problem is, despite claiming to want to know what went wrong as much as what went right, the WHO seems unwilling to even entertain the possibility that it created a counterproductive panic by labelling H1N1 a pandemic of the highest order (“level 6”).
Swine flu, as you’ve probably realized by now, has turned out to be a mild, not particularly deadly virus — it’s certainly far less deadly than the regular seasonal flu that most of us consider a mundane part of everyday life. If one were feeling charitable toward the WHO, one could point out that it didn’t know back in the spring of last year — when it shouted “level 6!” from the rooftops — that H1N1 would prove to be such a relatively innocuous bug. But it’s precisely because it didn’t know that the WHO should have been more cautious with its labelling. You don’t shout “fire” in a crowded theatre just because it smells like the popcorn might be a little on the burnt side. It’s not worth the chaos and alarm you might cause. (Or in this case, the run on vaccines and the resorting to quacks and sketchy “home” remedies.)
Between the unrestrained use of the term “pandemic” and the noted ability of the mass media to hype real and imagined risks, it’s almost surprising we didn’t have doomsday-style cults spring up over H1N1.
March 29, 2010
Nanny state to prevent the Queen from using stairs
I find this hard to believe:
A row over a staircase has led to the Queen withdrawing from an appearance at the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo during her forthcoming visit to Canada.
The tattoo would seem to be an ideal event to be graced by Her Majesty. It was a favourite of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, who opened the original one in 1979, and gained its royal title in honour of the Queen’s 80th birthday in 2006.
However, the Canadians reckon that Her Majesty is too old to manage the stairs.
Insulting and idiotic. Nicely played, organizers! You get to look like right twits, you’ve managed to offend the Queen, and you still appear as blithering bureaucratic meddlers to the rest of us.
He added: “If it is a condition [to use the stairs] for her to turn up then we can’t accept it. Do people still get their heads chopped off for defying the Queen?”
If. Only.
H/T to Taylor Empire Airways for the link.
March 15, 2010
Latest Iraq war drama bombs at box office
Hard though it may be to believe, American film-goers still don’t seem to want to watch anti-American movies:
In Team America: World Police, the first Hollywood-financed movie inspired by the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its attendant political controversy, South Park‘s Trey Parker and Matt Stone dispatched a squad of U.S. guerrillas — all in marionette form — to take down an Axis of Evil dictator and, in the process, slaughter the real villains of the piece: a bunch of self-important celebrities who had publicly opposed the U.S. policy. One of these stars is Matt Damon, who’s portrayed as such an idiot that all his dialogue consists of his grinning stupidly and saying, “Matt Damon!” The puppet Damon ends up dead, his head snapped by a Team America hero.
The real Matt Damon didn’t fare much better as the star of the new Green Zone: he went looking for the truth about Iraq’s WMDs, and got blown up by the IED of public indifference. The box-office curse of movies about the U.S. Mess-o-potamian escapade remained unbroken, as Damon became the latest star — after George Clooney, Jamie Foxx, Tom Cruise, Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal, not to mention the South Park guys — whose attempts to address the blood and blunders in our Mideast wars tanked with the mass audience.
Green Zone, reteaming Damon with Paul Greengrass, his director in the last two, very popular Jason Bourne films, earned just $14.5 million in its first three days at North American theaters, according to early studio estimates. That’s way below industry predictions (in the low to middle $20 millions) and less than a quarter of the $62 million amassed this weekend by the defending champ, Alice in Wonderland, which has leapt like a White Rabbit past the $200 million mark in just 10 days.
Full disclosure: haven’t seen it, almost certainly won’t see it. I’m not much of a movie fan, especially the type of movie with heavy-handed “message” overtones. Even though I’m well-read in military history, I rarely watch war movies (I suspect I have a touch of “extreme empathy“, honestly).
Update: Frank J. thinks it’s not all bad:
I’m sure Green Zone will make up the money in the merchandising like the McDonald’s Happy Meals tie ins.
March 10, 2010
March 9, 2010
This is why Fark.com has a special “Florida” tag
The headline really does say it all:
Shows with gay characters could lose Florida tax credits
Florida lawmakers are considering a “family friendly” bill that would deny tax credits to films and television shows with gay characters in favor of those promoting traditional values.
The proposal, which has fueled a heated controversy for its discriminatory nature, would increase current tax credits from 2 to 5% of production costs for shows considered “family friendly.”
I’m not in favour of tax credits for TV and movie production in any case, but if your government is going to be providing them, they should at least be available to all legal forms of entertainment. Discrimination in this way is ridiculous — and I’d be astounded if it was actually constitutional.
Another anti-piracy scheme that hurts legitimate users
French games developer Ubisoft was the target of a DDoS attack over the weekend, which took out their license verification servers. This left thousands of gamers unable to play their games . . . but not all gamers. Only the ones who bought the game legitimately, because the “real” version requires online validation every time you play . . . the cracked versions do not:
PC users started reporting problems accessing some of the French company’s most popular games, including best-seller Assassin’s Creed 2, on Sunday afternoon. It later emerged that attackers had targeted the company’s controversial anti-piracy system, causing it to break down — which in turn left thousands of people unable to play.
The chaos was so widespread because of the way that Ubisoft’s copy protection system — which requires players who have bought the game to log in online and verify that they are not playing a pirated version — is designed. By flooding the anti-piracy servers with web traffic, the unknown attackers forced it to collapse and therefore locked out those players who tried to sign in.
This angered many gamers, who felt that they had been punished for buying legal copies of the company’s games — which cost as much as £50.
“We’ve had to agree to their draconian rules in order to play their game, however Ubisoft haven’t given a single thought to what happens when their servers screw up,” said one disgruntled user on the company’s web forums.
This is far from the only example of companies trying to protect their intellectual property by imposing DRM “solutions” which punish their customers. In the long term, no matter how nice the product may be, it can’t be a good practice to place barriers in the way of the people who’ve paid to use the product.
March 4, 2010
QotD: The problem with modern journalism
The Times seems to have forgotten the most important aspect of the news business. For years now ’skeptic’ has been a dirty word at the Times when the subject of climate change comes up. Excuse me, but reporters are supposed to be skeptics. They are supposed to be cynical, hard bitten people who trust their mothers — but cut the cards. They are supposed to think that scientists are probably too much in love with their data, that issue advocates have hidden agendas, that high-toned rhetoric is often a cover for naked self interest, that bloviating politicians have cynical motives and that heroes, even Nobel Prize laureates, have feet of clay. That is their job; it is why we respect them and why we pay attention to what they write.
Reporters are not supposed to be wide-eyed gee-whiz college kids believing everything they hear and using the news columns of the paper to promote a social agenda. They are wet blankets, not cheerleaders, Eeyores, not Piglets and they can safely leave all the advocacy and flag-waving to the editorial writers and the op-ed pages.
This is not just a question of liberal bias. The same wide-eyed gee-whiz culture shaped much of the reporting on the run-up to the Iraq War. Maybe the word we are looking for when trying to describe what’s wrong with the mainstream press isn’t ‘liberal’ — maybe the term is something like ‘credulous’ or ‘naive.’ The gradual substitution of ‘professional journalists’ for the old hard boiled hacks may have given us a generation of journalists who are used to trusting reputable authority. They honestly think that people with good credentials and good manners don’t lie.
Today’s journalists are much too well-bred and well-connected to stand there in the crowd shouting “The emperor has no clothes!” They’ve worked with the tailors, they have had long background interviews with the tailors, they’ve been present for some of the fittings. Of course the emperor’s new clothes are fantastic; only those rude and uncouth ‘clothing deniers’ still have any doubts.
Walter Russell Mead, “Treason is a matter of dates”, The American Interest Online, 2010-03-03
How to tell when the bureaucracy has won
It’s when you have 18 firefighters standing around for six hours debating about whether the rules allow them to rescue a dying woman:
An injured woman lay for six hours at the foot of a disused mine shaft because safety rules banned firefighters from rescuing her, an inquiry heard yesterday. As Alison Hume was brought to the surface by mountain rescuers she died of a heart attack.
A senior fire officer at the scene admitted that crews could only listen to her cries for help, after she fell down the 60ft shaft, because regulations said their lifting equipment could not be used on the public. A memo had been circulated in Strathclyde Fire and Rescue stations months previously stating that it was for use by firefighters only.
The Scotsman has more:
During the hearing, solicitor Gregor Forbes asked Mr Rooney: “On the basis of the manpower and equipment that you had available, is it your view it would it would have been possible for the firefighters to have brought the person to the surface before the mountain rescue team?”
He replied: “Yes, I believe so.”
The now-retired fire officer said the memo had been circulated around Strathclyde Fire and Rescue stations in March 2008.
Mr Forbes said: “Your position is that, while you were supplied with safe working-at-height equipment, while this could be used to bring up firefighters, it could not be used to bring up a member of the public.”
Mr Rooney, 51, told the inquiry at Kilmarnock Sheriff Court: “Yes, that’s correct.”
All 18 firefighters at the scene were trained and capable of using the equipment, he added.
Of the memo four months before the incident, he was then asked: “If Mrs Hume had fallen down the shaft on 13 March, instead of 26 July, you could have used a lowering line?”
Mr Rooney replied: “We could have.”
I lack words to express my outrage and disgust with the “men” who allowed themselves to be restrained by a memo in this situation.
H/T to Natalie Solent for the link.
The jokes just write themselves
By way of Kathy Shaidle’s blog, a court case that was custom-designed for certain political campaigns:
A 45-year-old woman, charged with ending a domestic dispute by killing her 26-year-old husband of five days, is a registered lobbyist for a group fighting domestic violence.
Arelisha Bridges was ordered held without bond in the Fulton County Jail. She is scheduled for a preliminary hearing later this month on charges of felony murder, murder, aggravated assault and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony.
Officials said Bridges claimed she was unemployed. But records show she is a lobbyist for an organization called the National Declaration for Domestic Violence Order; its Web site says the group is pushing legislation to create a database of those convicted of sex crimes or domestic abuse.
And remember, guns don’t kill people: lobbyists for anti-domestic violence groups do.
March 3, 2010
That’s not data: that’s collated anecdotes
The way things are going, we may need to throw out even more contaminated “data” that has been used to track climate for over a century, because it can’t technically be called anything other than anecdotal:
The network relies on volunteers in the 48 contiguous states to take daily readings of high and low temperatures and precipitation measured by sensors they keep by their homes and offices. They deliver that information to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), which uses it to track changes in the climate.
Requirements aren’t very strict for volunteers: They need a modicum of training and decent vision in at least one eye to qualify. And they’re expected to take measurements seven days a week, 365 days a year.
That’s a recipe for trouble, says Watts, who told FoxNews.com that less scrupulous members of the network often fail to collect the data when they go on vacation or are sick. He said one volunteer filled in missing data with local weather reports from the newspapers that stacked up while he was out of town.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Volunteers take their readings at different times of day, then round the temperatures to the nearest whole number and mark down their measurements on paper forms they mail in monthly to the NCDC headquarters in Ashville, N.C.
“You’ve got this kind of a ragtag network that’s reporting the numbers for our official climate readings,” said Watts, who found that 90 percent of the stations violated the government’s guidelines for where they may be located.
Watts believes that poor placement of temperature sensors has compromised the system’s data. Though they are supposed to be situated in empty clearings, many of the stations are potentially corrupted by their proximity to heat sources, including exhaust pipes, trash-burning barrels, chimneys, barbecue grills, seas of asphalt — and even a grave.
There’s an old saying, frequently used in statistical discussions, that the “plural of anecdote is not data”. This is an excellent example of unreliable information being collated and depended upon as if it was rigorous and objective.
February 26, 2010
Detroit has no problem that the government can’t make worse
Detroit has had a rough time lately — if you define “lately” as 50 years. But never fear . . . in spite of depopulation, de-industrialization, urban decay, crime, and soaring rates of illiteracy, the government is going to do something:
From its status as one of the wealthiest communities in the country, with a population of close to 2 million people 50 years ago, it has shrunk to a chaotic, sclerotic mess of 900,000 souls.
So in America, land of the free, the city elders of Detroit are now planning a forced march down Woodward Avenue. Citizens will be relocated from desolate neighbourhoods, their former homes bulldozed.
How will the city get people to move? In some cases, it will invoke eminent domain legislation, that favourite weapon of central planners, and expropriate. In others, it will simply cut off more services as they become too expensive to provide.
Mass state-driven relocation has happened in Communist China, the former Soviet Union, but America? Not since the creation of Native American reservations, and certainly not in 21st century urban areas.
February 25, 2010
Design mistakes in consumer electronics
Benj Edwards looks at the long list of consumer electronic devices with design problems (most of which could have been avoided):
You saved and you saved until you could finally buy that shiny new $1000 gadget that promised you everything under the stars. When it came time to plug it in, you found your joy being subsumed by abject horror. Your stomach plunged deep into your gut and you (yes, mortal non-designer you) recognized a fundamental flaw in your flashy gizmo so obvious that it made you want to pick up the device and smash it over the designer’s head.
Even the best designers make mistakes . . . but this article isn’t about them. We’re about to, ahem, celebrate the worst consumer electronics designers through the lens of their faulty creations. Since I’m far from an all-knowing technology god, I’ve limited our survey to fifteen design problems that have not only bugged me through the years, but that are widespread enough to have bugged many of you too. These problems aren’t limited to current technology, but they all fall into the nebulous realm known as “consumer electronics.” You know: TVs, telephones, VCRs, DVD players, MP3 players, and more.
February 20, 2010
The editors at the National Post have the reverb setting too high
In two different articles I looked at today, there appears to be a slight problem with repetition. For example, in Rex Murphy’s piece on the on-again, off again boycott of oil from Alberta by BB&B, he appears to be trying to make some sort of point by repeating the company’s abbreviated name:
It cannot be very encouraging if one of the most dynamic industries in our recession-plagued country is operating in a state of mental waywardness. And if Bed Bath & Beyond, with an assist from Whole Foods, have rescued the captains of our oil industry from unknowing mental distress, why then this apparent BBB BBB BBB boycott would be worth its weight in stacked linens and whole sacks of the finest nickel-plated multiple-nozzle shower-heads.
[. . .]
Bed Bath & Beyond “clarified” in a press release: “Characterizations that we [BB BB and B] have ‘rejected’ any particular fuels are not accurate as we are not in a position to do so” (emphasis mine). Which is a little ambiguous since it leaves open the thought that were BBB BBB BBB in “a position to do so,” they would. So Albertans might take home the message that Bed Bath & Beyond have distanced themselves from the idea of “rejecting” oil sands fuel, not to spare Albertan sensibilities, but because there is no way for them not to do so. They’re just stuck with it. A little lacking, wouldn’t you say, in grace and tact?
[. . .]
My guess is the wavelet of backlash from Alberta at the ForestEthics press release was sufficient to haul the monks of BBB BBB BBB out of the eco-choir. BBB BBB BBB may have thought that sending a little incense to the Al Gore contingent of The Science is Settled and The Himalayan Glaciers are Toast Church of Global Warming (pre-Climategate Division) would titillate the balance sheet among the eco-fervent. But they quickly thought better of it. Oh that old Gloria Mundi. How Sic it Transits.
[. . .]
The IP IP CC has less prestige now than the Golden Globes, and bears no little resemblance to that farce’s incestuous relationship with its “industry.” The IP IP CC chairman is a rude, busy man who writes erotic novels — his muse, apparently, Jacqueline Susann.
(Emphasis mine). I decided that I just didn’t get the joke, until I looked at the lengthy criticism of the Liberal Party’s insistence on incorporating abortion rights into the government’s plans for targeting foreign aid to mothers and children, where Conrad Black seems to stutter over the acronyms, too:
Canada should tax provincial transactions and elective energy sales, the sale-of non-essential goods, and reduce income taxes and abolish capital gains taxes on sales by Canadians of Canadian securities. We should reintroduce private medicine alongside the public health system, as most advanced countries have done. Our health-care system should not be a model for the United States of what not to do, as it now is. We should be proposing drastic reforms to the UN UN , NATO NATO NATO NATO and the IMF, and building our defence capacity. An army of 19,000 is a scandal for a country as important as Canada. We should assist the private sector in making Canadians owners of a serious automobile manufacturer, and in the fair and advantageous repatriation of more of our industry. And the stocks, if not the lash, should be restored to deal with Dalton McGuinty and Jean Charest for fouling our nest by criticizing the Alberta oil sands at the most futile international conference, Copenhagen, since the Defenestration of Prague.
