Quotulatiousness

February 19, 2013

Horns on Viking helmets? Let’s all agree to blame Wagner…

Filed under: Europe, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:37

In The Economist, a sort-of-apology for perpetuating the myth that Vikings wore helmets with horns:

Economist cover with Viking horns

The practice of burying the dead with their goods has left archaeologists with lots of evidence about the Vikings, who were arguably the first maritime superpower. Unfortunately, few Viking helmets survive intact. The small sample size cannot prove the point definitively, but they are all horn-free.

Why, then, do cartoon Vikings, Scandinavian football fans and Economist covers persist in giving their helmets horns? As in the rest of Europe, Scandinavia saw an upsurge of interest during the 19th century in home-grown cultural traditions and images. Folk dances, songs, sagas — all were revived and celebrated. The 18th century had seen most of Europe trying to imitate sophisticated Parisian fashions. Now trolls were cool. Where there were gaps in the historical record, artists often used their imagination to reinvent traditions. Painters began to show Vikings with horned helmets, evidently inspired by Wagner’s costume designer, Professor Carl Emil Doepler, who created horned helmets for use in the first Bayreuth production of “Der Ring des Nibelungen” in 1876, as a reader points out in a letter we publish this week. (For the full story, see Roberta Frank, “The Invention of the Viking Horned Helmet“, published in International Scandinavian and Medieval Studies in Memory of Gerd Wolfgang Weber, 2000.)

February 14, 2013

The LCBO crowds out another private business

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

In the latest Ontario Wine Review, Michael Pinkus writes an obituary for Wine Access magazine and hurls “J’accuse!” at the Ontario government’s liquor monopoly for the murder:

Now there are some of you out there who will be asking how can the Ontario Liquor Monopoly put an Alberta-based magazine out of business — well it’s actually quite simple, if you’re willing to connect the dots: if you only have a certain amount of advertising dollars to spend in Canada how much are you going to allocate to the largest population in the country (Ontario); even more to the point, how much do you put into the Liquor Board willing to buy more product if you’ll spend more of your ad budget with them versus a magazine that might (or might not) increase your sales.

I have long advocated for the LCBO to cease publication of this magazine. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beauty of a publication — my wife fawns over the pictures every issue — but it’s a publication that competes against private enterprise, and the LCBO is after all an extension of the government — so what I, and many others have said is unfortunately true: the government in essence, taking thousands of dollars out of the hands of the companies that pay taxes, their own populace, and competing against them. Sure I hear many of you saying “finally my tax dollars hard at work”: but ask yourself this question: how would you like the government competing against your business?

People don’t see the problem with Food & Drink magazine because they aren’t in the publishing business and are not affected by its publication, but consider these numbers: in the Holiday 2011 issue of said magazine, an almost Sears catalogue sized edition, there were 308 pages total, 140 of those were advertising (not including product placement and promotions within editorial / advertorial which is no doubt paid for as well — and don’t forget the 6 hefty inserts included inside the plastic wrapper) … that’s money that was not spent with privately run magazines that could have, and most likely, would have. Here are some more numbers to boggle the mind. According to the Luxury Media Sales website a full page in F&D magazine is $20,588 (2012 rate) — that’s a lot of money the government of Ontario is taking from their tax paying private enterprise magazines (in a democratic, free market system — who would believe the government is competing against their own populace). Think about that kind of money funneling out of your business sector, your chosen profession or what you do for a living (it’s close to 3 million dollars – 140 x $20,588) … do you think you’d be making the kind of money you are now? Would you welcome that kind of competition? And before you crassly answer “sure, the government can’t do anything right” also put in the fact that they’re the biggest game in town and control what you sell. The nightmare scenario is the closing of your business due to unfair competition and lack of revenue (but it’s the government, so what can you do) — in the publishing game you just shuttered a magazine because of lack of revenue and unfair competition. If you’re RedPoint Media you close down Wine Access magazine.

So, in Clue fashion, who killed Wine Access? It was Colonel LCBO, in the wine cellar, with the government monopoly privilege.

December 17, 2012

Kim Jong-Un is Time man of the year (with help from 4chan)

Filed under: Asia, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:03

Tim Cushing on 4chan’s latest use of Time as a comedic sidekick:

4chan has returned to the limelight once again to torment reluctant sidekick TIME by voting early and often in its own particular idiom (read: bots, prolly) for Person of the Year. And the winner is none other than North Korean dictator and poster boy for evil, nepotism and ill-fitting grey smocks, Kim Jong-un. Here’s a portion of Time‘s statement on the poll results, which is good naturedly resigned, much in the way parents raising child 7+ are more concerned with keeping the cleaning products, bandages and fire extinguisher close at hand than preventing the feat of daredevilry that is currently being performed using Sharpies, a purloined Zippo and the second floor bannister.

    Kim Jong Un is having a good year. After taking over the leadership of North Korea from his late father Kim Jong Il, at the end of 2011, he’s solidified his control over the country, appeared on TIME‘s cover and he was even named “Sexiest Man Alive.” (OK, that honor was actually bestowed as a spoof in the satirical newspaper, The Onion, but a Chinese news service mistook the Onion piece for real news and the story went global.)

    Now, he’s gotten the most votes in TIME‘s completely unscientific reader Person of the Year Poll with 5.6 million votes. Not bad for a man who didn’t make an official public appearance until 2010.

December 7, 2012

No, we’re not running out of phosphorus (phosphate) and potassium (potash)

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:58

The most recent outbreak of the-sky-is-falling, we’re-at-peak-whatever panic mongering is debunked by Vaclav Smil:

Jeremy Grantham, a well-known presence in the financial world, recently published a World View column in the journal Nature in which he concludes that, “simply, we are running out” of almost all commodities whose consumption sustains modern civilization. There is nothing new about such claims, and since the emergence of a vocal global peak oil movement during the late 1990s, many other minerals have been added to the endangered list. Indeed, there is now a book called Peak Everything. What makes Grantham’s column – published under the alarmist headline “Be Persuasive. Be Brave. Be Arrested (If Necessary)” – worth noticing, and deconstructing, is that he puts his claims in terms more suitable for tabloids than for one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious scientific weekly magazines.

His direst example is “the impending shortage of two fertilizers: phosphorus (phosphate) and potassium (potash). These two elements cannot be made, cannot be substituted, are necessary to grow all life forms, and are mined and depleted. It’s a scary set of statements…. What happens when these fertilizers run out is a question I can’t get satisfactorily answered and, believe me, I have tried.” Well, he could have tried just a bit harder: an Internet search would have led him, in mere seconds, to “World Phosphate Rock Reserves and Resources,” a study published in 2010 by the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

This detailed assessment of the world’s phosphate reserves (that are the part of a wider category of resources that is recoverable with existing techniques and at acceptable cost) concluded that they are adequate to produce fertilizer for the next 300 to 400 years. As with all mineral resource appraisals (be they of crude oil or rare earths), the study’s conclusions can be criticized and questioned, and the statement by the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative is perhaps the best document of that kind. But even the most conservative interpretation of IFDC’s assessment shows that phosphates have a reserve/production ratio well in excess of 100 years, higher than that of many other critical mineral resources.

October 5, 2012

IT security magazine gets trolled

Filed under: Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:04

At The Register, John Leyden talks about the researchers who finally got sick of being asked to write articles (unpaid) for the “biggest IT security magazine in the world”:

Security researchers have taken revenge on a publishing outlet that spams them with requests to write unpaid articles — by using a bogus submission to satirise the outlet’s low editorial standards.

Hakin9 bills rather grandly bills itself as the “biggest IT security magazine in the world”, published for 10 years, and claims to have a database of 100,000 IT security specialists. Many of these security specialists are regularly spammed with requests to submit articles, without receiving any payment in return.

Rather than binning another of its periodic requests, a group of researchers responded with a nonsensical article entitled DARPA Inference Checking Kludge Scanning, which Warsaw-based Hakin9 published in full, apparently without checking. The gobbledygook treatment appeared as the first chapter in a recent eBook edition of the magazine about Nmap, the popular security scanner.

In reality there’s no such thing as DARPA Inference Checking Kludge Scanning (or DICKS, for short) and the submission was a wind-up. Nonetheless an article entitled Nmap: The Internet Considered Harmful — DARPA Inference Checking Kludge Scanning appeared as the lead chapter in recent eBook guide on Nmap by Hakin9.

September 16, 2012

The other side of the Philip Roth/Wikipedia spat

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

I admit that I didn’t follow this story when it got (for a literary spat) saturation coverage in various media outlets. Here (speaking in a private capacity and not as an official Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson) is Oliver, and he’s got a bit of refuting to do:

First, this is not a fundamental flaw in Wikipedia’s central precepts — this is one author and his agents being unable to navigate the internet and/or report the truth with any degree of accuracy. This is our attempt to make our information not only accurate, but verifiable — to ensure that readers have a hope in hell of actually checking the accuracy of our information. This is not achieved by enabling subjects to become the oracles of truth for any article that mentions them, or telling readers “we know it’s accurate because Philip Roth said so, and you’ll just have to trust us on that”. We don’t want readers to trust us. We want readers to think and be able to do their own research.

Second, maybe (although I doubt it) we need to have a frank debate over how we handle primary and secondary sourcing. But for all of the reasons explained above, Philip Roth and the Editorial of Azkaban is a terrible poster boy for such a debate.

Third: people should perhaps start having a debate about the way authors are treated in “proper” sources. The New Yorker, the Guardian, ABC News and the Los Angeles Times — all respected bodies. And all, without being able and/or willing to do their own research, happily published or republished Roth’s assertions. We rely on these organisations for reporting what our politicians do, what our armed forces do, how entities with the power of life and death over humanity are accountable to the people. And they happily gulp down the glorified press releases of anyone who offers to let them touch his Pulitzer.

There’s also a follow-up post providing more information and explanation.

September 14, 2012

The Bob Dylan interview within the Bob Dylan interview

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

I haven’t read Rolling Stone for decades, so I don’t know if this interview is typical of their house style these days:

Dylan talks about his new album, a bit about his apparent belief that the soul of a dead Hell’s Angel named Bobby Zimmerman (Dylan’s own birth name) took over his body in the 1960s (really, and I can’t explain it either), Dylan’s annoyance with people who attack him for using lines from other poets in his songs, and many other interesting things.

But around 10 percent of the interview is dedicated to a bizarre performance from interlocutor Mikal Gilmore seeming desperate to get Bob Dylan to say that he thinks criticism of Barack Obama is based on racism, say he voted for Obama, or say he really likes Obama.

Dylan leads into it with an impassioned and intelligent discussion of how the stain of slavery shapes this nation. “This country is just too fucked up about color….People at each others throats because they are of a different color. It’s the height of insanity, and it will hold any nation back — or any neighborhood back….It’s a country founded on the backs of slaves….If slavery had been given up in a more peaceful way, America would be far ahead today.”

This gives Gilmore his hook: didn’t Obama change all that? And isn’t it so that people who don’t like him don’t like him because of race? Gilmore takes five different swings at getting Dylan to agree. Some of Dylan’s responses: “They did the same thing to Bush, didn’t they? They did the same thing to Clinton, too, and Jimmy Carter before that….Eisenhower was accused of being un-American. And wasn’t Nixon a socialist? Look what he did in China. They’ll say bad things about the next guy too.” On Gilmore’s fourth attempt, Dylan just resorts to: “Do you want me to repeat what I just said, word for word? What are you talking about? People loved the guy when he was elected. So what are we talking about? People changing their minds?”

September 5, 2012

Nobody is getting to “have it all”

Filed under: Economics, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

I read Gregg Easterbrook’s NFL column partly for the football content and partly for the very-much-not-football stuff. Here’s an example from this week’s column where he reflects on the “having it all” meme:

Lately The Atlantic has been on the case of après-feminism. Hanna Rosin’s 2010 cover story showed how the double-XX cohort is taking over colleges and offices, positing trends in education and economics are such that “modern postindustrial society is simply better suited to women.” Those sci-fi stories set on worlds ruled by Amazonian females, where males exist solely for women’s amusement? Rosin sees this coming.

Then in 2011, an Atlantic cover had Kate Bolick declaring that men are already so inutile, a woman would be a fool to walk down the aisle. Her ideal evening: a romantic candlelit dinner for one. Bolick praised “the Mosuo people of southwest China, who eschew marriage and visit their lovers under cover of night.” That cheerful article ended by endorsing the Beguines, a Dutch order whose members live in secular chastity, vowing never to touch men.

Then this year came “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” a cover by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton dean and recent State Department official. Slaughter filled 14 magazine pages with angst about how despite a high-paying super-elite job with lifetime tenure, personal connections in the White House and a husband who does the child care, despite writing about herself for the cover of the world’s most important magazine, nevertheless she feels troubled that every moment of her days is not precisely what she wants.

The assertion that women “can’t have it all” was received as earthshaking by the commentariate, a magazine article making the front page of The New York Times. Living a favored life and yet looking for something to complain about is part of the Upper West Side mindset, so perhaps the Slaughter article appealed to the part of the Times demographic that searches desperately for new complaints.

Some of Slaughter’s points were solid, but they were the grievances of the 1 percent — 99 of 100 women would love to have what Slaughter presented as her burdens to bear. Nobody’s ever satisfied. Jacques Brel wrote, “Sons of the thief, sons of the saint/Where is the child without complaint?”

What was vexing was that the article seemed to misunderstand its own topic. The phrase “having it all” meant a woman could pursue a career and also be a good mother. This is something millions of women have now achieved, proving career and motherhood are not mutually exclusive, as men long claimed in order to keep women out of the workplace. But “all” never meant a woman could have everything she wants at every second without ever facing hard choices or bending over to pick up a piece of laundry. Men can’t “have it all” in that sense either. No one has ever “had it all” and no one ever will.

The Atlantic‘s female readers have been told they finally hold the upper hand, but this seems hollow victory if men become motes. They’ve been told marriage is so awful, get thee to a nunnery. And Atlantic‘s female readers have been told if they achieve tremendous career success under ideal conditions while miraculously finding the last desirable man on planet Earth, they will be riven with anxiety anyway. But hey, have a nice day!

July 30, 2012

Pre-season rankings: lies, damned lies, plus statistics

Filed under: Football, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:40

Even the most rabid Vikings fan isn’t really expecting a SuperBowl run this year: climbing from a 3-13 season to 8-8 would be a very significant improvement, and an honest fan would say that would be acceptable. Squeaking into the playoffs might be possible, except that the Vikings play in one of the toughest divisions in the NFL, so you’d need to be dangerously optimistic to expect that outcome.

That being said, the Vikings are getting no respect at all from the various pre-season ranking experts in the media. Christopher Gates explains why you shouldn’t pay too much attention to forecasts like the one published recently in Pro Football Weekly:

Ugh, there is so much wrong here, I’m not even sure where to start. . .but I’ll try.

– According to PFW, the Vikings’ defensive line (which tied for the NFL lead in sacks in 2011 and is led by the guy that probably should have been Defensive Player of the Year last season) is just as good as the Vikings’ secondary … a unit that allowed the second-highest passer rating against in NFL history, went nearly ten full games without an interception (setting an NFL record in the process), and allowed more touchdown passes than any team in the league last year. Yep … the same.

– Not only that, but the Vikings’ secondary is (according to PFW) just as good as Green Bay’s secondary. Yes, the Packers allowed the most passing yards in a season in NFL history in 2011 and only allowed five fewer TD passes than Minnesota did (34 to 29). The Packers also intercepted twenty-three more passes than the Vikings did (31 to 8) despite collecting about half as many sacks (50 for Minnesota, 29 for Green Bay) and their passer rating allowed was a full 27 points lower (107.6 for Minnesota, 80.6 for Green Bay). According to Pro Football Weekly? The secondaries are basically interchangeable. Seriously.

– Is Minnesota’s defensive line that much worse than Detroit’s, to the point where the Lions get an A- and the Vikings get the aforementioned C+? I really don’t think so. In fact, until Nick Fairley can become known for something other than personal fouls (in college) and getting arrested (since reaching the NFL), I fail to see where Detroit’s front four is better than Minnesota’s at all. (Sure, I’m biased … but come on.)

June 24, 2012

Do your media outlets suffer from ADD?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Okay, it’s a trick question: they all do. Gerard Vanderleun pulls out an older piece (originally posted in 2003) that explains how and why your mainstream media became afflicted with ADD:

Recently I became acquainted with a young boy, just turned nine. He’s a brilliant and happy kid, but he has a problem with cleaning up and organizing his room. It isn’t that he can’t do it, he simply has to be told about every five minutes to continue the process. In the course of picking things up to put away he discovers anew their potential to fascinate him.

The Gameboy? “Oh, here’s where I saved that last stage of Turoc. Let’s see if I can get the flame-thrower and…”

Any one of the 3,000 + Lego units? “Gee, I never did get the moon base hemi-dome set up, just let me put these 400 blocks in place and…” Books? “Sure thing and, hey, did Horton ever hatch that egg…”

On it goes until, after the sixth or seventh cajoling instruction, a path has been cleared for the vacuum cleaner. After which, he promptly begins taking everything he has put away out and strews it about the floor once again.

Today’s pop psychologists, addlepated educators and the marketing departments of large drug companies are hard at work trying to convince me children who behave like this have “Attention Deficit Disorder” or ADD. But I know enough to know it is the companies who are obsessed, confused and greedy in about that order.

What this young boy suffers from is no more than being a normal, heedless and all around great nine-year-old boy. He doesn’t have ADD anymore than I have an elephant chained in my back yard. (Yes, I just checked.)

The only group that I can see in the United States that, as a group, is seriously afflicted with ADD is a group of would-be adults — the group we call collectively “The Mainstream Media.” For members of this group ADD is not an option, it is a requirement. Far from being a means to informing and enlightening the public, the primary role of the MSM is to distract it. At this they are very good since they are “Distracted from distraction by distraction” by their very nature. They are “the ADD professionals.” They actually get paid for doing this. Paid well for having a disease.

May 29, 2012

Is junk science more credible when presented with a British accent?

Filed under: Britain, Media, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:10

In Slate, Daniel Engber talks about how easy it is for British junk science journalism to get republished in the United States:

More damning was the story’s overseas origin. The five-second study arrived in the American press by way of the Daily Mail, which explained in its own coverage that the work had been funded by a manufacturer of cleaning products, and then advised readers to replace their mop heads every three months so as to “minimize risk” from dangerous bacteria. When I contacted Manchester Metropolitan University for more details, I learned that the “researchers” and “scientists” described in media reports amounted to one person — a lab tech named Kathy Lees, who did not respond to my inquiries.

Let’s not single out the Mancunians, though: Industry-funded science fluff litters the whole of the British Isles. Also in the past few weeks, the U.K. press fawned over a comely chip-shop girl from Kent who was found by a national television network to possess a scientifically validated, perfect face, while the British version of HuffPo reported on a mathematical formula for the “perfect sandwich” — produced by a University of Warwick physicist in collaboration with a major bread manufacturer. Spurious mathematical formulae concocted at the behest of PR firms compose their own journalism beat in England: In recent years, we’ve seen the perfect boiled egg, the perfect day, the perfect breasts, and many more examples of scientists getting paid to turn life into algebra. As a naive magazine intern, I once took an assignment to write up one of these characteristically English equations — a means of calculating the perfect horror movie, in that case. The team of mathematicians behind the research turned out to be a couple of recent grads from King’s College London, who’d watched some movies and gotten drunk on vodka on behalf of Sky Broadcasting. “We only spent a couple of hours doing it,” one of them told me, “and didn’t put all that much thought into whether it works or how accurate it is.”

I love the use of the sure-to-be-useful-frequently term “labvertisements” for this sort of science-flavoured PR spam.

May 21, 2012

The answer to that burning question “Are libertarians misitreperted?”

Filed under: Humour, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:55

An interview with Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie in Salon gets the garble-for-comedy-gold treatment through Google Translate and Contentbot:

Chips Gillespie and Matt Welch, the writers of your primary libertarian distribution&Number160Reason, see pray for their many other People in the usa raising disenchantment while using governmental process. For their new publication &Promise of Independents: How Libertarian State policies Can Fix Whats Inappropriate With North america, they realize that independents now account for the best bloc of voters near your vicinity and craving far more defections from the two significant events. Only by taking apart this hierarchical process of electric power, they retain, will any of us achieve true deregulation of authorities-manage solutions, that will result in elevated shopper decision and a far more carefully democratized contemporary society.

Say what you want to about libertarian reasons, but they will be constantly entertaining to go about. So that we sat all the way down with Gillespie and Welch the 2009 weeks time and talked about their beliefs over the sushi the afternoon meal:

Your publication cravings the United states consumer to embrace an unregulated market free from authorities management. However you also have a quotation from Julian Assange, a self applied-described libertarian, stating that &a complimentary market results as being a monopoly if you do not power it to be free. You to get, some alternative entire body has to are available so that the liberty of an market &Number8212 doesn’t that imply that free financial markets are inextricable from some sort of authorities management?

H/T to Nick Gillespie for the link.

May 20, 2012

“If I were to lose 14 pounds, I’d have to part with both arms. And a foot.”

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Scarlett Johansson at the Huffington Post on healthy living and healthy weight:

People come in all shapes and sizes and everyone has the capability to meet their maximum potential. Once filming is completed, I’ll no longer need to rehash the 50 ways to lift a dumbbell, but I’ll commit to working out at least 30 minutes a day and eating a balanced diet of fruit, vegetables and lean proteins. Pull ups, crunches, lunges, squats, jumping jacks, planks, walking, jogging and push ups are all exercises that can be performed without fancy trainers or gym memberships. I’ve realized through this process that no matter how busy my life may be, I feel better when I take a little time to focus on staying active. We can all pledge to have healthy bodies no matter how diverse our lifestyles may be.

Since dedicating myself to getting into “superhero shape,” several articles regarding my weight have been brought to my attention. Claims have been made that I’ve been on a strict workout routine regulated by co-stars, whipped into shape by trainers I’ve never met, eating sprouted grains I can’t pronounce and ultimately losing 14 pounds off my 5’3″ frame. Losing 14 pounds out of necessity in order to live a healthier life is a huge victory. I’m a petite person to begin with, so the idea of my losing this amount of weight is utter lunacy. If I were to lose 14 pounds, I’d have to part with both arms. And a foot. I’m frustrated with the irresponsibility of tabloid media who sell the public ideas about what we should look like and how we should get there.

Every time I pass a newsstand, the bold yellow font of tabloid and lifestyle magazines scream out at me: “Look Who’s Lost It!” “They Were Fabby and Now They’re Flabby!” “They Were Flabby and Now They’re Flat!” We’re all aware of the sagas these glossies create: “Look Who’s Still A Sea Cow After Giving Birth to Twins!” Or the equally perverse: “Slammin’ Post Baby Beach Bodies Just Four Days After Crowning!”

According to the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA), as many as 10 million females and 1 million males living in the US are fighting a life and death battle with anorexia or bulimia. I’m someone who has always publicly advocated for a healthy body image and the idea that the media would maintain that I have lost an impossible amount of weight by some sort of “crash diet” or miracle workout is ludicrous. I believe it’s reckless and dangerous for these publications to sell the story that these are acceptable ways to looking like a “movie star.”

May 16, 2012

Thomas Mulcair: your “go-to guy [for] cockamamie wheels-within-wheels theor[ies]”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:24

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells gets in a small dig at Stephen Harper before unloading on Thomas Mulcair:

Before I make a bit more fun of Mulcair, and then try to take some of his arguments seriously, I should first stipulate that the Harper government is fully capable of childish absurdity on the energy/environment front. Indeed I think the confrontation between resource exports and environmental activism is turning into less of a slam-dunk political winner for Harper than he seemed to think in the New Year.

But we see two longstanding Mulcair traits in his remarks. First, a kind of Byzantine certainty. Not just that he knows what’s going on, but inevitably that what’s going on is so complex that only a fellow such as he can grasp its intricacy. Journalists have known for a long time that Mulcair was their go-to guy for some cockamamie wheels-within-wheels theory about his opponents’ motives and actions. It cannot possibly be that Alison Redford, Christy Clark and Brad Wall simply disagree with Mulcair, or even that they don’t care whether he’s right but are playing to different electorates. No, they say what they say because they are in league with Harper against him. Mulcair surely knows Christy Clark’s chief of staff, Ken Boessenkool, helped script Harper’s winning 2006 campaign. If he didn’t know that Brad Wall’s former environment minister, Nancy Heppner, worked in Harper’s PMO for a year after that campaign, he knows it now and will take great satisfaction in tucking it away for future use. See? She’s the go-between. I knew it.

The notion that Alison Redford is Harper’s preferred Alberta premier, or that she scans the skies at night for the light from the Harpsignal, is harder to square with the available data, but whatever. On to the second Mulcair characteristic: the belief that disagreement is synonymous with illegitimate attack against him. You will tell me that’s hardly unique. You’ll be right. Just look at the prime minister. But now we know Mulcair is no more immune from the garden-variety political martyr complex. Wells would write crap like “martyr complex.” He’s from Maclean’s. They hate me.

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.

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